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EDITED BY
K AT I E H A L S E Y AND
ANGUS VINE
Shakespeare
and Authority
Citations, Conceptions
and Constructions
palgrave shakespeare studies

General Editors: Michael Dobson and Dympna Callaghan
Palgrave Shakespeare Studies
Series Editors
Michael Dobson
The Shakespeare Institute
University of Birmingham
Stratford-upon-Avon, UK
Dympna Callaghan
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY, USA
“This fascinating multifaceted collection ventures to approach the subject of

authority as both a preoccupation within Shakespeare’s canon as well as the key
determinant of the long trajectory of his textual, dramatic, and critical recep-
tion. Together the essays give us a generous chronological and generic sweep, yet
each individual essay has its own tight focus on some aspect of the complex and
mutating interrelation of authority and authorship.”
—Margreta de Grazia, Emerita Sheli Z. and Burton Z. Rosenberg Professor of the
Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Palgrave Shakespeare Studies takes Shakespeare as its focus but strives
to understand the significance of his oeuvre in relation to his contem-
poraries, subsequent writers and historical and political contexts. By
extending the scope of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Studies
the series will open up the field to examinations of previously neglected
aspects or sources in the period’s art and thought. Titles in the Palgrave
Shakespeare Studies series seek to understand anew both where the liter-
ary achievements of the English Renaissance came from and where they
have brought us. Co-founded by Gail Kern Paster.
Editorial board members:

Margreta de Grazia
Peter Holland
Michael Neill
Lois D. Potter
David Jonathan Schalkwyk
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14658
Katie Halsey · Angus Vine
Editors
Shakespeare and
Authority
Citations, Conceptions and Constructions
Editors
Katie Halsey Angus Vine
Division of Literature and Languages Division of Literature and Languages
University of Stirling University of Stirling
Stirling, UK Stirling, UK
Palgrave Shakespeare Studies

ISBN 978-1-137-57852-5 ISBN 978-1-137-57853-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57853-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945816
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: ‘Mute Swan’ by Calum Colvin, by kind permission of the artist and
University of Stirling Art Collection
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
Note on the Text
Unless otherwise specified, references to Shakespeare’s works are to The

Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne
Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Mauss and Gordon
McMullan, third edition (2016). Other editions are specified in the lists
of Works Cited.
v
Acknowledgements
Like Antony, we are ‘well studied for a liberal thanks’ which we ‘do
owe’ to many people (2.6.46–48). This book had its origins in the sixth
biennial conference of the British Shakespeare Association in 2014, and
we gratefully acknowledge the contributions of all participants at that
conference, which shaped our thinking in helpful ways, and the sup-
port of the trustees of the Association. Special thanks to John Drakakis
for suggesting that we bid for the conference in the first place, and for
his support throughout the whole project. We would like to acknowl-
edge the financial assistance of Stirling Council, the School of Arts and
Humanities and the Division of Literature and Languages, University
of Stirling. Various individuals provided invaluable support: Douglas
Brodie, Dale Townshend, Maxine Branagh, Matt Foley, Stuart Lindsay,
Betsy Fuller, Alison Cooper, Andrew Miller, Alan MacGregor, Tom
Kowalski, David Murphy, Sarah Bromage, Margreta de Grazia, Colin
Burrow, Andrew Murphy, Andrew Hiscock, Pete Smith, Jane Lind, and
Elaine O’Hare all deserve our thanks.
The book itself had its genesis in a series of conversations with Ben
Doyle of Palgrave, and we gratefully acknowledge his input at that
stage. The book began to take shape in 2015, and we would also like
to thank Colin Burrow, Margreta de Grazia, Andrew Murphy, Dale
Townshend, Peter Lindfield, Andrew Hass, Peter Buchanan, Pauline
Hubner, and Jim Caudle for their various contributions to the book. The
editors of the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies Series, Michael Dobson and
Dympna Callaghan, offered helpful insights and advice, and also much
vii
viii Acknowledgements
encouragement. Calum Colvin generously allowed us to use his beautiful

artwork Mute Swan as our cover image, and we thank the University of
Stirling Art Gallery for permission to reproduce this work. Warm thanks
are due also to Ben Doyle and Camille Davies at Palgrave for their effi-
ciency and professionalism throughout the preparation of the work.
Finally, thanks to our families for their love and support.
Stirling, UK Katie Halsey

May 2017 Angus Vine
Contents
1 ‘Dressed in a Little Brief Authority’: Authority Before,

During, and After Shakespeare’s Plays 1
Katie Halsey and Angus Vine
Part I Defining and Redefining Authority
2 Shakespeare’s Authorities 31
Colin Burrow
3 Inside the Elephant’s Graveyard: Revising Geoffrey

Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare 55
John Drakakis
4 Author and Authority in the OED:

Nashe v. Shakespeare 79
Giles Goodland
5 ‘The King’s English’ ‘Our English’?: Shakespeare and

Linguistic Ownership 113
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
ix
x Contents
6 Foundations of Sovereign Authority: The Example

of Shakespearean Political Drama 135
Eric Heinze
Part II Shakespearean Authority
7 ‘A Trim Reckoning’: Accountability and

Authority in 1 and 2 Henry IV 157
Angus Vine
8 The King’s Ring: A Matter of Trust 179

Joseph Sterrett
9 ‘Constant in any Undertaking’: Writing the

Lipsian State in Measure for Measure 195
Daniel Cadman
10 Duty and Authority: Malvolio, Stewardship and

Montague’s Household Book 213
Eleanor Lowe
11 Poetic Authority in Julius Caesar: The Triumph

of the Poet-Playwright-Actor 231
Laetitia Sansonetti
Part III Shakespeare as Authority
12 Authority of the Actor in the Eighteenth Century 249

James Harriman-Smith
13 Shakespeare, Rule-Breaking and Artistic Genius:

The Case of Sir John Soane 265
Andrew Rudd
Contents xi
14 Whose Gothic Bard? Charles Robert Maturin and

Contestations of Shakespearean Authority in
British/Irish Romantic Culture 281
Benedicte Seynhaeve and Raphaël Ingelbien
15 Authority, Instrumental Reason and the Fault Lines

of Modern Civilization in Peter Brook’s Cinematic
Rendering of Shakespeare’s King Lear 301
Fred Ribkoff and Paul Tyndall
16 Will Power: Visualising Shakespeare’s Authority

in Contemporary Culture 317
Jane Partner
Index 337
Notes on Contributors
Colin Burrow is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

He is the author of several monographs on Shakespeare and on early
modern literature, including Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford
University Press, 2013), and Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford
University Press, 1993). He edited The Complete Sonnets and Poems for
the Oxford Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson’s poems for The Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. He is presently working on a study
of literary imitation, on an edition of Marston’s poems for the Oxford
Complete Works, and on the Elizabethan volume of the Oxford English
Literary History, of which he is one of the general editors.
Daniel Cadman is Lecturer in English Literature at Sheffield Hallam
University. His first monograph, Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern
Neo-Senecan Drama: Republicanism, Stoicism and Authority, was pub-
lished by Ashgate in 2015. He has also published articles on William
Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, and Fulke Greville. He is Managing Editor
of the online journal, Early Modern Literary Studies, and has co-edited
two special issues focusing on the works of Christopher Marlowe and
early modern literary and cultural responses to the influence of ancient
Rome.
John Drakakis is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Stirling and
is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Lincoln. He is the
editor of the Arden 3 edition of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,
and has edited volumes of essays on Shakespearean Tragedy (Longman,
xiii
xiv Notes on Contributors
1992) and Tragedy (Longman, 1998). In addition to contributing

widely to journals and volumes of essays on Shakespearean topics, he was
the editor of Alternative Shakespeares (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2005),
and Gothic Shakespeares (Routledge, 2008). He is currently working on
a new edition of Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of
Shakespeare.
Giles Goodland is a Senior Editorial Researcher at the Oxford English
Dictionary. He is also a widely published poet.
Katie Halsey is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature
at the University of Stirling. Her publications include Jane Austen
and her Readers, 1786–1945 (Anthem, 2012), The History of Reading
(Routledge, 2010; with Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed), The
History of Reading vol. 2: Evidence from the British Isles 1750–1945
(Palgrave, 2011; with W. R. Owens), and numerous articles on the lit-
erature and print culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Research interests include the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth
century, Jane Austen, and the history of reading.
James Harriman-Smith is a Lecturer in Restoration and Eighteenth-
Century Literature at the University of Newcastle and a trustee of the
British Shakespeare Association. After winning the Charles Oldham and
Harness Shakespeare scholarships at Cambridge University, he completed
a Ph.D. entitled Twin Stars: Shakespeare and the Idea of the Theatre in
the Eighteenth-Century there in 2015, and is now turning it into a book.
He has published articles on acting theory, editors, and Shakespeare’s
European reception in Theatre Journal, Restoration and Eighteenth-
Century Theatre Research, and Etudes françaises.
Eric Heinze is Professor of Law & Humanities at Queen Mary,
University of London. His most recent monograph is Hate Speech and
Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2016). His writings on
justice theory include book chapters and journal articles on The Comedy
of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Timon of Athens, Cymbeline,
The Tempest, and the English history plays, as well as plays by Jean
Racine. He has also published articles on justice theory in Plato and
Aristotle, and synthesizes ancient and early modern sources in his 2013
monograph The Concept of Injustice (Routledge).
Notes on Contributors xv
Raphaël Ingelbien is a Reader in Literary Studies at the University

of Leuven, Belgium, where he teaches a module on Shakespeare and
recently supervised a project on ‘Shakespeare and Irish Romanticism’.
He is the author of Irish Cultures of Travel. Writing on the Continent,
1829–1914 (Palgrave, 2016) and has published widely on Irish literature.
His essays on Shakespeare have appeared in Modern Language Quarterly,
Shakespeare, and a collection on Shakespeare and European Politics
(Delaware University Press, 2008).
Eleanor Lowe is Senior Lecturer in Drama in the Department of
English and Modern Languages at Oxford Brookes University. Her
research focuses on early modern drama with interests including material
culture, clothing, and costume, as well as in editing plays. Publications
include online editions of Brome’s A Mad Couple Well Matched and The
Love-Sick Court, Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth, and work on
humours comedy.
Jane Partner is Fellow Commoner, College Teaching Associate and
Director of Studies in English at Trinity Hall and a College Teaching
Associate at St John’s College as well as an Affiliated Lecturer in the
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Her research interests are
in Early Modern texts and visual culture, and the intersections between
the two.
Fred Ribkoff has a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in drama. He
teaches in the English and Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts programs at
Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada. Fred’s
research and writing focus on literary and cinematic representations of
trauma and mourning. He has published essays on Arthur Miller’s Death
of a Salesman, Tennessee Williams’ Not About Nightingales, Suddenly
Last Summer and the Holocaust, Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Management
of Grief’, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and co-authored
essays on Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Williams’ A
Streetcar Named Desire and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
Andrew Rudd is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic
Literature at the University of Exeter. He holds a Ph.D. from the
University of Cambridge and is the author of Sympathy and India in
British Literature, 1770–1830, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011.
xvi Notes on Contributors
Laetitia Sansonetti is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of

Paris Nanterre and general co-editor of the online journal of the French
Shakespeare Society (Société Française Shakespeare). She has pub-
lished articles on Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, and Chapman, as well
as a French translation of English Early Modern tales (William Painter
et alii, Roméo et Juliette avant Shakespeare [Romeo and Juliet Before
Shakespeare], 2014). Her current research bears on the reception of the
classics, questions of authorship and authority, and the links between
poetry and politics in late Elizabethan England.
Benedicte Seynhaeve holds an M.A. in Western Literature from the
Catholic University of Leuven. In 2016, she completed her doctoral the-
sis ‘“Coupled and inseparable”: Shakespeare and Irish Romanticism’. She
has published on several aspects of Shakespearean intertextuality in the
work of three key Irish Romantic writers (Lady Morgan, Charles Robert
Maturin, and James Clarence Mangan). At the moment, she works as
‘Coordinator Learning Network’ at Knowledge Centre ARhus, where
she is responsible for several projects with educational partners.
Joseph Sterrett is Associate Professor of English Literature at Aarhus
University. He is currently researching early modern expressions of trust
and their relation to a developing understanding of risk. He is organ-
izer of the Trust and Risk in Literature Network and Project. His mono-
graph, The Unheard Prayer: Religious Toleration in Shakespeare’s Drama
was published by Brill in 2012, and he is the editor of collections on
Prayer and Performance (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and
Sacred Text—Sacred Space (Brill, 2011), as well as the author of numer-
ous articles.
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton is Professor of Early Modern Literature in
the English Institute at the University of Neuchâtel. She is author of
Jonson, Shakespeare and early modern Virgil (Cambridge, 1998) as well as
numerous articles on English Renaissance literature, especially on transla-
tion and on Shakespeare. She has co-edited three collections of essays:
Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation (with
Martin Warner) (Macmillan, 1991); Textures of Renaissance Knowledge:
Cultural Difference and Critical Method (with Philippa Berry)
(Manchester University Press, 2003); This England, That Shakespeare
(with Willy Maley) (Ashgate, 2010).
Notes on Contributors xvii
Paul Tyndall completed a Ph.D. in English at Dalhousie University

in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a dissertation on the American poet-critic
Yvor Winters. He is currently a member of the English department at
Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia, where he
teaches courses in American literature and film, and Shakespeare and
film. His current research interests include Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead
trilogy and Shakespeare’s history plays on stage and screen.
Angus Vine is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of
Stirling. Major publications include In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian
Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2010) and
the forthcoming Miscellaneous Order: Manuscript Culture and the Early
Modern Organization of Knowledge (Oxford University Press). He is
also the editor (with Abigail Shinn) of The Copious Text: Encyclopaedic
Books in Early Modern England (special issue of Renaissance Studies,
vol. 28 [2014]). Teaching and research interests include Francis Bacon,
Shakespeare, manuscript culture, textual scholarship, and the history of
the book.
List of Figures
Fig. 12.1 David Garrick’s monument in Westminster Abbey.

Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster 260
Fig. 13.1 Henry Howard, The Vision of Shakespeare (1830),
oil on canvas. By courtesy of the Trustees of
Sir John Soane’s Museum 276
Fig. 14.1 James Barry, King Lear Weeping Over the Dead Body
of Cordelia (1786–1788). Copyright: Tate, London 2016 295
Fig. 16.1 Robert Cruikshank, The hostile press; and the consequences
of crim. con. or Shakespeare in danger. Etched and Hand
Coloured Satirical Print [Published February 1825].
London: J. Fairburn. By permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library 321
Fig. 16.2 Tom de Freston, Elizabeth Siddal as Ophelia (2011),
oil on canvas, private collection. By kind permission
of the artist 327
Fig. 16.3 Davy and Kristin McGuire, Ophelia’s Ghost (2014),
holographic film projection into water. By kind permission
of the artists 329
Fig. 16.4 Stephan Thiel, ‘Shakespeare Googled’ from ‘Understanding
Shakespeare’ (2010). By kind permission of the artist 331
xix
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Newly added Nashe first citations 87

Table 4.2 Shakespeare’s first citations in Schäfer’s list:
words that have been edited for OED3 91
Table 4.3 Nashe’s first citations in Schäfer’s list: words
that have been edited for OED3 105
Table 5.1 ‘The King’s English’(KE)/‘The King’s
Language’(KL)/‘The Queen’s English’(QE):
Early modern instances, 1550–1700 115
Table 6.1 Bases of sovereign authority 138
xxi
CHAPTER 1
‘Dressed in a Little Brief Authority’:

Authority Before, During, and After
Shakespeare’s Plays
Katie Halsey and Angus Vine
In his epigram ‘To William Camden’ Ben Jonson praised his friend and
former schoolmaster in the following lavish manner:
What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things!

What sight in searching the most antique springs!
What weight, and what authority in thy speech!
Man scarce can make that doubt, but thou canst teach. (Jonson
2012, V, pp. 119–120 [ll. 7–10])
Jonson’s anaphoric praise locates Camden’s scholarly merits in both his

deep knowledge of the past and his mastery of eloquence; the list of attrib-
utes conjoins his attention to ‘things’ with his historical perspicuity and his
proficiency in ‘speech’. Camden is celebrated for matter, knowledge, and
K. Halsey (*) · A. Vine (*)

Division of Literature and Languages, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK
e-mail: katherine.halsey@stir.ac.uk
A. Vine
e-mail: angus.vine@stir.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. Halsey and A. Vine (eds.), Shakespeare and Authority, Palgrave
Shakespeare Studies, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57853-2_1
2 K. Halsey and A. Vine
style, and then finally, as a result of all these, for his virtuoso pedagogy.
The anaphora, moreover, suggests an equivalence between these attributes,
emphasizing that it is their combination that earns Camden the accolade of
the man to whom Britain owes her ‘great renown and name’ (ll. 3–4) ear-
lier in the epigram. As such, the poem is an entirely fitting tribute to a man
who was at once pedagogue, grammarian, antiquary, and historian.
Strikingly, Jonson couches this compliment to his former teacher, first
and foremost, in terms of authority, with the anaphora culminating in
the hypermetrical ‘and what authority in thy speech’ (l. 8). Authority in
early modern English commonly denoted the ‘power to influence the
opinion of others, esp. because of one’s recognized knowledge or schol-
arship’ (OED, s.v. ‘authority’, n. iii. 5[a]), a usage synonymous with clas-
sical learning and acknowledged expertise. This is the sense that pertains
in Jonson’s poem: Camden’s authority as a writer and scholar is predi-
cated on his historical learning, his plumbing ‘antique springs’. That
authority, moreover, is also inextricably linked with classical and human-
ist learning: the second line of the second couplet is an imitation of Pliny
the Younger’s praise for his friend the Roman lawyer Titius Aristo (nihil
est quod discere velis quod ille docere non possit [1.22.2]; see Haynes 2003,
p. 71), mimetically enacting the very combination of matter, knowl-
edge, and style for which Camden himself is praised. In characteristi-
cally Jonsonian fashion, that praise of Camden’s authority also, therefore,
ends up being an act of self-aggrandizement and commendation of his
own authority and learning. As Lawrence Lipking has noted, speaking
of Jonson’s better known poem ‘To the memory of my beloved, The
Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us’, Jonsonian
eulogy frequently turns back as much on the poet as on the object of his
praise (Lipking 1981, pp. 142, 144). In the Camden epigram, the hier-
archical relation between master and pupil (rather than fellow playwright
and poet) is clearer and less contested, but the dynamics of authoriza-
tion and praise are largely the same—as the opening lines, testimony to
Jonson’s own scholarly and writerly authority (‘Camden, most reverend
head, to whom I owe | All that I am in arts’ [ll. 1–2]), make clear.
It is hardly surprising that Jonson, the archetypal classicizing poet,
would have understood authority in this way. Nor is it surprising that he
should have praised his schoolmaster as the source of his own author-
ity and as the national writer par excellence. Nonetheless, few people
today, certainly outside the academy, would think of Camden in relation
to either ‘authority of speech’ or the nation’s ‘great renown and name’.
1 ‘DRESSED IN A LITTLE BRIEF AUTHORITY’: AUTHORITY BEFORE … 3
That honour, when it comes to early modern writers at least, would nor-
mally be afforded instead to the man Jonson described in his conversa-
tions with William Drummond of Hawthornden as wanting ‘art’ (Jonson
2012, V, p. 361), and whom he famously said had ‘small Latin and
less Greek’ (‘To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William
Shakespeare: and what he hath left us’, l. 31). It is Shakespeare, not the
Westminster schoolmaster, whose face has adorned Bank of England
banknotes, an imprimatur that sets the seal of monumental authority on
both the promissory notes themselves and the cultural figure displayed
upon them (Holderness 1988a, p. xi). Furthermore, it is Shakespeare,
not Camden, whose texts have provided the archetypal testing material
for new media and technologies; when Thomas Edison, for example,
tested his inventions, including the electric pen that he patented in 1876,
he habitually turned not to the monumental opening of the Britannia,
but to the much more familiar, quasi-proverbial opening soliloquy of
Richard III (Galey 2014, pp. 170–172). And it is Shakespearean monu-
ments and inscriptions, not Camdenian ones, that decorate public spaces
and buildings across the western world: from Giovanni Fontana’s 1874
marble statue, which stands in Leicester Square in London (Engler
2011, p. 439), to the motto (misquoted) from The Tempest (‘WHAT IS
PAST IS PROLOGUE’ [cf. 2.1.246]), which is carved on a plinth on
the Pennsylvania Avenue side of the National Archives in Washington,
DC (Garber 2008, pp. 284–285; Galey 2014, pp. 49–52). Shakespeare’s
words—indeed, his material presence alone—it seems, bestow consider-
able cultural capital, monumentalizing purpose, and linguistic authority.
Camden and Jonson, by contrast, certainly in the modern era, have rarely
been put to such edifying purposes.1
Jonson’s epigram reminds us that Shakespeare’s contemporaries
would not necessarily have anticipated these developments. Certainly, for
much of the seventeenth century, it would have been by no means appar-
ent that his works would be afforded the position of unique cultural
authority that they have come to possess. Indeed, until Nicholas Rowe’s
biographical essay, ‘Some account of the life of Mr. William Shakespeare’,
which prefaced his 1709 edition of the Works, Shakespeare’s plays were
generally afforded no more authority than those of contemporaries such
as Jonson or Fletcher, the other playwrights of the era whose works
appeared in Folio collections, and to whom Shakespeare was most often
compared (De Grazia 1991, pp. 33–48). The same went for the fate of
the plays on the stage. As Michael Dobson has noted, by the 1630s, just
a decade after the publication of the First Folio, the number of plays in
regular repertory had been reduced to perhaps just five: Hamlet, Othello,
Julius Caesar, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and 1 Henry IV (Dobson
1992, p. 2). Moreover, even in the Restoration era, when Shakespeare
did start to return to the centre of English literary culture, many of the
plays were performed only in heavily revised and substantially rewritten
versions—a curious coming together that, as Dobson has also observed,
reveals ‘that adaptation and canonization, so far from being contradic-
tory processes, were often mutually reinforcing ones’ (Dobson 1992,
p. 5). Initially, at least, perceptions of Shakespeare’s authority (or rather
lack thereof) were such that his texts were freely available to later play-
wrights for adaptation and appropriation; it was only in the early eight-
eenth century that some kind of recognizable authorial authority began
widely to obtain (Dobson 1992, p. 61).
In fact, to some of Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century readers, his later
position as the figure of ultimate cultural authority would have come as a
very great surprise. The critic and historian Thomas Rymer, for example,
whose trenchant views in his 1693 A Short View of Tragedy; It’s Original,
Excellency, and Corruption. With Some Reflections on Shakespear and other
Practitioners for the Stage (1693) are often seen as the embodiment of
leaden-footed and rules-obsessed neoclassical criticism, would certainly
have been shocked. For Rymer, the problem with Shakespearean drama
in large part is its lack of authority, the departure from its classical and
modern sources, which leads to what he identifies as its unreasonable-
ness and unnaturalness.2 Speaking of Othello, Rymer observes that
‘Shakespear alters it from the Original in several particulars, but always,
unfortunately, for the worse’; in illustration of this, he cites the descrip-
tion of the titular character as ‘the Moor of Venice: a Note on pre-emi-
nence, which neither History nor Heraldry can allow him’ (Rymer 1693,
p. 87). Julius Caesar fares little better, with Rymer particularly critical
of the blooding episode (3.1.106–111) and Brutus’s visceral language
there: ‘For, indeed, that Language which Shakespear puts in the Mouth
of Brutus wou’d not suit, or be convenient, unless from some son of the
Shambles, or some naturall offspring of the Butchery’ (Rymer 1693,
p. 151). The issue for Rymer, then, is a matter of decorum, but also a
question of probability and reason: at this moment, he suggests, Brutus
speaks less like a member of the Roman nobility and more like a com-
mon butcher or slaughterman. He also points out, in a telling parallel
with his criticism of Othello, that Shakespeare’s scene is unauthorized by

‘History’ (p. 150): that is to say, unauthorized by Plutarch’s Lives, the
principal source for the play.
Few critics now would now object to Othello on grounds of heral-
dic probability; nor would many be troubled by Shakespeare’s depar-
ture from Plutarch to dramatize the moment when Brutus’s Republican
ideals most starkly unravel in the face of political reality. Furthermore,
few modern critics would share Rymer’s hotheaded indignation: at the
moment when he condemns Shakespeare for departing from ‘History’,
he speaks of ‘Shakespear’s own blundering Maggot of self contradic-
tion’ (p. 150). Indeed, the choleric and invective that characterize his
criticism have almost invariably met with revulsion and/or ridicule. As
John Dryden observed in 1693, in a letter to his friend and fellow critic
John Dennis, ‘[a]lmost all the Faults which he has discover’d are truly
there; yet who will read Mr. Rymer, or not read Shakespeare? For my own
part, I reverence Mr. Rymer’s Learning, but I detest his Ill-Nature and
Arrogance’ (Vickers 1995, p. 86). Nonetheless, Rymer’s views were ech-
oed, albeit in a less strident form, by many who valued the authority of
the ancients, and the neoclassical unities of time, place, and action. These
included Dryden himself, whose Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) would
set the terms of Shakespearean criticism for at least a century.
Intemperate and ‘pedantic’ as it is (see Eliot 1932, p. 97), Rymer’s
criticism does still remind us of the extent to which the issue of author-
ity was at stake in the seventeenth-century reading and reception of
Shakespeare.3 One of the principal reasons for this was because, from the
First Folio onwards, Shakespeare was very much identified as the poet of
nature rather than art, as Margareta De Grazia has compellingly shown
(De Grazia 1991, p. 46). John Heminges and Henry Condell initiated
this view, characterizing Shakespeare as a spontaneous author who wrote
without revision, and whose ingenuity enabled him to invent without the
artfulness customarily associated with conceptions of genius in the early
modern era or, indeed, the inkblots linked with scribal and authorial cor-
rection: ‘His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he
vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him a blot
in his papers’ (Shakespeare 1623, sig. A3r). Leonard Digges then rein-
forced this view in his commendatory poem ‘Vpon Master WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE, the Deceased Authour, and his POEMS’, written for
the edition of the sonnets and miscellaneous poems published by John
Benson in 1640. ‘Poets are borne not made,’ Digges observes in the
opening line of that poem, and Shakespeare is the prima facie evidence
for this: ‘when I would prove | This truth, the glad remembrance I must
love | Of never dying Shakespeare, who alone, | Is argument enough to
make that one’ (Shakespeare 1640, sig. *3r, ll. 1–4). With Shakespeare,
moreover, the reader finds ‘Art without Art unparaleld as yet’; ‘Nature
onely helpt him’, Digges adds (ll. 10–11). For Rymer, it was precisely
the lack of art in Digges’s second (punning) sense—that is, in the sense
of skill as a result of knowledge or practice (OED, s.v. ‘art’, n. i. 1)—
that was the problem, and what lay behind the faults that he identifies in
Othello and Julius Caesar. By 1668, this view of Shakespeare as the poet
of nature, rather than art, had become almost a truism, as we can see in
Dryden’s Of Dramatic Poesy:
He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the
largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of Nature were still
present to him and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily; when he
describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who
accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation:
he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read
nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. (Dryden 1918, p. 67)
If seventeenth-century readers increasingly constructed Shakespeare

as the poet of nature, Jonson, by contrast, was almost always figured
as the supreme poet of art—and, as such, also as a more immediately
obvious authority figure. Where Shakespeare’s works, in Heminges and
Condell’s, Digges’s, and Dryden’s accounts at least, are imagined as
transcending the strictures of literary precedents and classical authority,
Jonson’s works were widely recognized for their embodiment of those
very things. As Edward Heyward put it in his commendatory poem for
Jonson’s own 1616 Folio (‘TO BEN. IONSON, on his workes’):
Words speake thy matter; matter fills thy words;

And choyce that grace affords
That both are best: and both most fitly plac’t,
Are with new VENVS grac’t
From artfull method. (Jonson 1616, sig. 6v, ll. 15–19)
Heyward’s praise emphasizes that Jonson’s poetic powers reside in his

mastery of humanist discourse, his matching of matter and word in the
manner requisite for true eloquence, and that his transformative powers
thus rely not on nature, but on art, method, and knowledge. This con-
trast between Shakespeare and Jonson was, of course, in some senses a
rhetorical construct. As recent scholars have shown, Shakespeare’s clas-
sical learning, much of which he would have imbibed from his school-
days in Stratford-upon-Avon, was considerably more extensive than
popular consciousness has often allowed (see, inter alia, Martindale and
Martindale 1990; Bate 1993; Miola 2000; Gillespie 2001; Martindale
and Taylor 2004; Burrow 2004, 2013).4 Furthermore, the familiar nar-
rative of Shakespeare and Jonson as literary and intellectual opposites and
antagonists (as presented in Dryden’s Of Dramatic Poesy and elsewhere)
was, as Ian Donaldson has shown, largely a later historical invention,
which had as much to do with evolving conceptions of genius as with the
reality of the authors’ relations (Donaldson 2001). Nonetheless, there is
little doubt that the two outstanding dramatists of the Elizabethan and
Jacobean eras did have very different conceptions of literary author-
ity and that those conceptions did generate divergent attitudes towards
prior texts and sources.
In illustration of this, it is hard to imagine Jonson, the poet of ‘artfull
method’, complaining about ‘art made tongue-tied by authority’ in the
way that Shakespeare does in Sonnet 66 (l. 9). Shakespeare’s complaint
has sometimes been understood as an allusion to the fetters of press cen-
sorship and as his sole reference to the frustrations of working under
such conditions (Clare 1999, p. 39). But, as the Oxford and Penguin
editors of the Sonnets have both pointed out, the line also seems to sig-
nal the frustration of being limited, or inhibited, by precedent and tra-
dition (Shakespeare 2002, p. 512; and Shakespeare 1986, p. 257). Of
course, there is an irony in Shakespeare complaining about authority
in a sonnet, the most codified of all literary forms. That irony, moreo-
ver, is only emphasized by the sonnet’s dominant rhetorical scheme:
the anaphora which structures the poem’s list of ills, and which results
in the word ‘And’ repeated ten times at the beginning of ten differ-
ent lines. Furthermore, the litany of complaints in the sonnet (includ-
ing ‘art made tongue-tied by authority’) turns out to be conditional, as
the closing couplet makes clear: ‘Tired with all these, from these would
I be gone, | Save that to die I leave my love alone’ (ll. 13–14). So the
poem is not a straightforward rejection of authority in favour of some
notion of unbridled rule breaking and literary freedom: but it does sig-
nal the kind of commitment to transformative imitation that, as Margaret
Tudeau-Clayton and Colin Burrow have both emphasized, distinguishes

Shakespeare’s engagement with classical learning and authority (Tudeau-
Clayton 1998; and Burrow 2004, p. 16) from that of his most notable
contemporary.
*
The story of Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century transformation into
the paradigmatic authorizing literary figure has been extensively told
(see, for example, Bate 1989; De Grazia 1991; Dobson 1992; Ritchie
and Sabor 2012; and Rumbold 2016). This story begins with the grad-
ual return of Shakespeare to the stage at the Restoration, and it takes in
the construction of Shakespeare as an ‘author’ figure in the wake of the
emergence of copyright following the Statute of Queen Anne of 1710.
As such, it also tells of the reification of the (now commonly accepted)
connection between controlling authorship and authority—a connection
at odds, though, with both what we know about the collaborative nature
of dramatic production in the early modern era, and the material, tex-
tual, and biographical remains themselves. Further noteworthy develop-
ments in the story include the first great age of Shakespearean textual
scholarship and the series of editions by Pope, Theobald, Warburton,
Johnson, Capell, and Steevens that this produced, all of which followed
and built upon Rowe’s 1709 Works in what has been described as a
‘dynastic tradition’ (De Grazia 1991, p. 3). Other landmarks in this story
include David Garrick’s formative Stratford Jubilee of 1769, the three-
day Shakespearean celebration in the playwright’s hometown, which
did much to substantiate his reputation as the national poet, and the
emergence of notions of authorial authenticity in the wake of Edmund
Malone’s groundbreaking decision to include a textual and critical appa-
ratus in his 1790 The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare.5 The
Ireland forgeries of the 1790s add yet another dimension to the tale of
Shakespearean authority in the eighteenth century. The intense excite-
ment generated by the faked deeds, letters, and manuscripts that Ireland
claimed to have discovered, followed by the crushing disappointment of
Malone’s decisive exposure of the forgeries, reveals something of what
was invested in Shakespearean authority by 1795. In a letter to George
Steevens of 1796, James Boaden based his refutation of the supposed
Lear on the poor quality of the versification in the manuscript—an argu-
ment clearly derived from Shakespeare’s reputation as a writer of genius
(Boaden 1972). For Malone, in contrast, authority primarily depended
on historical accuracy—his Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain
Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796) proved conclusively

that various dates, as well as the handwriting and orthography were
incorrect, and hence that the documents must be fraudulent. Authority
and authenticity thus began to coalesce.
As well as these literary and authorial perspectives, the story of emer-
gent Shakespearean authority also had a significant political dimension,
as Michael Dobson has shown: ‘the transformation of Shakespeare’s sta-
tus from the comparative neglect of the Restoration to […] national,
indeed global pre-eminence,’ he observes, ‘constitutes one of the cen-
tral cultural expressions of England’s own transition from the aristocratic
regime of the Stuarts to the commercial empire presided over by the
Hanoverians’ (Dobson 1992, p. 8). More recently, it has also been sug-
gested that Shakespeare’s pervasive presence in eighteenth-century cul-
tural life had a significant moral dimension. Kate Rumbold has argued
that Shakespeare emerged in the same era as a source of moral author-
ity: something to which the ‘repeated acts of quotation’ in contemporary
novels, such as those discussed in Chap. 14 of this volume, which ‘invest
him with an enduring emotional and moral authority’, attest (Rumbold
2016, p. 50). ‘Perhaps the novel’s most significant contribution’, she
adds, ‘is to construct Shakespeare as a personal authority on whom all
kinds of individual can call’ (p. 53).
By 1814, Jane Austen could describe Shakespeare as ‘part of an
Englishman’s constitution’. Her character, Henry Crawford, continues,
‘His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them
everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct.’ In response, another
character agrees: ‘His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they
are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his simi-
les, and describe with his descriptions’ (Austen 2005, pp. 390–391).
But, as Gail Marshall has argued, Shakespeare’s pervasive presence in
the nineteenth century in fact points to a contested legacy: ‘Shakespeare
was not just the darling of civic bodies looking to advertise their cul-
tural credentials, but belonged just as much to the ordinary people of
Britain who used his voice to contest contemporary power distribution’
(Marshall 2012, p. 2). Evidence collected by historians of reading such
as Andrew Murphy and Jonathan Rose certainly supports this point.
As Murphy points out, the increasing availability of cheap editions of
Shakespeare’s texts made his works ever more accessible to working-class
readers (Murphy 2010, pp. 58–94; see also St Clair 2004, pp. 140–157,
692–714), and such readers sometimes saw in Shakespeare’s texts a
legitimization of their own challenges to authority. For example, Rose

discusses a number of readers for whom Shakespeare ‘was a proletarian
hero who spoke directly to working people’ (Rose 2001, pp. 122–123).
For some working-class readers, Shakespeare’s own obscure birth and
‘small Latin and less Greek’—his supposed lack of learning and ‘natu-
ral’ genius—was inspirational. And they found in his plays ‘a language of
radical political mobilization’, an anti-authoritarian stance that allowed
them to co-opt Shakespeare for their own purposes. J.L. Clynes, a tex-
tile worker who later became deputy leader of the House of Commons,
for example, ‘drew inspiration from the “strange truth” he discovered in
Twelfth Night: “Be not afraid of greatness (“What a creed! How it would
upset the world if men lived up to it, I thought” […] Reading Julius
Caesar, “the realization came suddenly to me that it was a mighty politi-
cal drama” about the class struggle’ (Rose 2001, p. 123). While such
responses seem willfully to ignore such negative representations of politi-
cal rebels as the plebeians in Julius Caesar and Jack Cade and his rebels
in 2 Henry VI, it is nonetheless significant that two competing notions of
Shakespearean authority came into being in the nineteenth century. The
idea of the ‘People’s Bard’ allowed many to see Shakespeare as an anti-
hierarchical, anti-authoritarian role model authorizing radical left-wing
political ideologies, while its polar opposite—what Marshall calls the
‘monumental civic Shakespeare’, memorialized in Establishment heart-
lands and invested with all the trappings of high art—implicitly opposed
all such ideas (Marshall 2012, p. 2).6 The story of Shakespeare’s complex
relationship to questions of national identity has been well told elsewhere
(see Klett 2009; Tudeau-Clayton and Maley 2010; Ivic 2017), and is dis-
cussed in Chaps. 5, 6, and 14 of this volume, but it is important also to
note that relationship here, and its effects in investing Shakespeare with
ever greater literary authority.
Scholarship has also started to recover Shakespeare’s signifi-
cance as a figure of authority in more recent periods. Topics to have
attracted attention range from Shakespeare’s importance as an author-
izing figure for the emergence of English Studies as an academic dis-
cipline in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (Hawkes
1986) to the rise of bardolatry and the so-called Shakespeare industry,
focused from Garrick’s Jubilee onwards, on Stratford-upon-Avon and
the supposed Shakespearean associations of its buildings and places
(Holderness 1988b). Studies have also begun to show the importance
of Shakespeare’s cultural authority beyond England or Britain. Doug
Lanier, for example, has recently drawn attention to how Union voices
in the American Civil War appropriated Shakespeare, drawing on and
claiming kinship with his long established status as a ‘transcendent, vatic,
even quasi-divine’ figure of English literary authority, while at the same
time also explicitly Americanizing him (Lanier 2015, pp. 146, 157–158).
Rather like the eighteenth-century novels discussed by Rumbold, the
website of New York’s Shakespeare Society (www.shakespearesociety.
org) continues to figure Shakespeare as personal moral authority, while
directly aligning him with that most American of cities: ‘Shakespeare
teaches us all how to be better human beings and citizens. A great city
like New York needs The Shakespeare Society’ (http://www.shake-
spearesociety.org/who-we-are, accessed 6 April 2017). Recent stud-
ies of Shakespeare in Japan, Africa, China, India, Korea, Brazil, the
Arab world, Latin America, and elsewhere (see, for example, Ryuta
Carruthers and Gillies 2001; da Cunha Resende 2002; Levith 2004;
Banham et al. 2013) demonstrate the various ways in which Shakespeare
is appropriated and into different national cultures in diverse and some-
times unexpected ways. MIT’s Global Shakespeares archive (http://
globalshakespeares.mit.edu/about/) bears tribute to the ubiquity of per-
formances of Shakespearean plays and the complexity of Shakespeare’s
cultural authority in the global economy.
*
The chapters in Shakespeare and Authority, jointly and individually, are
further contributions to this story. What sets the volume apart from pre-
vious explorations of the topic, though, is its chronological and generic
scope: chapters extend across the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth,
nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and examine topics
from performance and acting style to architecture, cinema, lexicogra-
phy, and visual culture.7 What also sets the volume apart is that it places
its discussions of Shakespeare as an authority figure alongside a series of
chapters in the first two parts of the book, which explore conceptions
of authority in and for Shakespeare. These chapters, which range from
discussions of the monarchy to investigations of the household, and from
explorations of the law to examinations of linguistic, financial, and mate-
rial accountability, consider the construction, performance, and ques-
tioning of authority across the Shakespearean canon. They also include a
series of re-examinations of Shakespearean sources, both from a method-
ological perspective and as case studies. What this three-fold organization
and content enables is a more rigorous examination of the significance
of Shakespeare for both the history of authority as a concept and the

shift from auctoritas to more modern understandings of the word—one
of our principal aims in this book. This tripartite approach, moreover,
underscores that both the plays themselves and their reception are essen-
tial to the story.
That authority is a central concern of Shakespearean drama has long
been recognized. As Robert Weimann notes, the word ‘authority’ occurs
no fewer than 60 times across the canon as a whole (Weimann 1995,
p. 201). The plays in this way responded to one of the great shifts in six-
teenth- and early seventeenth-century England: the reconceptualization
of authority, in the wake of the Reformation, as something no longer
accepted and received automatically as a given, but something instead to
be ‘negotiated, disputed, or reconstituted’ through acts of representation
(Weimann 1996, p. 5)—through speech, performance, and various forms
of textual inscription. For Weimann, moreover, the Elizabethan theatre
was the most important place for this exploration of authority and its
associated political, religious, and juridical discourses; he attributes this
to both the indeterminacy of the Elizabethan theatre and its different
spatial modes of performance and representation and to the location of
the playhouses themselves in the liberties just outside the city’s jurisdic-
tion (Weimann 1995, pp. 204–206).
In Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps the most obvious dramatization of this
Reformation redefinition of authority occurs in Act 3 Scene 1 of King
John, when the king disputes papal sway with Cardinal Pandulph and
disavows the legate’s authority as a mere earthly commission (3.1.73–
86). ‘What earthy name to interrogatories | Can task the free breath of a
sacred king?’ (3.1.73–74), John asserts, in anachronistic lines that clearly
echo the language of the Henrician Reformation and the discourse of
Tudor divine right. The rest of John’s speech, including his striking ref-
erences to tolling and tithing (‘no Italian priest | Shall tithe or toll in
our dominions’ [3.1.80]), largely reiterates the equivalent speech in the
play’s most important dramatic source, the avowedly Protestant and
anonymous history play The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn King of England
(1591). However, in one significant way, Shakespeare departs from his
source, and that is by framing the dispute explicitly in terms of author-
ity. Where in the earlier play John concludes his rebuttal of Pandulph
with a rejection of papal supremacy (‘so wil I raigne next vnder God,
supreame head both ouer spirituall and temprall: and hee that contra-
dicts me in this, Ile make him hoppe headlesse’ [The Troublesome Raigne
1591, sig. E1r]), Shakespeare’s John ends also with a reassertion of his
own divine authority and rejection of the Pope’s mere ‘mortal’ author-
ity: ‘Where we do reign, we will alone uphold | Without th’assistance
of a mortal hand. | So tell the Pope, all reverence set apart | To him and
his usurped authority’ (3.1.83–86). Pandulph’s response is not only to
excommunicate John (3.1.99), but also to legitimize rebellion against
him: ‘blessèd shall he be that doth revolt | From his allegiance to a here-
tic’ (3.1.100–101). This time there is a parallel passage in the earlier play
(‘I Pandulph of Padoa […] pronounce thee accursed discharging euery
of thy subiectes of all dutie and fealtie that they doo owe to thee’ [The
Troublesome Raigne 1591, sig. E1r–v]), although Shakespeare’s blunter
wording again makes the exploration of sovereignty and monarchical
authority much more prominent.
Some of the clearest evidence of the extent to which conceptions
of authority were in flux at the time comes from contemporary word-
lists. Glosses are multiple, and often not synonymous, and in this way
they are testimony to the process of redefinition and recalibration that
Weimann describes. In his Bibliotheca Eliotæ (1542) Sir Thomas Elyot
glossed authority in a number of different ways: ‘Authoritas, authori-
tie, credence, puyssaunce, iugement, the inioyeng of possession’ (Elyot
1542, sig. E8r). Importantly, his dictionary also foregrounds the connec-
tion (conceptual as well as etymological) between authority and author,
and his definition of the latter goes some way to explaining why one
individual rather than another might garner the warrantable expertise,
the ‘credence’ and ‘puyssaunce’, requisite to operate as an authority fig-
ure: ‘Author, the first inue[n]tour or maker of a thing also a reporter of
newes. also a ruler or tutor also he that dothe sell or delyuer a thynge
on warrantise. also he whom a man foloweth in doynge of any thynge’
(Elyot 1542, sig. E8r). The conjunction here between author and
authority, and the implicit relation to textuality and inscription, antici-
pates one of the more striking aspects of Shakespeare’s own treatment
of authority. As Richard Wilson has observed, in Shakespearean politics,
authority and authorship are ‘synonymous’; speaking of Jade Cade’s
revolt in 2 Henry VI, he notes that ‘[t]o the writer of these scenes, rebel-
lion is the rage of the illiterate against the written word’ (Wilson 1993,
pp. 27–28).
Later lexicographers tended to be more explicit about the identifica-
tion between authority and sovereignty. Authority was what the holder
of high office possessed and thus frequently a synonym for the monarch’s
(or, for that matter, any other official’s) power and rule. John Florio,
for example, defined the Italian word autorità in his Worlde of Wordes
as ‘authoritie, power, free will, command, swaie, rule’ (Florio 1598, sig.
C6r), a more delimited and politically more specific list of synonyms than
Elyot’s gloss, while Henry Cockeram then substantiated this association
between authority and the exercise of power through a series of glossarial
examples in his English Dictionarie (1623):
the Authority of a King. Regallity.
the Authority of a Magistrate. Magistracy.
lawfull Authority in a place. Iurisdiction.
Authority. Commission.
hauing all Authority in’s hand. Omni-regency.
which hath Authority to keepe out vnworthy persons fro[m] the church.
Oratory.
hauing Authority to order and to dispose of matters. Committee.

(Cockeram 1623, sig. A3v)
Cockeram’s lemmata emphasize that authority was a spiritual as well as

a temporal matter and a concept that was at once legislative and disposi-
tive. Other wordlists from the period also suggest that authority started
to be understood not necessarily as an innate quality, but as something
that could be adopted or put on, and as such a question of performance
rather than essence—an insight to which Shakespeare, as we shall see,
turns out to have been especially important.
Shakespearean drama, at different moments, entertains, examines, and
explores all these different senses of the word. In Pericles, for example,
authority is very much equated with sovereignty and the rightful exer-
cise of the law. When Lysimachus, governor of Mytilene, enters the city
brothel, he promises Marina that he will not abuse his power either to
prosecute her for prostitution or to take advantage of her: ‘Oh, you have
heard something of my power and so stand aloof for more serious woo-
ing, but I protest to thee, pretty one, my authority shall not see thee,
or else look friendly upon thee’ (4.6.77–80). In similar fashion, in All’s
Well That Ends Well the Countess speaks of the Clown remaining at the
court of Roussillon by her son’s ‘authority’, and of him taking that as
a ‘patent’, or licence, ‘for his sauciness’ (4.5.55–56), while in 2 Henry

IV, after he has read over and acceded to the rebels’ demands, Prince
John confesses that his ‘father’s purposes have been mistook, | And
some about him have too lavishly | Wrested his meaning and authority’
(4.1.223–225). All three instances reinforce the connection between
authority, legislation, and licence implicit in Florio and Cockeram’s defi-
nitions, while the third also underscores the essentialness of inscription
to the exercise of sovereign authority. As Prince John ruefully notes,
the king’s authority resides in his words, but that also leaves it open to
abuse, as interpreters may twist his ‘meaning’ to fit their own purposes.
The king’s authority thus emerges as oddly fragile and peculiarly limited,
subject to both the vagaries of language and the good will of his sub-
jects, an idea also central to Joseph Sterrett’s argument in Chap. 8 of this
volume.
Few Shakespearean rulers are quite as aware of the evanescence of
authority as, say, Marlowe’s Barabas after he has ‘gotten, by […] policy’
the governorship of Malta (Marlowe 1969, 5.2.28–34). But Shakespeare
does, on various occasions, present governors and rulers made strikingly
aware of the fragility of their own power. In Antony and Cleopatra, for
example, he dramatically stages Antony’s realization of his impotence fol-
lowing his humiliation at the Battle of Actium, figuring this explicitly as a
melting away of authority. ‘Approach there!’ Antony commands Caesar’s
messenger Thidias; almost immediately, though, he recognizes that his
words no longer carry sway and reflects grimly, ‘Now gods and devils! |
Authority melts from me. Of late, when I cried, “Ho!” | Like boys unto
a muss kings would start forth | And cry, “Your will?” (3.13.90–94).
Divested of authority by his dishonour in battle, the man who could
once render kings schoolboys is reduced to the object of a pert servant’s
scorn.
As to the connection between authority, office, and person,
Shakespearean drama is characteristically ambiguous. On the one hand,
the Duke of Alençon’s words in Act 5 Scene 5 of 1 Henry VI associate
authority with both the office of kingship and the power of the mon-
arch himself. In response to Winchester’s command that the Dauphin
and the French ‘shall become true liegemen’ to Henry VI’s crown, and
that the Dauphin shall ‘pay him tribute and submit’, the Duke indig-
nantly replies: ‘Must he then be a shadow of himself, | Adorn his temples
with a coronet, | And yet in substance and authority | Retain but privi-
lege of a private man’ (5.5.133–136). Authority, these lines suggest, is
what makes the king a king. Constituted through the ability to legislate,
it signifies, in particular, the status of not being subject to another. True
monarchical authority, then, is more than just what the material crown
signifies; it is also, Alençon’s words imply, what inheres in the body of
the king. As Colin Burrow points out in Chap. 2 of this volume, that
same sentiment is even more apparent in King Lear, when the disguised
Kent tells Lear ‘you have that in your countenance which I | would fain
call master’, that is, ‘Authority’ (1.4.23–24, 26)—lines that lend them-
selves readily to an absolutist reading and a defence of the divine right.
Lear may have abdicated, but to the loyal Kent he retains the marks of
sovereign authority, which transcend the external trappings of rule and
are signalled by his body itself. On the other hand, though, Shakespeare
also provides a series of moments that seem to deny any innate connec-
tion between authority and a ruler or governor’s person. In Coriolanus,
for example, the titular character contemns the tribunes of the people
‘[f]or they do prank them in authority | Against all noble sufferance’
(3.1.23–24). While Coriolanus’s words here maintain the hierarchi-
cal order essential to notions of absolutist government, the charge also
recognizes the portability of authority and the fact it was something
seemingly as easily put on as embodied; to prank in Shakespearean
English meant to dress up or embellish (OED, s.v. ‘prank’, v. 4.1[b]).
This is also, of course, the point of Isabella’s famous words in Measure
for Measure, from which we take this chapter’s title, when she inveighs
against Angelo’s unstinting and unbending exercise of the law: ‘man,
proud man | Dressed in a little brief authority, | Most ignorant of what
he’s most assured’ (2.2.118–120).
All these senses of authority are, to a greater or lesser extent, still
current today. They were also very much current in the age when
Shakespeare himself became the archetypal authority figure, as the vari-
ous definitions in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) attest. The most
famous of all English lexicographers, Johnson defined authority succes-
sively as ‘(1). Legal power’, ‘(2). Influence; credit’, ‘(3). Power; rule’,
‘(4). Support; justification; countenance’, ‘(5). Testimony’, and ‘(6).
Weight of testimony; credibility’ (Johnson 1755). There was, however,
one sense of Shakespearean authority that Johnson did not include, and
that is barely current today, but which has considerable significance for
our understanding of both Shakespeare’s method of composition and the
relation of the plays to their source materials. That is the peculiarly (but
not exclusively) early modern sense of authority associated with books,
reading, and humanist theories of knowledge production. Authority in

this sense constitutes what we take from others’ books to authorize our
own writing and knowledge—a variant, of course, of Jonson’s use in his
epigram to Camden with which we began this chapter. The most strik-
ing Shakespearean example of authority in this sense occurs in Love’s
Labour’s Lost, when in response to the King of Navarre’s foreswearing
of women in favour of study and books, Biron observes: ‘Small have
continual plodders ever won, | Save base authority from others’ books’
(1.1.86–87). Authority here is associated with commonplace books and
commonplace learning—methods that are apparently fit only for the
dullest, most plodding of writers and scholars.
Biron’s remark, however, is not quite the straightforward trenchant
dismissal it initially appears. For while his observation does demonstrate
that Shakespeare’s attitude towards textual authority was more than just
unthinking reverence, as Colin Burrow notes in Chap. 2 (p. 31), the joke
ends up being as much on Biron himself as on the dullards he berates.
The irony, as the King points out shortly afterwards (‘How well he’s
read to reason against reading’ [1.1.94]), is that Biron’s larger claim that
spiritual enlightenment comes not from books, but from gazing into a
beautiful woman’s eyes (1.1.72–93) is itself built upon the very literary
method that he disavows here. Not only is Biron’s argument a common-
place in the Petrarchan tradition, but the speech itself (the last 14 lines
of which constitute a sonnet) is made up of commonplace learning and
of phrases culled from the authority of others. As such, it is a model of
the very humanist textual practice it ostensibly rejects. Instances in the
speech include the world-weary ‘all delights are vain’ (1.1.80), a com-
monplace that repeatedly turns up in early modern literature, including
Middleton’s The Nice Valour (3.3.36) and Book 2 of The Faerie Queene
(II.v.27.2). A further notable example from later in the speech is the
analogy ‘Study is like the heavens’ glorious sun | That will not be deep-
searched with saucy looks’ (1.1.84–85), an (appropriately transforma-
tive) imitation of the proverb ‘He that gazes upon the sun shall at last
be blind’ (cf. Dent 1981, S971.1). The joke, then, is partly on Biron and
partly on humanist methods of reading, but also an implicit recognition
that those very methods are essential to literary composition. Authorities
are what produce eloquence—even if they need skillful hands to trans-
form them from slavish mimicry to true imitation.
*
It is with this literary sense of authority that Shakespeare and Authority

begins. The next two chapters in this volume revisit the question of
Shakespeare’s sources, and both suggest that we need a more capa-
cious term to reflect his range of influences and his mode of literary
composition. In Chap. 2, Colin Burrow proposes that we speak not of
Shakespeare’s sources, but of his authorities, arguing that Shakespeare’s
‘narrative’ sources have been explored at the expense of discursive texts.
Burrow suggests that we should pay attention to a wide range of texts
including narrative works, rhetorical treatises, and works of philosophy,
which provide the contentious seeds of thought within Shakespearean
drama. He discusses examples from 1 Henry IV, which show how
Shakespeare used Cicero’s De Oratore to enhance Prince Hal’s political
and rhetorical authority, and ends by arguing that in Hamlet and King
Lear a hybrid mingling of ‘authorities’, ranging from Cicero and Seneca
to Melanchthon, come to the fore in speeches by characters within the
drama who are themselves suffering crises of authority. In Chap. 3, John
Drakakis also suggests that the terms of ‘source study’ are unsatisfac-
tory, proposing the term ‘resources’ in response to Burrow’s ‘authori-
ties’. Theorized through Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, and Jacques
Derrida, and providing a close reading of Hamlet in this context,
Drakakis presents a radical questioning of the nature of the ‘text’ itself,
and offers an account of the palimpsestic nature of Shakespeare’s dra-
matic texts.
Chapter 4 (re)turns to linguistic authority, comparing Shakespeare
and Nashe, and considering the idea that Shakespeare’s cultural author-
ity can be indexed by the number and placement of Shakespearean cita-
tions in the Oxford English Dictionary. Giles Goodland suggests that
various changes in editorial policy and the development of electronic
resources in the past three decades have had important effects on that
authority. This research raises important warnings about Shakespeare’s
pre-eminent position as an authority for lexicographical and historical
linguistic research, and highlights the transformative potential of digi-
tal resources in re-writing narratives of linguistic authority. In Chap. 5,
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton continues the discussion of Shakespeare’s
linguistic authority, exploring the relationship between ‘Englishness’
and linguistic authority in The Merry Wives of Windsor through a discus-
sion of the phrase ‘the King’s English’ in the Folio version of that play.
Tudeau-Clayton argues that this phrase is commonly used as a rhetori-
cal/ideological tool to produce by exclusion the centre of ownership and
authority it represents, but is specifically interrogated in the Folio ver-

sion of Merry Wives, which sets against it an inclusionary idea of ‘our
English’ as a ‘gallymaufry’ without a centre. Eric Heinze also touches on
the relationship between national identity and Shakespearean authority in
Chap. 6. As post-Renaissance Europe created modern concepts of state-
hood and sovereignty, figures like Bodin, Grotius, and Hobbes under-
took ‘constructive’, system-building theories of sovereign authority.
Dramatists, in the meantime, de-constructed sovereignty by unsettling
the divergent bases of authority and legitimacy claimed for it. Concepts
like ‘rule of law’, ‘popular consent’, or ‘natural law’ often serve to char-
acterize rival legitimacy claims, but such concepts’ scope and interrela-
tionships can be vague. Through a reading of Shakespeare’s historical
tetralogies, Heinze’s chapter proposes a vocabulary and topology of legal
and political authority within early modern drama.
Part II of the volume contains five chapters that directly focus on
Shakespeare’s own representations of authority within the plays. In
Chap. 7, Angus Vine considers 1 and 2 Henry IV as plays that are essen-
tially concerned with the construction, questioning, and acceptance of
authority—paternal authority, monarchical authority, divine authority.
This chapter argues that central to their engagement with the idea of
authority is a persistent rhetoric of financial reckoning and fiscal respon-
sibility, a language of debit and credit. He connects this language with
a broader discourse of reckoning, financial, but also metaphorical, that
was emerging in early modern England. The chapter demonstrates that
in 1 and 2 Henry IV—and elsewhere, as Eleanor Lowe also shows in her
analysis of Twelfth Night in Chap. 10—Shakespeare invokes an emerg-
ing discourse of accountability, which is both spiritual and financial,
metaphorical and actual, first to examine notions of personal and pub-
lic responsibility, and then to explore what those notions mean for the
constitution of political, and more particularly, monarchical, author-
ity. Joseph Sterrett’s chapter examines the material and social effects of
an exchange of trust between a king, Henry VIII, and his counsellor,
Thomas Cranmer, in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True. The ring
that the King gives Cranmer is both nothing and everything: nothing
in that it could be anything, any ring, and everything because it is the
King’s and is declared to be so. Such a performance of trust not only
protects the King’s favoured minister, it dares and threatens Cranmer’s
enemies to do or say something that would jeopardize the King’s trust in
them. It is thus a uniquely assertive form of trust, a site where material,
political, and social values meet. Daniel Cadman returns to the notion
of Shakespeare’s authorities (in Burrow’s sense), considering Measure
for Measure as a response to De Constantia and Politica, the two major
works of the Flemish neo-stoic philosopher and political theorist, Justus
Lipsius. Cadman highlights that Duke Vincentio’s methods of exercising
his authority are two-fold: the Duke commends and seeks to inspire the
virtue of constancy in his subjects (as recommended in De Constantia),
while, at the same time, using questionable methods to strengthen his
own political power (similar to the often underhand political pragmatism
advocated in the Politica). The representation of such strategies is part of
the play’s sustained interrogation of Lipsian statecraft and the effects of
the tensions generated through the co-existence of the two principal ten-
ets of constancy and governmental prudence.
Like Joseph Sterrett’s, Eleanor Lowe’s chapter focuses on the
materiality of authority. Her analysis of Malvolio’s authority as stew-
ard in Chap. 10 is viewed through the prism of Viscount Montague’s
Household Book of 1595. Montague lists his servants, their duties
and his rules for the management of them and the household. The
Household Book provides a detailed description of the activities and
responsibilities of his servants, particular to their specific role, and pri-
oritizes the steward as most important in the household. Lowe exam-
ines Malvolio’s interactions and conduct in Twelfth Night in the light of
the steward’s ambiguous position between responsibility and authority,
concentrating on the performance of domestic authority on the early
modern stage. In Chap. 11, Laetitia Sansonetti considers the author-
ity of the poet-playwright-actor, a theme that is also explored by James
Harriman-Smith in Chap. 12. Sansonetti analyses Julius Caesar. In that
play, the character of Cinna-the-poet is often considered to represent a
form of poetic counter-authority. Far from taking the murdered poet as
a figure of self-identification for Shakespeare, this chapter argues that
Cinna deserves to die. The two poets in Julius Caesar fare so ill when it
comes to convincing others (the plebeians not to kill him for Cinna in
Act 3, Brutus and Octavius to patch up their quarrel for the anonymous
camp poet in Act 4) because they fail at composing and delivering effec-
tive rhetorical speeches. By showing the failures of uninventive poets on
stage, Shakespeare is actually staging the triumph of a more rounded fig-
ure of authority, that of the poet-playwright-actor.
In Chap. 12—the first of Part III of the volume, which considers
Shakespeare as authority—James Harriman-Smith distinguishes two ways
in which the authority of actors with regard to Shakespeare was articu-

lated during the playwright’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rise
to the status of a national poet. From the reopening of the theatres to
the early 1700s, actors appeared as apostles, handing down Shakespeare’s
intentions from generation to generation as part of an independent per-
formance tradition. The career of David Garrick, from 1741 to 1776, was
marked, however, with the claim that, rather than inheriting a connec-
tion to Shakespeare, this new star was Shakespeare reborn. Resurrection
had replaced succession as a mode for articulating the actor’s authority.
Harriman-Smith explains this paradigm shift with an analysis of the rise of
textual editing between the death of Betterton and the debut of Garrick,
showing how it destabilized the transmission of theatrical practice while
also justifying Garrick’s claim to bring Shakespeare to life through a close
study of his writing. The chapter then concludes with a brief study of the-
atrical authority beyond Garrick, focusing on the critical writing of John
Philip Kemble. Andrew Rudd’s chapter considers Shakespeare’s author-
ity in the field of architecture, examining the authority Shakespeare pro-
vided in the eighteenth century and Romantic period as a rule-breaker
whose genius transcended both Classicism and the Gothic. Specifically,
it considers his appeal to the architect John Soane, who referred to
Shakespeare’s plays (not always accurately) in his lectures to the Royal
Academy and whose house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields exemplified the eclec-
ticism Shakespeare’s ‘infinite variety’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.248)
supposedly mandated. It discusses Shakespeare criticism by Alexander
Pope, Elizabeth Montagu, and Samuel Johnson, as well as the ideas of
Soane’s associates John Britton, Joseph Gandy, and Barbara Hofland.
Rudd argues that Shakespeare acted as an authority for Soane to recon-
cile both personal crises and stylistic divisions between Neo-Classicism
and Romanticism. Benedicte Seynhaeve and Raphaël Ingelbien, in their
chapter, revisit the question of Shakespeare and national identity, discuss-
ing Shakespeare’s identity as the national ‘Gothic Bard’ in the context
of Irish appeals to his authority in the Romantic period. Invocations of
Shakespeare in English Gothic helped situate the genre in a native tra-
dition. However, Shakespeare’s status as a national ‘Gothic Bard’ was
complicated in the Irish context. Chap. 14 shows how Charles Robert
Maturin (1780–1824) used Shakespeare to justify a distinctly Irish aes-
thetic of Gothic excess. His deployment of Shakespearean horror and
hyperbolic emotion is contrasted with Ann Radcliffe’s Shakespearean
blend of terror and melancholy, simultaneously revealing very different
interpretations of Burkean aesthetics. Like the Shakespearean work of the

Irish painter James Barry, Maturin’s Gothic writings were condemned by
British commentators, whose sense of a Gothic Shakespeare was incom-
patible with the Irishmen’s perceived extravagance. The debates sur-
rounding their works show that Shakespeare was a contested national
icon within British Romantic culture.
The volume concludes with two chapters that consider Shakespeare in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Chap. 15, Paul Tyndall and
Fred Ribkoff discuss Peter Brook’s film version of King Lear. Brook’s
film dramatizes a paradigm shift from the discretionary authority and
divine right of Kings to a recognizably modern rule of law governed by
instrumental rationality. When Lear begs his daughter to ‘reason not the
need’ (2.2.445), he is unknowingly asking her to act counter to bru-
tally rational divisive forces he himself has set in motion. The rupture
of bonds between power and authority, and between family members,
is a result of the emergence of a modern sensibility. In Brook’s hands,
the Lear story becomes a malleable myth chronicling the transition from
a primitive, patriarchal culture into a culture reflective of Brook’s own
post-war, existential sensibility. Brook’s Lear evokes the primitive world
of Shakespeare’s King Lear as well as the inevitable collapse of civi-
lization characteristic of ancient Greek tragedy, while at the same time
embodying the apocalyptic vision of post-war avant-garde theatre and
film. Thus Shakespeare’s Lear, although clearly the source for Brook’s
film, is one of many ‘authorities’ operating as an intertext. Brook fore-
grounds the tragic consequences of the modern act of giving up per-
sonal freedom and power—thus authority—to the state for the sake of
security and social order, an act culminating in the erasure of all signs
of civilization. In the final chapter of this volume, Jane Partner exam-
ines the ways in which Shakespeare’s authority is constructed and rep-
resented in contemporary visual culture, and places a diverse selection
of contemporary artworks in the longer history of the interpretation of
Shakespeare in painting, sculpture, and printed media. The first section
examines the presentation of Shakespeare himself, examining modern
portraits and memorabilia in the context of earlier visual constructions
of Shakespeare’s ‘genius’. The second section considers contemporary
paintings and video art that take on Shakespearean subjects, interpret-
ing them as responses to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century usages of
these same subjects in the genre of ‘history’ painting. The final section
examines artists who use Shakespeare’s text itself as their material, either
in graphic projects or in the form of digital sculpture.
If one of the purposes of this book is to examine how Shakespeare
became the archetypal figure of English cultural authority, another is
to illuminate why—a question that, as David Hopkins has observed,
has received rather less attention (Hopkins 2004, p. 263). Two differ-
ent answers to that question, and two different strands, emerge from the
chapters here: first of all, the way in which Shakespeare freely adopts,
adapts, translates, and transforms his own sources and authorities; and
second, the extent to which his plays forensically examine the nature of
authority itself. But to worry at authority (political, historical, or liter-
ary) is not the same thing as to reject it outright, and in Shakespearean
drama, as Stephen Greenblatt has recently noted (Greenblatt 2010,
p. 17), the exercise of authority is not something easily evaded or laid
aside lightly. Instead, Shakespeare’s plays insistently emphasize the
notion of authority, only to destabilize straightforward understandings of
it. Such complexity inevitably colours the ways in which actors, readers,
and audiences respond to Shakespearean authority, as well as the ways in
which the author’s reputation is forged in the following ages. Shakespeare
and Authority therefore enables a new understanding of Shakespearean
authority by foregrounding both its historical precedents and its subse-
quent effects.
Notes
1. For images of Jonson (including his own statue in Westminster Abbey), see
Hearn (2014).
2. While this is partly explained by neoclassical dogma and the growing influ-
ence of French critics, Rymer himself, as Fred Parker has emphasized,
‘grounds his criticism in an appeal to the common sense of the reader’
(Parker 1988, p. 18).
3. In the same place, his essay ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’, Eliot also
observed (surely with his tongue in his cheek) that Rymer still ‘makes out
a very good case’ (Eliot 1932, p. 97, n. 3).
4. For the connection between Shakespeare’s education and his classical
learning, the most thorough account remains Baldwin (1944).
5. For eighteenth-century editing of Shakespeare, see Parker (1989), Seary
(1990), and Jarvis (1995); for the Stratford Jubilee, see Rumbold (2012);
and for Malone and the emergence of notions of textual and critical
authenticity, see De Grazia (1991).
6. Although this is not the place for a rehearsal of the Shakespearean author-
ship controversy, it is worth noting that the refusal to believe that a
Stratford grammar boy could have written the plays of Shakespeare, and
subsequent attributions to Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, et al. is directly
related to these contested notions of Shakespearean authority.
7. In our range and scope, we, of course, follow Taylor (1989), the exem-
plary multitudinous account of Shakespeare’s afterlife.
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a chalice in his hands, what it is intended to symbolise, so these
military operations, apart from their immediate object, are quite
regularly traced, in the mind of the general responsible for the
campaign, from the plans of earlier battles, which we may call the
past experience, the literature, the learning, the etymology, the
aristocracy (whichever you like) of the battles of to-day. Observe that
I am not speaking for the moment of the local, the (what shall I call
it?) spatial identity of battles. That exists also. A battle-field has
never been, and never will be throughout the centuries, simply the
ground upon which a particular battle has been fought. If it has been
a battle-field, that was because it combined certain conditions of
geographical position, of geological formation, drawbacks even, of a
kind that would obstruct the enemy (a river, for instance, cutting his
force in two), which made it a good field of battle. And so what it has
been it will continue to be. A painter doesn’t make a studio out of any
old room; so you don’t make a battle-field out of any old piece of
ground. There are places set apart for the purpose. But, once again,
this is not what I was telling you about; it was the type of battle which
one follows, in a sort of strategic tracing, a tactical imitation, if you
like. Battles like Ulm, Lodi, Leipzig, Cannae. I can’t say whether
there is ever going to be another war, or what nations are going to
fight in it, but, if a war does come, you may be sure that it will include
(and deliberately, on the commander’s part) a Cannae, an Austerlitz,
a Rosbach, a Waterloo. Some of our people say quite openly that
Marshal von Schieffer and General Falkenhausen have prepared a
Battle of Cannae against France, in the Hannibal style, pinning their
enemy down along his whole front, and advancing on both flanks,
especially through Belgium, while Bernhardi prefers the oblique
order of Frederick the Great, Lenthen rather than Cannae. Others
expound their views less crudely, but I can tell you one thing, my boy,
that Beauconseil, the squadron commander I introduced you to the
other day, who is an officer with a very great future before him, has
swotted up a little Pratzen attack of his own; he knows it inside out,
he is keeping it up his sleeve, and if he ever has an opportunity to
put it into practice he will make a clean job of it and let us have it on
a big scale. The break through in the centre at Rivoli, too; that’s a
thing that will crop up if there’s ever another war. It’s no more
obsolete than the Iliad. I must add that we are practically condemned
to make frontal attacks, because we can’t afford to repeat the
mistake we made in Seventy; we must assume the offensive, and
nothing else. The only thing that troubles me is that if I see only the
slower, more antiquated minds among us opposing this splendid
doctrine, still, one of the youngest of my masters, who is a genius, I
mean Mangin, would like us to leave room, provisionally of course,
for the defensive. It is not very easy to answer him when he cites the
example of Austerlitz, where the defence was merely a prelude to
attack and victory.”
The enunciation of these theories by Saint-Loup made me happy.
They gave me to hope that perhaps I was not being led astray, in my
life at Doncières, with regard to these officers whom I used to hear
being discussed while I sat sipping a sauterne which bathed them in
its charming golden glint, by the same magnifying power which had
swollen to such enormous proportions in my eyes while I was at
Balbec the King and Queen of the South Sea Island, the little group
of the four epicures, the young gambler, Legrandin’s brother-in-law,
now shrunken so in my view as to appear non-existent. What gave
me pleasure to-day would not, perhaps, leave me indifferent to-
morrow, as had always happened hitherto; the creature that I still
was at this moment was not, perhaps, doomed to immediate
destruction, since to the ardent and fugitive passion which I had felt
on these few evenings for everything connected with military life,
Saint-Loup, by what he had just been saying to me, touching the art
of war, added an intellectual foundation, of a permanent character,
capable of attaching me to itself so strongly that I might, without any
attempt to deceive myself, feel assured that after I had left Doncières
I should continue to take an interest in the work of my friends there,
and should not be long in coming to pay them another visit. At the
same time, so as to make quite sure that this art of war was indeed
an art in the true sense of the word:
“You interest me—I beg your pardon, tu interest me enormously,” I
said to Saint-Loup, “but tell me, there is one point that puzzles me. I
feel that I could be keenly thrilled by the art of strategy, but if so I
must first be sure that it is not so very different from the other arts,
that knowing the rules is not everything. You tell me that plans of
battles are copied. I do find something aesthetic, just as you said, in
seeing beneath a modern battle the plan of an older one, I can’t tell
you how attractive it sounds. But then, does the genius of the
commander count for nothing? Does he really do no more than apply
the rules? Or, in point of science, are there great generals as there
are great surgeons, who, when the symptoms exhibited by two
states of ill-health are identical to the outward eye, nevertheless feel,
for some infinitesimal reason, founded perhaps on their experience,
but interpreted afresh, that in one case they ought to do one thing, in
another case another; that in one case it is better to operate, in
another to wait?”
“I should just say so! You will find Napoleon not attacking when all
the rules ordered him to attack, but some obscure divination warned
him not to. For instance, look at Austerlitz, or in 1806 take his
instructions to Lannes. But you will find certain generals slavishly
imitating one of Napoleon’s movements and arriving at a
diametrically opposite result. There are a dozen examples of that in
1870. But even for the interpretation of what the enemy may do,
what he actually does is only a symptom which may mean any
number of different things. Each of them has an equal chance of
being the right thing, if one looks only to reasoning and science, just
as in certain difficult cases all the medical science in the world will be
powerless to decide whether the invisible tumour is malignant or not,
whether or not the operation ought to be performed. It is his instinct,
his divination—like Mme. de Thèbes (you follow me?)—which
decides, in the great general as in the great doctor. Thus I’ve been
telling you, to take one instance, what might be meant by a
reconnaissance on the eve of a battle. But it may mean a dozen
other things also, such as to make the enemy think you are going to
attack him at one point whereas you intend to attack him at another,
to put out a screen which will prevent him from seeing the
preparations for your real operation, to force him to bring up fresh
troops, to hold them, to immobilise them in a different place from
where they are needed, to form an estimate of the forces at his
disposal, to feel him, to force him to shew his hand. Sometimes,
indeed, the fact that you employ an immense number of troops in an
operation is by no means a proof that that is your true objective; for
you may be justified in carrying it out, even if it is only a feint, so that
your feint may have a better chance of deceiving the enemy. If I had
time now to go through the Napoleonic wars from this point of view, I
assure you that these simple classic movements which we study
here, and which you will come and see us practising in the field, just
for the pleasure of a walk, you young rascal—no, I know you’re not
well, I apologise!—well, in a war, when you feel behind you the
vigilance, the judgment, the profound study of the Higher Command,
you are as much moved by them as by the simple lamps of a
lighthouse, only a material combustion, but an emanation of the
spirit, sweeping through space to warn ships of danger. I may have
been wrong, perhaps, in speaking to you only of the literature of war.
In reality, as the formation of the soil, the direction of wind and light
tell us which way a tree will grow, so the conditions in which a
campaign is fought, the features of the country through which you
march, prescribe, to a certain extent, and limit the number of the
plans among which the general has to choose. Which means that
along a mountain range, through a system of valleys, over certain
plains, it is almost with the inevitability and the tremendous beauty of
an avalanche that you can forecast the line of an army on the
march.”
“Now you deny me that freedom of choice in the commander, that
power of divination in the enemy who is trying to discover his plan,
which you allowed me a moment ago.”
“Not at all. You remember that book of philosophy we read
together at Balbec, the richness of the world of possibilities
compared with the real world. Very well. It is the same again with the
art of strategy. In a given situation there will be four plans that offer
themselves, one of which the general has to choose, as a disease
may pass through various phases for which the doctor has to watch.
And here again the weakness and greatness of the human elements
are fresh causes of uncertainty. For of these four plans let us
assume that contingent reasons (such as the attainment of minor
objects, or time, which may be pressing, or the smallness of his
effective strength and shortage of rations) lead the general to prefer
the first, which is less perfect, but less costly also to carry out, is
more rapid, and has for its terrain a richer country for feeding his
troops. He may, after having begun with this plan, which the enemy,
uncertain at first, will soon detect, find that success lies beyond his
grasp, the difficulties being too great (that is what I call the element
of human weakness), abandon it and try the second or third or
fourth. But it may equally be that he has tried the first plan (and this
is what I call human greatness) merely as a feint to pin down the
enemy, so as to surprise him later at a point where he has not been
expecting an attack. Thus at Ulm, Mack, who expected the enemy to
advance from the west, was surrounded from the north where he
thought he was perfectly safe. My example is not a very good one,
as a matter of fact. And Ulm is a better type of enveloping battle,
which the future will see reproduced, because it is not only a classic
example from which generals will seek inspiration, but a form that is
to some extent necessary (one of several necessities, which leaves
room for choice, for variety) like a type of crystallisation. But it
doesn’t much matter, really, because these conditions are after all
artificial. To go back to our philosophy book; it is like the rules of logic
or scientific laws, reality does conform to it more or less, but bear in
mind that the great mathematician Poincaré is by no means certain
that mathematics are strictly accurate. As to the rules themselves,
which I mentioned to you, they are of secondary importance really,
and besides they are altered from time to time. We cavalrymen, for
instance, have to go by the Field Service of 1895, which, you may
say, is out of date since it is based on the old and obsolete doctrine
which maintains that cavalry warfare has little more than a moral
effect, in the panic that the charge creates in the enemy. Whereas
the more intelligent of our teachers, all the best brains in the cavalry,
and particularly the major I was telling you about, anticipate on the
contrary that the decisive victory will be obtained by a real hand to
hand encounter in which our weapons will be sabre and lance and
the side that can hold out longer will win, not simply morally and by
creating panic, but materially.”
“Saint-Loup is quite right, and it is probable that the next Field
Service will shew signs of this evolution,” put in my other neighbour.
“I am not ungrateful for your support, for your opinions seem to
make more impression upon my friend than mine,” said Saint-Loup
with a smile, whether because the growing attraction between his
comrade and myself annoyed him slightly or because he thought it
graceful to solemnise it with this official confirmation. “Perhaps I may
have underestimated the importance of the rules; I don’t know. They
do change, that must be admitted. But in the mean time they control
the military situation, the plans of campaign and concentration. If
they reflect a false conception of strategy they may be the principal
cause of defeat. All this is a little too technical for you,” he remarked
to me. “After all, you may say that what does most to accelerate the
evolution of the art of war is wars themselves. In the course of a
campaign, if it is at all long, you will see one belligerent profiting by
the lessons furnished him by the successes and mistakes, perfecting
the methods of the other, who will improve on him in turn. But all that
is a thing of the past. With the terrible advance of artillery, the wars
of the future, if there are to be any more wars, will be so short that,
before we have had time to think of putting our lessons into practice,
peace will have been signed.”
“Don’t be so touchy,” I told Saint-Loup, reverting to the first words
of this speech. “I was listening to you quite eagerly.”
“If you will kindly not fly into a passion, and will allow me to speak,”
his friend went on, “I shall add to what you have just been saying
that if battles copy and coincide with one another it is not merely due
to the mind of the commander. It may happen that a mistake on his
part (for instance, his failure to appreciate the strength of the enemy)
will lead him to call upon his men for extravagant sacrifices,
sacrifices which certain units will make with an abnegation so
sublime that their part in the battle will be analogous to that played
by some other unit in some other battle, and these will be quoted in
history as interchangeable examples: to stick to 1870, we have the
Prussian Guard at Saint-Privat, and the Turcos at Frœschviller and
Wissembourg.”
“Ah! Interchangeable; very neat! Excellent! The lad has brains,”
was Saint-Loup’s comment.
I was not unmoved by these last examples, as always when,
beneath the particular instance, I was afforded a glimpse of the
general law. Still, the genius of the commander, that was what
interested me, I was anxious to discover in what it consisted, what
steps, in given circumstances, when the commander who lacked
genius could not withstand the enemy, the inspired leader would take
to re-establish his jeopardised position, which, according to Saint-
Loup, was quite possible and had been done by Napoleon more than
once. And to understand what military worth meant I asked for
comparisons between the various generals whom I knew by name,
which of them had most markedly the character of a leader, the gifts
of a tactician; at the risk of boring my new friends, who however
shewed no signs of boredom, but continued to answer me with an
inexhaustible good-nature.
I felt myself isolated, not only from the great, freezing night which
extended far around us and in which we heard from time to time the
whistle of a train which only rendered more keen the pleasure of
being where we were, or the chime of an hour which, happily, was
still a long way short of that at which these young men would have to
buckle on their sabres and go, but also from all my external
obsessions, almost from the memory of Mme. de Guermantes, by
the hospitality of Saint-Loup, to which that of his friends, reinforcing
it, gave, so to speak, a greater solidity; by the warmth also of this
little dining-room, by the savour of the well-chosen dishes that were
set before us. They gave as much pleasure to my imagination as to
my appetite; sometimes the little piece of still life from which they
had been taken, the rugged holy water stoup of the oyster in which
lingered a few drops of brackish water, or the knotted stem, the
yellow leaves of a bunch of grapes still enveloped them, inedible,
poetic and remote as a landscape, and producing, at different points
in the course of the meal, the impressions of rest in the shade of a
vine and of an excursion out to sea; on other evenings it was the
cook alone who threw into relief these original properties of our food,
which he presented in its natural setting, like a work of art; and a fish
cooked in wine was brought in on a long earthenware dish, on which,
as it stood out in relief on a bed of bluish herbs, unbreakable now but
still contorted from having been dropped alive into boiling water,
surrounded by a circle of satellite creatures in their shells, crabs,
shrimps and mussels, it had the appearance of being part of a
ceramic design by Bernard Palissy.
“I am jealous, furious,” Saint-Loup attacked me, half smiling, half in
earnest, alluding to the interminable conversations aside which I had
been having with his friend. “Is it because you find him more
intelligent than me; do you like him better than me? Well, I suppose
he’s everything now, and no one else is to have a look in!” Men who
are enormously in love with a woman, who live in the society of
woman-lovers, allow themselves pleasantries on which others, who
would see less innocence in them, would never venture.
When the conversation became general, they avoided any
reference to Dreyfus for fear of offending Saint-Loup. The following
week, however, two of his friends were remarking what a curious
thing it was that, living in so military an atmosphere, he was so keen
a Dreyfusard, almost an anti-militarist: “The reason is,” I suggested,
not wishing to enter into details, “that the influence of environment is
not so important as people think....” I intended of course to stop at
this point, and not to reiterate the observations which I had made to
Saint-Loup a few days earlier. Since, however, I had repeated these
words almost textually, I proceeded to excuse myself by adding: “As,
in fact, I was saying the other day....” But I had reckoned without the
reverse side of Robert’s polite admiration of myself and certain other
persons. That admiration reached its fulfilment in so entire an
assimilation of their ideas that, in the course of a day or two, he
would have completely forgotten that those ideas were not his own.
And so, in the matter of my modest theory, Saint-Loup, for all the
world as though it had always dwelt in his own brain, and as though I
were merely poaching on his preserves, felt it incumbent upon him to
greet my discovery with warm approval.
“Why, yes; environment is of no importance.”
And with as much vehemence as if he were afraid of my
interrupting, or failing to understand him:
“The real influence is that of one’s intellectual environment! One is
the man of one’s idea!”
He stopped for a moment, with the satisfied smile of one who has
digested his dinner, dropped his eyeglass and, fixing me with a
gimlet-like stare:
“All men with similar ideas are alike,” he informed me, with a
challenging air. Probably he had completely forgotten that I myself
had said to him, only a few days earlier, what on the other hand he
remembered so well.
I did not arrive at Saint-Loup’s restaurant every evening in the
same state of mind. If a memory, a sorrow that weigh on us are able
to leave us so effectively that we are no longer aware of them, they
can also return and sometimes remain with us for a long time. There
were evenings when, as I passed through the town on my way to the
restaurant, I felt so keen a longing for Mme. de Guermantes that I
could scarcely breathe; you might have said that part of my breast
had been cut open by a skilled anatomist, taken out, and replaced by
an equal part of immaterial suffering, by an equivalent load of
longing and love. And however neatly the wound may have been
stitched together, there is not much comfort in life when regret for the
loss of another person is substituted for one’s entrails, it seems to be
occupying more room than they, one feels it perpetually, and
besides, what a contradiction in terms to be obliged to think a part of
one’s body. Only it seems that we are worth more, somehow. At the
whisper of a breeze we sigh, from oppression, but from weariness
also. I would look up at the sky. If it were clear, I would say to myself:
“Perhaps she is in the country; she is looking at the same stars; and,
for all I know, when I arrive at the restaurant Robert may say to me:
‘Good news! I have just heard from my aunt; she wants to meet you;
she is coming down here.’” It was not in the firmament alone that I
enshrined the thought of Mme. de Guermantes. A passing breath of
air, more fragrant than the rest, seemed to bring me a message from
her, as, long ago, from Gilberte in the cornfields of Méséglise. We do
not change; we introduce into the feeling with which we regard a
person many slumbering elements which that feeling revives but
which are foreign to it. Besides, with these feelings for particular
people, there is always something in us that is trying to bring them
nearer to the truth, that is to say, to absorb them in a more general
feeling, common to the whole of humanity, with which people and the
suffering that they cause us are merely a means to enable us to
communicate. What brought a certain pleasure into my grief was that
I knew it to be a tiny fragment of the universal love. Simply because I
thought that I recognised sorrows which I had felt on Gilberte’s
account, or else when in the evenings at Combray Mamma would
not stay in any room, and also the memory of certain pages of
Bergotte, in the agony I now felt, to which Mme. de Guermantes, her
coldness, her absence, were not clearly linked, as cause is to effect
in the mind of a philosopher, I did not conclude that Mme. de
Guermantes was not the cause of that agony. Is there not such a
thing as a diffused bodily pain, extending, radiating out into other
parts, which, however, it leaves, to vanish altogether, if the
practitioner lays his finger on the precise spot from which it springs?
And yet, until that moment, its extension gave it for us so vague, so
fatal a semblance that, powerless to explain or even to locate it, we
imagined that there was no possibility of its being healed. As I made
my way to the restaurant I said to myself: “A fortnight already since I
last saw Mme. de Guermantes.” A fortnight which did not appear so
enormous an interval save to me, who, when Mme. de Guermantes
was concerned, reckoned time by minutes. For me it was no longer
the stars and the breeze merely, but the arithmetical divisions of time
that assumed a dolorous and poetic aspect. Each day now was like
the loose crest of a crumbling mountain, down one side of which I
felt that I could descend into oblivion, but down the other was borne
by the necessity of seeing the Duchess again. And I was continually
inclining one way or the other, having no stable equilibrium. One day
I said to myself: “Perhaps there will be a letter to-night;” and on
entering the dining-room I found courage to ask Saint-Loup:
“You don’t happen to have had any news from Paris?”
“Yes,” he replied gloomily; “bad news.”
I breathed a sigh of relief when I realised that it was only he who
was unhappy, and that the news came from his mistress. But I soon
saw that one of its consequences would be to prevent Robert, for
ever so long, from taking me to see his aunt.
I learned that a quarrel had broken out between him and his
mistress, through the post presumably, unless she had come down
to pay him a flying visit between trains. And the quarrels, even when
relatively slight, which they had previously had, had always seemed
as though they must prove insoluble. For she was a girl of violent
temper, who would stamp her foot and burst into tears for reasons as
incomprehensible as those that make children shut themselves into
dark cupboards, not come out for dinner, refuse to give any
explanation, and only redouble their sobs when, our patience
exhausted, we visit them with a whipping. To say that Saint-Loup
suffered terribly from this estrangement would be an understatement
of the truth, which would give the reader a false impression of his
grief. When he found himself alone, the only picture in his mind
being that of his mistress parting from him with the respect which
she had felt for him at the sight of his energy, the anxieties which he
had had at first gave way before the irreparable, and the cessation of
an anxiety is so pleasant a thing that the rupture, once it was certain,
assumed for him something of the same kind of charm as a
reconciliation. What he began to suffer from, a little later, was a
secondary and accidental grief, the tide of which flowed incessantly
from his own heart, at the idea that perhaps she would be glad to
make it up, that it was not inconceivable that she was waiting for a
word from him, that in the mean time, to be avenged on him, she
would perhaps on a certain evening, in a certain place, do a certain
thing, and that he had only to telegraph to her that he was coming for
it not to happen, that others perhaps were taking advantage of the
time which he was letting slip, and that in a few days it would be too
late to recapture her, for she would be already bespoke. Among all
these possibilities he was certain of nothing; his mistress preserved
a silence which wrought him up to such a frenzy of grief that he
began to ask himself whether she might not be in hiding at
Doncières, or have sailed for the Indies.
It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely
different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who
are loved. It increases the anxiety of the lover who has to wait.
Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping
us apart; and what barrier is there so insurmountable as silence? It
has been said also that silence is a torture, capable of goading to
madness him who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what a
torture—keener than that of having to keep silence—to have to
endure the silence of the person one loves! Robert asked himself:
“What can she be doing, never to send me a single word, like this?
She hates me, perhaps, and will always go on hating me.” And he
reproached himself. Thus her silence did indeed drive him mad with
jealousy and remorse. Besides, more cruel than the silence of
prisons, that kind of silence is in itself a prison. An immaterial
enclosure, I admit, but impenetrable, this interposed slice of empty
atmosphere through which, despite its emptiness, the visual rays of
the abandoned lover cannot pass. Is there a more terrible
illumination than that of silence which shews us not one absent love
but a thousand, and shews us each of them in the act of indulging in
some fresh betrayal? Sometimes, in an abrupt relaxation of his
strain, Robert would imagine that this period of silence was just
coming to an end, that the long expected letter was on its way. He
saw it, it arrived, he started at every sound, his thirst was already
quenched, he murmured: “The letter! The letter!” After this glimpse of
a phantom oasis of affection, he found himself once more toiling
across the real desert of a silence without end.
He suffered in anticipation, without a single omission, all the griefs
and pains of a rupture which at other moments he fancied he might
somehow contrive to avoid, like people who put all their affairs in
order with a view to a migration abroad which they never make,
whose minds, no longer certain where they will find themselves living
next day, flutter helplessly for the time being, detached from them,
like a heart that is taken out of a dying man and continues to beat,
though disjoined from the rest of his body. Anyhow, this hope that his
mistress would return gave him courage to persevere in the rupture,
as the belief that one will return alive from the battle helps one to
face death. And inasmuch as habit is, of all the plants of human
growth, the one that has least need of nutritious soil in order to live,
and is the first to appear upon what is apparently the most barren
rock, perhaps had he begun by effecting their rupture as a feint he
would in the end have grown genuinely accustomed to it. But his
uncertainty kept him in a state of emotion which, linked with the
memory of the woman herself, was akin to love. He forced himself,
nevertheless, not to write to her, thinking perhaps that it was a less
cruel torment to live without his mistress than with her in certain
conditions, or else that, after the way in which they had parted, it was
necessary to wait for excuses from her, if she was to keep what he
believed her to feel for him in the way, if not of love, at any rate of
esteem and regard. He contented himself with going to the
telephone, which had recently been installed at Doncières, and
asking for news from, or giving instructions to a lady’s maid whom he
had procured and placed with his friend. These communications
were, as it turned out, complicated and took up much of his time,
since, influenced by what her literary friends preached to her about
the ugliness of the capital, but principally for the sake of her animals,
her dogs, her monkey, her canaries and her parrokeet, whose
incessant din her Paris landlord had declined to tolerate for another
moment, Robert’s mistress had now taken a little house in the
neighbourhood of Versailles. Meanwhile he, down at Doncières, no
longer slept a wink all night. Once, in my room, overcome by
exhaustion, he dozed off for a little. But suddenly he began to talk,
tried to get up and run, to stop something from happening, said: “I
hear her; you shan’t ... you shan’t....” He awoke. He had been
dreaming, he explained to me, that he was in the country with the
serjeant-major. His host had tried to keep him away from a certain
part of the house. Saint-Loup had discovered that the serjeant-major
had staying with him a subaltern, extremely rich and extremely
vicious, whom he knew to have a violent passion for his mistress.
And suddenly in his dream he had distinctly heard the spasmodic,
regular cries which his mistress was in the habit of uttering at the
moment of gratification. He had tried to force the serjeant-major to
take him to the room in which she was. And the other had held him
back, to keep him from going there, with an air of annoyance at such
a want of discretion in a guest which, Robert said, he would never be
able to forget.
“It was an idiotic dream,” he concluded, still quite breathless.
All the same I could see that, during the hour that followed, he was
more than once on the point of telephoning to his mistress to beg for
a reconciliation. My father had now had the telephone for some time
at home, but I doubt whether that would have been of much use to
Saint-Loup. Besides, it hardly seemed to me quite proper to make
my parents, or even a mechanical instrument installed in their house,
play pander between Saint-Loup and his mistress, ladylike and high-
minded as the latter might be. His bad dream began to fade from his
memory. With a fixed and absent stare, he came to see me on each
of those cruel days which traced in my mind as they followed one
after the other the splendid sweep of a staircase forged in hard metal
on which Robert stood asking himself what decision his friend was
going to take.
At length she wrote to ask whether he would consent to forgive
her. As soon as he realised that a definite rupture had been avoided
he saw all the disadvantages of a reconciliation. Besides, he had
already begun to suffer less acutely, and had almost accepted a grief
the sharp tooth of which he would have, in a few months perhaps, to
feel again if their intimacy were to be resumed. He did not hesitate
for long. And perhaps he hesitated only because he was now certain
of being able to recapture his mistress, of being able to do it and
therefore of doing it. Only she asked him, so that she might have
time to recover her equanimity, not to come to Paris at the New Year.
Now he had not the heart to go to Paris without seeing her. On the
other hand, she had declared her willingness to go abroad with him,
but for that he would need to make a formal application for leave,
which Captain de Borodino was unwilling to grant.
“I’m sorry about it, because of your meeting with my aunt, which
will have to be put off. I dare say I shall be in Paris at Easter.”
“We shan’t be able to call on Mme. de Guermantes then, because
I shall have gone to Balbec. But, really, it doesn’t matter in the least,
I assure you.”
“To Balbec? But you didn’t go there till August.”
“I know; but next year they’re making me go there earlier, for my
health.”
All that he feared was that I might form a bad impression of his
mistress, after what he had told me. “She is violent simply because
she is too frank, too thorough in her feelings. But she is a sublime
creature. You can’t imagine what exquisite poetry there is in her. She
goes every year to spend All Souls’ Day at Bruges. ‘Nice’ of her,
don’t you think? If you ever do meet her you’ll see what I mean; she
has a greatness....” And, as he was infected with certain of the
mannerisms used in the literary circles in which the lady moved:
“There is something sidereal about her, in fact something bardic; you
know what I mean, the poet merging into the priest.”
I was searching all through dinner for a pretext which would
enable Saint-Loup to ask his aunt to see me without my having to
wait until he came to Paris. Now such a pretext was furnished by the
desire that I had to see some more pictures by Elstir, the famous
painter whom Saint-Loup and I had met at Balbec. A pretext behind
which there was, moreover, an element of truth, for if, on my visits to
Elstir, what I had asked of his painting had been that it should lead
me to the comprehension and love of things better than itself, a real
thaw, an authentic square in a country town, live women on a beach
(all the more would I have commissioned from it the portraits of the
realities which I had not been able to fathom, such as a lane of
hawthorn-blossoms, not so much that it might perpetuate their
beauty for me as that it might reveal that beauty to me), now, on the
other hand, it was the originality, the seductive attraction of those
paintings that aroused my desire, and what I wanted above anything
else was to look at other pictures by Elstir.
It seemed to me, also, that the least of his pictures were
something quite different from the masterpieces even of greater
painters than himself. His work was like a realm apart, whose
frontiers were not to be passed, matchless in substance. Eagerly
collecting the infrequent periodicals in which articles on him and his
work had appeared, I had learned that it was only recently that he
had begun to paint landscapes and still life, and that he had started
with mythological subjects (I had seen photographs of two of these in
his studio), and had then been for long under the influence of
Japanese art.
Several of the works most characteristic of his various manners
were scattered about the provinces. A certain house at Les Andelys,
in which there was one of his finest landscapes, seemed to me as
precious, gave me as keen a desire to go there and see it as did a
village in the Chartres district, among whose millstone walls was
enshrined a glorious painted window; and towards the possessor of
this treasure, towards the man who, inside his ugly house, on the
main street, closeted like an astrologer, sat questioning one of those
mirrors of the world which Elstir’s pictures were, and who had
perhaps bought it for many thousands of francs, I felt myself borne
by that instinctive sympathy which joins the very hearts, the inmost
natures of those who think alike upon a vital subject. Now three
important works by my favourite painter were described in one of
these articles as belonging to Mme. de Guermantes. So that it was,
after all, quite sincerely that, on the evening on which Saint-Loup told
me of his lady’s projected visit to Bruges, I was able, during dinner,
in front of his friends, to let fall, as though on the spur of the moment:
“Listen, if you don’t mind. Just one last word on the subject of the
lady we were speaking about. You remember Elstir, the painter I met
at Balbec?”
“Why, of course I do.”
“You remember how much I admired his work?”
“I do, quite well; and the letter we sent him.”
“Very well, one of the reasons—not one of the chief reasons, a
subordinate reason—why I should like to meet the said lady—you do
know who’ I mean, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. How involved you’re getting.”
“Is that she has in her house one very fine picture, at least, by
Elstir.”
“I say, I never knew that.”
“Elstir will probably be at Balbec at Easter; you know he stays
down there now all the year round, practically. I should very much
like to have seen this picture before I leave Paris. I don’t know
whether you’re on sufficiently intimate terms with your aunt: but
couldn’t you manage, somehow, to give her so good an impression
of me that she won’t refuse, and then ask her if she’ll let me come
and see the picture without you, since you won’t be there?”
“That’s all right. I’ll answer for her; I’ll make a special point of it.”
“Oh, Robert, you are an angel; I do love you.”
“It’s very nice of you to love me, but it would be equally nice if you
were to call me tu, as you promised, and as you began to do.”
“I hope it’s not your departure that you two are plotting together,”
one of Robert’s friends said to me. “You know, if Saint-Loup does go
on leave, it needn’t make any difference, we shall still be here. It will
be less amusing for you, perhaps, but we’ll do all we can to make
you forget his absence.” As a matter of fact, just as we had decided
that Robert’s mistress would have to go to Bruges by herself, the
news came that Captain de Borodino, obdurate hitherto in his
refusal, had given authority for Serjeant Saint-Loup to proceed on
long leave to Bruges. What had happened was this. The Prince,
extremely proud of his luxuriant head of hair, was an assiduous
customer of the principal hairdresser in the town, who had started life
as a boy under Napoleon III’s barber. Captain de Borodino was on
the best of terms with the hairdresser, being, in spite of his air of
majesty, quite simple in his dealings with his inferiors. But the
hairdresser, through whose books the Prince’s account had been
running without payment for at least five years, swollen no less by
bottles of Portugal and Eau des Souverains, irons, razors, and
strops, than by the ordinary charges for shampooing, haircutting and
the like, had a greater respect for Saint-Loup, who always paid on
the nail and kept several carriages and saddle-horses. Having
learned of Saint-Loup’s vexation at not being able to go with his
mistress, he had spoken strongly about it to the Prince at a moment
when he was trussed up in a white surplice with his head held firmly
over the back of the chair and his throat menaced by a razor. This
narrative of a young man’s gallant adventures won from the princely
captain a smile of Bonapartish indulgence. It is hardly probable that
he thought of his unpaid bill, but the barber’s recommendation
tended to put him in as good a humour as one from a duke would
have put him in a bad. While his chin was still smothered in soap, the
leave was promised, and the warrant was signed that evening. As for
the hairdresser, who was in the habit of boasting all day long of his
own exploits, and in order to do so claimed for himself, shewing an
astonishing faculty for lying, distinctions that were pure fabrications,
having for once rendered this signal service to Saint-Loup, not only
did he refrain from publishing it broadcast, but, as if vanity were
obliged to lie, and when there was no scope for lying gave place to
modesty, he never mentioned the matter to Robert again.
All his friends assured me that, as long as I stayed at Doncières,
or if I should come there again at any time, even although Robert
were away, their horses, their quarters, their time would be at my
disposal, and I felt that it was with the greatest cordiality that these
young men put their comfort and youth and strength at the service of
my weakness.
“Why on earth,” they went on, after insisting that I should stay,
“don’t you come down here every year; you see how our quiet life
appeals to you! Besides you’re so keen about everything that goes
on in the Regiment; quite the old soldier.”
For I continued my eager demands that they would classify the
different officers whose names I knew according to the degree of
admiration which they seemed to deserve, just as, in my schooldays,
I used to make the other boys classify the actors of the Théâtre-
Français. If, in the place of one of the generals whom I had always
heard mentioned at the head of the list, such as Galliffet or Négrier,
one of Saint-Loup’s friends, with a contemptuous: “But Négrier is one
of the feeblest of our general officers,” put the new, intact, appetising
name of Pau or Geslin de Bourgogne, I felt the same joyful surprise
as long ago when the outworn name of Thiron or Febvre was sent
flying by the sudden explosion of the unfamiliar name of Amaury.
“Better even than Négrier? But in what respect; give me an
example?” I should have liked there to exist profound differences
even among the junior officers of the regiment, and I hoped in the
reason for these differences to seize the essential quality of what
constituted military superiority. The one whom I should have been
most interested to hear discussed, because he was the one whom I
had most often seen, was the Prince de Borodino. But neither Saint-
Loup nor his friends, if they did justice to the fine officer who kept his
squadron up to the supreme pitch of efficiency, liked the man.
Without speaking of him, naturally, in the same tone as of certain
other officers, rankers and freemasons, who did not associate much
with the rest and had, in comparison, an uncouth, barrack-room
manner, they seemed not to include M. de Borodino among the
officers of noble birth, from whom, it must be admitted, he differed
considerably in his attitude even towards Saint-Loup. The others,
taking advantage of the fact that Robert was only an N.C.O., and
that therefore his influential relatives might be grateful were he
invited to the houses of superior officers on whom ordinarily they
would have looked down, lost no opportunity of having him to dine
when any bigwig was expected who might be of use to a young
cavalry serjeant. Captain de Borodino alone confined himself to his
official relations (which, for that matter, were always excellent) with
Robert. The fact was that the Prince, whose grandfather had been
made a Marshal and a Prince-Duke by the Emperor, with whose
family he had subsequently allied himself by marriage, while his
father had married a cousin of Napoleon III and had twice been a
Minister after the Coup d’Etat, felt that in spite of all this he did not
count for much with Saint-Loup and the Guermantes connexion, who
in turn, since he did not look at things from the same point of view as
they, counted for very little with him. He suspected that, for Saint-
Loup, he himself was—he, a kinsman of the Hohenzollern—not a
true noble but the grandson of a farmer, but at the same time he
regarded Saint-Loup as the son of a man whose Countship had
been confirmed by the Emperor—one of what were known in the
Faubourg Saint-Germain as “touched-up” Counts—and who had
besought him first for a Prefecture, then for some other post a long
way down the list of subordinates to His Highness the Prince de
Borodino, Minister of State, who was styled on his letters
“Monseigneur” and was a nephew of the Sovereign.
Something more than a nephew, possibly. The first Princesse de
Borodino was reputed to have bestowed her favours on Napoleon I,
whom she followed to the Isle of Elba, and the second hers on
Napoleon III. And if, in the Captain’s placid countenance, one caught
a trace of Napoleon I—if not in his natural features, at least in the
studied majesty of the mask—the officer had, particularly in his
melancholy and kindly gaze, in his drooping moustache, something
that reminded one also of Napoleon III; and this in so striking a
fashion that, having asked leave, after Sedan, to join the Emperor in
captivity, and having been sent away by Bismarck, before whom he
had been brought, the latter, happening to look up at the young man
who was preparing to leave the room, was at once impressed by the
likeness and, reconsidering his decision, recalled him and gave him
the authorisation which he, in common with every one else, had just
been refused.
If the Prince de Borodino was not prepared to make overtures to
Saint-Loup nor to the other representatives of Faubourg Saint-
Germain society that there were in the regiment (while he frequently
invited two subalterns of plebeian origin who were pleasant
companions) it was because, looking down upon them all from the
height of his Imperial grandeur, he drew between these two classes
of inferiors the distinction that one set consisted of inferiors who
knew themselves to be such and with whom he was delighted to
spend his time, being beneath his outward majesty of a simple, jovial
humour, and the other of inferiors who thought themselves his
superiors, a claim which he could not allow. And so, while all the
other officers of the regiment made much of Saint-Loup, the Prince
de Borodino, to whose care the young man had been recommended
by Marshal X——, confined himself to being obliging with regard to
the military duties which Saint-Loup always performed in the most
exemplary fashion, but never had him to his house except on one
special occasion when he found himself practically compelled to
invite him, and when, as this occurred during my stay at Doncières,
he asked him to bring me to dinner also. I had no difficulty that
evening, as I watched Saint-Loup sitting at his Captain’s table, in
distinguishing, in their respective manners and refinements, the
difference that existed between the two aristocracies: the old nobility
and that of the Empire. The offspring of a caste the faults of which,
even if he repudiated them with all the force of his intellect, had been
absorbed into his blood, a caste which, having ceased to exert any
real authority for at least a century, saw nothing more now in the
protective affability which formed part of its regular course of
education, than an exercise, like horsemanship or fencing, cultivated
without any serious purpose, as a sport; on meeting representatives
of that middle class on which the old nobility so far looked down as
to believe that they were flattered by its intimacy and would be
honoured by the informality of its tone, Saint-Loup would take the
hand of no matter who might be introduced to him, though he had
failed perhaps to catch the stranger’s name, in a friendly grip, and as
he talked to him (crossing and uncrossing his legs all the time,
flinging himself back in his chair in an attitude of absolute
unconstraint, one foot in the palm of his hand) call him “my dear
fellow.” Belonging on the other hand to a nobility whose titles still
preserved their original meaning, provided that their holders still
possessed the splendid emoluments given in reward for glorious
services and bringing to mind the record of high offices in which one
is in command of numberless men and must know how to deal with
men, the Prince de Borodino—not perhaps very distinctly or with any
clear personal sense of superiority, but at any rate in his body, which
revealed it by its attitudes and behaviour generally—regarded his
own rank as a prerogative that was still effective; those same

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Shakespeare and Authority: Citations,

Conceptions and Constructions Katie

Conceptions of Giftedness and Talent Robert J.

Shakespeare and East Asia Alexa Alice Joubin

Shakespeare and Disability Studies Sonya Freeman Loftis

Esoteric transfers and constructions: Judaism,

Christian Philosophy: Conceptions, Continuations, and

Foucault and Postmodern Conceptions of Reason 1st

Livy: The Fragments and Periochae Volume I: Fragments,

Design and Fabrication of Large Polymer Constructions

palgrave shakespeare studies

“This fascinating multifaceted collection ventures to approach the subject of

Editorial board members:

More information about this series at

Palgrave Shakespeare Studies

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945816

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Unless otherwise specified, references to Shakespeare’s works are to The

encouragement. Calum Colvin generously allowed us to use his beautiful

Stirling, UK Katie Halsey

1 ‘Dressed in a Little Brief Authority’: Authority Before,

Part I Defining and Redefining Authority

3 Inside the Elephant’s Graveyard: Revising Geoffrey

4 Author and Authority in the OED:

5 ‘The King’s English’ ‘Our English’?: Shakespeare and

6 Foundations of Sovereign Authority: The Example

Part II Shakespearean Authority

7 ‘A Trim Reckoning’: Accountability and

8 The King’s Ring: A Matter of Trust 179

9 ‘Constant in any Undertaking’: Writing the

10 Duty and Authority: Malvolio, Stewardship and

11 Poetic Authority in Julius Caesar: The Triumph

Part III Shakespeare as Authority

12 Authority of the Actor in the Eighteenth Century 249

13 Shakespeare, Rule-Breaking and Artistic Genius:

14 Whose Gothic Bard? Charles Robert Maturin and

15 Authority, Instrumental Reason and the Fault Lines

16 Will Power: Visualising Shakespeare’s Authority

Colin Burrow is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

1992) and Tragedy (Longman, 1998). In addition to contributing

Raphaël Ingelbien is a Reader in Literary Studies at the University

Laetitia Sansonetti is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of

Paul Tyndall completed a Ph.D. in English at Dalhousie University

Fig. 12.1 David Garrick’s monument in Westminster Abbey.

Table 4.1 Newly added Nashe first citations 87

‘Dressed in a Little Brief Authority’:

Katie Halsey and Angus Vine

What name, what skill, what faith hast thou in things!

Jonson’s anaphoric praise locates Camden’s scholarly merits in both his

K. Halsey (*) · A. Vine (*)

© The Author(s) 2018 1

with his criticism of Othello, that Shakespeare’s scene is unauthorized by

If seventeenth-century readers increasingly constructed Shakespeare

Words speake thy matter; matter fills thy words;

Heyward’s praise emphasizes that Jonson’s poetic powers reside in his

Tudeau-Clayton and Colin Burrow have both emphasized, distinguishes

Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796) proved conclusively

legitimization of their own challenges to authority. For example, Rose

of Shakespeare for both the history of authority as a concept and the

the Authority of a King. Regallity.

the Authority of a Magistrate. Magistracy.

K. Halsey () · A. Vine ()