Learning to Curse

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Stephen
Greenblatt
Learning to Curse
Essays in early modern culture

with a new introduction by the author

First published 1990 by Routledge

First published in paperback 1992 by Routledge

First published in Routledge Classics 2007

by Routledge
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© 1990 Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc

Introduction to the Routledge Classics edition © 2007 Stephen Greenblatt

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Greenblatt, Stephen.
Learning to curse: essays in early modern culture / Stephen Greenblatt; with a new introduction by the
author.—Routledge classics ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism.
2. Renaissance. 3. Culture. I. Ttitle.
PR413.G74 2006
820.9′003—dc22
2006029609

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN10: 0–415–77160–9
ISBN13: 978–0–415–77160–3
 CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION

1 Introduction
2 Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth
Century
3 Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism
4 Filthy Rites
5 The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs
6 Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion
7 Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture
8 Towards a Poetics of Culture
9 Resonance and Wonder

INDEX
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth

Century,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on
the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976), pp. 561–580.
“Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” in Critical Inquiry 5 (1978), pp.
291–307.
“Filthy Rites,” in Daedalus 111 (1982), pp. 1–16.
“The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs,” Raritan 2 (1982),
pp. 92–124.
“Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,”
in Representations 1 (1983), pp. 1–29.
“Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance
Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 210–224.
“Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in Southern Review 20 (1987), pp. 3–15. A
slightly different version of this essay appears as “Capitalist Culture and
the Circulatory System,” in The Aims of Representation:
Subject/Text/History, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987), pp. 257–273.
“Resonance and Wonder,” in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences 43 (1990), pp. 11–34. Also in Literary Theory Today, ed. Peter
Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 74–
90.
 PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE
CLASSICS EDITION

In the introduction I originally wrote for this collection of essays, I recounted

some of the particular circumstances in my upbringing and education that
condition my own characteristic perceptions, set the questions I typically ask
of the world, and help shape (before I even begin to work) the sentences I am
likely to generate. These autobiographical reflections were meant to serve in
lieu of something about the specific occasions that called forth each of the
pieces—a conference here, a lecture invitation there, the welcome
opportunity to step forward and vent my folly, as Touchstone mockingly says,
in the pages of one journal or another. Having ducked the opportunity to
describe these occasions once, it is probably ridiculous to embrace it now,
but I will venture briefly to comment on a few of these pieces, since their
originating circumstances are now all far enough in the past to make them
seem at once emblematic and somewhat curious.
The title essay, “Learning to Curse,” owes its existence to an invitation to
participate in a conference held in 1975 at UCLA on “First Images of
America.” My own connection to the subject was rather tenuous: in a book,
based on my dissertation, on Sir Walter Ralegh, I had included a discussion
of his voyages to Guiana. The pages must have caught the attention of the
conference organizer, the prodigiously energetic director of UCLA's Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Fredi Chiappelli. A Florentine
whose blend of worldliness and entrepreneurial cunning earned him the
wryly affectionate nickname “Machiapelli,” he had the foresight to
anticipate, some twenty years before the event, that the quincentenery of
Columbus's first voyage would summon up unusual scholarly efforts, and he
embarked on a plan that called for the translation of all of Columbus’ extant
writings; research on his intellectual and cultural contexts; an attempt,
through an exhibition of landscape paintings of Italy, Greece, Spain, and the
Caribbean, to reconstruct his visual world; and a sustained focus on the great
moment of the fateful encounter. “First Images of America” was Chiappelli's
initial salvo, and it was done in characteristic style: a grand international
event, with dozens of papers in an array of languages, exhibitions,
receptions, banquets, and an intense sense, still perhaps at least dimly
conveyed by the two massive volumes of published conference papers, that
something very important was happening.
Something important, in any case, was happening for me. I had, in the
course of writing my paper, discovered the fascination of the great
collections of travel accounts assembled by Hakluyt, Purchas, and Ramusio,
a fascination that determined much of the subsequent work on which I
embarked for decades afterward. The fascination was not unmixed with
anger and disgust, for the accounts are often quite horrible, but a deep inner
disturbance has its uses. I could not stop reading these narratives: they
haunted my dreams, as well as my waking hours, and I discovered, not for the
last time, that what began as background reading, was jostling its way to the
foreground. At the start, I wanted to know why in The Tempest Caliban is
said to have no language at all, until Prospero and his daughter teach him to
speak. The question remained central for me, but the material I began to
assemble in order to construct an answer had a disturbing life of its own.
That life, I grasped, is inseparable from the imagination. That is, I did not
see before me a work of art, on the one hand, and a set of raw materials, on
the other. The Tempest, to be sure, is a stupendous literary achievement, but
the most homely documents assembled by Hakluyt are not unshaped by
fantasy, narrative cunning, and linguistic artfulness. This perception of the
artfulness of the ordinary now seems perhaps like an embarrassingly obvious
discovery, but the literary training I had received made it less obvious and
therefore more exciting. I realized that I could use some of the critical tools I
had been sharpening not only on the objects for which they were intended but
also on objects that were not usually regarded as worthy of such attention.
And I could then attempt to bring together the literary document and the
historical document in a new and revealing way.
This attempt is visible in many of these essays, as is a certain
obsessiveness. I would repeatedly encounter something, almost always a
narrative (though on occasion an image or even, as with Marx's “On the
Jewish Question,” a philosophical essay), that I literally could not get out of
my mind. I could hope to exorcise it only by linking it to a celebrated literary
work into which it might nest. The slight air of desperation in all of this is
most noticeable, I think, in the essay “Lear's Anxiety,” where I labor mightily
to bury the story of little Heman Wayland's experience of paternal “love” in
the rich soil of King Lear. Though I think the essay is something of a failure
—and though I still remember the pummeling I took when I presented it as a
paper at Johns Hopkins’ notoriously pugnacious Tudor and Stuart Club—I
remain fond of it, in part because of the intensity of my struggle to get it right
and in part because the implausible conjunction seems to me to cast an eerie
light on both texts.
That flickering and uncertain light stands in for any theoretical defense of
my practice in several of these essays of conjoining texts that are not causally
related, a practice that has been repeatedly and vigorously challenged. A
decade after the publication of Learning to Curse, Catherine Gallagher and I
attempted in Practicing New Historicism to respond to the challenge by
articulating what we took to be the principles that motivated our criticism.
But the articulation of principles in that book cannot adequately account for
the spirit in which these essays were written, and not only because of the
quality have I called obsessive. For they were written precisely to sidestep
or defer questions of theoretical or methodological justification. Neither the
Marxism in which I had immersed myself in the early 1970s nor the post-
structuralism that followed close on its heels seemed to me to serve my
purposes, and I was hardly alone. These essays articulate a shared discontent
and a collective experiment.
When the group of Berkeley friends with whom I had been reading and
exchanging work for several years decided to start a journal, we sat down to
write a programmatic statement, but we could not succeed in producing the
document we had told ourselves was appropriate and necessary. In part our
inability to do so was because we disagreed with one another – historian
arguing with literary critic, anthropologist crossing swords with art historian,
and so forth. But in part we could not formulate a coherent methodological
program because the whole project of first working out a theory or method
and then applying it to historical or aesthetic objects seemed to close off the
very avenues each of us most wished to explore. Our interpretive energy
depended on a certain risk-taking: bringing together materials that seemed to
impinge on one another in unpredictable ways and carefully tracking their
interaction. Thus, in place of the statement of purpose that should by rights
have introduced the first issue of our new journal, Representations, there
was instead the essay “Murdering Peasants.”
A final description of the setting for one of the essays collected in
Learning to Curse will enable me to get at something not adequately
conveyed as yet by the terms—fascination, disturbance, obsessiveness, and
theoretical discontent—that I have thus far employed. “Resonance and
Wonder” originated as the section on visual artifacts (roughly, the last half of
the essay) which I wrote for “The Poetics and Politics of Representation,” a
1988 conference at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. The occasion, a
talk to museum curators and scholars interested in the display of visual
artifacts, helps to account for a slightly odd effect: my invocation of the
notion of resonance in an analysis of what are, after all, silent objects,
objects designed to be looked at. Artifacts displayed in museums, for the
most part, do not speak, and if the people who view them do speak—often
while listening to the taped voice of a curator—these voices are not
ordinarily understood to be essential to the aesthetic experience. “I like your
silence,” says Shakespeare's Paulina in The Winter's Tale, when she first
shows Hermione's statue to Leontes, mute with amazement, “It the more
shows off/Your wonder” (5.3.31–32).1
Of course, books are also silent, but, as a literary scholar with a
particular interest in theater, I am more or less constantly aware of the voices
that have called language into being and the voices that are called into being
by the words on the page. The literal sounds of those voices immediately
fade, of course, but they leave complex echoes. I take it that one of the
principal tasks—or at least one of principal rewards—of literary study is to
enable one to hear and to understand these echoes. I refer, of course, not only
to the particular voices that recite or perform a given text, but also to the
whole elaborate sound system formed by the language from which a text is
fashioned.
 The transfer of the notion of resonance from the linguistic to the visual
medium was, I grasped, somewhat discordant, but this discordance seemed
to me to have some potential advantages. Specifically, it enabled me to
adduce, in discussing the State Jewish Museum in Prague, the murmuring
voices that once subtended, interpenetrated, launched, justified, and used the
objects that had been torn from their communities. With one significant
exception—the eighteen benedictions of the Amidah2—Hebrew prayers are
spoken, chanted, or muttered aloud. Passages of the Torah read as part of the
weekly cycle of prayers are formally chanted, following a system of notation
developed in the ninth and tenth centuries. Hence the objects on display in the
museum (silver text pointers in the shape of fingers, Torah covers, ark
curtains, and the like) were almost always linked to voices. The silencing of
those voices—the Nazi deportation and murder of the Jewish communities
whose ritual objects they carefully preserved for future ethnographic study—
was, in this case, the circumstance that governed the museum display of
artifacts that have in themselves (or so I claimed) rather limited power to
compel aesthetic admiration but enormous power to call forth ghosts. That is,
the artifacts are less about wonder than about resonance.
At the same time, I did not want the governing terms to remain entirely
stable. Part of the pleasure of cultural poetics is to become aware of the
hidden transfers between apparently discontinuous or even opposed spheres.
Wonder is generated by the objects on the walls and in the glass cases of the
State Jewish Museum, but it is wonder concentrated not in the artifacts
themselves, whose formal qualities are relatively modest, but rather in the
historical circumstances that led to their very presence in the deconsecrated
rooms. And resonance, ordinarily identified principally with historical
circumstances, is found here instead within the objects which encode in their
form the voices of the dead.
A strange thing happened to me at the Smithsonian conference that had
some bearing on my understanding of the instability of resonance and
wonder. When I got up to speak, I looked out at the audience in the hall and
saw with astonishment someone who looked uncannily like my first serious
girlfriend, from my university days more than twenty-five years earlier.
There was no mistaking it: it was the girl I had once loved, now older of
course, but unmistakably she. This circumstance would not by itself have
been so surprising—though a quarter of a century had passed since I last saw
or spoke to her—had it not been for something else. Some two months earlier
my mother had clipped from the newspaper and sent me my ex-girlfriend's
obituary. She had died tragically young of breast cancer.
For a moment, in the peculiar heightened intensity in which one begins a
talk before a large audience of strangers, I thought I might be going mad. I
was almost overcome with wonder. The experience was as close as I will
ever get in real life to what Leontes feels when he first sees the statue of
Hermione. At the time I was far too unnerved to think of a literary analog.
But I understood even then, in the split-second of my disoriented response,
that the wonder welling up in me conjoined desire and impossibility.
Then, even as I opened my mouth to speak, my mind raced frantically for
some reassurance, some escape route, in effect, from an excess of wonder. I
found it quickly enough: it must not have been more than a few seconds
before it flashed upon me that my girlfriend had an identical twin sister
whom I had only briefly encountered, since she went to a different university.
And indeed when the talk was over, this twin came up to introduce herself to
me. She had brought some pages of her sister's diary from the time that we
were dating, and wanted me to see how sweetly and poignantly she wrote
about our relationship. The voice, the handwriting, the turns of phrase, the
snatches of conversation recorded from so long before—all conjured up
what was now irrevocably past and slowly turned wonder into resonance.

NOTES
1 Note, however, that Paulina continues, “But yet speak; first you, my liege./ Comes it not something
near?”
2 The rabbinical commentary on this silence assumes the ordinary vocalization of prayer. Mishnah
Brurah: Concerning the prohibition against interrupting the Amidah [Silent Prayer] Siman 104:1. (1)
One must not interrupt (2) one's own Silent Prayer. Even if a Jewish king greets him he should not
answer. However, (3) with a non-Jewish king, if it is possible to complete the prayer by shortening it
before the king reaches him, one should do so, by saying the beginning and ending of each remaining
blessing. (4) Or, if it is possible to move to the side of the road and thereby avoid having to interrupt
one's prayer [even though this means he moves from his position, which is ordinarily not allowed
during the Silent Prayer—LC], one should do so. In any case, one should avoid speaking during
one's prayer [i.e., one should use a non-verbal greeting], (5) but if that is impossible one should
interrupt by speaking.
 1

INTRODUCTION

THE TRAJECTORY
These essays on Renaissance cultural poetics, written over the course of
fifteen years, do not tell a unified story but they describe an intellectual
trajectory. In graduate school at Yale in the late 1960s, I found myself deeply
uncertain about the direction I wanted my work to take. I was only mildly
interested in the formalist agenda that dominated graduate instruction and
was epitomized in the imposing figure of William K. Wimsatt. His theory of
the concrete universal—poetry as “an object which in a mysterious and
special way is both highly general and highly particular”—seemed almost
irresistibly true, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to enlist myself for life as a
celebrant of the mystery. I would go in the late afternoon to the Elizabethan
Club—all male, a black servant in a starched white jacket, cucumber
sandwiches and tea—and listen to Wimsatt at the great round table hold forth
like Doctor Johnson on poetry and aesthetics. Wimsatt seemed to be eight
feet tall and to be the possessor of a set of absolute convictions, but I was
anything but certain. The best I could manage was a seminar paper that
celebrated Sir Philip Sidney's narrative staging of his own confusions: “there
is nothing so certain,” Sidney wrote, “as our continual uncertainty.”
I briefly entertained a notion of going on to write a dissertation on
uncertainty—to make a virtue of my own inner necessity— but the project
seemed to me a capitulation, in thin disguise, to the hierophantic service to
the mystery cult that I precisely wished to resist. For the radical uncertainty
(what would now be called aporia) with which I was concerned was not, in
the end, very different from the “mysterious and special” status of the
concrete universal. Besides, I had another idea. Before starting graduate
school, I had spent two years as a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge where,
relieved from my undergraduate grade anxieties, I read and attended lectures
in an omniverous but almost entirely undisciplined way. I had been struck by
what seemed to me the uncanny modernity of Sir Walter Ralegh's poetry
(which at that time meant that certain passages reminded me of “The
Wasteland”), and I had been equally struck by what seemed to me the
intellectual power and moral authority of one of my teachers, Raymond
Williams. Marxist literary criticism had received short shrift in my
undergraduate years at Yale. Literary Criticism: A Short History, by
Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, devoted a grand total of 6 out of its 755 pages,
to Marxist thought; “Marxism and the forms of social criticism more closely
related to it,” they wrote, “have never had any real concern with literature
and literary problems.” Small wonder then that the Marxist critic, “in all the
severity of his logic, should have driven this method . . . to a conclusion that
completely destroys the literary viewpoint.” Marxism in short was not only
historically uninterested in literature but programmatically incapable of
understanding the concrete universal and hence of understanding art: “In the
crudity both of its determinism and of its inconsistent propagandism, the
socio-realistic tradition of literary criticism has on the whole contributed
little to an understanding of the relation which universality bears to
individuality in artistic expression.”1 I was not at all prepared then for the
critical subtlety and theoretical intelligence of Raymond Williams. In
Williams's lectures all that had been carefully excluded from the literary
criticism in which I had been trained—who controlled access to the printing
press, who owned the land and the factories, whose voices were being
repressed as well as represented in literary texts, what social strategies were
being served by the aesthetic values we constructed—came pressing back in
upon the act of interpretation. Back in the United States I thought I could
combine my fascination with Ralegh and the influence of Williams by
undertaking a dissertation on the functions of writing in Ralegh's career.
I took my proposal to a very brilliant younger professor at Yale; he read
it, looked up, and said, “If you want to do that kind of thing, why don't you
do a scholarly edition of one of Ralegh's minor works?” I am certain that I
was not mistaking the note of contempt I heard in that suggestion. It has taken
the remarkable work of Stephen Orgel, Jerome McGann, and others during
the past decade to enable me to see that what is at stake in editing texts is
precisely the range of questions I most wished to ask. But at the time, I only
heard dismissal—a sentence of exile to the hydroelectric plant in Ulan Bator.
To my good fortune, I found someone else who was sufficiently interested in
my project, and trusted me enough, to supervise the dissertation.
I recount this personal history precisely because it is not entirely
personal—I was participating in a more general tendency, a shift away from
a criticism centered on “verbal icons” toward a criticism centered on
cultural artifacts. In my early years of teaching, I thought of this shift as a turn
to Marxist aesthetics; more recently, in the wake of an interest in
anthropology and post-structuralism, I have called what I do “cultural
poetics” or “new historicism.” The essays collected in this volume trace the
uneven evolution of my critical methods and interests. But I am reluctant to
confer upon any of these rubrics the air of doctrine or to claim that each
marks out a quite distinct and well-bounded territory. To a considerable
extent, in American universities critical affiliations like new historicism or
deconstruction or now even Marxism are not linked to systematic thought.
(They are like our political parties, confusing to Europeans because they are
important but ideologically evasive and inconsistent.) It is possible in the
United States to describe oneself and be perceived as a Marxist literary
critic without believing in the class struggle as the principal motor force in
history; without believing in the theory of surplus value; without believing in
the determining power of economic base over ideological superstructure;
without believing in the inevitability, let alone the imminence, of capitalism's
collapse. Back in the 1970s, at a hotel in Morocco, a genial, gray-haired
tourist from Hawaii offered me a shopping bag filled with marijuana that he
didn't want to take across the border when he left the country the next
morning. He was on his way, he said, to Mecca “to have a look around.”
When I expressed doubt that he, a non-Moslem, would be permitted to visit
Mecca, he replied, “Hey man, we're all Moslems.” Americans in general like
porous borders; they think that access (at least for themselves) should be
easy.
Does this mean that new historicism is a completely empty term, its
relative success due entirely to the felicitous conjunction of two marketable
signs: “new” and “ism”? I think not, though it will not do to exaggerate its
coherence (nor am I overly sympathetic to calls for its systematization). For
me it describes less a set of beliefs than the trajectory I have begun to sketch,
a trajectory that led from American literary formalism through the political
and theoretical ferment of the 1970s to a fascination with what one of the best
new historicist critics calls “the historicity of texts and the textuality of
history.”2 My own version of this trajectory was particularly shaped by
Raymond Williams and by Michel Foucault, who taught regularly at Berkeley
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And there were other powerful intellectual
encounters along the way with the work, for example, of Mikhail Bakhtin or
Kenneth Burke or Michel de Certeau. But the intellectual course of which I
speak points less to a doctrine, cobbled together out of a set of what an
English publishing house calls “modern masters,” than to a shared life
experience.
When I arrived in Berkeley in 1969, the University of California was in
turmoil which lasted throughout the year and into the next. National Guard
troops and heavily armed squadrons of police battled massive student and
faculty protests against the Viet Nam War; the campus was continually
redolent of tear gas. Everything was in an uproar; all routines were
disrupted; nothing could be taken for granted. Classes still met, at least
sporadically, but the lecture platform would often be appropriated, with or
without the professor's permission, by protesters, and seminar discussions
would veer wildly from, say, Ben Jonson's metrics to the undeclared air war
over Cambodia. Many students and at least some faculty were calling for the
“reconstitution” of the university—though no one knew quite what
“reconstitution” was—so that even ordinary classes had an air of
provisionality. It was, in its way, sublime.
But despite the heady rhetoric and at least the partial reality of radical
ferment, the internal intellectual structure of Berkeley remained for the most
part at once stable and staunchly conservative. By “intellectual structure” I
mean both the institutional organization that governs research and teaching
and the informal network of discourse that determines who talks seriously to
whom. On my first day on campus, I was taken to the English Department
office housed in a large and imposing building with a grand neo-classical
facade and an air of overwhelming respectability. (This building,
incidentally, was revealed in recent years to be both contaminated with
carcinogenic asbestos fibers and exceptionally vulnerable to earthquake
danger.) My guide, the department chairman, told me with pride that virtually
the entire building—the dozens of offices, the lounge, the library, the bulletin
boards—was given over to English. When I saw the cramped quarters of
several other departments, I understood the chairman's pleasure, but I also
felt some dismay. For it was possible to spend one's days entirely in the
company of other English professors, English graduate students, and English
majors—one can imagine a worse fate, I suppose, but the arrangement played
into the kind of intellectual isolationism and claustrophobia commonly
confused in large American universities with responsible academic
professionalism.
My own work was pulling me in other directions—I wanted in fact to
erase all boundaries separating cultural studies into narrowly specialized
compartments—and in the years that followed, I found people in other
departments, at Berkeley and elsewhere, with whom to talk and exchange
work. The essays in this collection are deeply indebted to these exchanges,
but they also strike me as still written within the governing agenda of the
particular discipline in which I had been trained. In part this is a mark of
failure—my inability to carry out the utopian project of obliterating
disciplinary boundaries altogether; in larger part it is a mark of my
recognition that boundaries, provided they are permeable and negotiable, are
useful things to think with.

STORY-TELLING
These essays reflect not only my desire to play with boundaries but my will
to tell stories, critical stories or stories told as a form of criticism. In one of
his last essays before his untimely death, Joel Fineman brilliantly explored
the theoretical implications of new historicism's characteristic use of
anecdotes. The anecdote, he writes, “determines the destiny of a specifically
historiographic integration of event and context”; as “the narration of a
singular event,” it is “the literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the
real.” The anecdote has at once something of the literary and something that
exceeds the literary, a narrative form and a pointed, referential access to
what lies beyond or beneath that form. This conjunction of the literary and the
referential, Fineman argues, functions in the writing of history not as the
servant of a grand, integrated narrative of beginning, middle, and end but
rather as what “introduces an opening” into that teleological narration: “The
anecdote produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by
establishing an event as an event within and yet without the framing context
of historical successivity, i.e., it does so only in so far as its narration both
comprises and refracts the narration it reports.”3
 What is crucial for me in this account is the insistence on contingency, the
sense if not of a break then at least of a swerve in the ordinary and well-
understood succession of events. The historical anecdote functions less as
explanatory illustration than as disturbance, that which requires explanation,
contextualization, interpretation. Anecdotes are the equivalents in the register
of the real of what drew me to the study of literature: the encounter with
something that I could not stand not understanding, that I could not quite finish
with or finish off, that I had to get out of my inner life where it had taken
hold, that I could retell and contemplate and struggle with. The historical
evidence—“mere anecdotes”—conventionally invoked in literary criticism
to assist in the explication of a text seemed to me dead precisely because it
was the enemy of wonder: it was brought in to lay contingency and
disturbance to rest. I do not want history to enable me to escape the effect of
the literary but to deepen it by making it touch the effect of the real, a touch
that would reciprocally deepen and complicate history.
But I do not wish to pretend that these theoretical and programmatic
considerations directly motivated the writing of these essays. It was first of
all as a writer that I experienced the will to use stories, and I wished to do so
less for reasons of hermeneutical method than for reasons bound up with my
sense of myself, with my experience of identity. Trained to be sensitive to
these “writerly” questions in the authors whom they analyze, literary critics
are generally deaf to them in themselves: it is difficult for me even to think of
myself as a “writer,” the idea having, absurdly I suppose, something of the
grandiose and romantic about it.
My earliest recollections of “having an identity” or “being a self” are
bound up with story-telling—narrating my own life or having it narrated for
me by my mother. I suppose that I usually used the personal pronoun “I” in
telling my own stories and that my mother used my name, but the heart of the
initial experience of selfhood lay in the stories, not in the unequivocal,
unmediated possession of an identity. Indeed the stories need not have been
directly about me for me to experience them as an expression of my identity:
my mother was generously fond of telling me long stories I found amusing
about someone named Terrible Stanley, a child whom I superficially
resembled but who made a series of disastrous life decisions—running into
traffic, playing with matches, going to the zoo without telling his mother, and
so on. Stanley was the “other” with a vengeance, but he was also my double,
and my sense of myself seemed bound up with the monitory tales of his
tragicomic fate.
As I grew slightly older, this sense of identity as intertwined with
narratives of the self and its doubles was confirmed by my father who also
had a penchant for story-telling—stories not so gratifyingly focussed on my
small being as my mother's were, but compelling and wonderfully well-told
stories of himself and of a cousin, a few years younger than he, by whom he
was virtually obsessed. My father and his cousin came from almost identical
backgrounds: first-generation Americans born in Boston to poor Jewish
immigrants from Lithuania. Like my father, the cousin had become a lawyer,
and here began the story. My father was named Harry J. Greenblatt; his
cousin Joseph H. Greenblatt. But when the latter became a lawyer, he moved
into the same building in which my father had his office, and he began to call
himself J. Harry Greenblatt. He managed, or so my father thought, to siphon
off some clients from my father's already established practice. By itself this
would have been enough to cause considerable tension, but over the years J.
Harry compounded the offense by apparently becoming richer than my father,
Harry J.—wealth, as far as I can tell, being measured principally by the
amount of money donated annually to local charities, the contributions
printed annually in a small but well-perused booklet. There were, as I grew
up, endless stories about J. Harry—chance encounters in the street,
confusions of identity that always seemed to work to my father's
disadvantage, tearful reconciliations that would quickly give way to renewed
rancor. This went on for decades and would, I suppose, have become
intolerably boring had my father not possessed considerable comic gifts,
along with a vast repertory of other stories. But a few years before my
father's death at 86, the rivalry and doubling took a strange twist: J. Harry
Greenblatt was indicted on charges of embezzlement; the charges were
prominently reported in the newspapers; and the newspapers mistakenly
printed the name of the culprit as Harry J. Greenblatt. Busybodies phoned our
house to offer their commiserations to my mother. The confusion was
awkward, but it had at least one benefit: it enabled my father to tell a whole
new set of stories about himself and his double. When you are in your 80s,
new stories can be a precious commodity.
My father's narrative impulse, we can say, was a strategic way of turning
disappointment, anger, rivalry, and a sense of menace into comic pleasure, a
way of reestablishing the self on the site of its threatened loss. But there was
an underside to this strategy that I have hinted at by calling his stories
obsessive. For the stories in some sense were the loss of identity which they
were meant to ward off—there was something compulsive about them, as if
someone were standing outside of my father and insisting that he endlessly
recite his tales. Near the end of his life, he would sometimes abandon the
pretence of having a conversation, interrupt what was being said, and simply
begin to tell one of his stories.
This sense of compulsiveness in the telling of stories is not simply a
function of garrulous old age; it is, I think, a quality that attaches to narrative
itself, a quality thematized in The Arabian Nights and The Ancient Mariner.
In response to the compulsiveness there have arisen numerous social and
aesthetic regulations— not only the rules that govern civil conversation but
the rules that govern the production and reception of narrative in books, on
screen, on the stage. And there have arisen too less evident but powerful
psychic regulations that govern how much narrative you are meant to
experience, as it were, within your identity.
One of the worst times I have ever been through in my life was a period
—I cannot recall if it was a matter of days or weeks—when I could not rid
my mind of the impulse to narrate my being. I was a student at Cambridge,
trying to decide whether to return to America and go to law school or
graduate school in English. “He's sitting at his desk, trying to decide what to
do with his life,” a voice—my voice, I suppose, but also not my voice—
spoke within my head. “Now he's putting his head on his hand; now he is
furrowing his brow; and now he is getting up to open the window.” And on
and on, with a slight tone of derision through it all. I was split off from
myself, J. Harry to my Harry J. (or Terrible Stanley to my Stephen), in an
unhappy reprise of my early sense of self as story. It was unhappy, I suppose,
because by my early 20s my identity had been fashioned as a single being
exactly corresponding to the personal pronoun “I,” and the unpleasantly
ironic “he” sounding inside my head felt like an internal violation of my
internal space, an invasion of my privacy, an objectification of what I least
wished to objectify. I experienced the compulsive and detached narrativizing
voice as something that had seized me, that I could not throw off, for even my
attempts to do so were immediately turned into narrative. It occurred to me
that I might be going mad. When the voice left me, it did so suddenly,
inexplicably, with the sound of something snapping.
 If the experience I have just described intensified my interest in narrative,
it made me quite literally wish to get the narratives outside myself. Hence
perhaps the critical distance that I attempt to inscribe in and with the stories I
tell, for the narrative impulse in my writing is yoked to the service of literary
and cultural criticism; it pulls out and away from myself. Hence too perhaps
my fascination with figures of estrangement: I could not endure the
compulsive estrangement of my life, as if it belonged to someone else, but I
could perhaps understand the uncanny otherness of my own voice, make it
comprehensible and bring it under rational control by trying to understand the
way in which all voices come to be woven out of strands of alien experience.
I am committed to the project of making strange what has become familiar, of
demonstrating that what seems an untroubling and untroubled part of
ourselves (for example, Shakespeare) is actually part of something else,
something different.
It is only now, I think, that I can even gesture toward a sense that the
practice of writing is more than an act of self-expression. For it turns out that
self-expression is always and inescapably the expression of something else,
something different. A recognition and an understanding of the difference
does not negate self-expression—I have been unpersuaded by arguments that
the self has been radically deconstructed—but it does help one see more
clearly where in the world one's identity comes from and what kinds of
negotiation and conflict it entails. In my own case, I would have to analyze,
for example, the presence in my father's stories (and speech rhythms and
perceptions of the world) of the Yiddish humor of the stetl, adapted to very
different American circumstances, as this humor is comparably adapted, say,
in Woody Allen. I will not undertake this project, as it would be of interest
principally to myself, but my work has attempted to undertake a comparable
project at the broader level of the cultural identity fashioned in and by
English literature.

LITERARY PLEASURE AND HISTORICAL

UNDERSTANDING
Pleasure is an important part of my sense of literature—that is, part both of
my own response (for pleasure and what I have called disturbance are often
identical) and of what I most wish to understand. I am frequently baffled by
the tendency especially in those explicitly concerned with historical or
ideological functions of art to ignore the analysis of pleasure or, for that
matter, of play. (Psychoanalytic critics have generally been far better at this,
but too often at the cost of the suppression of history.) Literature may do
important work in the world, but each sentence is not hard labor, and the
effectiveness of this work depends upon the ability to delight. You certainly
cannot hope to write convincingly about Shakespeare without coming to
terms with what Prospero at the end of The Tempest claims was his whole
“project”: “to please.” (The terrible line from King Lear echoes darkly as a
condemnation of failed art: “better thou/Hadst not been born than not t'have
pleas'd me better.”)
But pleasure as a category is extremely elusive for historical
understanding. We can marvel, as Marx did in the Introduction to the
Critique of Political Economy, at its apparently transhistorical stability: the
difficulty, Marx wrote, “does not lie in understanding that the Greek art and
epos are bound up with certain forms of social development. It rather lies in
understanding why they still afford us aesthetic enjoyment and in certain
respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment.” This stability
poses a problem for any theory that insists in a strong way upon the historical
embeddedness of literary texts (or cultural artifacts in general), insists, that
is, upon the inseparability of their meaning from the circumstances of their
making or reception. Few people would any longer credit Marx's own
proposed solution, that the Greeks were the “historical childhood of
humanity,” and consequently that they possess for us an “eternal charm.”
Instead the supposed continuity of aesthetic response seems to lead most
often to a notion of the inherence in the text itself of the power to produce
aesthetic pleasure and to lead correspondingly to a notion that this pleasure
is outside of history, disinterested and contemplative.
We can, however, argue that the transhistorical stability or continuity of
literary pleasure is an illusion; we can suggest that there is little reason to
believe that the pleasure generated by The Tempest, say, was the same for the
Jacobean audience as it is for ourselves. The overt material sign of
gratification—the applause for which Prospero asks at the close—is the
same, but the actual nature of that gratification, the objects and sensations and
meanings and practices by which it is provoked and to which it is attached,
differs significantly. The monolithic and timeless character of pleasure
would begin to crack apart: we would begin to question the validity of
conflating theatrical pleasure with the “literary” (a category that did not exist
in Shakespeare's time) or of conflating both with the “aesthetic”; we would
ask if the pleasure experienced by the standing auditors in the pit was
identical to that of the seated auditors in the galleries or if men and women
were applauding for the same reasons; and we would certainly begin to
wonder if the audience (at least half of them American tourists) delighting in
a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest at Stratford is
responding to the same signals to which playgoers in early-seventeenth-
century London responded. The task then would be to historicize pleasure, to
explore its shifts and changes, to understand its interests.
As will be clear to any reader of these essays, I am inclined toward this
latter view, and I take heart from the remarkable recent studies that have been
begun to give a history to sensations, states of being, and emotions that had
seemed timeless: Delumeau on fear, Corbin on smell, Blumenberg on
curiosity, and so forth. There is perhaps a comparable account to be given of
theatrical pleasure. But I should note certain reservations. For there do seem
to be long-term continuities in pleasure and in those things that trigger
pleasure. Such continuities do not necessarily lead to theories of literary
autonomy nor do they lead me to conclude that aesthetic pleasure is
disinterested, but they should make us wary of exaggerating the psychological
or moral distance that separates us from cultures temporally or
geographically distant from our own. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to
track historical differences in pleasure. Occasionally, there is a major
institutional change that seems to signal a change in pleasure—for example,
the shift in England from all-male to male-female playing companies—but
even here the significance of the shift is extremely elusive. We can make
some progress by looking closely at works that no longer give audiences
pleasure and trying to deduce why they might have done so once, but it
remains difficult to connect whatever we conclude with those works from the
same period that still do produce pleasure. If we believe that aesthetic
pleasure is unitary and fixed, we can at least trust our phenomenological or
psychological analyses to help us gauge the experience of men and women in
the past, but if pleasure is multiple, shifting, and time-bound, we have no
assurance that there is any meaningful bridge between such analyses and
historical study.
In these circumstances, I try to make a virtue of necessity and rethink the
elusiveness that troubles me. That elusiveness is, I would argue, at once the
sign and the consequence of the fact that neither the work of art nor the
person experiencing the work of art nor the historical situation in which the
work is produced or received fully possesses the pleasure that is art's
principal reason for being and its ticket to survival. Virtually every form of
aesthetic pleasure—and this is particularly true of theatrical pleasure—is
located in an intermediate zone of social transaction, a betwixt and between.
It is this mobility, a mobility that includes the power of ready mutation, rather
than disinterestedness or stability, that enables the pleasures provoked by
certain works of art to seem to endure unchanged for centuries.

FICTION AND REALITY

Consider the following passage from Edmund Scott's Exact Discourse of the
Subtilties, Fashions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East
Indians (1606). Scott was the principal Agent for the East India Company in
Bantam, Java, in 1603–1605. They were years of commercial rivalry with
the Dutch, fear of fire and theft, and growing hatred of both the Javanese and
Chinese. He writes that the English caught a Chinese goldsmith who had, they
believed, been involved in an attempt to rob them of their gold; the alleged
culprit “would tell us nothing.”
Wherefore, because of his sullenness, I thought I would burn him now a little (for we were now in
the heat of our anger). First I caused him to be burned under the nails of his thumbs, fingers, and
toes with sharp hot iron, and the nails to be torn off. And because he never blemished [i.e. turned
pale] at that, we thought that his hands and legs had been numbed with tying; wherefore we
burned him in the arms, shoulders, and neck. But all was one with him. Then we burned him quite
through the hands, and with rasps of iron tore out the flesh and sinews. After that, I caused them
to knock the edges of his shin bones with hot searing irons. Then I caused cold screws or iron to
be screwed into the bones of his arms and suddenly to be snatched out. After that all the bones of
his fingers and toes to be broken with pincers. Yet for all this he never shed tear; no, nor once
turned his head aside, nor stirred hand or foot; but when we demanded any question, he would put
his tongue between his teeth and strike his chin upon his knees to bite it off. When all the extremity
we could use was but in vain, I caused him to be put fast in irons again; where the emmets [ants]
(which do greatly abound there) got into his wounds and tormented him worse than we had done,
as we might well see by his gesture. The [Javanese] king's officers desired me he might be shot to
death. I told them that was too good a death for such a villain. . . . But they do hold it to be the
cruellest and basest death that is. Wherefore, they being very importunate, in the evening we led
him into the fields and made him fast to a stake. The first shot carried away a piece of his arm
bone, and all the next shot struck him through the breast, up near to the shoulder. Then he, holding
down his head, looked upon the wound. The third shot that was made, one of our men had cut a
bullet in three parts, which struck upon his breast in a triangle; whereat he fell down as low as the
stake would give him leave. But between our men and the Hollanders, they shot him almost all to
pieces before they left him.4
 What are we to do with such a passage? what is “history” to make of it?
what kind of story do we want to tell about Scott and his victim—or not to
tell about them? The Hakluyt Society editor, writing let us take note in 1943,
makes no direct comment on this passage at all in his long introduction.
Scott's narrative, he writes, “is an epic story of a grim struggle against
disease and dangers of many descriptions, sustained by a dogged
determination to keep the flag flying at all costs. Scott himself stands out,
without any boasting or undue egotism, as a man of ability, who proved fully
equal to all the calls made upon him. Calm and prudent, his constant
vigilance frustrated many plots against the factory; and every emergency was
faced with an energy and decision that soon brought a successful issue. . . .
His proudest boast is that, small as were the numbers of resources of the
English, they yet won and kept the good opinion of the Asiatics by whom they
were surrounded, at the same time maintaining the honour of their sovereign
and the good name of their country” (xxxix–lx).
The moral stupidity of this drivel obviously reflects the blind patriotism
of a nation besieged, but it is also the expression of a more long-term
historiographical project that extends at least to the Reverend Samuel
Purchas who first published Scott's narrative in 1613 in his multi-volume
commemoration of English voyages. This project is linked not only to a
recording of the military exploits of the nation-state but to an analysis of
broader institutional and social patterns of danger and well-being. The well-
being in the case of Scott is succinctly summarized by Sir William Foster:
“the final outcome” of the expedition, he writes, was “not unsatisfactory”:
“The investors had recovered not only their capital but a profit of ninety-five
per cent” (xxx). Here too, of course, the passage I began by quoting simply
disappears.
It is one of the virtues of traditional Marxist history that it could at least
acknowledge—and not simply as an “aberration” or a sign of the barbarism
of a “backward age”—the horror of Scott's account and attempt to understand
it in terms of the nascent capitalist and imperialist venture in which it takes
place. But this very understanding—and the theory of historical necessity to
which it is wed—also runs the risk of losing the dark specificity of that
account, the risk of absorbing the unspeakable but spoken rupture of human
relatedness into an abstract, prepackaged schema. The English boasted of the
fact that, in contrast to continental practice, torture was, as Sir Edward Coke
wrote, “directly against the common lawes of England.”5 But in fact between
1560 and 1620 torture was regularly used in the interrogation of Catholics
accused of treason, and Scott is not unique in recording its use against racial
as well as religious others. The link between capitalism and imperialism
does manifest itself in Scott's writing and his actions, but we may doubt that
this link is sufficient to explain either the writing or the actions or doubt that
its history is the history that it most behooves us to tell when we read those
terrible sentences.
But why do we read the sentences at all? Might we be better off quietly
forgetting about them? Is it vulgar or lurid even to rehearse Scott's text? Scott
is by our lights a sadist, but is it also sadistic to quote him? Is there not some
hidden pleasure, some imaginative provocation, in this spectacle of torture?
Is there something indecent about using such sentences to illustrate a point
about historicism? The Chinese victim was uncannily, unimaginably, perhaps
heroically silent; is it the historian's task, after all this time, finally to compel
him to speak? But then if we are silent, if we turn our eyes away, are we not
collaborating with Scott and with all the others like him?
A crime was committed—not the crime against property with which Scott
was so concerned but the crime against humanity that he committed—and its
textual trace has survived. Does it require a set of “implicit
‘counterfactuals’” or “utopian postulates” to feel compelled to speak of this
crime and to try to understand it? Does it require a “theory of history”? I
don't think so; I think that all it initially requires is a hatred of cruelty and a
capacity for wonder. But we cannot get very far without history. We have to
know something about the East India Company, about the practice of torture
in early modern Europe, about the behavior of the English in their own
country and abroad, about prevailing conceptions of racial and religious
difference. And we have to know something about texts.
What is the status of Scott's Exact Discourse? One of the principal
achievements of post-structuralism has been to problematize the distinction
between literary and non-literary texts, to challenge the stable difference
between the fictive and the actual, to look at discourse not as a transparent
glass through which we glimpse reality but as the creator of what Barthes
called the “realityeffect.” In more senses than one, the Exact Discourse is not
an innocent text. Scott had shipped out on the voyage as a very minor figure;
he had become the Agent at Bantam only after the death of two superiors.
When he returned to London, he entered into a long dispute with the company
over his remuneration, a dispute that was only resolved by arbitration in
1609, three years after the publication of his narrative. The Exact Discourse
was almost certainly then part of Scott's campaign for a larger share of the
profits, and every detail may well reflect his idea of what would most
impress the Company's directors.
How can we be certain that what Scott reports in the passage I have
quoted actually took place? The answer is that we cannot. There is, so far as
I can tell, no corroborating testimony in the other documentary traces of the
voyage, and at this distance even such testimony could not give us certainty.
Moreover, in the fiction of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century
there are passages that are strikingly similar to Scott's; for example, Thomas
Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1593) has a description of an execution
that fully rivals Scott's in its attention to detail, and, of course, Shakespeare's
King Lear famously shows on stage the torture and blinding of the bound
Earl of Gloucester. Scott's account is in the first-person, but that in itself is
not enough to differentiate it from fiction, and there are no other formal
features that enable us to secure such differentiation.
These considerations are unsettling, for they seem to threaten a loss of
moral bearings, but they also force us to look again and more closely at the
text, not to peer through it but to peer at it. If there is any value to what has
become known as “new historicism,” it must be here, in an intensified
willingness to read all of the textual traces of the past with the attention
traditionally conferred only on literary texts. What is unbearable about
Scott's passage exists for us in the text, and not only in his complacent
acceptance of his own acts. There is something about the sentences
themselves that is horrible, something suggested by Elaine Scarry's remark,
“Nowhere is the sadistic potential of a language built on agency so visible as
in torture.”6 And it is in the context of this horribleness that the victim's
silence—the torturer's inability to turn pain into a manifestation of his power,
to extort so much as a scream that he could then record—takes on whatever
meaning it has.
This is not the place to tease out the implications of Scott's text; I have
only wanted to indicate the kinds of questions that it raises, for they are
questions that are implicit in most of the essays. But I don't want to end
without making explicit my conviction that the post-structuralist confounding
of fiction and non-fiction is important but inadequate. It matters that The
Unfortunate Traveller is marked out for us in a variety of ways as fiction
and that Scott's Exact Discourse is not; it fundamentally alters our mode of
reading the texts and changes our ethical position toward them. If we
discovered that Scott's account was a fabrication, his text would thereby be
revealed to be not a work of art but a lie. Our belief in language's capacity
for reference is part of our contract with the world; the contract may be
playfully suspended or broken altogether, but no abrogation is without
consequences, and there are circumstances where the abrogation is
unacceptable. The existence or absence of a real world, real body, real pain,
makes a difference. The traditional paradigms for the uses of history and the
interpretation of texts have all eroded—this is a time in which it will not do
to invoke the same pathetically narrow repertoire of dogmatic explanations
—but any history and any textual interpretation worth doing will have to
speak to this difference.

NOTES
1 William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), pp. 468–73.
2 Louis A. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” in The New
Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York & London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15–36.
3 Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in The New Historicism, ed. H.
Aram Veeser, pp. 49–76.
4 In The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas, 1604–1606, ed. Sir William Foster,
C.I.E., Hakluyt Society Series 2, vol. 88 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1943), pp. 121–22. As Anne
Barton has pointed out in a review of my book (New York Review of Books 38 [1991], p. 54), the
Hakluyt Society editor omits from the opening sentence of this passage a phrase that emphasizes the
“horrible symmetry” of the torture: “Wherefore, because of his sullennesse, and that it was hee
that fired us, I thought I would burne him now a little . . .” (italics added).
5 The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, Chap. 2 (London: 1797), pp. 34–35. I
owe this reference to “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” an article by Elizabeth Hanson,
in Representations 34 (1991), 53–84.
6 The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985), p. 27.
 2

LEARNING TO CURSE:
ASPECTS OF LINGUISTIC
COLONIALISM IN THE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY

At the close of Musophilus, Samuel Daniel's brooding philosophical poem

of 1599, the poet's spokesman, anxious and uncertain through much of the
dialogue in the face of his opponent's skepticism, at last rises to a ringing
defense of eloquence, and particularly English eloquence, culminating in a
vision of its future possibilities:
And who in time knowes whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent,
T'inrich vnknowing Nations with our stores?
What worlds in th'yet vnformed Occident
May come refin'd with th'accents that are ours?1

For Daniel, the New World is a vast, rich field for the plantation of the
English language. Deftly he reverses the conventional image and imagines
argosies freighted with a cargo of priceless words, sailing west “T'inrich
vnknowing Nations with our stores.” There is another reversal of sorts here:
the “best glorie” that the English voyagers will carry with them is not “the
treasure of our faith” but “the treasure of our tongue.” It is as if in place of
the evangelical spirit, which in the early English voyages is but a small flame
compared to the blazing mission of the Spanish friars, Daniel would
substitute a linguistic mission, the propagation of English speech.
 Linguistic colonialism is mentioned by continental writers as well but
usually as a small part of the larger enterprise of conquest, conversion, and
settlement. Thus Peter Martyr writes to Pope Leo X of the “large landes and
many regyons whiche shal hereafter receaue owre nations, tounges, and
maners: and therwith embrase owre relygion.”2 Occasionally, more
substantial claims are made. In 1492, in the introduction to his Gramática,
the first grammar of a modern European tongue, Antonio de Nebrija writes
that language has always been the partner (“compañera”) of empire. And in
the ceremonial presentation of the volume to Queen Isabella, the bishop of
Avila, speaking on the scholar's behalf, claimed a still more central role for
language. When the queen asked flatly, “What is it for?” the bishop replied,
“Your Majesty, language is the perfect instrument of empire.”3 But for
Daniel, English is neither partner nor instrument; its expansion is virtually the
goal of the whole enterprise.
Daniel does not consider the spread of English a conquest but rather a
gift of inestimable value. He hasn't the slightest sense that the natives might
be reluctant to abandon their own tongue; for him, the Occident is “yet
unformed,” its nations “unknowing.” Or, as Peter Martyr puts it, the natives
are a tabula rasa ready to take the imprint of European civilization: “For
lyke as rased or vnpaynted tables, are apte to receaue what formes soo euer
are fyrst drawen theron by the hande of the paynter, euen soo these naked and
simple people, doo soone receaue the customes of owre Religion, and by
conuersation with owre men, shake of theyr fierce and natiue barbarousnes.”4
The mention of the nakedness of the Indians is typical; to a ruling class
obsessed with the symbolism of dress, the Indians’ physical appearance was
a token of a cultural void. In the eyes of the Europeans, the Indians were
culturally naked.
This illusion that the inhabitants of the New World are essentially without
a culture of their own is both early and remarkably persistent, even in the
face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. In his journal entry for the day
of days, 12 October 1492, Columbus expresses the thought that the Indians
ought to make good servants, “for I see that they repeat very quickly
whatever was said to them.” He thinks, too, that they would easily be
converted to Christianity, “because it seemed to me that they belonged to no
religion.” And he continues: “I, please Our Lord, will carry off six of them at
my departure to Your Highnesses, that they may learn to speak.” The first of
the endless series of kidnappings, then, was plotted in order to secure
interpreters; the primal crime in the New World was committed in the
interest of language. But the actual phrase of the journal merits close
attention: “that they may learn to speak” (para que aprendan a hablar).5 We
are dealing, of course, with an idiom: Columbus must have known, even in
that first encounter, that the Indians could speak, and he argued from the
beginning that they were rational human beings. But the idiom has a life of its
own; it implies that the Indians had no language at all.
This is, in part, an aspect of that linguistic colonialism we have already
encountered in Musophilus: to speak is to speak one's own language, or at
least a language with which one is familiar. “A man would be more cheerful
with his dog for company,” writes Saint Augustine, “than with a foreigner.”6
The unfamiliarity of their speech is a recurrent motif in the early accounts of
the New World's inhabitants, and it is paraded forth in the company of all
their other strange and often repellent qualities. The chronicler Robert
Fabian writes of three savages presented to Henry VII that they “were
clothed in beasts skins, & did eate raw flesh, and spake such speach that no
man could understand them, and in their demeanour like to bruite beastes.”
Roy Harvey Pearce cites this as an example of the typical English view of
the Indians as animals, but Fabian is far more ambiguous, for he continues:
“Of the which upon two yeeres after, I saw two apparelled after the maner of
Englishmen in Westminster pallace, which that time I could not discerne from
Englishmen, til I was learned what they were, but as for speach, I heard none
of them utter one word.”7 When he sees the natives again, are they still
savages, now masked by their dress, or was his first impression misleading?
And the seal of the ambiguity is the fact that he did not hear them utter a
word, as if the real test of their conversion to civilization would be whether
they had been able to master a language that “men” could understand.
In the 1570s the strangeness of Indian language can still be used in
precisely the same way. In his first voyage to “Meta Incognita,” as George
Best reports, Frobisher captured a savage to take home with him as “. . . a
sufficient witnesse of the captaines farre and tedious travell towards the
unknowen parts of the world, as did well appeare by this strange infidell,
whose like was never seene, read, nor heard of before, and whose language
was neither knowen nor understood of any. . . .”8 For Gregorio García,
whose massive study of the origins of the Indians was published in 1607,
there was something diabolical about the difficulty and variety of languages
in the New World: Satan had helped the Indians to invent new tongues, thus
impeding the labors of Christian missionaries.9 And even the young John
Milton, attacking the legal jargon of his time, can say in rhetorical outrage,
“our speech is, I know not what, American, I suppose, or not even human!”10
Of course, there were many early attempts to treat Indian speech as
something men could come to understand. According to John H. Parry, “All
the early friars endeavoured to master Indian languages, usually Nahuatl,
though some acquired other languages; the learned Andrés de Olmos, an
early companion of Zumárraga, was credited with ten.”11 Traders and settlers
also had an obvious interest in learning at least a few Indian words, and there
are numerous word lists in the early accounts, facilitated as Peter Martyr
points out by the fortuitous circumstance that “the languages of all the nations
of these Ilandes, maye well be written with our Latine letters.”12 Such lists
even suggested to one observer, Marc Lescarbot, the fact the Indian
languages could change in time, just as French had changed from the age of
Charlemagne. This, he explains, is why Cartier's dictionary of Indian words,
compiled in the 1530s, is no longer of much use in the early seventeenth
century.13
Indian languages even found some influential European admirers. In a
famous passage, Montaigne approvingly quotes in translation several Indian
songs, noting of one that “the invention hath no barbarism at all in it, but is
altogether Anacreontic.” In his judgment, “Their language is a kind of
pleasant speech, and hath a pleasing sound and some affinity with the Greek
terminations.”14 Ralegh, likewise, finds that the Tivitivas of Guiana have “the
most manlie speech and most deliberate that euer I heard of what nation
soeuer,”15 while, in the next century, William Penn judges Indian speech
“lofty” and full of words “of more sweetness or greatness” than most
European tongues.16 And the great Bartolomé de Las Casas, as he so often
does, turns the tables on the Europeans:
A man is apt to be called barbarous, in comparison with another, because he is strange in his
manner of speech and mispronounces the language of the other. . . . According to Strabo, Book
XIV, this was the chief reason the Greeks called other peoples barbarous, that is, because they
were mispronouncing the Greek language. But from this point of view, there is no man or race
which is not barbarous with respect to some other man or race. . . . Thus, just as we esteemed
these peoples of these Indies barbarous, so they considered us, because of not understanding us.17
 Simple and obvious as this point seems to us, it does not appear to have
taken firm hold in the early years of conquest and settlement. Something of its
spirit may be found in Oviedo's observation of an Indian interpreter failing to
communicate with the members of another tribe: “[he] did not understand
them better than a Biscayan talking Basque could make himself intelligible to
a person speaking German or Arabic, or any other strange language.”18 But
the view that Indian speech was close to gibberish remained current in
intellectual as well as popular circles at least into the seventeenth century.19
Indeed it is precisely in educated, and particularly humanist, circles that the
view proved most tenacious and extreme. The rough, illiterate sea dog,
bartering for gold trinkets on a faraway beach, was far more likely than the
scholar to understand that the natives had their own tongue. The captains or
lieutenants whose accounts we read had stood on the same beach, but when
they sat down to record their experiences, powerful cultural presuppositions
asserted themselves almost irresistibly.
For long before men without the full command of language, which is to
say without eloquence, were thought to have been discovered in the New
World, Renaissance humanists knew that such men existed, rather as modern
scientists knew from the periodic table of the necessary existence of elements
yet undiscovered. Virtually every Renaissance schoolboy read in Cicero's De
oratore that only eloquence had been powerful enough “to gather scattered
mankind together in one place, to transplant human beings from a barbarous
life in the wilderness to a civilized social system, to establish organized
communities, to equip them with laws and judicial safeguards and civic
rights.”20 These lines, and similar passages from Isocrates and Quintilian,
are echoed again and again in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the
proudest boast of the stadium humanitatis. Eloquence, wrote Andrea Ugo of
Siena in 1421, led wandering humanity from a savage, bestial existence to
civilized culture. Likewise, Andrea Brenta of Padua declared in 1480 that
primitive men had led brutish and lawless lives in the fields until eloquence
brought them together and converted barbaric violence into humanity and
culture.21 And more than a hundred years later, Puttenham can make the same
claim, in the same terms, on behalf of poetry:
Poesie was th'originall cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when before the people
remained in the woods and mountains, vagarant and dipersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and
 naked, or verie ill clad, and of all good and necessarie prouision for harbour or sustenance vtterly
vnfurnished: so as they litle diffred for their maner of life, from the very brute beasts of the field.22

Curiously enough, a few pages later Puttenham cites the peoples of the New
World as proof that poetry is more ancient than prose:
This is proued by certificate of marchants & trauellers, who by late nauigations haue surueyed the
whole world, and discouered large countries and strange peoples wild and sauage, affirming that
the American, the Perusine & the very Canniball, do sing and also say, their highest and holiest
matters in certaine riming versicles and not in prose.23

But it was more reasonable and logically consistent to conclude, as others

did, that the savages of America were without eloquence or even without
language. To validate one of their major tenets, humanists needed to reach
such a conclusion, and they clung to it, in the face of all the evidence, with
corresponding tenacity.
Moreover, both intellectual and popular culture in the Renaissance had
kept alive the medieval figure of the Wild Man, one of whose common
characteristics is the absence of speech. Thus when Spenser's Salvage Man,
in Book VI of the Faerie Queene, wishes to express his compassion for a
distressed damsel, he kisses his hands and crouches low to the ground,
For other language had he none, nor speach,
But a soft murmure, and confused sound
Of senselesse words, which Nature did him teach.24

To be sure, the Wild Man of medieval and Renaissance literature often turns
out to be of gentle blood, having been lost, as an infant, in the woods; his
language problem, then, is a consequence of his condition, rather than, as in
Cicero, its prime cause. But this view accorded perfectly with the various
speculations about the origins of the Indians, whether they were seen as lost
descendants of the Trojans, Hebrews, Carthaginians, or Chinese. Indian
speech, that speech no man could understand, could be viewed as the tattered
remnants of a lost language.25
It is only a slight exaggeration, I think, to suggest that Europeans had, for
centuries, rehearsed their encounter with the peoples of the New World,
acting out, in their response to the legendary Wild Man, their mingled
attraction and revulsion, longing and hatred. In the Christian Middle Ages,
according to a recent account, “the Wild Man is the distillation of the
specific anxieties underlying the three securities supposedly provided by the
specifically Christian institutions of civilized life: the securities of sex (as
organized by the institution of the family), sustenance (as provided by the
political, social, and economic institutions), and salvation (as provided by
the Church).”26 These are precisely the areas in which the Indians most
disturb their early observers. They appear to some to have no stable family
life and are given instead to wantonness and perversion.27 Nor, according to
others, are they capable of political organization or settled social life.
Against the campaign to free the enslaved Indians, it was argued that once
given their liberty, they would return to their old ways: “For being idle and
slothfull, they wander vp & downe, and returne to their olde rites and
ceremonies, and foule and mischieuous actes.”28 And everywhere we hear of
their worship of idols which, in the eyes of the Europeans, strikingly
resemble the images of devils in Christian art,29
Certainly the Indians were again and again identified as Wild Men, as
wild, in the words of Francis Pretty, “as ever was a bucke or any other wilde
beast.”30 “These men may very well and truely be called Wilde,” writes
Jacques Cartier, at once confirming and qualifying the popular name,
“because there is no poorer people in the world.”31 Peter Martyr records
tales of Wild Men in the New World, but he distinguishes them from the
majority of the inhabitants:
They say there are certeyne wyld men whiche lyue in the caues and dennes of the montaynes,
contented onely with wilde fruites. These men neuer vsed the companye of any other: nor wyll by
any meanes becoome tame. They lyue without any certaine dwellynge places, and with owte
tyllage or culturynge of the grounde, as wee reade of them whiche in oulde tyme lyued in the
golden age. They say also that these men are withowte any certaine language. They are sumtymes
seene. But owre men haue yet layde handes on none of them.32

As Martyr's description suggests, Wild Men live beyond the pale of

civilized life, outside all institutions, untouched by the long, slow
development of human culture. If their existence is rude and repugnant, it also
has, as Martyr's curious mention of the Golden Age suggests, a disturbing
allure. The figure of the Wild Man, and the Indians identified as Wild Men,
serve as a screen onto which Renaissance Europeans, bound by their
institutions, project their darkest and yet most compelling fantasies. In the
words of the earliest English tract on America:
 the people of this lande haue no kynge nor lorde nor theyr god. But all thinges is comune/this
people goeth all naked. . . . These folke lyuen lyke bestes without any resonablenes and the
wymen be also as comon. And the men hath conuersacyon with the wymen/who that they ben or
who they fyrst mete/is she his syster/his mother/his daughter/or any other kyndred. And the
wymen be very hoote and dysposed to lecherdnes. And they ete also on[e] another. The man
etethe his wyfe his chylderne. . . . And that lande is ryght full of folke/for they lyue commonly, iii.
C. [300] yere and more as with sykenesse they dye nat.33

This bizarre description is, of course, an almost embarrasingly clinical

delineation of the Freudian id. And the id, according to Freud, is without
language.
At the furthest extreme, the Wild Man shades into the animal— one
possible source of the medieval legend being European observation of the
great apes.34 Language is, after all, one of the crucial ways of distinguishing
between men and beasts: “The one special advantage we enjoy over
animals,” writes Cicero, “is our power to speak with one another, to express
our thoughts in words.”35 Not surprisingly, then, there was some early
speculation that the Indians were subhuman and thus, among other things,
incapable of receiving the true faith. One of the early advocates on their
behalf, Bernadino de Minaya, recalls that, on his return to Spain from the
New World,
I went on foot, begging, to Valladolid, where I visited the cardinal and informed him that Friar
Domingo [de Betanzos, an exponent of the theory that the Indians were beasts] knew neither the
Indians’ language nor their true nature. I told him of their ability and the right they had to become
Christians. He replied that I was much deceived, for he understood that the Indians were no more
than parrots, and he believed that Friar Domingo spoke with prophetic spirit . . .36

The debate was dampened but by no means extinguished by Pope Paul

Ill's condemnation, in the bull Sublimis Deus (1537), of the opinion that the
Indians are “dumb brutes created for our service” and “incapable of
receiving the Catholic faith.”37 Friar Domingo conceded in 1544 that the
Indians had language but argued against training them for the clergy on the
grounds that their language was defective, lacking the character and
copiousness necessary to explain Christian doctrine without introducing great
improprieties which could easily lead to great errors.38 Similarly, Pierre
Massée observes that the Brazilian Indians lack the letters F, L, and R, which
they could only receive by divine inspiration, insofar as they have neither
“Foy, Loy, ne Roy.”39 Ironically, it is here, in these virtual slanders, that we
find some of the fullest acknowledgment of the enormous cultural gap
between Europeans and Indians, and of the near impossibility of translating
concepts like conversion, Incarnation, or the Trinity into native speech.40
Perhaps the profoundest literary exploration of these themes in the
Renaissance is to be found in Shakespeare. In The Tempest the startling
encounter between a lettered and an unlettered culture is heightened, almost
parodied, in the relationship between a European whose entire source of
power is his library and a savage who had no speech at all before the
European's arrival. “Remember/First to possess his books,” Caliban warns
the lower-class and presumably illiterate Stephano and Trinculo,
for without them
He's but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command: they all do hate him
As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.41

This idea may well have had some historical analogue in the early years of
conquest. In his Thresor de l'histoire des langves de cest univers (1607),
Claude Duret reports that the Indians, fearing that their secrets would be
recorded and revealed, would not approach certain trees whose leaves the
Spanish used for paper, and Father Chaumonot writes in 1640 that the Hurons
“were convinced that we were sorcerers, imposters come to take possession
of their country, after having made them perish by our spells, which were
shut up in our inkstands, in our books, etc.,—inasmuch that we dared not,
without hiding ourselves, open a book or write anything.”42
The link between The Tempest and the New World has often been noted,
as, for example, by Terence Hawkes who suggests, in his book
Shakespeare's Talking Animals, that in creating Prospero, the play-wright's
imagination was fired by the resemblance he perceived between himself and
a colonist. “A colonist,” writes Hawkes,
acts essentially as a dramatist. He imposes the “shape” of his own culture, embodied in his
speech, on the new world, and makes that world recognizable, habitable, “natural,” able to speak
his language.43

Conversely,
the dramatist is metaphorically a colonist. His art penetrates new areas of experience, his language
expands the boundaries of our culture, and makes the new territory over in its own image. His
 “raids on the inarticulate” open up new worlds for the imagination. (212)44

The problem for critics has been to accommodate this perceived

resemblance between dramatist and colonist with a revulsion that reaches
from the political critiques of colonialism in our own century back to the
moral outrage of Las Casas and Montaigne. Moreover, there are many
aspects of the play itself that make colonialism a problematical model for the
theatrical imagination: if The Tempest holds up a mirror to empire,
Shakespeare would appear deeply ambivalent about using the reflected
image as a representation of his own practice.
Caliban enters in Act I, cursing Prospero and protesting bitterly: “This
island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak'st from me” (I. ii.
333–34). When he first arrived, Prospero made much of Caliban, and
Caliban, in turn, showed Prospero “all the qualities o'th’isle.” But now,
Caliban complains, “I am all the subjects that you have, / Which first was
mine own King.” Prospero replies angrily that he had treated Caliban “with
human care” until he tried to rape Miranda, a charge Caliban does not deny.
At this point, Miranda herself chimes in, with a speech Dryden and others
have found disturbingly indelicate:
Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confin'd into this rock,
Who hadst deserv'd more than a prison.45

To this, Caliban replies:

You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
(I. ii. 353–67)
 Caliban's retort might be taken as self-indictment: even with the gift of
language, his nature is so debased that he can only learn to curse. But the
lines refuse to mean this; what we experience instead is a sense of their
devastating justness. Ugly, rude, savage, Caliban nevertheless achieves for
an instant an absolute if intolerably bitter moral victory. There is no reply;
only Prospero's command: “Hag-seed, hence! / Fetch us in fuel,” coupled
with an ugly threat:
If thou neglect'st, or dost unwillingly
What I command, I'll rack thee with old cramps,
Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar,
That beasts shall tremble at thy din.
(I. ii. 370–73)

What makes this exchange so powerful, I think, is that Caliban is anything

but a Noble Savage. Shakespeare does not shrink from the darkest European
fantasies about the Wild Man; indeed he exaggerates them: Caliban is
deformed, lecherous, evil-smelling, idle, treacherous, naive, drunken,
rebellious, violent, and devil-worshipping.46 According to Prospero, he is
not even human: a “born devil,” “got by the devil himself/Upon thy wicked
dam” (I. ii. 321–22). The Tempest utterly rejects the uniformitarian view of
the human race, the view that would later triumph in the Enlightenment and
prevail in the West to this day. All men, the play seems to suggest, are not
alike; strip away the adornments of culture and you will not reach a single
human essence. If anything, The Tempest seems closer in spirit to the attitude
of the present-day inhabitants of Java who, according to Clifford Geertz,
quite flatly say, “To be human is to be Javanese.”47
And yet out of the midst of this attitude Caliban wins a momentary victory
that is, quite simply, an assertion of inconsolable human pain and bitterness.
And out of the midst of this attitude Prospero comes, at the end of the play, to
say of Caliban, “this thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (V. i. 275–76).
Like Caliban's earlier reply, Prospero's words are ambiguous; they might be
taken as a bare statement that the strange “demidevil” is one of Prospero's
party as opposed to Alonso's, or even that Caliban is Prospero's slave. But
again the lines refuse to mean this: they acknowledge a deep, if entirely
unsentimental, bond. By no means is Caliban accepted into the family of man;
rather, he is claimed as Philoctetes might claim his own festering wound.
Perhaps, too, the word “acknowledge” implies some moral responsibility, as
when the Lord, in the King James translation of Jeremiah, exhorts men to
“acknowledge thine iniquity, that thou hast transgressed against the Lord thy
God” (3:13). Certainly the Caliban of Act V is in a very real sense
Prospero's creature, and the bitter justness of his retort early in the play still
casts a shadow at its close. With Prospero restored to his dukedom, the
match of Ferdinand and Miranda blessed, Ariel freed to the elements, and
even the wind and tides of the return voyage settled, Shakespeare leaves
Caliban's fate naggingly unclear. Prospero has acknowledged a bond; that is
all.

Arrogant, blindly obstinate, and destructive as was the belief that the
Indians had no language at all, the opposite conviction— that there was no
significant language barrier between Europeans and savages—may have had
consequences as bad or worse. Superficially, this latter view is the more
sympathetic and seductive, in that it never needs to be stated. It is hard, after
all, to resist the story of the caciques of the Cenú Indians who are reported
by the Spanish captain to have rebutted the official claim to their land thus:
what I said about the Pope being the Lord of all the universe in the place of God, and that he had
given the land of the Indies to the King of Castille, the Pope must have been drunk when he did it,
for he gave what was not his; also . . . the King, who asked for, or received, this gift, must be some
madman, for that he asked to have that given him which belonged to others.48

It is considerably less hard to resist the account of the caciques of new

Granada who declared in a memorial sent to the pope in 1553 that “if by
chance Your Holiness has been told that we are bestial, you are to understand
that this is true inasmuch as we follow devilish rites and ceremonies.”49 The
principle in both cases is the same: whatever the natives may have actually
thought and said has been altered out of recognition by being cast in
European diction and syntax.
Again and again in the early accounts, Europeans and Indians, after
looking on each other's faces for the first time, converse without the slightest
difficulty; indeed the Indians often speak with as great a facility in English or
Spanish as the Renaissance gentlemen themselves. There were interpreters,
to be sure, but these are frequently credited with linguistic feats that
challenge belief. Thus Las Casas indignantly objects to the pretense that
complex negotiations were conducted through the mediation of interpreters
who, in actual fact, “communicate with a few phrases like ‘Gimme bread,’
‘Gimme food,’ ‘Take this, gimme that,’ and otherwise carry on with
gestures.”50 He argues that the narratives are intentionally falsified, to make
the conquistadores’ actions appear fairer and more deliberative than they
actually were. There may have been such willful falsification, but there also
seems to have been a great deal of what we may call “filling in the blanks.”
The Europeans and the interpreters themselves translated such fragments as
they understood or thought they understood into a coherent story, and they
came to believe quite easily that the story was what they had actually heard.
There could be, and apparently were, murderous results.51
The savages in the early accounts of the New World may occasionally
make strange noises— “Oh ho” or “bow-wow”52— but, once credited with
intelligible speech, they employ our accents and are comfortable in our
modes of thought. Thus the amorous daughter of a cruel cacique, we learn in
The Florida of the Inca, saved the young Spanish captive with the following
words:
Lest you lose faith in me and despair of your life or doubt that I will do everything in my power to
save you . . . I will assist you to escape and find refuge if you are a man and have the courage to
flee. For tonight, if you will come at a certain hour to a certain place, you will find an Indian in
whom I shall entrust both your welfare and mine.53

It may be objected that this is narrative convention: as in adventure movies,

the natives look exotic but speak our language. But such conventions are
almost never mere technical conveniences. If it was immensely difficult in
sixteenth-century narratives to represent a language barrier, it is because
embedded in the narrative convention of the period was a powerful,
unspoken belief in the isomorphic relationship between language and reality.
The denial of Indian language or of the language barrier grew out of the same
soil that, in the mid-seventeenth century, would bring forth the search for a
universal language. Many sixteenth-century observers of the Indians seem to
have assumed that language— their language—represented the true, rational
order of things in the world. Accordingly, Indians were frequently either
found defective in speech, and hence pushed toward the zone of wild things,
or granted essentially the same speech as the Europeans. Linguists in the
seventeenth century brought the underlying assumption to the surface, not, of
course, to claim that English, or Latin, or even Hebrew expressed the shape
of reality, but to advocate the discovery or fashioning of a universal language
that would do so.
 Behind this project, and behind the narrative convention that
foreshadowed it, lay the conviction that reality was one and universal,
constituted identically for all men at all times and in all places. The ultimate
grounds for this faith were theological and were many times explicitly
voiced, as here by Ralegh in his History of the World:
The same just God who liueth and gouerneth all thinges for euer, doeth in these our times giue
victorie, courage, and discourage, raise, and throw downe Kinges, Estates, Cities, and Nations, for
the same offenses which were committed of old, and are committed in the present.54

There is a single faith, a single text, a single reality.

This complex of convictions may illuminate that most startling document,
the Requerimiento, which was drawn up in 1513 and put into effect the next
year. The Requerimiento was to be read aloud to newly encountered peoples
in the New World; it demands both obedience to the king and queen of Spain
as rulers of the Indies by virtue of the donation of the pope, and permission
for the religious fathers to preach the true faith. If these demands are
promptly met, many benefits are promised, but if there should be refusal or
malicious delay, the consequences are made perfectly clear:
We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such
shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your
goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey,
and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and
losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of
these cavaliers who come with us. And that we have said this to you and made this Requisition, we
request the notary here present to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are
present that they should be witnesses of this Requisition.55

Las Casas writes that he doesn't know “whether to laugh or cry at the
absurdity” of the Requerimiento, an absurdity born out in the stories of its
actual use.56 In our times, Madariaga calls it “quaint and naive,” but neither
adjective seems to me appropriate for what is a diabolical and, in its way,
sophisticated document.57
A strange blend of ritual, cynicism, legal fiction, and perverse idealism,
the Requerimiento contains at its core the conviction that there is no serious
language barrier between the Indians and the Europeans. To be sure, there
are one or two hints of uneasiness, but they are not allowed to disrupt the
illusion of scrupulous and meaningful communication established from the
beginning:
On the part of the King, Don Fernando, and of Doña Juana, his daughter, Queen of Castille and
Leon, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants notify and make known to you, as best
we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man
and one woman, of whom you and we, and all the men of the world, were and are descendants,
and all those who come after us.58

The proclamation that all men are brothers may seem an odd way to
begin a document that ends with threats of enslavement and a denial of
responsibility for all ensuing deaths and losses, but it is precisely this
opening that justifies the close. That all human beings are descended from
“one man and one woman” proves that there is a single human essence, a
single reality. As such, all problems of communication are merely accidental.
Indeed, the Requerimiento conveniently passes over in silence the biblical
account of the variety of languages and the scattering of mankind. In Genesis
11, we are told that “the whole earth was of one language, and of one
speech,” until men began to build the tower of Babel:
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to
do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go
down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So
the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build
the city. (Gen. 11:6–8)

In place of this, the Requerimiento offers a demographic account of the

dispersion of the human race:
on account of the multitude which has sprung from this man and woman in the five thousand years
since the world was created, it was necessary that some men should go one way and some
another, and that they should be divided into many kingdoms and provinces, for in one alone they
could not be sustained59

The Babel story has to be omitted, for to acknowledge it here would be to

undermine the basic linguistic premise of the whole document.
The Requerimiento, then, forces us to confront the dangers inherent in
what most of us would consider the central liberal tenet, namely the basic
unity of mankind. The belief that a shared essence lies beneath our particular
customs, stories, and language turns out to be the cornerstone of the
document's self-righteousness and arrogance. It certainly did not cause the
horrors of the Conquest, but it made those horrors easier for those at home to
live with. After all, the Indians had been warned. The king and queen had
promised “joyfully and benignantly” to receive them as vassals. The
Requerimiento even offered to let them see the “certain writings” wherein
the pope made his donation of the Indies. If, after all this, the Indians
obstinately refused to comply, they themselves would have to bear
responsibility for the inevitable consequences.

The two beliefs that I have discussed in this paper—that Indian language
was deficient or non-existent and that there was no serious language barrier
—are not, of course, the only sixteenth-century attitudes toward American
speech. I have already mentioned some of the Europeans, missionaries, and
laymen who took native tongues seriously. There are, moreover, numerous
practical acknowledgments of the language problem which do not simply
reduce the native speech to gibberish. Thus René de Laudonnière reports that
the Indians “every houre made us a 1000 discourses, being merveilous sory
that we could not understand them.” Instead of simply throwing up his hands,
he proceeds to ask the Indian names for various objects and comes gradually
to understand a part of what they are saying.60
But the theoretical positions on Indian speech that we have considered
press in from either side on the Old World's experience of the New. Though
they seem to be opposite extremes, both positions reflect a fundamental
inability to sustain the simultaneous perception of likeness and difference, the
very special perception we give to metaphor. Instead they either push the
Indians toward utter difference—and thus silence—or toward utter likeness
—and thus the collapse of their own, unique identity. Shakespeare, in The
Tempest, experiments with an extreme version of this problem, placing
Caliban at the outer limits of difference only to insist upon a mysterious
measure of resemblance. It is as if he were testing our capacity to sustain
metaphor. And in this instance only, the audience achieves a fullness of
understanding before Prospero does, an understanding that Prospero is only
groping toward at the play's close. In the poisoned relationship between
master and slave, Caliban can only curse; but we know that Caliban's
consciousness is not simply a warped negation of Prospero's:
I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;
 Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble mamoset; I'll bring thee
To clustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee
Young scamels from the rock.
(II. ii. 167–72)

The rich, irreducible concreteness of the verse compels us to acknowledge

the independence and integrity of Caliban's construction of reality. We do not
sentimentalize this construction— indeed the play insists that we judge it and
that we prefer another—but we cannot make it vanish into silence. Caliban's
world has what we may call opacity, and the perfect emblem of that opacity
is the fact that we do not to this day know the meaning of the word “scamel.”
But it is not until Vico's New Science (1725) that we find a genuine
theoretical breakthrough, a radical shift from the philosophical assumptions
that helped to determine European response to alien languages and cultures.
Vico refuses to accept the position by then widely held that “in the vulgar
languages meanings were fixed by convention,” that “articulate human words
have arbitrary significations.” On the contrary, he insists, “because of their
natural origins, they must have had natural significations.”61 Up to this point,
he seems simply to be reverting to the old search for a universal character.
But then he makes a momentous leap:
There remains, however, the very great difficulty: How is it that there are as many different vulgar
tongues as there are peoples? To solve it, we must here establish this great truth: that, as the
people have certainly by diversity of climates acquired different natures, from which have sprung
as many different customs, so from their different natures and customs as many different
languages have arisen. (p. 133)

For Vico, the key to the diversity of languages is not the arbitrary character of
signs but the variety of human natures. Each language reflects and
substantiates the specific character of the culture out of which it springs.
Vico, however, is far away from the first impact of the New World upon
the Old, and, in truth, his insights have scarcely been fully explored in our
own times. Europeans in the sixteenth century, like ourselves, find it difficult
to credit another language with opacity. In other words, they render Indian
language transparent, either by limiting or denying its existence or by
dismissing its significance as an obstacle to communication between
peoples. And as opacity is denied to native speech, so, by the same token, is
it denied to native culture. For a specific language and a specific culture are
not here, nor are they ever, entirely separable. To divorce them is to turn
from the messy, confusing welter of details that characterize a particular
society at a particular time to the cool realm of abstract principles. It is
precisely to validate such high-sounding principles— “Eloquence brought
men from barbarism to civility” or “All men are descended from one man
and one woman”—that the Indian languages are peeled away and discarded
like rubbish by so many of the early writers. But as we are now beginning
fully to understand, reality for each society is constructed to a significant
degree out of the specific qualities of its language and symbols. Discard the
particular words and you have discarded the particular men. And so most of
the people of the New World will never speak to us. That communication,
with all that we might have learned, is lost to us forever.

NOTES
1 Samuel Daniel, Poems and a Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Cambridge 1930) 11,
957–962.
2 Peter Martyr, The Decades of the Newe Worlde (De orbe novo), trans. Richard Eden, Decade 3,
Book 9, in The First Three English Books on America, ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham 1885) 177.
3 Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana, ed. Ig. González-Llubera (Oxford 1926) 3;
Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern
World (Chicago and London 1959) 8.
4 Martyr (n. 2 above) Decade 2, Book 1, p. 106.
5 Christopher Columbus, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher
Columbus, trans. and ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York 1963) 65. For the Spanish, see
Cristoforo Colombo, Diario de Colón, libro de la primera navegación y descubrimiento de la
Indias, ed. Carlos Sanz López [facsimile of the original transcript] (Madrid 1962) fol. 9b. There has
been considerable debate about Columbus’ journal, which survived only in Las Casas’ transcription.
But Las Casas indicates that he is quoting Columbus here, and the words are revealing, no matter
who penned them.
6 Augustine, Concerning The City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson, ed. David
Knowles (Harmondsworth 1972) Book 19, Ch. 7, p. 861. The whole passage, with its reference to
Roman linguistic colonialism, is interesting in this context:

. . . the diversity of languages separates man from man. For if two men meet, and are forced
by some compelling reason not to pass on but to stay in company, then if neither knows the
other's language, it is easier for dumb animals, even of different kinds, to associate together
than these men, although both are human beings. For when men cannot communicate their
thoughts to each other, simply because of difference of language, all the similarity of their
common human nature is of no avail to unite them in fellowship. So true is this that a man
would be more cheerful with his dog for company than with a foreigner. I shall be told that the
Imperial City has been at pains to impose on conquered peoples not only her yoke but her
language also, as a bond of peace and fellowship, so that there should be no lack of
 interpreters but even a profusion of them. True; but think of the cost of this achievement!
Consider the scale of those wars, with all that slaughter of human beings, all the human blood
that was shed!

For a variation of the theme of linguistic isolation, see Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. Peter Ure
(Cambridge, Mass. 1956) I. iii. 159–173.
7 Robert Fabian, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and
Discoveries of the English Nation . . . (12 vols. Glasgow 1903–05) 7. 155. Roy Harvey Pearce,
“Primitivistic Ideas in the Faerie Queene.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 44
(1945) 149.
8 In Hakluyt (n. 7 above) 7. 282.
9 See Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians; European Concepts, 1492—
1729, Latin American Monographs 11 (Austin, Tex. 1967) 66.
10 Milton, Prolusiones, ed. Donald Leman Clark, trans. Bromley Smith, in Works, ed. Frank Allen
Peterson (18 vols. New York 1931–38) 12. 277.
11 John H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London and New York 1966) 163. Cf. France V.
Scholes and Ralph L. Roys: “Although some of the friars, notably Fray Luis de Villalpando and Fray
Diego de Landa, learned to speak and write Maya and gave instruction to the others, it is doubtful
whether more than half of the clergy became proficient in the language.” Quoted in Landa's
relación de las cosas de Yucatán, trans. Alfred M. Tozzer, Papers of the Peabody Museum of
American Archaeology and Ethnology 18 (1941) 70 n. 313.
12 Martyr (n. 2 above) Decade 1, Book 1, p. 67. See, in the same volume, Sebastian Münster, p. 29, and
Martyr, Decade 2, Book 1, p. 138. For examples of word lists, see Martyr, Decade 3, Book 1, p. 45;
Francisco López de Gómara, The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast India, now
called New Spayne, trans. T. N. (London 1578) 370 ff.; John Davis, in Hakluyt (n. 7 above) 7.398–
399; Sir Robert Dudley, in Hakluyt, 10. 211–212; William Strachey, The Historie of Travell into
Virginia Britania (1612), ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund, Hakluyt Society, Ser. 2, 103
(London 1953) 174–207; James Rosier, “Extracts of a Virginian Voyage made An. 1605. by
Captaine George Waymouth,” in Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his
Pilgrimes, Hakluyt Society, Extra series (20 vols. Glasgow 1905–07; rpt. of 1625 ed.) 18. 359. The
most delightful of the lists is Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London 1643;
rpt. Providence, R.I. 1936). There are also sample conversations in Indian languages; see Williams,
Key; Jean de Léry, Navigatio in Brasiliam Americae, Ch. 19, in Theodor de Bry, Americae tertia
pars (Frankfort 1592) 250 ff.; Martyr (n. 2 above) Decade 3, Book 8, p. 170.
13 Lescarbot, in Claude Duret, Thresor de l'histoire des langues de cest univers (Cologny 1613) 954–
955. I am indebted for this reference and for many useful suggestions to Professor Natalie Zemon
Davis.
14 Montaigne, Selected Essays, trans. John Florio, ed. Walter Kaiser (Boston 1964) 79. The possibility
that Indian language has traces of Greek is explored by Sarmien to de Gamboa and Gregorio Garcia
(see Huddleston [n. 9 above] 30, 73), and by Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, in Tracts and
Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in
North America, comp. Peter Force (4 vols. Washington [c. 1836–47]; rpt. New York 1947 and
Gloucester, Mass. 1963) 2.15–18.
15 Ralegh, The Discoverie of the large and bewtiful Empire of Guiana, ed. V. T. Harlow (London
1928) 38.
16 Quoted in Gary B. Nash, “The Image of the Indian in the Southern Colonial Mind,” in The Wild Man
Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Edward Dudley
and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh 1972) 72. See, likewise, Cornelius J. Jaenen, “Amerindian
Views of French Culture in the Seventeenth Century,” Canadian Historical Review 55 (1974)
276–277.
17 Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Selection of his Writings, trans, and ed. George Sanderlin (New York
1971) 144. Thomas More makes the same point in the early sixteenth century to defend English:
“For as for that our tong is called barbarous, is but a fantasye. For so is, as euery lerned man
knoweth, euery strange language to other.” (Dialogue concerning Heresies, quoted in J. L. Moore,
Tudor-Stuart Views on the Growth, Status, and Destiny of the English Language, Studien zur
Englischen Philologie 41 (Halle 1920) 19.)
18 Oviedo, quoted in Sir Arthur Helps, The Spanish Conquest of America and its Relation to the
History of Slavery and to the Government of Colonies, ed. M. Oppenheim (4 vols. London
1900–04; rpt. New York 1966) 1. 269.
19 For a nineteenth-century variation, see Daniel Webster's remark in a letter to Ticknor, 1 March 1826:
“I ought to say that I am a total unbeliever in the new doctrines about the Indian languages. I believe
them to be the rudest forms of speech; and I believe there is as little in the languages of the tribes as
in their laws, manners, and customs, worth studying or worth knowing. All this is heresy, I know, but
so I think”; see George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster (2 vols. New York 1872) 1. 260. By
1826, it should be noted, Webster is on the defensive. I owe this reference to Professor Larzer Ziff.
20 Cicero, De oratore I. viii. 33, in On the Good Life, trans. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth 1971)
247.
21 Andrea Ugo and Andrea Brenta, in Karl Müllner, Reden und Briefe Italienischer Humanisten
(Vienna 1899) 110–111,75–76. See, likewise in the same volume, the orations of Lapo de
Castiglionchio, Andrea Giuliano of Venice, Francesco Filelfo, Antonio da Rho, Tiphernas (Gregorio
da Città di Castello), and Giovanni Toscanella.
22 George(?) Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London 1589; Scolar Press facs. ed. Menston
1968) 3–4. The myth that Orpheus tamed wild bests by his music is intended to show, according to
Puttenham, “how by his discreete and wholsome lessons vttered in harmonie and with melodious
instruments, he brought the rude and sauage people to a more ciuill and orderly life, nothing, as it
seemeth, more preuailing or fit to redresse and edifie the cruell and sturdie courage of man then it”
(4). Without speech, according to Hobbes, “there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth,
nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves,” Leviathan, ed.
Michael Oake-shott (Oxford 1960) 18.
23 Puttenham (n. 22 above) 7. See also Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, in English Literary
Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York 1963): “Euen among the most
barbarous and simple Indians where no writing is, yet haue they their Poets, who make and sing
songs, which they call Areytos, both of theyr Auncestors deedes and praises of theyr Gods: a
sufficient probabilitie that if euer learning come among them, it must be by hauing theyr hard dull
wits softned and sharpened with the sweete delights of Poetrie. For vntill they find a pleasure in the
exercises of the minde, great promises of much knowledge will little perswade them that knowe not
the fruites of knowledge” (102). On the Indian Areytos, see Martyr (n. 2 above) Decade 3, Book 7,
pp. 166–167; likewise, Las Casas, History of the Indies, trans. and ed. Andrée Collard (New York
1971) 279–280. For a comparable phenomenon in the British Isles, see J. E. C. Hill, “Puritans and
The Dark Corners of the Land,’” Royal Historical Society Transactions, Ser. 5, 13 (1963) 82: “On
Sundays and holy days, we are told of North Wales about 1600, ‘the multitude of all sorts of men,
 women and children’ used to meet to hear ‘their harpers and crowthers sing them songs of the
doings of their ancestors.’”
24 The Faerie Queene, VI. iv. 11, in The Works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin
Greenlaw et al. (9 vols. Baltimore 1932–49). On Spenser's Wild Man, see Pearce (n. 7 above) and
Donald Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in “The Faerie Queene”
(New Haven 1966). On the figure of the Wild Man, see Dudley and Novak (n. 16 above); Richard
Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology
(Cambridge, Mass. 1952).
25 On the comparison of Indian and Old World words, see Huddleston (n. 9 above) esp. 23, 30, 37, 44,
91–92. The Indians were described by Cotton Mather as “the veriest ruines of mankind, which
[were] to be found any where upon the face of the earth”: quoted in Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism
and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore 1965; rpt. 1967) 29.
26 Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” in Dudley and Novak (n. 16
above) 21.
27 “Thei vse no lawful coniunction of mariage, but euery one hath as many women as him listeth, and
leaueth them agayn at his pleasure,” Sebastian Münster, A Treatyse of the Newe ‘India,’ trans.
Richard Eden, in Arber (n. 2 above) 37. See, likewise, Martyr (n. 2 above) Decade 3, Book 1, p.
138; Martyr, trans. Michael Lok, in A Selection of Curious, Rare, and Early Voyages and
Histories of Interesting Discoveries chiefly published by Hakluyt . . . (London 1812) Decade 8,
Ch. 8, p. 673; Laudonnière, in Hakluyt (n. 7 above) 8. 453; Henry Hawks, in Hakluyt (n. 7 above) 9.
386; Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore 1963)
19, 122, 124. On one of Frobisher's voyages, a native man and woman, captured separately, are
brought together before the silent and eagerly expectant sailors. The observers are astonished at the
“shamefastnes and chastity of those Savage captives” (in Hakluyt [n. 7 above] 7. 306).
28 Martyr, trans. Lok (n. 27 above) Decade 7, Ch. 4, p. 627. “Wandering up and down” seems almost
as much of an offense as idolatry. There is a trace of this disapproval and anxiety in the description
of Othello as an “erring barbarian,” an “extravagant and wheeling stranger.”
29 See for example, Martyr, trans. Lok (n. 27 above) Decade 4, Ch. 9, p. 539: “with such a
countenance, as we use to paint hobgoblings or spirites which walke by night.”
30 In Hakluyt (n. 7 above) 11.297. Note that Spenser uses the same metaphor for his Wild Man: “For he
was swift as any bucke in chace” (FQ, VI. iv. 8).
31 In Hakluyt (n. 7 above) 8. 201–202.
32 Martyr, ed. Arber (n. 2 above) Decade 3, Book 8, p. 173.
33 Of the newe landes, in Arber (n. 2 above) p. xxvii; cf. Wilberforce Eames, “Description of a Wood
Engraving Illustrating the South American Indians (1505),” Bulletin of the New York Public
Library 26 (1922) 755–760.
34 See Horst Woldemar Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
(London 1952).
35 Cicero, De oratore I. viii. 32, in On the Good Life (n. 20 above) 247.
36 Quoted in Lewis Hanke, “Pope Paul III and the American Indians,” Harvard Theological Review
30 (1937) 84.
37 Quoted in Hanke (n. 36 above) 72; likewise in Hanke (n. 3 above) 19.
38 Quoted in Hanke (n. 36 above) 102. On his death-bed, Domingo de Betanzos recanted his
denigration of the Indians.
39 Massée, in Duret (n. 13 above) 945.
40 For a more sympathetic grasp of the problem of translating religious concepts, see Las Casas (n. 23
above) 238–239; Marc Lescarbot, History of New France, trans. W. L. Grant (3 vols. Toronto
1907–14) 2. 179–180; José de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans.
Edward Grimston [1604], ed. Clements R. Markham, Hakluyt Society 60–61 (2 vols. London 1880)
2. 301–302. Cornelius Jaenen (n. 16 above) suggests that the difficulty was more cultural than
linguistic: “The natives saw some danger in divulging their religious vocabulary to the evangelists of
the new religion, therefore they refused to cooperate extensively in the linguistic task of compiling
dictionaries and grammars, and of translating religious books” (277).
41 The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass. 1954) III. ii. 90–93.
42 Duret (n. 13 above) 935; Chaumonot, quoted in Jaenen (n. 16 above) 275–276.
43 Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals (London 1973) 211. For another appraisal of
colonialism in The Tempest, see Dominique O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology
of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (New York 1956) 97–109.
44 “Raids on the inarticulate”—the quotation is from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and, as Hawkes uses
it, eerily invokes the sixteenth-century fantasy that the Indians were without speech.
45 The lines are sometimes attributed, without any textual authority, to Prospero. “Which any print of
goodness wilt not take,” it might be noted, plays on the tabula rasa theme.
46 Shakespeare even appeals to early seventeenth-century class fears by having Caliban form an
alliance with the lower-class Stephano and Trinculo to overthrow the noble Prospero. On class-
consciousness in the period, see Christopher Hill, “The Many-Headed Monster in Late Tudor and
Early Stuart Political Thinking,” in From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. Essays in
Honor of Garrett Mattingly, ed. Charles H. Carter (New York 1965) 296–324.
47 Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” in his selected
essays, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York 1973) 52. I am indebted throughout to this
suggestive essay.
48 Enciso, Suma de geographia, quoted in Helps (n. 18 above) 1. 279–280.
49 Quoted in Hanke (n. 36 above) 95. It is not impossible that the caciques said something vaguely
similar; see Las Casas (n. 23 above) 82: “what could we expect from these gentle and unprotected
Indians suffering such torments, servitude and decimation but immense pusillanimity, profound
discouragement and annihilation of their inner selves, to the point of doubting whether they were
men or mere cats?”
50 Las Casas (n. 23 above) 241.
51 Ibid., 50–52, 130–131.
52 Both are in James Rosier (n. 12 above) 18. 342, 344.
53 Garcilaso de la Vega, The Florida of the Inca, trans, and ed. John Grier Varner and Jeannette
Johnson Varner (Austin, Tex. 1951) 69–70; quoted by Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New
World, American Culture: The Formative Years (New York 1964; Viking paperback ed. 1967) 25–
26.
54 Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (London 1614) II. xix. 3, pp. 508–509.
55 In Helps (n. 18 above) 1. 266–267.
56 Las Casas (n. 23 above) 196. “For the actual use of the Requerimiento, see Lewis Hanke, The
Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia 1949; rpt. Boston 1965)
 34.
57 Salvador de Madariaga, The Rise of the Spanish American Empire (New York 1947) 12.
58 In Helps (n. 18 above) 1. 264.
59 Ibid.
60 In Hakluyt (n. 7 above) 8. 466.
61 Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca 1948) 132.
 3

MARLOWE, MARX, AND

ANTI-SEMITISM

A fantasy: Barabas, the Jew of Malta, had two children. The eldest, Abigail,
sickened by the revelation that her father had murdered her Christian suitor,
converted and entered a nunnery. The other child, a son, likewise
apostatized; indeed he wrote a violently anti-Semitic pamphlet denouncing
the essence of his father's religion as huckstering, its basis self-interest, its
jealous god money. The pamphlet concluded with a call for the emancipation
of mankind from Judaism, but, curiously, the son did not convert to
Christianity and try to assimilate. On the contrary, he insisted that his father's
hated religion was simply the practical essence of Christianity, the thing
itself stripped of its spiritual mystifications. The Christians who prided
themselves on their superiority to Jews were themselves practicing Judaism
in their daily lives, worshipping money, serving egoistic need, buying and
selling men as commodities, as so many pounds of flesh. The son's name, of
course, was Karl Marx.
The purpose of this paper is to read Marlowe's The Jew of Malta in the
light of Marx's “On the Jewish Question.”1 Fantasy aside, this is neither an
obvious nor a particularly promising enterprise. There was no “Jewish
Question” in Marlowe's England; there were scarcely any Jews.2 Civil
society, the rights of man, the political state, the concept of citizenship—
Marx's basic terms— would have been quite incomprehensible to an
Elizabethan. Marx's central theme, that political emancipation is not the same
as human emancipation, would likewise have been incomprehensible in an
age in which there was scarcely a conception of politics, in the modern
sense, let alone a dream that man might some day be emancipated from both
state and religion. Marx's discourse is informed by the Enlightenment, the
American and French Revolutions, Feuerbach's analysis of religion, and the
growth of capitalism; its occasion, a critique of Bruno Bauer's Die
Judenfrage and “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu
werden,” depends upon the particular, historically determined situation of the
Ashkenazic Jews of nineteenth-century Germany; its rhetoric is colored both
by the virulent modern strain of popular anti-Semitism and by the author's
own troubled relationship to the religion of his fathers.3
Nevertheless, Marx's essay has a profound bearing upon The Jew of
Malta; their conjunction enriches our understanding of the authors’ relation
to ideology and, more generally, raises fruitful questions about a Marxist
reading of literature. The fact that both works use the figure of the perfidious
Jew provides a powerful interpretive link between Renaissance and modern
thought, for despite the great differences to which I have just pointed, this
shared reference is not an accident or a mirage. “On the Jewish Question”
represents the nineteenth-century development of a late sixteenth-century idea
or, more accurately, a late sixteenth-century trope. Marlowe and Marx seize
upon the Jew as a kind of powerful rhetorical device, a way of marshaling
deep popular hatred and clarifying its object. The Jew is charged not with
racial deviance or religious impiety but with economic and social crime,
crime that is committed not only against the dominant Christian society but,
in less “pure” form, by that society. Both writers hope to focus attention upon
activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the
community and to direct against the activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the
audience. The Jews themselves in their real historical situation are finally
incidental in these works, Marx's as well as Marlowe's, except insofar as
they excite the fear and loathing of the great mass of Christians. It is this
privileged access to mass psychology by means of a semimythical figure
linked in the popular imagination with usury, sharp dealing, and ruthless
cunning that attracts both the sixteenth-century playwright and the nineteenth-
century polemicist.4
Twentieth-century history has demonstrated with numbing force how
tragically misguided this rhetorical strategy was, how utterly it
underestimated the irrationality, the fixation upon its object, and the
persistence of anti-Semitism. The Christian hatred of the Jew, nurtured by
popular superstition, middle-class ressentiment, the frequent complicity of
Church and state, the place of the Jews in the European economy, and the
complex religious and cultural barriers, would not be so easily turned against
a particular structure of economic or social relations or a cast of mind that
crossed racial and religious boundaries but would light with murderous force
upon the whole Jewish community. It is folly to attempt to use a people as a
rhetorical device or to exploit popular prejudice as a force for constructive
change, let alone moral enlightenment. Even granting that historical hindsight
gives us an unearned wisdom, even granting all of the mitigating intentions
with which the authors evidently used the figure of the Jew, we are obliged to
acknowledge that there is something unsavory, inexcusable, about both
works. Their nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand; they
are, I would insist, defiled by the dark forces they are trying to exploit, used
by what they are trying to use. But this acknowledgment, necessary if we are
to keep our moral bearings and look unflinchingly at the horrors of our
history, is not identical with understanding. The latter will come only by
patiently exploring what I have called the shared rhetorical strategy of The
Jew of Malta and “On the Jewish Question.”
I will begin by looking briefly at a famous use of the Jewish stereotype
that contrasts sharply with Marlowe's and Marx's. The Merchant of Venice is
built around a series of decisive structural conflicts—Old Law vs. New
Law, Justice vs. Mercy, Revenge vs. Love, Calculation vs. Recklessness,
Thrift vs. Prodigality—all of which are focussed upon the central dramatic
conflict of Jew and Gentile or, more precisely, of Jewish fiscalism and
Gentile mercantilism.5 The great economic utility of Shylock—and of the
Jew in this period—is his possession of liquid assets, assets which he is
committed, for his very existence, to employ actively.6 In general, in the
northern Italian city-states, when the Christian merchants were weaker, the
Jewish moneylenders were stronger; in Venice, as Brian Pullan has shown,
there was a vigorous attempt by the merchant class to undermine the power
of Jewish moneylenders through the establishment of the Monte di Caritá,
Christian lending institutions that would disrupt the Jews’ “bargains” by
providing interest-free loans.7 All of this seems to be reflected in the hatred
Shylock and Antonio have for each other, hatred Antonio attributes to the fact
that he has “oft deliver'd from his forfeitures / Many that have at times made
moan to me” (3.3.22–23).8
If Shylock is set against Antonio on grounds of fiscalism vs.
mercantilism, he is set against Portia on grounds equally based upon the
economic position of Jews in early modern Europe. As Jacob Katz observes,
the constant application of capital, to which the Jews were committed,
precluded investment in immovable property. The law did not permit the Jew
to acquire land, and the Jew, for his part, did not attempt to secure such
permission:
Landed property attracted the ordinary burgher who attained wealth because of the feeling of
stability and economic security it gave him and the social prestige involved. But in his peculiar
situation, the Jew would set no great store by either. He could not hope to perpetuate his wealth in
that locality, nor did he seek a niche in the dominant social and economic hierarchy. The economic
nexus linking the Jew with his environment was purely instrumental.9

In Shakespeare's play this economic nexus is suggested above all by

Shylock's usury, but it is also symbolized by his nonparticipation in Venetian
society, his cold, empty house, and such subtle indicators of value as his
hostility to masquing—“the vile squealing of the wry-neck'd fife” (2.5.30).
All of this is in sharp contrast to Portia, who has plenty of liquid assets; she
can offer at a moment's notice enough gold to pay Antonio's 3000-ducat debt
“twenty times over” (3.2.306). But her special values in the play are bound
up with her house at Belmont and all it represents: its starlit garden,
enchanting music, hospitality, social prestige. That is, the economic nexus
linking Portia with her environment is precisely not instrumental; her world
is not a field in which she operates for profit, but a living web of noble
values and moral orderliness.
Shylock is the antithesis of this world, as he is of the Christian
mercantilism of Venice. He is the “alien,” the “stranger cur,” “a kind of
devil,” in short, the “faithless Jew.” Even the language he shares with the
Christian Venetians does not provide a bridge between them; he may use the
same words, but he uses them in a wholly different sense:
Shylock: Antonio is a good man.
Bassanio: Have you heard any imputation to the contrary?
Shylock: Ho no, no, no, no: my meaning in saying he is a good
man, is to have you understand that he is sufficient.
[1.3.10–15]

Shylock needs to explain his use of the apparently innocuous “good man,” as
he will later be pressed to explain why he insists, against all reason and self-
interest, upon his bond: linguistically, psychologically, ethically, as well as
religiously, he is different. To be sure, he appeals at moments to his sameness
—“Hath not a Jew eyes?”—and this sameness runs like a dark current
through the play, intimating secret bonds that no one, not even the audience,
can fully acknowledge. For if Shakespeare subtly suggests obscure links
between Jew and Gentile, he compels the audience to transform its disturbing
perception of sameness into a reassuring perception of difference. Indeed the
Jew seems to embody the abstract principle of difference itself, the principle
to which he appeals when the Duke demands an explanation for his malice:
Some men there are love not a gaping pig!
Some that are mad if they behold a cat!
And others when the bagpipe sings i'th’nose,
Cannot contain their urine. . . .
[4.1.46–49]

The examples would be whimsical—evoking a motive no grander than

allegory—were they not spoken by Shylock, knife in hand; instead, they
bespeak impulses utterly inaccessible to reason and persuasion; they embody
what the rational mind, intent upon establishing an absolute category of
difference, terms madness.
The Jew of Malta opens with an apparent gesture toward the same
principle of differentiation that governs The Merchant of Venice. Marlowe's
Jew is introduced in the prologue by Macheuill as one “Who smiles to see
how full is bags are cramb'd”; he enters, then, already trailing clouds of
ignominy, already a “marked case.” But while never relinquishing the anti-
Semitic stereotype, Marlowe quickly suggests that the Jew is not the
exception to but rather the true representative of his society. Though he
begins with a paean to liquid assets, Barabas is not primarily a usurer, set off
by his hated occupation from the rest of the community, but a great merchant,
sending his argosies around the world exactly as Shakespeare's much-loved
Antonio does. His pursuit of wealth does not mark him out but rather
establishes him—if anything, rather respectably—in the midst of all the other
forces in the play: the Turks exacting tribute from the Christians; the
Christians expropriating money from the Jews; the convent profiting from
these expropriations; religious orders competing for wealthy converts; the
prostitute plying her trade and the blackmailer his. When the governor of
Malta asks the Turkish “Bashaw,” “What wind drives you thus into Malta
rhode?” the latter replies with perfect frankness, “The wind that bloweth all
the world besides, / Desire of gold” (3.1421–23). Barabas’ own desire of
gold, so eloquently voiced at the start and vividly enacted in the scene in
which he hugs his money bags, is the glowing core of that passion which fires
all the characters. To be sure, other values are expressed—love, faith, and
honor—but as private values, these are revealed to be hopelessly fragile,
while as public values, they are revealed to be mere screens for powerful
economic forces. Thus, on the one hand, Abigail, Don Mathias, and the nuns
are killed off with remarkable ease and, in effect, with the complicity of the
laughing audience. (The audience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's
brilliant 1964 production roared with delight when the poisoned nuns came
tumbling out of the house.)10 On the other hand, the public invocation of
Christian ethics or knightly honor is always linked by Marlowe to baser
motives. The knights concern themselves with Barabas’ “inherent sinne” only
at the moment when they are about to preach him out of his possessions,
while the decision to resist the “barbarous mis-beleeuing Turkes” facilitates
all too easily the sale into slavery of a shipload of Turkish captives. The
religious and political ideology that seems at first to govern Christian
attitudes toward infidels in fact does nothing of the sort; this ideology is
clearly subordinated to considerations of profit. In Marx's terms, both
religion and the political state are shown to rest upon the foundation of civil
society which is entirely governed by the relentless pursuit of money.
Because of the primacy of money, Barabas, for all the contempt heaped
upon him, is seen as the dominant spirit of the play, its most energetic and
inventive force. A victim at the level of religion and political power, he is, in
effect, emancipated at the level of civil society, emancipated in Marx's
contemptuous use of the word:
The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money,
but also because money had become, through him and also apart from him, a world power, while
the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have
emancipated themselves in so far as the Christians have become Jews. [P. 35]

Barabas’ avarice, egotism, duplicity, and murderous cunning do not signal

his exclusion from the world of Malta but rather his central place within it.
His “Judaism” is, again in Marx's words, “a universal antisocial element of
the present time” (p. 34).
For neither Marlowe nor Marx does this recognition signal a turning
away from Jew-baiting; if anything, Jew-baiting is intensified even as the
hostility it excites is directed as well against Christian society. Thus
Marlowe never discredits anti-Semitism, but he does discredit early in the
play a “Christian” social concern that might otherwise have been used to
counter a specifically Jewish antisocial element. When the governor of Malta
seizes the wealth of the Jews on the grounds that it is “better one want for a
common good, / Then many perish for a priuate man” (1.331–32), an
audience at all familiar with the New Testament will hear in these words
echoes not of Christ but of Caiaphas and, a few lines further on, of Pilate.11
There are, to be sure, moments of social solidarity—as when the Jews gather
around Barabas to comfort him or when Ferneze and Katherine together
mourn the death of their sons—but they are brief and ineffectual. The true
emblem of the society of the play is the slave market where “Euery ones
price is written on his backe” (2.764).12 Here in the market-place men are
literally turned, in Marx's phrase, “into alienable, saleable objects, in thrall
to egoistic need and huckstering” (p. 39). And at this level of society, the
religious and political barriers fall away: the Jew buys a Turk at the
Christian slave market. Such is the triumph of civil society.
For Marlowe as for Marx, the dominant mode of perceiving the world, in
a society hagridden by the power of money and given over to the slave
market, is contempt, contempt aroused in the beholders of such a society and,
as important, governing the behavior of those who bring it into being and
function within it. This is Barabas’ constant attitude, virtually his signature;
his withering scorn lights not only on the Christian rulers of Malta (“thus
slaues will learne,” he sneers, when the defeated governor is forced into
submission [5.2150]), but on his daughter's suitor (“the slaue looks like a
hogs cheek new sindg'd” [2.803]), his daughter (“An Hebrew borne, and
would become a Christian. / Cazzo, diabolo” [4.1527–28]), his slave
Ithamore (“Thus euery villaine ambles after wealth / Although he ne're be
richer then in hope” [3.1354–55]), the Turks (“How the slaue jeeres at him,”
observes the governor of Barabas greeting Calymath [5.2339]), the pimp,
Pilia-Borza (“a shaggy, totter'd staring slaue” [4.1858]), his fellow Jews
(“See the simplicitie of these base slaues” [1.448]), and even, when he has
blundered by making the poison too weak, himself (“What a damn'd slaue
was I” [5.2025]). Barabas’ frequent asides assure us that he is feeling
contempt even when he is not openly expressing it, and the reiteration of the
derogatory epithet “slaue” firmly anchors this contempt in the structure of
relations that governs the play. Barabas's liberality in bestowing this epithet
—from the governor to the pimp—reflects the extraordinary unity of the
structure, its intricate series of mirror images: Pilia-Borza's extortion racket
is repeated at the “national” level in the extortion of the Jewish community's
wealth and at the international level in the Turkish extortion of the Christian
tribute. It is as if the play were anticipating the historian Frederic Lane's
notion of Renaissance international relations as a kind of glorified
gangsterism, a vast “protection” racket.13
At all levels of society in Marlowe's play and behind each version of the
racket (and making it possible) is violence or the threat of violence, and so
here too Barabas’ murderousness is presented both as a characteristic of his
accursed tribe and as the expression of a universal phenomenon. This
expression, to be sure, is extravagant—he is responsible, directly or
indirectly, for the deaths of Mathias, Lodowick, Abigail, Pilia-Borza,
Bellamira, Ithamore, Frair Jacamo, Friar Barnadine, and innumerable
poisoned nuns and massacred soldiers—but then everything about Barabas is
extravagant: he is more contemptuous than anyone else, more resourceful,
cynical, egotistical, and avaricious. The difference, however, in each of these
cases is of degree rather than of kind; Barabas expresses in extreme,
unmediated form the motives that have been partially disguised by the
spiritual humbug of Christianity. Barabas cannot in the last analysis be
assimilated to his world—Marlowe ultimately veers away from so entirely
sociological a conception—but it is important to grasp the great extent to
which the Jew is brought into being by the Christian society around him. His
extraordinary energy does not alter the fact of his passivity throughout the
play; his actions are always responses to the initiatives of others. Not only is
the plot of the whole play set in motion by the governor's expropriation of
Barabas’ wealth, but each of Barabas’ particular plots is a reaction to what
he perceives as a provocation or a threat. Only his final stratagem—the
betrayal of the Turks—seems an exception, since the Jew is for once in
power, but even this fatal blunder is a response to his perfectly sound
perception that “Malta hates me, and in hating me / My life's in danger”
(5.2131–32).
Barabas’ passivity sits strangely with his entire domination of the spirit
of the play, and, once again, we may turn to Marx for an explication:
Judaism could not create a new world. It could only bring the new creations and conditions of the
world within its own sphere of activity, because practical need, the spirit of which is self-interest, is
 always passive, cannot expand at will, but finds itself extended as a result of the continued
development of society. [P. 38]

Though the Jew is identified here with the spirit of egotism and selfish need,
his success is credited to the triumph of Christianity which “objectifies” and
hence alienates all national, natural, moral, and theoretical relationships,
dissolving “the human world into a world of atomistic, antagonistic
individuals” (p. 39). The concrete emblem of this alienation in Marlowe's
play is the slave market: its ideological expression is the religious
chauvinism that sees Jews as inherently sinful, Turks as barbarous
misbelievers.
The Jew of Malta ends on a powerfully ironic note of this “spiritual
egoism” (to use Marx's phrase) when the governor celebrates the treacherous
destruction of Barabas and the Turks by giving due praise “Neither to Fate
nor Fortune, but to Heauen” (5.2410). (Once again, the National Theater's
audience guffawed at this bit of hypocritical sententiousness.) But we do not
have to wait until the closing moments of the play to witness the Christian
practice of alienation. It is, as I have suggested, present throughout and
nowhere more powerfully than in the figure of Barabas himself. For not only
are Barabas’ actions called forth by Christian actions, but his identity itself
is to a great extent the product of the Christian conception of a Jew's identity.
This is not entirely the case: Marlowe invokes an “indigenous” Judaism in
the wicked parody of the materialism of Job and in Barabas’ repeated
invocation of Hebraic exclusivism (“These swine-eating Christians,” etc.).
Nevertheless, Barabas’ sense of himself, his characteristic response to the
world, and his self-presentation are very largely constructed out of the
materials of the dominant, Christian culture. This is nowhere more evident
than in his speech which is virtually composed of hard little aphorisms,
cynical adages, worldly maxims—all the neatly packaged nastiness of his
society. Where Shylock, as we have seen, is differentiated from the
Christians even in his use of the common language, Barabas is inscribed at
the center of the society of the play, a society whose speech is a tissue of
aphorisms. Whole speeches are little more than strings of sayings: maxims
are exchanged, inverted, employed as weapons; the characters enact and
even deliberately “stage” proverbs (with all of the manic energy of
Breughel's “Netherlandish Proverbs”). When Barabas, intent upon poisoning
the nuns, calls for the pot of rice porridge, Ithamore carries it to him along
with a ladle, explaining that since “the prouerb saies, he that eats with the
deuil had need for a long spoone, I haue brought you a Ladle” (3.1360–62).14
And when Barabas and Ithamore together strangle Friar Barnadine, to whom
Abigail has revealed their crimes in confession, the Jew explains, “Blame
not vs but the prouerb, Confes & be hang'd” (4.1655).
Proverbs in The Jew of Malta are a kind of currency, the compressed
ideological wealth of the society. Their terseness corresponds to that
concentration of material wealth that Barabas celebrates: “Infinite riches in a
little roome.” Barabas’ own store of these ideological riches comprises the
most cynical and self-serving portion:
Who is honour'd now but for his wealth?
[1.151]

Ego mihimet sum semper proximus.

[1.228]

A reaching thought will search his deepest wits,

And cast with cunning for the time to come.
[1.455–56]

. . . in extremitie
We ought to make barre of no policie.
[1.507–8]

. . . Religion
Hides many mischiefes from suspition.
[1.519–20]

Now will I shew my selfe to haue more of the Serpent

Then the Doue; that is, more knaue than foole.
[2.797–98]

Faith is not to be held with Heretickes.

[2.1076]

For he that liueth in Authority,

And neither gets him friends, nor fils his bags,
Liues like the Asse that Æsope speaketh of,
That labours with a load of bread and wine,
And leaues if off to snap on Thistle tops.
[5.2139–43]

For so I liue, perish may all the world.

[5.2292]
This is not the exotic language of the Jews but the product of the whole
society, indeed its most familiar and ordinary face. And as the essence of
proverbs is their anonymity, the effect of their recurrent use by Barabas is to
render him more and more typical, to de-individualize him. This is, of
course, the opposite of the usual process. Most dramatic characters—
Shylock is the appropriate example—accumulate identity in the course of
their play; Barabas loses it. He is never again as distinct and unique an
individual as he is in the first moments:
Goe tell ’em the Iew of Malta sent thee, man:
Tush, who amongst ’em knowes not Barabas?
[1.102–3]

Even his account of his past—killing sick people or poisoning wells—tends

to make him more vague and unreal, accommodating him to an abstract, anti-
Semitic fantasy of a Jew's past. The shift that critics have noted in Barabas’
language, from the resonant eloquence of the opening to the terse irony of the
close, is part of Marlowe's rhetorical design. It is one of the ways in which
he reveals Barabas as the alienated essence of Christian society.
Even the Jew's exclusion from political power does not mark him off
decisively from Christian society; rather it enacts, as Marx puts it, “the
contradiction between politics and the power of money.” The relationship
between Barabas and the world of the play is almost perfectly expressed by
Marx's own aphorisms:
The Jew, who occupies a distinctive place in civil society, only manifests in a distinctive way the
Judaism of civil society.
Judaism has been preserved, not in spite of history, but by history.
It is from its own entrails that civil society ceaselessly engenders the Jew.
[P. 36]

With these aphorisms we are close to the heart of The Jew of Malta, as
close, in any case, as Marx's “On the Jewish Question” will take us. But
precisely at this point we should, I think, feel a certain uneasiness, for where
Marx would collapse the Jew into “the Judaism of civil society,” Marlowe
insists upon elements of Barabas’ character which do sharply and
qualitatively distinguish him even from the world that has engendered him
and whose spirit he expresses. For his own part, Barabas insistently
excludes himself from all groups, Turks, Christians, and Jews:
 Nay, let ’em combat, conquer, and kill all,
So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth.
[1.191–92]

By itself this sentiment is not surprising; it is simply the expression of that

ruthless egotism fostered by the whole society. But Barabas does seem set
apart from everyone in the play, especially in his cold clarity of vision, his
apparent freedom from all ideology. “A counterfet profession is better / Then
vnseene hypocrisie” (1.531–32), he tells his daughter. In the long run, the
play challenges this conviction, at least from the point of view of survival;
the governor, who is the very embodiment of “vnseene hypocrisie,”
eventually triumphs over the Jew's “counterfet profession.” But Marlowe
uses the distinction to direct the audience's allegiance toward Barabas; to lie
and to know that one is lying seems more attractive, more moral even, than to
lie and believe that one is telling the truth.
The ethical basis of such a discrimination does not bear scrutiny; what
matters is that the audience becomes Barabas’ accomplice. And the pact is
affirmed over and over again in Barabas’ frequent, malevolently comic
asides:
Lodowick: Good Barabas glance not at our holy Nuns
Barabas: No, but I doe it through a burning zeale, Hoping ere
long to set the house a fire. (Aside)
[2.849–51]

Years ago, in Naples, I watched a deft pickpocket lift a camera from a

tourist's shoulder bag and replace it instantaneously with a rock of equal
weight. The thief spotted me watching but did not run away—instead he
winked, and I was frozen in mute complicity. In The Jew of Malta, the
audience's conventional silence becomes the silence of the passive
accomplice, winked at by his fellow criminal. Such a relationship is, of
course, itself conventional. The Jew has, for the audience, something of the
attractiveness of the wily, misused slave in Roman comedy who is always on
the brink of disaster, always revealed to have a trick or two up his sleeve.
The mythic core of this character's endless resourcefulness is comic
resurrection, and, though Barabas is destined for a darker end, he is granted
at least one such moment: thrown over the city walls and left for dead, he
springs up full of scheming energy. At this moment, as elsewhere in the play,
the audience waits expectantly for Barabas’ recovery, wills his continued
existence, and hence identifies with him.15
Along with this identification, the audience grants Barabas certain
traditional rights by allowing him the privileged status of unmasker or
satirist. Where in Marx's “On the Jewish Question” there is an unvoiced but
essential boundary between the author, who stands free of the social structure
he excoriates, and the Jew, who is the quintessential product of that social
structure, in Marlowe's play the boundary is blurred and the Jew linked in
subtle ways with the playwright. The result is that even as the audience
perceives Barabas as the alienated essence of Christian society, it identifies
with Barabas as the scourge of that society.
The most striking indication of a subtle link between Marlowe and his
hero, a link that distinguishes the Jew from the world around him and
justifies the audience's identification with him, is Barabas’ unique capacity
for what one must call aesthetic experience. In his opening soliloquy this is
manifested as an eloquent appreciation of his wealth:
Bags of fiery Opals, Saphires, Amatists,
Iacints, hard Topas, grasse-greene Emeraulds,
Beauteous Rubyes, sparkling Diamonds,
And seildsene costly stones. . . .
[1.60–63]

Though the passion for wealth is widely shared, no one else in the play is
capable of such a response. And it becomes clear that it is not only wealth
that excites Barabas’ energy, eloquence, and delight; money is not finally the
jealous god of the Jew of Malta. To be sure, Barabas does speak to the end
of turning a profit, but wealth is gradually displaced as the exclusive object
of his concern; his main object through the latter half of the play seems to be
revenge, at any cost, upon the Christians. Then, with his attempt to destroy
the Turks and restore the Christians to power, it becomes evident that even
revenge is not Barabas’ exclusive object. At the end he seems to be pursuing
deception virtually for its own sake:
why, is not this
A kingly kinde of trade to purchase Townes
By treachery, and sell ’em by deceit?
Now tell me, worldlings, vnderneath the sunne
If greater falsehood euer has bin done.
 [5.2329–33]

As Barabas, hammer in hand, constructs the machinery for this climactic

falsehood, it is difficult not to equate him with the playwright himself,
constructing the plot, and Marlowe appears consciously to encourage this
perception: “Leaue nothing loose, all leueld to my mind,” Barabas instructs
his carpenters, “Why now I see that you haue Art indeed” (5.2285–86).
Deception here takes on something of the status of literary art, and we might
recall that Plato's rival Gorgias held that deception—apate—is the very
essence of the creative imagination: the tragic artist's special power is the
power to deceive. Such a conception of art does not preclude its claim to
strip away fraud since tragedy “with its myths and emotions has created a
deception such that its successful practitioner is nearer to reality than the
unsuccessful, and the man who lets himself be deceived is wiser than he who
does not.” This paradox in Gorgias depends upon an epistemology and
ontology summed up in his proposition that “Nothing whatever exists.” And,
as I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely this dark vision, this denial of
Being, that haunts all of Marlowe's plays.16
Barabas devises falsehoods so eagerly because he is himself a falsehood,
a fiction composed of the sleaziest materials in his culture. At times he seems
almost aware of himself as such: “we are villaines both” (5.979), he
announces to Ithamore after they have run through a catalog of outrageous,
blatantly fictional misdeeds. In celebrating deception, he is celebrating
himself— not simply his cunning, his power to impose himself on others, his
inventiveness, but his very distance from ontological fullness. Barabas is the
Jewish Knight of Non-Being. From this perspective, the language shift, to
which I alluded earlier, is a deliberate assault upon that immediacy, that
sense of presence, evoked at the beginning in Barabas's rich poetry with its
confident sense of realized identity. “Infinite riches in a little roome” is
speech dreaming its plenitude, its possession of being.17 Without that opening
soliloquy, so unlike anything Barabas speaks thereafter, we would have no
norm by which to measure his effacement; he exists subsequently in the
failure of the opening rhetoric to return, in the spaces between his words, in
his lack of substance. He is a thing of nothing.
This is why the particular objects Barabas sets for himself and
passionately pursues seem nonetheless curiously unreal: nothing can desire
nothing. But if there is no substance, within or without, there remains in
Barabas an intense, playful energy. Marlowe's hero is not defined finally by
the particular object he pursues but by the eerie playfulness with which he
pursues it. This playfulness manifests itself as cruel humor, murderous
practical jokes, a penchant for the outlandish and the absurd, delight in role-
playing, entire absorption in the game at hand and consequent indifference to
what lies outside the boundaries of the game, radical insensitivity to human
complexity and suffering, extreme but disciplined aggression, hostility to
transcendence and indeed to the whole metaphysics of presence. There is
some evidence for a similar dark playfulness in Marlowe's own career, with
the comic (and extremely dangerous) blasphemies, the nearly overt (and
equally dangerous) homosexuality, the mysterious stint as double agent, and,
of course the cruel, aggressive plays themselves. The will to play flaunts
society's cherished orthodoxies, embraces what the culture finds loathsome
or frightening, transforms the serious into the joke and then unsettles the
category of the joke by taking it seriously. For Barabas, as for Marlowe
himself, this is play on the brink of an abyss, absolute play.
Nothing could be further from Marx. To be sure, Marx dreamed of play
as the very center of social existence but only in a society transformed by
communism. The essential quality of this revolutionary playfulness is the
return of man's powers to himself through the abolition of the division of
labor and hence a liberated polymorphousness:
As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere
of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a
fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means
of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but
each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production
and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the
morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,
without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.18

This is, in effect, a hypostatization of the experience of writing or reading

literature, a realization at the level of the body in time and space of what we
now only imaginatively experience. Marx then reserves, in the ideal scheme
of things, an extraordinarily privileged place for what we think of as the play
of art. But precisely by locating this experience in an historical or, if you
will, posthistorical moment, Marx cuts literature off from absolute play, from
its essence as Marlowe conceives it. Before its concrete, material realization
in a truly communist society, play can never be in and for itself; it is rather a
way station, a form of planning, a mode at once of criticism and of prophecy.
The vision of the revolutionary society for Marx, like the apocalyptic vision
in Christianity, undermines the autonomy of play and renders it a critical
reflection upon everything that exists or a model of non-alienated labor.19 As
the former, play may keep man from being locked in the reified structures of
his particular society; as the latter, it may keep alive in a dark time certain
vital human possibilities. But it is not emancipation itself which must always
be pursued beyond the particular moments of liberated artistic play.20
It is this passionate, relentless pursuit of emancipation that governs
Marx's rhetorical strategy in “On the Jewish Question,” and it is this
rhetorical strategy—the quest for a world without “Jews” or “Judaism”—
that is ultimately blocked in The Jew of Malta by Marlowe's absolute play,
that is, by his buried identification with Barabas. This identification should
not be overstated: Barabas is not, after all, an artist; the trap door and
cauldron are not a playwright's plot but a Machiavelli's. The connection
between the artist and the Jew is only strong enough to complicate the
conclusion, based on our use of Marx's essay, that Barabas is the alienated
essence of Christian society. To shore up this conclusion, we could argue that
Barabas’ passion for deceptive play does not exist for its own sake but rather
to serve his instinct for survival: “For so I liue, perish may all the world”
(5.2292). Such an argument would serve to reintegrate Barabas into the now
familiar world of rapacious egotism. Yet beneath this egotism, so zestfully
proclaimed in his asides, lies a dark, indeed scarcely visible, but potent self-
destructiveness.
This self-destructiveness certainly does not exist at the level of conscious
motivation, and with a character who manifests as little interiority as
Barabas, it is difficult and quite possibly pointless to talk of unconscious
motivation. The self-destructiveness rather is built into the very structure of
Barabas’ identity. He is determined, he says, to survive, determined not to be
“a senseless lumpe of clay / That will with euery water wash to dirt”
(1.450–51), determined not to “vanish ore the earth in ayre, / And leaue no
memory that e're I was” (1.499–500). Yet the play as a whole depicts
Barabas’ own commitment to just such erosion of himself as a complex,
integrated subject. Having cut himself off from everyone and everything,
neither persecuted outsider nor accepted insider, he is a far more shadowy
figure at the close than he was at the start. That he dies in his own trap is no
accident, nor is it solely the result of the governor's superior cunning: his
career is in its very essence suicidal. He proclaims that he always wants to
serve his own self-interest: “Ego mihimet sum semper proximus” (1.228);
but where exactly is the self whose interests he serves? Even the Latin tag
betrays an ominous self-distance: “I am always my own neighbor,” or even,
“I am always next to myself.” Beneath the noisy protestations of self-interest,
his career is a steady, stealthy dispossession of himself, an extended
vanishing, an assault upon the subject.
Once again we might attempt to reintegrate Barabas into his world and
find in his self-destructiveness the supreme expression of that “human self-
estrangement” Marx saw embodied in the Jew. But we are prevented from
doing so by the uncanny sense that we have an unmistakable complicity in
Barbaras’ whole career, that Marlowe would have us admire Barabas’
progress toward the boiling cauldron as he would have us admire the Jew's
cynical clarity of vision and his playfulness. Where Marx depicts human self-
estrangement in order to turn his readers toward pursuit of human
emancipation, Marlowe depicts something very similar in order to disabuse
his audience of certain illusions. And the greatest of these illusions is that
human emancipation can be achieved.
Marx can finally envisage the liberation of mankind from what he
inexcusably calls “Judaism.” Marlowe cannot. In fact, Marlowe celebrates
his Jew for being clearer, smarter, and more self-destructive than the
Christians whose underlying values Barabas travesties and transcends. Self-
destructiveness in the play, as elsewhere in Marlowe's work, is a much-
admired virtue, for it is the sign that the hero has divested himself of hope
and committed himself instead to the anarchic, playful discharge of his
energy. Nothing stands in the way of this discharge, not even survival, and
certainly not that imaginary construction, that collection of social scraps and
offal, that is Barabas’ identity. This identity—everything that marks him as at
once his society's most-hated enemy and its most characteristic product—is
in the last analysis subordinate to his radical will to play, the will that is
inseparable from the process that destroys him.
The Jew of Malta diverges most crucially from Marx at the point at
which the latter invokes, in effect, what Ernst Bloch calls Das Prinzip
Hoffnung, the principle of hope. In Marx there is the principle of hope
without the will to play; in Marlowe, the will to play without the principle of
hope.
NOTES
1 All citations to Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (Complete Works, ed., C. F. Tucker Brooke [Oxford,
1910]) and Marx's “On the Jewish Question” (Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore [New
York, 1963]) will appear in the text.
2 On Jews in Renaissance England, see Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford,
1964); Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Citizen or
Alien Conjurer (New York, 1967); and C. J. Sisson, “A Colony of Jews in Shakespeare's London,”
Essays and Studies 22 (1937): 38–51.
3 On Marx's essay, see Shlomo Avinieri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
(Cambridge, 1968), pp. 43–46; Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 3d ed.
(London, 1963), pp. 27, 99–100; Jean-Yves Calvez, La Pensée de Karl Marx, 6th ed. (Paris, 1956),
pp. 64–78; Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1962), pp. 68–73; Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx
(Cambridge, 1961), pp. 111–13; and Istvan Meszaros, Marx's Theory of Alienation (London, 1970),
pp. 28–31, 71–74.
4 Anti-Semitism, it should be emphasized, is never merely a trope to be adopted or discarded by an
author as he might choose to employ zeugma or eschew personification. It is charged from the start
with irrationality and bad faith and only partly rationalized as a rhetorical strategy. Marlowe depicts
his Jew with the compulsive cruelty that characterizes virtually all of his work, while Marx's essay
obviously has elements of a sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background. It is
particularly tempting to reduce the latter work to a dark chapter in its author's personal history. The
links I am attempting to establish with Marlowe or the more direct link with Feuerbach, however,
locate the essay in a far wider context. Still, the extreme violence of the latter half of Marx's work
and his utter separation of himself from the people he excoriates undoubtedly owe much to his
personal situation. It is interesting that the tone of the attack on the Jews rises to an almost ecstatic
disgust at the moment when Marx seems to be locating the Jews most clearly as a product of
bourgeois culture; it is as if Marx were eager to prove that he is in no way excusing or forgiving the
Jews.
5 All citations to The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), will
appear in the text. There is a useful summary of the voluminous criticism of the play by Norman
Rabkin, “Meaning and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare 1971, ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R.
Margeson, Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress, Vancouver, 1971 (Toronto, 1972, pp.
89–106). Of particular importance are C. L. Barber's chapter on the play in Shakespeare's Festive
Comedy (Princeton, N.J., 1959) and Barbara Lewalski's “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The
Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327–43. On usury and Shakespeare's
play, see John W. Draper, “Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” Modern Philology 33 (1935): 37–
47; E. C. Pettet, “The Merchant of Venice and the Problem of Usury,” Essays and Studies 31
(1946): 19–33; and Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal
Otherhood (Princeton, N.J., 1949). On fiscalism and mercantilism, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The
Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-
Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 147–51.
6 See Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (1st ed.,
1958; New York, 1971), pp. 46–47; see also Anthony Molho, “A Note on Jewish Moneylenders in
Tuscany in the Late Trecento and Early Quattrocento,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans
Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence, 1971), pp. 101–17.
 7 See Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic
State, to 1620 (Oxford, 1971).
8 Shylock seems, in part at least, to confirm this notion at 3.1.46 ff.
9 Katz, Tradition and Crisis, pp. 47–48.
10 This was the invention of the director, Clifford Williams; in Marlowe's text only the dying Abigail
appears. There is a discussion of this and other productions of Marlowe's play in James L. Smith's
“The Jew of Malta in the Theatre,” in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Brian Morris, Mermaid Critical
Commentaries (London, 1968), pp. 1–23.
11 See G. K. Hunter, “The Theology of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 236.
12 Shylock attempts to make this a similarly central issue in the trial scene, but, as we might expect, the
attempt fails (4.1.90–100).
13 Frederic C. Lane, Venice and History (Baltimore, 1966).
14 For the Jew as devil, see Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval
Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven, Conn., 1943).
15 See my “The False Ending in Volpone,” JEGP 75 (1976): 93.
16 For Gorgias, see Mario Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Oxford, 1954), p. 113;
Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, “Gorgias, Aeschylus, and Apate,” American Journal of Philology 76
(1955): 255–60. For Marlowe's “Gorgian” aesthetic, see my “Marlowe and Renaissance Self-
Fashioning,” in Two Renaissance Mythmakers, ed. Alvin B. Kernan, Selected Papers from the
English Institute 1975–76 (Baltimore, 1977).
17 For an illuminating discussion of this concept of presence in Western ontotheology, see Jacques
Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), pp. 27–73.
18 Marx, The German Ideology, pt. 1, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York,
1972), p. 124.
19 On the problematical status of play in Marx's thought, see Francis Hearn, “Toward a Critical Theory
of Play,” Telos 30 (1976–77): 145–60; on art as a model of nonalienated labor, see Hans Robert
Jauss, “The Idealist Embarrassment: Observations on Marxist Aesthetics,” New Literary History 7
(1975): 191–208.
20 The most searching exploration in Marxist thought of these “moments” of emancipation is by Jürgen
Habermas; see esp. “Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Recent Sociology, no. 2,
ed. Hans Peter Dreitzel (New York, 1970), pp. 115–48; and Knowledge and Human Interests,
trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1971). For an ambitious exploration of the opposition of play and
seriousness in Renaissance culture, see Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary
Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn., 1976).
 4

FILTHY RITES

On the evening of November 17, 1881, during my stay in the village of Zuñi, New
Mexico, the Nebue-Cue, one of the secret orders of the Zuñis, sent word to Mr. Frank
H. Cashing, whose guest I was, that they would do us the unusual honor of coming to
our house to give us one of their characteristic dances, which, Cushing said, was
unprecedented.1

So writes Captain John G. Bourke, Third Cavalry, U.S. Army, Indian

fighter and amateur ethnographer, author of An Apache Campaign and Snake
Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, Mackenzie's Last Fight with the
Cheyennes and Notes on the Tbeogony and Cosmogony of the Mojaves. The
ceremonies began auspiciously enough with a ritual cleansing of the long
living room, but when, at nightfall, the dance began, the honored guest found
himself strangely unsettled. Some of the dancers were arrayed, with
appropriate picturesqueness, in breech-cloths and wild turkey feathers, but
others were dressed in cast-off American army uniforms, and one, clad in a
long india-rubber gossamer robe, and with a pair of goggles, painted white,
over his eyes, appeared to be got up in imitation of a Catholic Priest.
Captain Bourke had seated himself at one side of the dark room, behind a
table on which was a small coal-oil lamp. The feeble light of the lamp cast a
faint glow behind his head, and it is to this halo that he attributes the
performance that followed: “The dancers suddenly wheeled into line, threw
themselves on their knees before my table, and with extravagant beatings of
the breast began an outlandish but faithful mockery of a Mexican Catholic
congregation at vespers.” With the ethnographer thus enlisted as votive
figure, the parody continued, “to the uncontrolled merriment of the red-
skinned listeners,” with the mock priest delivering a passionate sermon and,
after a brief interlude, a most surprising communion: “A squaw entered,
carrying an ‘olla’ of urine, of which the filthy brutes drank heartily.” Two or
three gallons were thus consumed, we are told, and one of the participants
expressed regret that the dance had not been held out of doors, in one of the
plazas, for there they always made it a point of honor to eat the excrement of
men and dogs. “For my part,” write Captain Bourke, “I felt satisfied with the
omission, particularly as the room stuffed with one hundred Zuñis had
become so foul and filthy as to be almost unbearable” (p. 6). As soon as the
dance was over, he ran, he tells us, into the refreshing night air.
One should remark at once that Captain Bourke was not hallucinating; the
dance is described elsewhere, and the fraternity in question (the Ne'wekwe,
or Galaxy) noted for its particular fondness for mimicking priests and army
officers. Moreover, the remark about the plaza was not simply designed to
heighten the visitor's no doubt amusing disgust; as another early ethnographer
relates, the consumption of excrement is an essential part of the fraternity's
vaunted medical powers as well as a kind of contest: “The one who
swallows the largest amount of filth with the greatest gusto is most
commended by the fraternity and onlookers.”2 And in a sense, Captain
Bourke paid the dancers an appropriate compliment: he may indignantly deny
the implicit suggestion that communion is the eating of excrement in both
kinds, and may write, with evident relief and snobbery, that “Hebrews and
Christians will discover a common ground of congratulation in the fact that
believers in their system are now absolutely free from any suggestion of this
filth taint,” but he does so in the preface to a work directly inspired by his
disquieting experience, a 500-page study—the result of ten years’ obsessive
research—the Scatologic Rites of All Nations.
Like all resonant stories, Captain Bourke's is the focal point for several
distinct lines of cultural and psychic force. In it we encounter a minor, but
intense, version of an interesting, even haunting phenomenon: the role of
loathing and disgust in the development of the human sciences. Ethnography
is, in effect, the study of those who do not live by one's own rules; to study
one's immediate surroundings is to change the very essence of the project,
whose enabling condition is the otherness of the object of study. (There are,
to be sure, attempts at ethnographic studies of one's own culture, but these
must begin with a certain deliberate self-estrangement, so that familiar rules
seem alien and in need of explication and representation.) Now in the West,
since the onset of the early modern period, the archetypal rules, the earliest
and most systematic to which the child is exposed and in which he is trained,
are those governing the definition and control of wastes. The behavior
manuals of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries return again and again to
codes elaborated for the management of the body's products: urine, feces,
mucus, saliva, and wind.3 Proper control of each of these products, along
with the acquisition of the prevailing table manners and modes of speech,
mark the entrance into civility, an entrance that distinguishes not only the
child from the adult, but the members of a privileged group from the vulgar,
the upper classes from the lower, the courtly from the rustic, the civilized
from the savage.
Force plays a role in the imposition of these codes, but a far greater role
is played by the arousal of disgust, embarrassment, “delicacy of feeling,”
contempt, distaste, modesty—in short, the complex shaping of a sense of
social decency and social horror. When the behavioral codes are
successfully implanted, the individual will experience physical and psychic
discomfort in the presence of violations: blushing, an acute sense of shame,
nausea. To hold back wind is dangerous, writes Erasmus in the 1530s, but
one should hide the sound with a cough, for “the sound of farting, especially
of those who stand on elevated ground, is horrible.” “It does not befit a
modest, honorable man to prepare to relieve nature in the presence of other
people,” counsels della Casa's Galateo (1558); “similarly, he will not wash
his hands on returning to decent society from private places, as the reason for
his washing will arouse disagreeable thoughts in people”; at table, a
seventeenth-century manual declares, “to blow your nose openly into your
handkerchief, without concealing yourself with your serviette, and to wipe
away your sweat with it . . . are filthy habits fit to make everyone's gorge
rise.”4
As these few examples should make clear, such regulations have little or
nothing to do with hygiene, though health is occasionally involved as a
rationale. Their concern, rather, is the fashioning of social and personal
identity, identity dependent not only on shared norms, but on differences as
well. Since one of the principal agents in this process of fashioning is disgust
—or more accurately, a wide range of negative sensations, from
“disagreeable thoughts” and queasiness to amused contempt—there is a high
likelihood that the observer of an alien culture, even the observer well
disposed to the object of his study, will experience bouts of revulsion. For
the very conception that a culture is alien rests upon the perceived difference
of that culture from one's own behavioral codes, and it is precisely at the
points of perceived difference that the individual is conditioned, as a
founding principle of personal and group identity, to experience disgust.
Early European accounts of foreign peoples are rich in the expression of
revulsion, though one should note that this is by no means the only reaction,
for the shifting codes of manners themselves bear witness to the mobility and
learned character of “disagreeable thoughts.” What is perhaps most striking
in the early accounts—in Bernal Díaz del Castillo's description of the Aztec
priests or Edmund Scot's account of the Javanese—is the undisguised
openness of revulsion, a revulsion that often coexists with understanding and
admiration.5 One should add that the natives’ response to the first Europeans,
insofar as it is recorded, provides evidence of a comparable reaction: one
Amerindian, astonished at the French custom of collecting and carrying about
mucus in handkerchiefs, wryly declared: “If thou likest that filth, give my thy
handkerchief and I will soon fill it.”6 The rise of “scientific” methodology
brought about the systematic suppression of the articulation of disgust in
ethnographic writing, but as Malinowski's diaries eloquently attest, the
experience itself remained quite strong and underlay pursuit of the objective
knowledge of the other. Here too the response could be reciprocal: when
Malinowski ventured to suggest to the Trobriand islanders that they should
discipline recalcitrant children by beating them, the islanders considered the
idea “unnatural and immoral.”7
All of this returns us to Captain Bourke, who witnessed among the Zuñi
Indians extreme and simultaneous violations of the codes governing food and
waste, and hence experienced extreme disgust. This reaction is not simply an
occupational hazard; after all, it is the ethnographer's nausea that gives him
his particular discursive field. The boundaries of his long study are defined
precisely by the rising of his gorge; thus Scatologic Rites includes the
consumption of garlic and hashish as well as earwax and sweat. In the
absence of a stable and universal enumeration of those things that must be
regarded as filthy, Bourke relies upon the felt distance between himself and
aspects of the world to provide him with his subject matter, and that distance
is registered in the level of his disgust. His disgust is, moreover, an
affirmation of his own cultural identity, a mark of his participation in that
civilized world that takes the primitive as one of its characteristic
intellectual and moral concerns, the very emblem of that which is alien.8 It
would be absurd to conclude that a similar, if better disguised, revulsion lies
at the constitutive moment of all ethnography, but one may easily find other
and more respectable instances than the work of Captain Bourke, in which
aversion serves to transform behavior and material substances into the
objects of representation and interpretation.
The ethnographic project that reflects this revulsion also helps to
alleviate it, not necessarily because the attempt at understanding breeds
tolerant acceptance—Scatologic Rites bears eloquent, if eccentric, witness
that it need not—but because the act of recording assumes the eventual,
perhaps imminent disappearance of the observed behavior. It is recorded in
part because, as a survival of an earlier stage of human development, it
cannot long endure; indeed, much early anthropology is engaged quite
consciously in helping to bring about a more hasty demise. At the same time,
the ethnographer's disgust often seems to be the other side of longing: it may
be complacently psychoanalytical to say so, but there appears to be at least
as much “philia” as phobia in Captain Bourke's ten-year labor, a kind of
nostalgie de la merde.
It is tempting to reverse this formulation for the Zuñis and to argue that
there is as much disgust as relish in their coprophagous ritual. Captain
Bourke's explanation is along these lines: citing Isaiah 36:12, he suggests that
the abominable dance represents a catastrophic famine that the Zuñis had at
some time, perhaps centuries earlier, endured during an enemy siege. But
festivals that commemorate a national disaster—the Jewish Tisha b'Av
would be an example—are not usually pervaded by the spirit of clowning,
uncontrolled merriment, and, above all, malicious parody. The transcription
of portions of a recent oral history project, Self-Portrayals by the Zuñi
People, raises the possibility of a different semiotic relation between the
dance and the Zuñis’ historical experience, a relation not of commemoration,
but of festive travesty. “Our grandparents,” it is said, prophesied to their
children that “drinkers of dark liquids will come upon the land, speaking
nonsense and filth. Then the end shall be nearer.”9 Were the Ne'wekwe
dancers, then, in the presence of the representatives of the conquering
institutions, comically enacting the roles of their oppressors, displacing and
absorbing alien cultural symbols in a ritual of mockery, warding off, as it
were, eschatology with scatology?
Captain Bourke speculates that the dancers were recalling their ancient
Apache enemies, but it seems far more likely that he himself was the object
of their abusive mirth, along with all the other army officers and priests who
tirelessly struggled to bring civilization to the heathen. One should perhaps
add enthnographers, not only because of Captain Bourke's own dual function,
but because an observer in 1918 noticed one of the dancers holding a
ceremonial stave composed of cattails, cornstalks, and the measuring stick
that Alfred Kroeber had used in a survey three years before.10
The Ne'wekwe ceremony cannot, however, be reduced to its element of
mockery; after all, if the filth is symbolically directed at the white man, it is
swallowed by the Indians. The gesture of insult is at the same time an
acknowledgment of defeat, for the satiric humor of the oppressed, no matter
how telling it may be, always assumes the condition of oppression, perhaps
even reinforces that condition, both by releasing aggression nonviolently
through laughter and by confirming in the minds of the conquerors the
impotence of the conquered. And yet this duality may not be the most
important point, for we may recall that the ritual is conceived as powerful
medicine, “the most powerful known to the Zuñi people.”11 I would like to
argue not that this medical function explains, or is explained by, the dialectic
of aggression and submission, but rather the reverse; the elements are not
fully integrated, they defy hierarchical organization, they do not form a
unified whole. Somehow the magical healing has survived alongside all of
the portentous significance of the encounter with white civilization, and has
resisted semantic organization by that encounter. In this indifference to unity,
this refusal of conceptual integration, we may grasp one of the sources of the
Zuñis’ dogged resistance, to this day, to assimilation.
Where does this leave Captain Bourke? Beside the point, I suppose—not,
as it seemed, the symbolic center of the ceremony, but utterly marginal. Yet if
he found no place in Zuñi culture, he may have encountered something
important about his own. I refer now not to his disgust, but rather to his very
shrewd speculation that what he had witnessed bore a striking resemblance
to the accounts of the Feast of Fools in early modern Europe. For him, this
resemblance could only signify the “filth taint” from which is own culture
had cleansed itself, but our understanding of the Feast of Fools has been
deepened in the last decades, especially by the Russian semiologist Mikhail
Bakhtin's brilliant study, Rabelais and His World.12
Laughter, Bakhtin suggests, which had been eliminated in the Middle
Ages from official cult and ideology, survived in the unofficial, but widely
tolerated, carnival aspect of virtually every feast. The festivities often
included masking, hiding, parades, dancing, noise-making, gambling, and
costuming: fools dressed as dignitaries, peasants as lords, men as women,
women as men. Festive laughter—popular, universal, ambivalent in its
triumph and derision, gaiety and degradation—has at its center what Bakhtin
calls the “grotesque body,” ever unfinished, ever creating, ever exceeding its
limits in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, dying, eating, drinking, and
defecating. The grotesque body—open to the world in all its orifices,
unbounded, abusive, devouring, and nurturing—receives its fullest visual
representation in the art of Bosch and Breughel, its most masterful literary
expression in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Rabelais's scatology,
Bakhtin suggests, must be understood in the context of rituals like the mock
mass, in which excrement was used instead of incense, or processions in
which the festive clergy, eating boudins, rode in carts loaded with dung and
tossed it at the crowd. And, as we might expect in a writer who was both
monk and doctor, the protagonists of these rituals are medical as well as
clerical: the Rabelaisian image of the physician, Bakhtin writes, is an
ambivalent composite of Hippocrates's noble physician and of the
scatophage who devours excrement in antique comedies, mimes, and
medieval facéties.
The comic force of Rabelais's scatological improvisations on
carnivalesque themes is felt from the first pages of his work in the account of
Gargantua's birth. The hero's mother, Gargamelle, has been carrying him in
her belly for eleven months, when, after the slaughter of three hundred sixty-
seven thousand fourteen fat oxen, she indulges her voracious appetite at a
feast of tainted tripe. Her husband warns her to eat modestly—“Anyone who
eats the bag,” he said, “might just as well be chewing dung”—but she
consumes a vast amount: “Oh, what fine faecal matter to swell up inside
her!”13 After a frolicking dance and a drinking party, Gargamelle believes
that she feels the first birth pangs. The midwives who reach underneath find
“some rather ill-smelling excrescences, which they thought were the child;
but it was her fundament slipping out because of the softening of her right
intestine—which you call the bum-gut—owing to her having eaten too much
tripe.” In response, “a dirty old hag of the company who had the reputation of
being a good she-doctor” applies an astringent “so horrible that all her
sphincter muscles were stopped and constricted.” “By this misfortune,” the
narrator continues, “the cotyledons of the matrix were loosened at the top,
and the child leapt up through them to enter the hollow vein. Then, climbing
through the diaphragm to a point above the shoulders where this vein divides
in two, he took the left fork and came out by the left ear.” The newborn does
not cry like other babies, but instead shouts, “Drink! Drink! Drink!”
This remarkable episode is in part an exuberant parody of classical
legends of the birth of heroes: the narrator invokes Bacchus, Minerva,
Adonis, and Castor and Pollux. We shall have occasion to return to this
learned comedy, which it is all too easy to neglect in the context of the
riotous popular festivities Bakhtin invokes. Those festivities often included,
we have noted, parodies of the most sacred mysteries in the official religion,
and Rabelais daringly pursues the same impulse: “I doubt whether you will
truly believe in this strange nativity,” the narrator remarks, “but an honest
man, a man of good sense, always believes what he is told and what he finds
written down.” The first edition then continues with a passage that was
suppressed in 1542 (and that is omitted from the Urquhart-Motteux
translation and from J. M. Cohen's influential modern translation):
Ne dict pas Solomon Proverbiorum 14: “Innocens credit omni verbo etc.,” et Saint Paul, prime
Corinthio. 13: “Charitas omnia credit.” Pourquoy ne le croyriez vous? Pour ce (dictez vous) qu'il
n'y a nulle apparence. Je vous dicz que pour ceste seule cause vous le debvez croyre en foy
parfaicte. Car les Sorbonistes disent que foy est argument des choses de nulle apparence.14

This passage not only mocks the Paris theologians, as More and Erasmus had
done a few years earlier, but goes very far toward mocking the miraculous
nativity at the heart of Christianity itself. To be sure, such mockery could be
accommodated, if somewhat uneasily, to the larger rhythms of faith: thus for
centuries periodic outbursts of parodic festivity had been tolerated as a
release of pent-up frustrations, a safety valve that would enable the
participants to return with renewed obedience to the discipline of true faith.
Moreover, in works of art such as the English Second Shepherd's Play, the
element of parody—the lamb in the manger instead of the holy babe—could
be viewed as a moving comic tribute to the Christian mystery.
Rabelais's parody of the sacred, however, cannot be so easily absorbed
or domesticated. Gargantua is no lamb, and the overarching symbolic and
institutional constraints that enclose the carnival and return its participants to
the everyday world are altogether missing from Rabelais's novel. Moreover,
the mockery in the suppressed passage strikes at one of the central doctrinal
tactics since St. Paul for the suppression of doubt: the definition of faith
comically attributed to the Sorbonistes is from Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews.
This definition was invoked to defend doctrines like the Virgin Birth and the
Real Presence against the skeptical challenge of materialism; Rabelais's
deadpan parody— “For I say to you that to God nothing is impossible”—is
solemnly invoked as the justification for a grotesque hypermaterialism, the
realm (in Bakhtin's phrase) of the “lower bodily stratum.”
Rabelais's exuberant laughter turns the world topsy-turvy, challenges the
dominant structures of authority, triumphs over fear and constraint, breaks
down what had seemed essential boundaries. The birth of Gargantua
celebrates a primal, animal energy, difficult to moralize conventionally and
impossible to contain; when Gargamelle's sphincter muscles are closed, the
infant—in a comic prefiguration of what Freud called “displacement
upward”—forces his way through a different orifice. This miraculous birth is
not transcendence of the human condition—inter urinas et faeces nascimur
—but a radical confirmation in which the veins of the head, the birth canal,
and the intestines are confounded with one another. Acts of degradation—
including the eating of excrement—are linked inseparably with birth, fertility,
renewal; acts of renewal are linked, in turn, with decay and death. The birth
of Gargantua, Bakhtin writes, “ties into one grotesque knot the slaughter, the
dismemberment and disemboweling, bodily life, abundance, fat, the banquet,
merry improprieties, and finally childbirth” (p. 222).
With this blend of laughter, religious parody, and exuberant self-
affirmation, and its carnivalesque context compounded of rebellion,
celebration, humiliation, and excremental medicine, we are, as Captain
Bourke dimly grasped, quite close to the Ne'wekwe dances. What he
witnessed in a state of shock, and in the conviction of profound cultural
distance, was something his own European and American forebears had
relatively recently suppressed. What the Zuñis did to Bourke—brazenly
performing filthy rites in his presence, mocking him under the pretense of
doing him honor, making him at once comically central and yet in a deeper
sense quite peripheral—Rabelais in effect did again and again to the
Sorbonists, who responded by trying to destroy him and suppress his book.
Indeed, the Indian fighter/ethnographer's response to the savages, a response
composed of disgust, self-congratulation, and obscure, nostalgic longing,
strikingly resembles the response of the European elite to the unreformed
carnivalesque customs of the lower orders. The connection is perfectly
explicit as early as the sixteenth century, and had important historical
consequences; as Karen Kupperman has recently demonstrated, colonial
policy in Virginia was deeply conditioned by the widespread notion that the
natives resembled the common people of England, Algonkian culture being a
curious anamorphic representation of European popular culture.15
But we must caution ourselves at this point against simply equating
Renaissance popular culture with Rabelais's novel: Gargantua and
Pantagruel is not carnival, but the brilliant aesthetic representation of
carnival motifs; not the communal laughter of a largely illiterate populace,
but the highly crafted, classicizing of a supremely literate individual; not
festive mayhem in the streets, but words on a page. The difference—like the
difference between the traditional Whitsunale an Englishman could still have
seen in 1611 in dozens of country villages, and the Whitsun-ale he could have
seen represented at the Globe Theater in The Winter's Tale—signals as much
the break away from the festive mode as its continued vigor. Though they
would not vanish until quite late—despite the efforts of the Society for the
Suppression of Vice, there are records of wakes and popular fairs in England
until well into the nineteenth century—the Feast of the Fools and other
carnivalesque recreations had come under increasingly effective attack in the
Renaissance from clerical authorities, social reformers, city fathers, popular
preachers, and significant elements of the folk itself.16 Rabelais does not
seem to share in any way our ethnographer's revulsion, but his act of
recording implies the evanescence, as well as the aesthetic and social power,
of the popular rituals from which his art draws its inspiration.
Indeed, some of Rabelais's power derives from the evanescence of the
festive tradition, or more accurately, from the sense of a literary, social, and
religious world hardening in its commitment to order, discipline, and
decorum. In the realm of manners, bodily functions that had been largely
ignored come under increasing scrutiny and regulation; in the family,
patriarchal authority is asserted with a new and intense insistence, while
children are subjected to increased disciplinary attention; in religion, a sharp
intensification of dogmatic rigidity is fueled by the crisis of the Reformation;
in literature, there is a growing self-consciousness about decorum. Rabelais's
work must be understood not as the naive self-expression of an unregenerate
popular spirit, but as a sophisticated and brilliant response to such
developments: hence the grotesque violations of “good manners,” the
hyperbolic celebration of the unconstrained instinctual energies of childhood,
the mockery of the theological rage for order, the comic breaches of literary
decorum. Rabelais's festive representations derive at least some of their
intensity from this new agonistic situation: not Carnival in its recurrent,
cyclical struggle with Lent, but the carnivalesque threatened in its very
existence. The excessiveness and the dense particularity of Gargantua and
Patagruel are in compensatory relation to the long day's dying of all that
Rabelais hyperbolically depicts.
So too in just this period, European humanists begin to compile vast
collections of folk proverbs, and the attention, even when closer to
admiration than amused contempt, reflects less the continued vitality of
popular culture than its slow contraction into an object of learned study,
literary representation, and pastoral reform.17 Rabelais shows no interest in
reforming the people, but his work has a certain quality of inspired
compilation, as if to suggest that from now on the carnivalesque will live
more authentically and fully in the pages of Gargantua and Pantagruel than
in actual folk experience. And this proposition is inadvertently confirmed
when Bakhtin draws virtually all of his best evidence for the realm of the
“grotesque body” from this novel written by a highly learned
humanist/monk/physician writing under the protection of aristocratic,
clerical, and royal patrons.
The folk culture forged by Rabelais into a devastating comic weapon is
in effect presented to those patrons, as scatological and bawdy tales were
traditionally presented, alongside chivalric romances and allegories of love,
to the aristocratic audiences of the Merovingian court.18 The presence of the
book's noble protectors is registered not only in the circumstances of its
composition and publication, but in some of its most characteristic values as
well. Thus, when in the famous description of the Abbey of Thélème,
Rabelais imagines a world of freedom and delight, he does so, not as a
peasant dream of abundance, but as an elegant aristocratic retreat, comically
reconceived as a monastery. The monks and nuns are all “free, well-born,
well-bred, and easy in honest company,” and their elegant lives are
simplified and sweetened by armies of servants in discreet attendance:
“These attendants also provided the ladies’ rooms each morning with rose-
water, orange-water, and myrtle-water, and brought for each lady a precious
casket, which breathed of every aromatic scent” (p. 156). The excremental
aggression and reckless exuberance have vanished, as if they were only
called into being by resistance and constraint. In a world whose sole rule is
“Do what you will,” excrement is completely transformed, as Artemidorus's
ancient dream interpretation had foretold, into showers of superfluous
wealth: gold, precious jewels, costly clothes, and those sweet-smelling
caskets.19
Rabelais's fantasy of perfect aristocratic liberty, like his fantasy of
unending popular carnival, is generated in response to a culture increasingly
intolerant of disorder in society, in the individual, and in art. Scatology, of
course, did not vanish—indeed, its endurance has surpassed that of the
aristocracy—but what Norbert Elias calls “the threshold of shame and
embarrassment” altered, so what was once acceptable in the central zone of
the social system was pushed out to the periphery, and what was once
tolerated on the periphery was declared altogether unacceptable. The
expurgation of Rabelais's novel began in his own lifetime, and the process of
cleansing extended, of course, well beyond this single scandalous French
text. Shakespeare's distinguished eighteenth-century editor Warburton, to cite
one of the more subtle examples, proposed a decorous textual emendation:
where, in the folio text of the tragedy, Cleopatra, contemplating suicide,
declares that it is great “to do that thing that ends all other deeds . . . Which
sleeps, and never palates more the dung” (V. ii. 5–7), he suggests that
Shakespeare had intended to write, “and never palates more the dug”—that
is, the nipple. Excrement is transformed into milk.20
But conscious or unconscious attempts at bowdlerizing are probably less
significant than disciplinary pressures brought to bear upon scatology itself
and consequent changes in the symbolic significance of the “lower bodily
stratum.” In Rabelais, as in the Ne'wekwe dances, excrement was the
material sign of abundance as well as humiliation, magical medicine as well
as corruption, renewal as well as death. From the early Renaissance onward,
such paradoxical doubleness is more and more widely repudiated, and then
repressed, so that by the nineteenth century, it is recoverable only in
ethnographic descriptions of savage rituals. In England, this transformation
may be traced at the symbolic center of society in the history of the royal
Privy Chamber. During the regime of Rabelais's contemporary, Henry VIII,
the working head of the Privy Chamber was a high-ranking and influential
gentleman, called the Groom of the Stool, whose status originated in his duty
to attend on the king when he made use of the royal close-stool. This
attendance signaled the groom's publicly acknowledged intimacy with the
king, an intimacy that conferred power not only by virtue of the king's evident
confidence, but by virtue as well of a charisma that extended even to the
barest functions of the king's body. By the later seventeenth century, that
charisma had drastically waned, and royal body service had begun to seem
an embarrassment. As early as 1669, a writer on court offices solemnly
explained that the correct title of the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber was
Groom of the Stole, “he having the office and honour to present and put on
his Majesty's first garment or shirt every morning.”21 By the eighteenth
century, the office had become a sinecure having little or nothing to do with
the king's body, and at the accession of Victoria, the groomship was
abolished altogether in an attempt to reduce costs.
This brief history reflects not only the waning of royal charisma, but a
separation of body and spirit whose implications extend well beyond the fate
of the monarchy. In this separation, the “lower bodily stratum” steadily loses
any connection with renewal and potency, except in the increasingly
disreputable dreams of alchemists and cranks. Eventually, all of the body's
products, except tears, become simply unmentionable in decent society, but
long before this repression, scatology is reconceived symbolically, so that it
can have none of the festive ambivalence it possesses in Rabelais's novel or
in the Zuñi ceremony. We may glimpse this refiguration in Thomas More's
Utopia, written at a time, we may recall, when Henry VIII's Groom of the
Stool derived prestige from his important function and would be rewarded,
at the king's death, with the precious collection of royal close-stools.22 While
the Utopians, More writes,
eat and drink from earthenware and glassware of fine workmanship but of little value, from gold
and silver they make chamber pots and all the humblest vessels for use everywhere. . . .
Moreover, they employ the same metals to make the chains and solid fetters which they put on
their slaves. Finally, as for those who bear the stigma of disgrace on account of some crime, they
have gold ornaments hanging from their ears, gold rings encircling their fingers, gold chains thrown
around their necks, and, as a last touch, a gold crown binding their temples. Thus by every means
in their power they make gold and silver a mark of ill fame.23

In More's dream of a communal society, a society with neither charismatic

absolutism nor private property, men can be freed from excessive, anxious
attachment to wealth by means of the social power of shaming. Defecation is
used, along with slavery and disgrace, to stigmatize gold and silver, and
these metals, bearing the weight of the communal judgment, may subsequently
be used elsewhere to symbolize dishonor.
The “lower bodily stratum” plays an important role, then, in the
technology of social control that makes possible Utopian communism, but we
should not conclude that the values of More's imaginary society revolve
around a loathing of the flesh such as we find in certain strains of medieval
monasticism. Utopia is not an ascetic community but one officially dedicated
to the pursuit of pleasure, including the humblest pleasures of the body. All
pleasures are, however, carefully ranked in an order that represents the
objective standard of the community and permits no individual deviation. At
the top of the hierarchy are the pleasures of the soul; below are the bodily
pleasures, which the Utopians divide into two general categories. The first is
“a calm and harmonious state of the body,” that is, the pleasure of overall
good health; the second is the pleasure of the senses. This latter is in turn
divided into two kinds: the intangible, but sweet, pleasure of music; and the
pleasure of the body's organs. And this last and lowest form of pleasure is
also divided into two parts: pleasure that arises from renewal, that is, from
eating and drinking; and the pleasure that arises from elimination. The latter
sensation “occurs when we discharge feces from our bowels or perform the
activity generative of children or relieve the itching of some part by rubbing
or scratching.”24 The Utopians, then, embrace bodily pleasures, but they do
so in a scheme that seems designed to curb sexuality by equating it with
defecation and scratching. As so often happens in More's Utopia, what is at
first heralded as a central value turns out, on closer inspection, to be hedged
about with restrictions:
If a person thinks that his felicity consists in this kind of pleasure, he must admit that he will be in
the greatest happiness if his lot happens to be a life which is spent in perpetual hunger, thirst,
itching, eating, drinking, scratching, and rubbing. Who does not see that such a life is not only
disgusting but wretched? (p. 101)

In More's representation of the pleasures of the body, there is none of the

festive excess, the mingled degradation and exuberance, that characterize
Rabelais's scatological representation. For More, the instinctual demands of
the flesh take their appointed place in a great, integrated social body, into
which every individual must merge himself. Utopia is in this respect the
secular equivalent of the Catholic corpus Christianorum, for which More
gave his own life. In More's Christianity, the body is not utterly despised, but
it is subordinated to higher values, the values embodied in the universal,
visible Catholic Church. In the service of this ultimate authority, even the
grossest bodily functions must play their part, that of the agents of shame and
disgrace. During the years of violent religious controversy in England, More
calls upon those functions to bear the full charge of aggression against any
individual who dares to challenge the Catholic consensus. Writing on behalf
of Henry VIII, More tells Luther that
as long as your reverend paternity will be determined to tell these shameless lies, others will be
permitted, on behalf of his English majesty, to throw back into your paternity's shitty mouth, truly
the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up, and
to empty out all the sewers and privies onto your crown.25

More is not inaccurate when he claims to be throwing back at Luther

something Luther himself threw with reckless abandon. Significantly, More
speaks for his ruler and in his opponent's idiom; Luther speaks for himself,
and his scatological imagery far exceeds in quantity, intensity, and
inventiveness anything that More could muster. If for More scatology
normally expresses a communal disapproval, for Luther, it expresses a deep
personal rage. This rage has many external objects, from the pope and his
bishops (“They are no part of the body, or clean and healthy members but
merely the filth of squiredom, merd spattered on the sleeve and veritable
ordure”26) to the Jews (“You should read only the bible that is found under
the sow's tail, and eat and drink the letters that drop from there”27). But all of
these hated enemies—priest, temporizing princes, rebellious peasants,
usurers, Jews—resolve themselves into a single, supreme enemy, the
Devil.28 For Luther, the Devil dwells in excrement, and his dominion over
the world is made possible by the world's excremental character: its
obsession with gold and silver, its lies and trickery, its filthy desires. If the
Devil assaults with excrement—”A Christian should and could be gay, but
then the devil shits on him”—so too the Christian must counterattack with
excrement: “For note this down,” Luther tells Satan, “I have shit in the pants,
and you can hang them around your neck and wipe your mouth with it.”29
Powerful psychohistorical explorations by Norman O. Brown and by
Erik H. Erickson of Luther's “excremental vision” have enabled us to
understand this extraordinary scatological language, not as the incidental
reflection of the reformer's peasant origins, but as a central element in
Luther's conception of the world and of himself. In the present context, we
can begin to understand that Luther's symbolic use of the “lower bodily
stratum” is set against both the festive celebrations of the grotesque body
expressed by Rabelais and the communal judgments expressed by More. If in
these expressions Rabelais and More reflect conflicting aspects of Catholic
culture in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, so Luther's scatology
is powerfully linked to early Protestantism: there is, in short, a telling
difference between the Catholic and Protestant semiotics of excrement.
Where the excremental in Rabelais is bound up with renewal as well as
decay, in Luther it is a sign of the Church's corrupt compromise with pagan
idolatry and evil. Where Rabelais cheerfully acknowledges an ineradicable
connection between human ideals and man's grossest functions, Luther
regards that connection as proof of man's depravity, and proclaims that
salvation lies only in God's utter eradication of the filth taint. Where
defecation in More is a necessity that God has rendered mildly, if
embarrassingly, pleasurable, it is for Luther a mark of sinfulness and spiritual
violence, though the violence can be turned back against the enemy. Most
significantly perhaps, where scatology in More is part of an institutional
rhetoric—an agent of the shared wrath of the visible consensus fidelium
against heresy, or a device in the Utopians’ collective dishonoring of gold
and silver—scatology in Luther is part of a personal vision, a weapon in the
struggle of an isolated believer against Satan, or an expression of the inward
state of the individual fleshly man. For More, the emotion principally
associated with excrement is shame; for Luther, it is not shame, the social
sense of disgrace in the eyes of the community, but guilt. When Luther looks
into himself, that is, into his natural inwardness unaided by divine grace,
what he perceives is filth: “I am like ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic
ass-hole. We probably will let go of each other soon.”30 There is intense
self-loathing in this excremental vision—a nauseated perception of utter
worthlessness and damnation—but there is also a paradoxical self-
importance, a sense of the immensity of individual depravity that makes
possible a corresponding sense of the immensity of God's mercy in cleansing
man of his guilt.
With shame and guilt, communal regulation and individual anxiety, we
have the two forces that between them will stamp out over the ensuing
centuries almost all popular manifestations of the “grotesque body.” Yet it
will not do to conclude simply that a repressive disciplinary scatology
destroyed the radical, liberated excrementalism represented in Gargantua
and Pantagruel. Out of the midst of his unbridled, carnivalesque exuberance,
the energies of the “lower bodily stratum,” Rabelais produced the
aristocratic fantasy of the Abbey of Thélème; out of the midst of their
conservatism and repressiveness, More and Luther generated and inspired
some of the most radical social thought of the early modern period. We may
glimpse, before we close, a daring attempt by one seventeenth-century
visionary to forge a liberating social and religious practice out of ideological
materials, including scatology, drawn from More and Luther.
On April 1, 1649, a half-dozen poor men began to dig on the common
land at St. George's Hill, Surrey, to prepare the ground for planting. They
were followers of Gerrard Winstanley, to whom, in a trance, a voice had
come, saying, “Worke together, Eat bread together.”31 The actions of these
men and women— and the group, known as the Diggers, quickly grew—were
modest and scrupulously nonviolent, but their project, like others undertaken
by religious radicals in the wake of the execution of Charles I, was
millennial: “That we may work in righteousness and lay the Foundation of
making the Earth a Common Treasure for All, both Rich and Poor” (p. 257).
To this end, the Digger community outlawed private property and wage
labor, struggled to overturn the patriarchal oppression of women and
children, shared their goods in common, and attempted to live exemplary,
decent lives, free from fear, subservience, and hunger:
Therefore we are resolved to be cheated no longer, nor be held under the slavish fear of you no
longer, seeing the Earth was made for us, as well as for you. . . . If we lie still, and let you steale
away our birthrights, we perish; and if we Petition we perish also. . . . Therefore we require, and
we resolve to take both Common Land, and Common woods to be a livelihood for us, and look
upon you as equal with us, not above us. (p. 273)

The project drew from local freeholders and magistrates immediate and
predictable hostility, to which Winstanley responded in a remarkable series
of pamphlets explaining and defending his “experimental” religion (p. 93)
and social reform. In the beginning of time, he writes, “there was an evenness
between man and all creatures, and an evenness between man and his Maker”
(p. 156). But when man fell, he began to imagine that all of his happiness lay
in possessing external objects for himself, tyrannizing over others, enclosing
the earth, enriching himself with the labor of his fellows, and upholding by
force the principle, “This is mine” (p. 158). The fall is at once an inward
condition and a specific set of external injustices, a spiritual darkness and a
social evil. Hence, there can be no personal righteousness without a
transformation of the oppressive circumstances in which the common people
live, and no lasting social reform without inward salvation.
 Man can be ruled, Winstanley writes, by “a particular, confining, selfish
power, which is the Devil,” or by “a universall spreading power, that
delights in the liberty of the whole Creation, which is Christ” (p. 172). The
Devil does not dwell in an external hell, but in the “bottomless pit, your very
fleshly self,” and all torments and miseries are “but the breakings forth of that
stinking dunghill, that is seated within you” (p. 216). The whole of mankind
can be conceived as a great creature, whose “face is called the universal
power of Love,” but whose “back parts is called the selfish power” (p. 376).
All men and women have an equal birthright in the earth, but under the
dominion of the “back parts,” men have enslaved each other, while through
buying and selling, “the earth stinks, because this hath been established by a
compulsive binding power” (p. 188). The earth must be made clean again by
returning it to those things that belong by “the Law of Creation” to all
mankind: “Be not like the Rats and Mice, that drawes the treasures of the
Earth into your holes to looke upon, whil'st your fellow-members . . . doe
starve for want” (p. 448). All that is locked up covetously becomes inner
filth, and at the appointed time, those who are ruled by the dark power of
possessiveness “must and shall be torne in pieces, and scattered, and
shamed; . . . and be cast out, as stinking, imaginary dung” (p. 447). To avoid
this fate, men and women, governed by “the Spirit of Community,” must come
together “to plant and manure the Common land” (p. 274), so that the poor
may once again “suck the Brests of their mother Earth” (p. 265). “The voyce
is gone out.” Winstanley writes, “freedome, freedome, freedome: he that hath
eares to heare, let him heare, he that is filthie, let him be filthie still, till he be
cast out as dung” (p. 448).
If we consider the excremental imagery scattered throughout Winstanley's
writings not as a psychic aberration but as part of a continuing social
dialogue about body, spirit, property, and power, we can understand that he
is trying to fuse, in a revolutionary synthesis, elements of the bitterly opposed
visions expressed by More and Luther. He shares with Luther the perception
that covetous men are dominated by the “back part”—the “dunghill” within—
and that this “back part” is in fact the Devil. But for Winstanley, this
perception is not an acknowledgment of universal depravity, the
worthlessness of human “works,” and his own personal guilt. Instead, he
shares with More a conviction that communal actions can arouse men's sense
of shame, liberate them from their attachment to property, and return them to
righteousness and peace. But for Winstanley, this conviction is not an
adherence to any visible church or formal ritual or hierarchical institution,
and he utterly rejects both the enslavement of criminals that More
contemplated in Utopia and the persecution of heretics that More supported
in his own life. Winstanley feels angry at his oppressors, but he struggles to
transform scatological aggression into its opposite: not an inward feeling of
love, but an active social practice—manuring the earth.
On June 11, 1649, four unarmed Diggers on St. George's Hill were set
upon and severely beaten by two freeholders on horseback and a club-
wielding gang of men in women's apparel. The cross-dressing was perhaps a
disguise—though the magistrates were far more interested in prosecuting than
in protecting the Diggers—but it was also a familiar and traditional emblem
of the carnivalesque. The festive gesture seems calculated to deride the
Diggers, to avoid the impression of an official military or judicial
repression, to deprive them of the possibility of dignity in defeat, and to pit
one conception of the common people against another. In the weeks of
harassment and violence that followed, Winstanley acknowledged the
symbolism: the fury of their enemies is so great, he writes,
that they would not only drive away all the Cowes upon the ground, but spoyl the corn too, and
when they had done this mischief, the Bayliffs, & the other . . . snapsack boyes went hollowing
and shouting, as if they were dancing at a whitson Ale; so glad they are to do mischief to the
Diggers, that they might hinder the work of freedome. (p. 335)

By the spring of 1650, the Diggers were destroyed. The old exuberant spirit
of carnival, safely in the pay of the landlords, had played its part in the
destruction.

NOTES
1 John G. Bourke, Scatologic Rites of All Nations (Washington, D.C.: Lowdermilk and Company,
1891), p. 4. The introductory pages of the present essay appeared in University Publishing 8
(1979): 5–6.
2 Matilda Coxe Stevenson, “The Zuñi Indians,” U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology. Annual Report,
1901–2, p. 437.
3 Semen and menses are also, of course, the object of complex regulations, but rarely in behavior
manuals. For a brilliant study of these manuals, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process,
translated by Edmond Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978; original German edition, 1939). On
the cultural definition of filth, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966).
4 Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium; Giovanni della Casa, Galateo; Antoine de Courtin,
Nouveau traité de civilité, quoted in Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 130, 131, 146.
 5 In a provocative essay, “Paradox and Limits in the History of Ethnology” (Daedalus 109 [1980];
73–91), James A. Boon challenges the conventional distinction between pre-Enlightenment prejudice
and Enlightenment objectivity. He cites Darwin on the Fuegians: they were “quite naked . . . stunted
in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair
entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly
make one's self believe that they are fellow-creatures” (p. 86).
6 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, edited by R. G. Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows
Company, 1896–1901), 47:297. The same correspondent reports that “some time ago a Savage,
looking into a Frenchman's face with most extraordinary attention and in profound silence, suddenly
exclaimed, after considering him a long time, ‘Oh, the bearded man! Oh, how ugly he is!’” (47:287).
See also Cornelius J. Jaenen. “Amerindian Views of French Culture in the Seventeenth Century,”
Canadian Historical Review 55 (1974): 261–91.
7 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), pp. 52–53. Malinowski remarks of the Trobriand pastime, during
the kwakwadu, or amorous excursion, of eating the lice found in one's lover's hair, that it is “a
practice disgusting to us and ill associated with lovemaking,” but he quickly adds that to the
Trobriands, “the idea of European boys and girls going out for a picnic with a knapsack full of
eatables is as disgusting and indecent as their kwakwadu would be to a Puritan” (p. 327). See also
Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, translated by Norbert Guterman
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967).
8 We may look beyond ethnology in this regard to the work of Bourke's great contemporary, Sigmund
Freud, who speculates that the experience of revulsion at the intertwining of “excremental things”
and “sexual things” leads to the splitting off of the conscious from the unconscious and hence to the
human condition itself. (“The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life” [1912], in
Collected Papers, edited by J. Riviere and J. Strachey, 5 vols. [New York: International Psycho-
Analytical Press, 1924–50], 4:215). Freud knew Bourke's Scatologic Rites.
9 The Zuñis: Self-Portrayals, translated by Alvina Quam (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1972), p. 3.
10 Elsie Clews Parson, “Winter and Summer Dance Series in Zuñi in 1918,” University of California
Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 17 (1922): 189.
11 In Freudian theory, the source of this powerful medicine is the infantile narcissistic project of
becoming father of oneself; in Norman O. Brown's words, “The project of becoming father of
oneself and thus triumphing over death, can be worked out with things, and at the same time retain
bodily meaning, only if the things produced by the body at the same time nourish it” (Life Against
Death [New York: Vintage Books, 1959], p. 293).
12 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1968).
13 François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by J. M. Cohen
(Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), book 1, chapters 4–6, pp. 47–53.
14 Rabelais, Oeuvres, edited by Abel Lefranc, 6 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1913), I:72. “Does not Solomon
say, in Proverbs 14, ‘The simple believeth every word etc.,’ and St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13,
‘Charity believeth all things.’ Why should you not believe what I tell you? Because, you say, there is
no evidence. I tell you that for this reason alone you ought to believe with perfect faith. For the
gentlemen of the Sorbonne say that faith is the evidence of things not seen.”
15 Karen Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in
America. 1580—1649 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980).
16 See Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973).
17 See Natalie Zemon Davis, “Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors,” in Society and Culture in
Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 227–67.
18 See Per Nykrog, Les Fabliaux: Etude d'histoire littéraire et de stylistique mediévale
(Copenhague: E. Munksgaard, 1957); Bawdy Tales from the Courts of Medieval France,
translated and edited by Paul Brians (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. vii–x.
19 In dreams, according to Artemidorus of Daldis, human excrement is both a sign of dishonor and a
sign of the release of retained surpluses of wealth (The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by
Robert J. White, Noyes Classical Studies [New Jersey: Noves Press, 1975], pp. 106, 171). I owe
this reference to Peter Brown. Rabelais refers to Artemidorus's volume in Gargantua and
Pantagruel, book 3, chapter 13.
20 The modern editor of the Pelican edition leaves “dung,” but suggests as a gloss, “i.e., the fruits of the
earth.”
21 David Starkey, “Representation Through Intimacy: A study in the symbolism of monarchy and court
office in early-modern England,” in Symbols and Sentiments: Cross-Cultural Studies in
Symbolism, edited by Joan Lewis (London: Academic Press, 1977), p. 218.
22 Ibid., p. 205. For a zany and learned meditation of Elizabethan close-stools, see Sir John Harrington,
The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1956), edited by Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1962).
23 St. Thomas More, Utopia, edited by Edward Surtz, S.J. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964),
p. 86.
24 Utopia, p. 173. The linking of excretion with other types of “evacuation” was evidently medical, as
well as moral, wisdom. Robert Burton connects feces with sex, sweat, menstruation, and nosebleed,
and remarks that it is dangerous to attempt to stop any of these too suddenly. “The extremes being
both bad, the medium is to be kept, which cannot easily be determined.” (The Anatomy of
Melancholy, edited by Holbrook Jackson, 3 vols. [London: Dent, 1932], 2:34.)
25 Responsio ad Lutherum, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, edited by John M. Headley,
translated by Sister Scholastica Mandeville (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 5:1, p. 311.
26 Quoted in Brown, Life Against Death, p. 225.
27 “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543), in Luther's Works, edited by Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols.
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 47:212.
28 Thus, for example, “Wherever you see a genuine Jew, you may with good conscience cross yourself
and bluntly say: ‘There goes a devil incarnate,’” Luther's Works 47:214.
29 These and similar outbursts are from Table Talk (#522, #1557). As the English translation in
Luther's Works, vol. 54, is deliberately colorless, I have followed the translation in Erik H. Erikson,
Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1958), pp. 244, 245. In Erikson's sensitive account,
“Martin's tortured attempt to establish silence, self-restraint, and submission to the Church's
authority and dogma had led to rebellious self-expression” (p. 245). I would only add that passages
like those from the essay on the Jews are useful reminders of some of the external consequences of
this internal drama.
30 Table Talk, #5537, cited in Erikson, Young Man Luther, p. 206.
31 The Works of Gerard Winstanley, edited by George H. Sabine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1941; reissue by Russell & Russell, 1965), pp. 190. I am indebted throughout my discussion of
Winstanley to George Shulman, “The Lamb and the Dragon: Gerrard Winstanley and Thomas
Hobbes in the English Revolution” (Ph.D. dissertion, University of California, Berkeley, Department
of Political Science, 1982).
 5

THE CULTIVATION OF
ANXIETY: KING LEAR
AND HIS HEIRS

I want to begin this essay far from the Renaissance, with a narrative of social
practice first published in the American Baptist Magazine of 1831. Its author
is the Reverend Francis Wayland, an early president of Brown University
and a Baptist minister. The passage concerns his infant son, Heman Lincoln
Wayland, who was himself to become a college president and Baptist
minister:
My youngest child is an infant about 15 months old, with about the intelligence common to children
of that age. It has for some months been evident, that he was more than usually self willed, but the
several attempts to subdue him, had been thus far relinquished, from the fear that he did not fully
understand what was said to him. It so happened, however, that I had never been brought into
collision with him myself, until the incident occurred which I am about to relate. Still I had seen
enough to convince me of the necessity of subduing his temper, and resolved to seize upon the first
favorable opportunity which presented, for settling the question of authority between us.
On Friday last before breakfast, on my taking him from his nurse, he began to cry violently. I
determined to hold him in my arms until he ceased. As he had a piece of bread in his hand, I took it
away, intending to give it to him again after he became quiet. In a few minutes he ceased, but
when I offered him the bread he threw it away, although he was very hungry. He had, in fact,
taken no nourishment except a cup of milk since 5 o'clock on the preceding afternoon. I considered
this a fit opportunity for attempting to subdue his temper, and resolved to embrace it. I thought it
necessary to change his disposition, so that he would receive the bread from me, and also be so
reconciled to me that he would voluntarily come to me. The task I found more difficult than I had
expected.
I put him into a room by himself, and desired that no one should speak to him, or give him any
food or drink whatever. This was about 8 o'clock in the morning. I visited him every hour or two
during the day, and spoke to him in the kindest tones, offering him the bread and putting out my
arms to take him. But throughout the whole day he remained inflexibly obstinate. He did not yield a
 hair's breadth. I put a cup of water to his mouth, and he drank it greedily, but would not touch it
with his hand. If a crumb was dropped on the floor he would eat it, but if I offered him the piece of
bread, he would push it away from him. When I told him to come to me, he would turn away and
cry bitterly. He went to bed supperless. It was now twenty-four hours since he had eaten anything.
He woke the next morning in the same state. He would take nothing that I offered him, and
shunned all my offers of kindness. He was now truly an object of pity. He had fasted thirty-six
hours. His eyes were wan and sunken. His breath hot and feverish, and his voice feeble and
wailing. Yet he remained obstinate. He continued thus, till 10 o'clock, A.M when hunger overcame
him, and he took from me a piece of bread, to which I added a cup of milk, and hoped that the
labor was at last accomplished.
In this however I had not rightly judged. He ate his bread greedily, but when I offered to take
him, he still refused as pertinaciously as ever. I therefore ceased feeding him, and recommenced
my course of discipline.
He was again left alone in his crib, and I visited him as before, at intervals. About one o'clock,
Saturday, I found that he began to view his condition in its true light. The tones of his voice in
weeping were graver and less passionate, and had more the appearance of one bemoaning himself.
Yet when I went to him he still remained obstinate. You could clearly see in him the abortive
efforts of the will. Frequently he would raise his hands an inch or two, and then suddenly put them
down again. He would look at me, and then hiding his face in the bedclothes weep most
sorrowfully. During all this time I was addressing him, whenever I came into the room, with
invariable kindness. But my kindness met with no suitable return. All I required of him was, that he
should come to me. This he would not do, and he began now to see that it had become a serious
business. Hence his distress increased. He would not submit, and he found that there was no help
without it. It was truly surprising to behold how much agony so young a being could inflict upon
himself.
About three o'clock I visited him again. He continued in the state I have described. I was going
away, and had opened the door, when I thought that he looked somewhat softened, and returning,
put out my hands, again requesting him to come to me. To my joy, and I hope gratitude, he rose up
and put forth his hands immediately. The agony was over. He was completely subdued. He
repeatedly kissed me, and would do so whenever I commanded. He would kiss any one when I
directed him, so full of love was he to all the family. Indeed, so entirely and instantaneously were
his feelings towards me changed, that he preferred me now to any of the family. As he had never
done before, he moaned after me when he saw that I was going away.
Since this event several slight revivals of his former temper have occurred, but they have all
been easily subdued. His disposition is, as it never has been before, mild and obedient. He is kind
and affectionate, and evidently much happier than he was, when he was determined to have his
own way. I hope and pray that it may prove that an effect has been produced upon him for life.1

The indignation and disgust that this account immediately excited in the
popular press of Jacksonian America, as it does in ourselves, seem to me
appropriate but incomplete responses, for if we say that tyranny here
masquerades as paternal kindness, we must also remember that, as Kafka
once remarked of his father, “love often wears the face of violence.”
Wayland's behavior reflects the relentless effort of generations of evangelical
fathers to break the child's will, but it would be a mistake to conceive of this
effort as a rejection of affective familial bonds or as a primitive disciplinary
pathology from which our own unfailing decency toward the young has freed
itself. On the contrary, Wayland's struggle is a strategy of intense familial
love, and it is the sophisticated product of a long historical process whose
roots lie at least partly in early modern England, the England of
Shakespeare's King Lear.
Wayland's twin demands—that his son take food directly from him and
come to him voluntarily, as an act of love and not forced compliance—may
in fact be seen, from the perspective of what French historians call the
longue durée, as a domesticated, “realistic,” and, as it were, bourgeoisified
version of the love test with which Shakespeare's play opens. Lear too
wishes to be the object—the preferred and even the sole recipient—of his
child's love. He can endure a portion of that love being turned elsewhere, but
only when he directs that it be so divided, just as Reverend Wayland was in
the end pleased that the child “would kiss any one when I directed him.”
Such a kiss is not a turning elsewhere but an indirect expression of love for
the father.
Goneril, to be sure, understands that the test she so successfully passes is
focussed on compliance: “you have obedience scanted,” she tells Cordelia,
“And well are worth the want that you have wanted” (I,i). But Lear's
response to his youngest daughter's declaration that she does not love him all
suggests that more than outward deference is at stake: “But goes thy heart
with this?” From Cordelia at least he wants something more than formal
obedience, something akin to the odd blend of submission to authority and
almost erotic longing depicted at the close of Wayland's account: “He
repeatedly kissed me, and would do so whenever I commanded. . . . As he
had never done before, he moaned after me when he saw that I was going
away.”
To obtain such love, Wayland withholds his child's food, and it is
tempting to say that Lear, in disinheriting Cordelia, does the same. But what
is a technique for Wayland is for Lear a dire and irreversible punishment: the
disinheriting and banishment of Cordelia is not a lesson, even for the elder
sisters, let alone for Cordelia herself, but a permanent estrangement, sealed
with the most solemn oaths. Wayland's familial strategy uses parental
discipline to bring about a desired relationship rather than to punish when the
relationship has failed. In his account, the taking away of the child's food
initiates the love test, whereas in King Lear the father's angry cancellation of
his daughter's dowry signals the abandonment of the love test and the formal
disclaimer of all paternal care. In the contrast between this bitter finality and
a more calculating discipline that punishes in order to fashion its object into
a desired shape, we glimpse the first of the differences that help to account
for the resounding success of Wayland's test and the grotesque and terrifying
failure of Lear's.
A second crucial difference is that by the early nineteenth century the age
of the child who is tested has been pushed back drastically; Wayland had
noticed signs of self-will in his infant son for some months, but had not
sought to subdue it until he was certain that the child could “fully understand
what was said to him.” That he expected to find such understanding in a
fifteen-month-old reflects a transformation in cultural attitudes toward
children, a transformation whose early signs may be glimpsed in Puritan
child-rearing manuals and early seventeenth-century religious lyrics and that
culminates in the educational philosophy of Rousseau and the poetry of
Wordsworth.
King Lear, by contrast, locates the moment of testing, for Cordelia at
least, precisely in what was for Shakespeare's England the age that
demanded the greatest attention, instruction, and discipline, the years
between sexual maturity at about fifteen and social maturity at about twenty-
six. This was, in the words of a seventeenth-century clergyman quoted by
Keith Thomas, “a slippery age, full of passion, rashness, wilfulness,” upon
which adults must impose restraints and exercise shaping power. The
Elizabethan and Jacobean theater returned almost obsessively to the
representation of this age group, which, not coincidentally, constituted a
significant portion of the play-going population. Civic officials, lawyers,
preachers, and moralists joined dramatists in worrying chiefly about what
Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800
calls “potentially the most unruly element in any society, the floating mass of
young unmarried males,” and it was to curb their spirits, fashion their wills,
and delay their full entry into the adult world that the educational system and
the laws governing apprenticeship addressed themselves. But girls were also
the objects of a sustained cultural scrutiny that focussed on the critical
passage from the authority of the father or guardian to the authority of the
husband. This transition was of the highest structural significance, entailing
complex transactions of love, power, and material substance, all of which,
we may note, are simultaneously at issue when Lear demands of his youngest
daughter a declaration she is unwilling or unable to give.
Love, power, and material substance are likewise at issue in the struggle
between Reverend Wayland and his toddler, but all reduced to the
proportions of the nursery: a kiss, an infantile gesture of refusal, a piece of
bread. In the nineteenth-century confrontation, punishment is justified as
exemplary technique, and the temporal frame has shifted from adolescence to
infancy. Equally significant, the spatial frame has shifted as well, from the
public to the private. Lear is of course a king, for whom there would, in any
case, be no privacy, but generally Renaissance writers do not assume that the
family is set off from public life. On the contrary, public life is itself most
frequently conceived in familial terms, as an interlocking, hierarchical
system of patriarchal authorities, while conversely the family is conceived as
a little commonwealth. Indeed the family is widely understood in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as both the historical source and the
ideological justification of society: “for I admit,” writes Bacon, “the law to
be that if the son kill his father or mother it is petty treason, and that there
remainith in our laws so much of the ancient footsteps of potestas patria and
natural obedience, which by the law of God is the very instance itself, and all
other government and obedience is taken but by equity.” In other words, the
Fifth Commandment—“Honor thy father and mother”—is the original letter
of the law which equity “enlarges,” as the Elizabethan jurist Edmund
Plowden puts it, to include all political authority.
This general understanding of the enlargement by which the state is
derived from the family is given virtually emblematic form in representations
of the ruling family; hence the supremely public nature of Lear's
interrogations of his daughters’ feelings toward him does not mark him off, as
other elements in the play do, from the world of Shakespeare's audience, but
rather registers a central ideological principle of middle- and upperclass
families in the early modern period. Affairs of family shade into affairs of
state, as Gloucester's anxious broodings on the late eclipses of the sun and
moon make clear: “Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities
mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack'd
twixt son and father” (I, ii). The very order of the phrases here, in their
failure to move decisively from private to public, their reversion at the close
to the familial bond, signals the interinvolvement of household and society.
By the time of Jacksonian America, the family has moved indoors, separated
from civil society, which in turn has been separated from the state. Reverend
Wayland's account of his domestic crisis is also, of course, intended for
public consumption, but it was published anonymously, as if to respect the
protective boundaries of the family, and more important still, it makes public
a private event in order to assist the private lives of others, that is, to
strengthen the resolve of loving parents to subdue the temper of their own
infants.
We will return later to the temporal and spatial problems touched upon
here—the cultural evaluation of differing age groups and the status of privacy
—but we should first note several of the significant continuities between
Renaissance child-rearing techniques and those of nineteenth-century
American evangelicals. The first, and ground of all the others, is the not-so-
simple fact of observation: these parents pay attention to their children,
testing the young to gauge the precise cast of their emotion and will. This is
more obviously the case with Reverend Wayland, who when his child was
scarcely a year old was already scrutinizing him for signs of self-will. The
fathers in Shakespeare's play seem purblind by comparison: Lear apparently
cannot perceive the difference between his eldest daughters’ blatant
hypocrisy and his youngest daughter's truth, while Gloucester evidently does
not know what his eldest (and sole legitimate) son's handwriting—his
“character”—looks like and is easily persuaded that this son (with whom he
had talked for two hours the night before) wishes to kill him. This seeming
obliviousness, however, signifies not indifference but error: Lear and
Gloucester are hopelessly inept at reading their children's “characters,” but
the effort to do so is of the utmost importance in the play, which, after all,
represents the fatal consequences of an incorrect “reading.” We may say,
with the Fool, that Lear was “a pretty fellow” when he had “no need to care”
for his daughter's frowns (I, iv), but this indifference only exists outside the
play itself, or perhaps in its initial moments; thereafter (and irreversibly)
parents must scrutinize their children with what Lear, in a moment of
uncharacteristic self-criticism, calls a “jealous curiosity” (I, iv). In initiating
the plot against Edgar, Edmund gauges perfectly his father's blend of
credulity and inquisitorial curiosity: “Edmund, how now! what news? . . .
Why so earnestly seek you to put up that letter? . . . What paper were you
reading? . . . What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? . .
. Let's see: come; if it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles” (I, ii). Children
in the play, we might add, similarly scrutinize their fathers: “You see how
full of changes his age is,” Goneril remarks to Regan in their first moment
alone together; “the observation we have made of it hath not been little” (I,
i). The whole family comes to exist sub specie semioticae; everyone is intent
on reading the signs in everyone else.
This mode of observation is common to Shakespeare's play and
Wayland's account, but not because it is intrinsic to all family life: intense
paternal observation of the young is by no means a universal practice. It is,
rather, learned by certain social groups in particular cultures and ages. Thus
there is virtually no evidence of the practice in late medieval England, while
for the seventeenth century there is (given the general paucity of materials for
intimate family history) quite impressive evidence, especially for the
substantial segment of the population touched by Puritanism. For example,
the Essex vicar Ralph Josselin (1617–83) has left in his diary a remarkably
full record of his troubled relationship with his son, particularly during the
latter's adolescence. “My soule yearned over John,” notes one characteristic
entry, “oh lord overcome his heart.” The conflict between them reached a
crisis in 1674, when, in a family discussion held in the presence of his wife
and four daughters, Josselin put the following proposition before his twenty-
three-year-old heir:
John set your selfe to fear God, & bee industrious in my business, refrain your evill courses, and I
will passe by all past offences, setle all my estate on you after your mothers death, and leave you
with some stocke on the ground and within doores to the value of an £100 and desire of you, out of
your marriage portion but £400 to provide for my daughters or otherwise to charge my land with so
much for their porcions; but if you continue your ill courses I shall dispose of my land otherwise,
and make only a provision for your life to put bread in your hand.

The father's strategy was at least temporarily successful, as John prudently

accepted the offer and “ownd his debauchery.”
Josselin's insistance upon the economic consequences of disobedience
provides an immediate link to King Lear, where the father's power to alter
portions and to disinherit is of crucial importance. We should note that
primogeniture was never so inflexibly established in England, even among
the aristocracy, as to preclude the exercise of paternal discretion, the power
to bribe, threaten, reward, and punish. Lear's division of the kingdom, his
attempt both to set his daughters in competition with each other and to
dispose of his property equitably among them, seems less a wanton violation
of the normative practice than a daring attempt to use the paternal power
always inherent in it. This power is exhibited in more conventional form in
the subplot: “And of my land, / Loyal and natural boy,” the deceived
Gloucester tells his conniving bastard son, “I'll work the means / To make
thee capable” (II, i). This economic pressure is not, of course, immediately
apparent in Reverent Wayland's dealings with his infant, but Josselin's threat
to “make only a provision . . . to put bread in your hand” curiously
anticipates the symbolic object of contention in the Wayland nursery and
suggests that there too the paternal power to withhold or manipulate the
means of sustenance is at issue.
This power should not be regarded as exclusively disciplinary. It is
instead an aspect of a general familial concern with planning for the future, a
concern that extends from attempts to shape the careers of individual children
to an overarching interest in the prosperity of the “house.” Francis Wayland's
struggle with his son is not a flaring-up of paternal anger but a calculated
effort to fashion his child's future: “I hope and pray that it may prove that an
effect has been produced upon him for life.” Similarly, Lear's disastrous
division of the kingdom is undertaken, he claims, so that “future strife / May
be prevented now” (I, i), and the love test marked the formal entry into his
planned retirement.
These efforts to shape the future of the family seem to reflect a conviction
that there are certain critical moments upon which a whole train of
subsequent events depends, moments whose enabling conditions may be
irrecoverable and whose consequences may be irreversible. Such a
conviction is formally expressed most often in relation to great public events,
but its influence is more widespread, extending, for example, to rhetorical
training, religious belief, and, I would suggest, child rearing. Parents must be
careful to watch for what we may call, to adapt the rhetorical term, kairotic
moments and to grasp the occasion for action. Hence Francis Wayland,
wishing to alter his son's nature for life, “resolved to seize upon the first
favorable opportunity which presented, for settling the question of authority
between us.” Had the father not done so, he would not only have diminished
his own position but risked the destruction of his child's spiritual and
physical being. Moreover, Wayland adds, had he received his stubborn child
on any other terms than “the unconditional surrender of his will,” he would
have permitted the formation of a topsy-turvy world in which his entire
family would have submitted to the caprices of an infant: “He must have been
made the center of a whole system. A whole family under the control of a
child 15 months old!” This carnivalesque reversal of roles would then have
invited further insurrections, for “my other children and every member of my
family would have been entitled to the same privilege.” “Hence,” Wayland
concludes, “there would have been as many supreme authorities as there
were individuals, and contention to the uttermost must have ensued.”
King Lear depicts something very much like such a world turned upside
down: Lear, as the Fools says, has made his daughters his mothers, and they
employ on him, as in a nightmare, those disciplinary techniques deemed
appropriate for “a slippery age, full of passion, rashness, wilfulness.” “Old
fools are babes again,” says Goneril, “and must be us'd / With checks as
flatteries, when they are seen abus'd” (I, iii). In the carnival tradition,
tolerated—if uneasily—by the medieval church and state, such reversals of
role, provided they were temporary, could be seen as restorative, renewing
the proper order of society by releasing pent-up frustrations and potentially
disruptive energies. As we know from a family account, even Francis
Wayland could allow his children occasional bursts of festive inversion,
always returning in the end to the supreme paternal authority that his early
discipline had secured. But in Lear the role reversal is permanent, and its
effect is the disintegration of the entire kingdom. Wayland similarly links
permanent disorder in the family to chaos in the political, moral, and
theological realms; indeed his loving struggle with his son offers, he
suggests, a precise and resonant analogy to God's struggle with the sinner: it
is infinitely kind in God to resist the sinner's will, “for if he were not
resisted, he would destroy the happiness of the universe and himself
together.”
Here again, in Wayland's conviction that the fate of the universe may be
linked to the power struggle in his nursery, we may hear an echo of Lear:
O Heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if you yourselves are old,
Make it your cause; send down and take my part.
(II, iv)

Of course, as these very lines suggest, what is assumed in Wayland is deeply

problematical in Lear: the fictive nature of the play, reinforced by its
specifically pagan setting, seems to have licensed Shakespeare to anatomize
the status and the underlying motives of virtually all of the elements that we
have noted as common to the two texts. This difference is crucial, and it
comes as no surprise that King Lear is more profound than Francis
Wayland's account of his paternal authority: celebration of Shakespeare's
profundity is an institutionalized rite of civility in our culture. We tend to
assume, however, that Shakespearean self-consciousness and irony lead to a
radical transcendence of the network of social conditions, paradigms, and
practices in the plays. I would argue, by contrast, that Renaissance theatrical
representation itself is fully implicated in this network and that Shakespeare's
self-consciousness is in significant ways bound up with the institutions and
the symbology of power it anatomizes.
But if its local ideological situation, its historical embeddedness, is so
crucial to Shakespeare's play, what accounts for the similarities I have
sketched between King Lear and Wayland's family narrative? The
explanation lies first in the fact that nineteenth-century evangelical child-
rearing techniques are the heirs of more widely diffused child-rearing
techniques in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Wayland's
practices may be seen almost fully articulated in a work like John Robinson's
Of Children and Their Education, published in 1628 though written some
years earlier—and second in the fact that the Renaissance English drama was
one of the cultural institutions that expressed and fashioned just those
qualities that we have identified as enabling the familial love test in the first
place. That is, the mode of the drama, quite apart from any specific content,
depended upon and fostered in its audience observation, the close reading of
gesture and speech as manifestations of character and intention; planning, a
sensitivity to the consequences of action (i.e., plot) and to kairotic moments
(i.e., rhetoric); and a sense of resonance, the conviction, rooted in the
drama's medieval inheritance, that cosmic meanings were bound up with
local and particular circumstances.
I am not, of course, suggesting that the nineteenth-century American
minister was fashioned by the Renaissance theater (a theater his seventeenth-
century religious forebears detested and sought to close) nor that without the
theater Renaissance child-rearing techniques would have been far different.
But the theater was not merely the passive reflector of social forces that lay
entirely outside of it; rather, like all forms of art, indeed like all utterances,
the theater was itself a social event. Artistic expression is never perfectly
self-contained and abstract, nor can it be derived satisfactorily from the
subjective consciousness of an isolated creator. Collective actions, ritual
gestures, paradigms of relationship, and shared images of authority penetrate
the work of art and shape it from within, while conversely the socially
overdetermined work of art, along with a multitude of other institutions and
utterances, contributes to the formation, realignment, and transmission of
social practices.
Works of art are, to be sure, marked off in our culture from ordinary
utterances, but this demarcation is itself a communal event and signals not the
effacement of the social but rather its successful absorption into the work by
implication or articulation. This absorption—the presence within the work of
its social being—makes it possible, as Bakhtin has argued, for art to survive
the disappearance of its enabling social conditions, where ordinary
utterance, more dependent upon the extraverbal pragmatic situation, drifts
rapidly toward insignificance or incomprehensibility. Hence art's genius for
survival, its delighted reception by audiences for whom it was never
intended, does not signal its freedom from all other domains of life, nor does
its inward articulation of the social confer upon it a formal coherence
independent of the world outside its boundaries. On the contrary, artistic
form itself both expresses and fashions social evaluations and practices.
Thus the Renaissance theater does not by virtue of the content of a
particular play reach across a void to touch the Renaissance family; rather
the theater is itself already saturated with social significance and hence with
the family as the period's central social institution. Conversely, the theater
contributes, in a small but by no means entirely negligible way, to the formal
condensation and expression of patterns of observation, planning, and a sense
of resonance. Hence it is fitting that when Cordelia resists Lear's paternal
demand, she does so in an antitheatrical gesture, a refusal to perform: the
theater and the family are simultaneously at stake.
To these shared patterns that link the quasi-mythical family of King Lear
to the prosaic and amply documented family of Francis Wayland, we may
now add four further interlocking features of Wayland's account that are more
closely tied not to the mode of the theater as a whole but to the specific form
and content of Shakespeare's tragedy: these are the absence or displacement
of the mother, an affirmation of absolute paternal authority, an overriding
interest in the will and hence in differentiating voluntary from merely forced
compliance, and a belief in salutary anxiety.
Francis Wayland's wife was alive in 1831, but she is entirely, even
eerily, missing from his account. Where was she during the long ordeal? In
part her absence must depend upon her husband's understanding of the
theological significance of the incident: in Francis Wayland's Christianity,
there is no female intercessor, no Mother of Mankind to appeal to the stern
Father for mercy upon a wayward child. Even if Mrs. Wayland did in fact try
to temper (or reinforce) her husband's actions, he might well have regarded
such intervention as irrelevant. Moreover, we may speculate that the timing
of the incident—what we have called the perception of the kairotic moment
—is designed precisely to avoid such irrelevant interventions. We do not
know when any of the Wayland children were weaned, but fifteen months
would seem about the earliest age at which the disciplinary withdrawal of
food—the piece of bread and the cup of milk—could be undertaken without
involving the mother or the nurse.
Thus the father is able entirely to displace the nurturing female body and
with this displacement make manifest his “supreme authority” in the family, a
micropolitics that, as we have seen, has its analogue both in the human world
outside the home and in the divine realm. Between the law of the father and
the law of God there is a perfect fit; between the father's authority and
worldly authorities there is a more complicated relation, since Wayland,
though an absolutist within his family, could not invoke in Jacksonian
America a specific model of absolute power. The most he can do is to
invoke, in effect, a generalized image of the social world and of the child as
misfit: had his son been left unchecked, he “would soon have entered a world
where other and more powerful beings than he would have opposed his
will, and his disposition which I had cherished must have made him
miserable as long as he lived.”
This social vision does not mean that Waylaid's primary interest is in
outward compliance; on the contrary, a “forced yielding,” as he terms it, is
worthless. “Our voluntary service he requires,” says Milton's Raphael of the
Divine Father in Paradise Lost,
Not our necessitated, such with him
Finds no acceptance, nor can find, for how
Can hearts, not free, be tri'd whether they serve
Willing or no . . .
. . . freely we serve.
Because we freely love.

The proper goal is conversion, and to achieve this the father cannot rely on
physical compulsion. He employs instead a technique of disciplinary
kindness designed to show the child that his misery is entirely self-inflicted
and can only be relieved by a similarly voluntary and inward surrender. In
short, Wayland attempts to generate in his son a salutary anxiety that will lead
to a transformation of the will.
With salutary anxiety we return powerfully to the mode and the content of
King Lear. The very practice of tragedy depends upon a communal
conviction that anxiety may be profitably and even pleasurably cultivated.
That is, tragedy goes beyond the usual philosophical and religious
consolations for affliction, and both exemplifies and perfects techniques for
the creation or intensification of affliction. To justify such techniques,
Renaissance artists could appeal to the theoretical account of tragedy that
originated with Aristotle and was substantially elaborated in the sixteenth
century, especially in Italy. But like most such theories, this one was inert
until it intersected with a set of powerful social practices in the period.
From the perspective of Wayland's account, we may say that the most
enduring of these practices is the Protestant cultivation of a sense of sin, the
deliberate heightening of an anxiety that can only be relieved by a divine
grace whose effect can only be felt by one who has experienced the anxiety.
(I should emphasize that I am speaking here not simply of a set of theological
propositions but of a program, prescribed in great detail and carried out by
English Protestants from Tyndale onward.) To this religious practice, we
may add the child-rearing techniques that also appear in Wayland's account,
techniques that once again made a self-conscious and programmatic attempt
to arouse anxiety for the child's ultimate good. But what is lost by early
nineteenth-century America is the practice of salutary anxiety at the symbolic
center of society, that is, in the characteristic operations of royal power. That
power, concentrated and personalized, aroused anxiety not only as the
negative limit but as the positive condition of its functioning. The monarchy,
let us remind ourselves, did not conceive its purpose as the furthering of the
subject's pursuit of happiness, nor was the political center of society a point
at which all tensions and contradictions disappeared. On the contrary,
Elizabethan and Jacobean charismatic absolutism battened on as well as
suffered from the anxiety that arose from the instability of favor, the
unresolved tensions in the religious settlement, the constantly proclaimed
threats of subversion, invasion, and civil war, the spectacular public
maimings and executions, and even the conspicuous gap between the
monarch's ideological claim to perfect wisdom, beauty, and power and the
all-too-visible limitations of the actual Elizabeth and James. The obedience
required of the subject consisted not so much in preserving a genuine
ignorance of this gap but in behaving as if the gap, though fully recognized,
did not exist. The pressure of such a performance, demanded by the
monarch's paradoxical yoking of the language of love and the language of
coercion and registered in the subject's endless effusions of strained but not
entirely hypocritical admiration, was itself an enhancement of royal power.
Throughout his career Shakespeare displays the deepest sensitivity to this
production of salutary anxiety, a production he simultaneously questions and
assimilates to his own authorial power. The fullest metatheatrical
explorations of the phenomenon are in Measure for Measure and The
Tempest, where both Dukes systematically awaken anxiety in others and
become, for this reason, images of the dramatist himself. But Shakespeare's
fullest embodiment of the practice is King Lear, and the vast critical
literature that has grown up around the play, since the restoration of the text
in the early nineteenth century, bears eloquent witness to the power of this
anxiety to generate tireless expressions of love. King Lear characteristically
incorporates several powerful and complex representations of salutary
anxiety, the most notable of which, for our purposes, is the love test itself, a
ritual whose intended function seems to have been to allay the retiring
monarch's anxiety by arousing it in others. As the opening words of the play
make clear, the division of the kingdom has in effect already taken place,
with the shares carefully weighed. Lear's pretence that this prearranged legal
agreement is a contest—“which of you shall we say doth love us most?”—
infuses symbolic uncertainty into a situation where apparently no real
uncertainty exists. This is confirmed by his persistence in the test even when
its declared occasion has been rendered wholly absurd by the disposition of
the first two-thirds of the kingdom, complete with declarations that
possession is “perpetual,” “hereditary ever.” Lear wants his children to
experience the anxiety of a competition for his bounty without having to
endure any of the actual consequences of such a competition; he wants, that
is, to produce in them something like the effect of a work of art, where
emotions run high and practical effects seem negligible.
Why should Lear want his children, even his “joy” Cordelia, to
experience such anxiety? Shakespeare's sources, going back to the distant
folk tale with its salt motif, suggest that Lear wishes his full value to be
recognized and that he stages the love test to enforce this recognition, which
is crucially important to him because he is about to abdicate and hence lose
the power to compel the deference of his children. Marks of deference such
as kneeling for blessings, removing the hat, and sitting only when granted
leave to do so, were of great significance in medieval and early modern
families, though John Aubrey testifies that by the mid-seventeenth century
they seemed strained and arbitrary. They figured as part of a complex,
interlocking system of public signs of respect for wealth, caste, and, at
virtually every level of society, age. The period had a deep gerontological
bias. It told itself constantly that by the will of God and the natural order of
things authority belonged to the old, and it contrived, through such practices
as deferral of marriage, prolonged apprenticeships, and systematic exclusion
of the young from office, to ensure that this proper arrangement of society be
observed. At stake, it was thought, was not only a societal arrangement—the
protection, in an economy of scarcity, of the material interests of
gerontological hierarchy against the counterclaims of the young—but the
structure and meaning of a world where the old in each generation formed a
link with the old of the preceding generation and so, by contiguity, reached
back to the ideal, sanctified order at the origin of time.
But paradoxically the late Middle Ages and the early modern period also
kept telling itself that without the control of property and the means of
production, age's claim to authority was pathetically vulnerable to the
ruthless ambitions of the young. Sermons and, more generally, the writings of
moralists over several centuries provide numerous monitory tales of parents
who turn their wealth over to their children and are, in consequence, treated
brutally. “Your father were a fool,” Gremio, echoing the moral of these tales,
tells Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, “To give thee all, and in his waning
age / Set foot under thy table” (II, i).
The story of King Lear in its numerous retellings from at least the twelfth
century on seems to have served precisely as one of these admonitions, and
Shakespeare's Edmund, in the forged letter he passes off as Edgar's, gives
full voice to the fears of the old, that is, to their fantasy of what the young,
beneath the superficial marks of deference, are really thinking:
This policy and reverence of age makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps our
fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. I begin to find an idle and fond bondage in the
oppression of aged tyranny, who sways, not as it hath power, but as it is suffr'd. (I, ii).

This recurrent nightmare of the old seems to challenge not only the material
well-being of fathers but the conception of the natural order of things to
which the old appeal in justification of their prerogatives. “Fathers fear,”
writes Pascal, “that the natural love of their children can be erased. What
kind of nature is this, that can thus be erased? Custom is a second nature that
destroys the first. But what is nature? Why isn't custom natural? I am very
much afraid that this nature is only a first custom, as custom is a second
nature.” Shakespeare's King Lear is haunted by this fear, voiced not in the
relative privacy of the Pensées but in the public agony of family and state
relations: “. . . let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is
there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (Ill, vi).
But it would be misleading simply to associate Shakespeare's play with
this uneasiness without specifying the practical measures that medieval and
early modern fathers undertook to protect themselves when retirement,
always frowned upon, could not be avoided. Such situations arose most
frequently in Shakespeare's own class of origin, that is, among artisans and
small landowners whose income depended upon continual personal
productivity. Faced with a precipitous decline in such productivity, the old
frequently did have to transfer a farm or workshop to the young, but for all
the talk of the natural privileges and supernatural protection of the aged, there
was, as we have seen, remarkably little confidence in either the inherent or
customary rights of parents. On the contrary, as Alan Macfarlane has noted in
The Origins of English Individualism, “contemporaries seem to have been
well aware that without legal guarantees, parents had no rights whatsoever.”
There could even be a ritual acknowledgment of this fact, as testimony in a
thirteenth-century lawsuit suggests: having agreed to give his daughter in
marriage to Hugh, with half of his land, the widower Anseline and the
married couple were to live together in one house. “And the same Anseline
went out of the house and handed over to them the door by the hasp, and at
once begged lodging out of charity.”
Once a father had given up his land, he became, even in the house that
had once been his own, what was called a “sojourner.” The connotations of
the word are suggested by its use in the Authorized Version of the Old
Testament: “We are strangers before Thee, and sojourners, as were all our
fathers. Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding” (1
Chron. 29).
Threatened with such a drastic loss of their status and authority, parents
facing retirement turned, not surprisingly, to the law, obtaining contracts or
maintenance agreements by which, in return for the transfer of family
property, children undertook to provide food, clothing, and shelter. The
extent of parental anxiety may be gauged by the great specificity of many of
these requirements—so many yards of woolen cloth, pounds of coal, or
bushels of grain—and by the pervasive fear of being turned out of the house
in the wake of a quarrel. The father, who has been, in Sir Edward Coke's
phrase, “the guardian by nature” of his children, now has these children for
his legal guardians. The maintenance agreement is essentially a medieval
device, linked to feudal contractualism, to temper the power of this new
guardianship by stipulating that the children are only “depositaries” of the
paternal property, so that, in the words of William West's early seventeenth-
century legal manual Simboleography, “the self same thing [may] be restored
whensoeuer it shall please him that so leaueth it.” Thus the maintenance
agreement can “reserve” to the father some right or interest in the property
that he has conveyed to his children.
We are, of course, very far from the social world of King Lear, which
does not represent the milieu of yeomen and artisans, but I would argue that
Shakespeare's play is powerfully situated in the midst of precisely the
concerns of the makers of these maintenance agreements: the terror of being
turned out of doors or of becoming a stranger even in one's own house; the
fear of losing the food, clothing, and shelter necessary for survival, let alone
dignity; the humiliating loss of parental authority; the dread, particularly
powerful in a society that adhered to the principle of gerontological
hierarchy, of being supplanted by the young. Lear's royal status does not
cancel but rather intensifies these concerns: he will “invest” in Goneril and
Regan, along with their husbands, his “power,/Pre-eminence, and all the
large effects/That troop with majesty,” but he wants to retain the hundred
knights and “The name and all th'addition to a king” (I, i). He wishes, that is,
to avoid at all costs the drastic loss of status that inevitably attended
retirement in the early modern period, and his maddened rage, later in the
play, is a response not only to his daughters’ vicious ingratitude but to the
horror of being reduced to the position of an Anseline:
Ask her forgiveness?
Do you but mark how this becomes the house:
“Dear daughter, I confess that I am old;
Age is unnecessary: on my knees I beg
That you'll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.”
(II, iv)
His daughter, in response, unbendingly proposes that he “return and
sojourn”—a word whose special force in this context we have now
recovered—“with my sister.”
Near the climax of this terrible scene in which Goneril and Regan, by
relentlessly diminishing his retinue, in effect strip away his social identity,
Lear speaks as if he had actually drawn up a maintenance agreement with is
daughters:

Lear I gave you all—

Regan And in good time you gave it.
Lear Made you my guardians, my depositaries, But kept a
reservation to be follow'd
With such a number. (II, iv)

But there is no maintenance agreement between Lear and his daughters; there
could be none, since as Lear makes clear in the first scene, he will not as
absolute monarch allow anything “To come betwixt our sentence and our
power” (I, i), and an autonomous system of laws would have constituted just
such an intervention. For a contract in English law implied bargain
consideration, that is, the reciprocity inherent in a set of shared obligations
and limits, and this understanding that a gift could only be given with the
expectation of receiving something in return is incompatible with Lear's
sense of his royal prerogative, just as it is incompatible with the period's
absolutist conception of paternal power and divine power.
Lear's power draws upon the network of rights and obligations that is
sketched by the play's pervasive language of service, but as Kent's
experience in the first scene makes clear, royal absolutism is at the same time
at war with this feudal legacy. Shakespeare's play emphasizes Lear's claim to
unbounded power, even at the moment of his abdication, since his “darker
purpose” sets itself above all constraints upon the royal will and pleasure.
What enables him to lay aside his claim to rule, the scene suggests, is the
transformation of power into a demand for unbounded love, a love that then
takes the place of the older contractual bond between parents and children.
Goneril and Regan understand Lear's demand as an aspect of absolutist
theater; hence in their flattering speeches they discursively perform the
impossibility of ever adequately expressing their love: “Sir, I love you more
than word can wield the matter / . . . A love that makes breath poor and
speech unable; / Beyond all manner of so much I love you” (I, i). This
cunning representation of the impossibility of representation contaminates
Cordelia's inability to speak by speaking it; that is, Goneril's words occupy
the discursive space that Cordelia would have to claim for herself if she
were truly to satisfy her father's demand. Consequently, any attempt to
represent her silent love is already tainted: representation is theatricalization
is hypocrisy and hence is misrepresentation. Even Cordelia's initial aside
seems to long for the avoidance of language altogether and thus for an escape
from the theater. Her words have an odd internal distance, as if they were
spoken by another, and more precisely as if the author outside the play were
asking himself what he should have his character say and deciding that she
should say nothing: “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent” (I, i).
But this attempt to remain silent—to surpass her sisters and satisfy her father
by refusing to represent her love—is rejected, as is her subsequent attempt to
say nothing, that is, literally to speak the word “nothing.” Driven into
discourse by her father's anger, Cordelia then appeals not like her sisters to
an utter dependence upon paternal love but to a “bond” that is both
reciprocal and limited. Against paternal and monarchical absolutism,
Cordelia opposes in effect the ethos of the maintenance agreement, and this
opposition has for Lear the quality of treason.
Lear, who has, as he thinks, given all to this children, demands all from
them. In place of a contract, he has substituted the love test. He wants, that is,
not only the formal marks of deference that publicly acknowledge his value,
but also the inward and absolute tribute of the heart. It is in the spirit of this
demand that he absorbs into himself the figure of the mother; there can be no
division for Lear between authority and love. But as the play's tragic logic
reveals, Lear cannot have both the public deference and the inward love of
his children. The public deference is only as good as the legal constraints
that Lear's absolute power paradoxically deprives him of, and the inward
love cannot be adequately represented in social discourse, licensed by
authority and performed in the public sphere, enacted as in a court or theater.
Lear had thought to set his rest—the phrase means both to stake everything
and to find response—on Cordelia's “kind nursery,” but only in his fantasy of
perpetual imprisonment with his daughter does he glimpse, desperately and
pathetically, what he sought. That is, only when he has been decisively
separated from his public authority and locked away from the world, only
when the direct link between family and state power has been broken, can
Lear hope, in the dream of the prison as nursery, for his daughter's sustaining
and boundless love.
With this image of the prison as nursery we return for the last time to
Francis Wayland, who, to gain the love of his child, used the nursery as a
prison. We return, then, to the crucial differences, as we sketched them,
between the early seventeenth-and early nineteenth-century versions of
salutary anxiety, differences between a culture in which the theater was a
centrally significant and emblematic artistic practice, profoundly linked with
family and power, and a culture in which the theater had shrivelled to
marginal entertainment. The love test for Wayland takes place in the privacy
of the nursery where he shuts up his fifteen-month-old infant. In consequence,
what is sought by the father is not the representation of love in public
discourse, but things prior to and separate from language: the embrace, the
kiss, the taking of food, the inarticulate moaning after the father when he
leaves the room. It is only here, before verbal representation, that the love
test could be wholly successful, here that the conditional, reciprocal, social
world of the maintenance agreement could be decisively replaced by the
child's absolute and lifelong love. And, we might add, the father did not in
this case have to renounce the public tribute entirely; he had only to wait until
he ceased to exist. For upon the death of Francis Wayland, Heman Lincoln
Wayland collaborated in writing a reverential two-volume biography of his
father, a son's final monument to familial love. Lear, by contrast, dies still
looking on his daughter's lips for the words that she never speaks.

NOTES
1 Wayland's letter is reprinted in full in William G. McLoughlin, “Evangelical Childrearing in the Age of
Jackson: Francis Wayland's Views on When and How to Subdue the Willfulness of Children,”
Journal of Social History 9 (1975), pp. 20–43; it was first brought to my attention by Philip
Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and
the Self in Early America (New York, 1977).
 6

MURDERING PEASANTS:
STATUS, GENRE, AND
THE REPRESENTATION
OF REBELLION

In 1525, determined to set his country's art on a rational footing by instructing

its youth in the skills of applied geometry and perspective, Albrecht Dürer
published his Painter's Manual, “A Manual of Measurement of Lines,
Areas, and Solids by Means of Compass and Ruler.” Among the detailed
instructions—for the determination of the center of a circle, the construction
of spirals and egg-shaped lines, the design of tile patterns, the building of a
sundial, and so forth—I would like the dwell upon Dürer's plans for several
civil monuments, for, as I hope to show, these plans provide a suggestive
introduction to the problematic relation in the Renaissance between genre
and historical experience.
Dürer's first proposal is the most straightforward and familiar: a
monument to commemorate a victory. “It happens frequently,” he writes, “that
after a victorious battle a memorial or a column is erected at the place where
the enemy was vanquished in order to commemorate the event and to inform
posterity about what the enemy was like.”1 If the enemy was rich and
powerful, Dürer notes, “some of the booty might be used for the construction
of the column,” as the Romans had done many centuries before. Insofar as
this conception seems classical, it partakes of a cultural dream—the dream
of a return to ancient dignity and glory— that extends beyond commemorative
architecture. Monuments of this type not only record the achievements of the
victors and remind the vanquished of their defeat but provide a proper setting
for the noble actions of those who live in their shadows. As such these
columns have a special appropriateness to literary tragedy, the genre that
concerns itself with the actions and the destiny of rulers. Hence when
imagining a stage fit for the performance of classical tragedies, Sebastiano
Serlio draws a city-scape dominated by high triumphal columns.2
But Dürer's proposed column is anything but classical in design: it
consists of a massive stone block which supports a ten-foot cannon of the
type known as a mortar, which in turn supports a twenty-one-foot cannon
surmounted by four coats of armor with high plumes (fig. 1). Is the design
seriously intended or a capriccio? Difficult to say. Stranger memorials to
military triumphs were actually erected, but Dürer's plan, which includes
powder kegs and cannon balls, is slightly unsettling, as if the artist were
wryly—or is it only inadvertently?—recording the triumph of military
ordnance over human heroism itself. Where we might have expected coats of
arms, we find only coats of armor. Dürer had said that the monument should
inform posterity about what the enemy was like; perhaps the enemy, as
Ariosto thought, was the cannon itself.3 The design, in other words, seems to
generate at least the possibility of an internal distance, a gap, between the
form of the monument and its ethos. From the midst of the genre of heroic
commemoration, there arise doubts about the possibility of sustaining the
genre in its traditional form. A victory column, like any other artistic genre,
is a received collective practice, but the social conditions of this practice—
both the circumstances that make the genre possible and the objects that the
genre represents—may change in such a way as to undermine the form. Here
the technology of modern warfare literally takes over the column and even in
the act of expressing the genre makes it seem rather obsolete.
Figure 1 Albrecht Dürer. “Monument to Commemorate a Victory” (in The Painter's Manual, 1525).

That Dürer was quite conscious of the complex generic implications of

his monument is suggested by the two subsequent designs, a “Monument to
Commemorate a Victory over the Rebellious Peasants” and a “Memorial to a
Drunkard.” If the military monument we have just considered is the proper
backdrop to a tragedy, the drunkard's monument—which includes a beer
barrel, covered by a board game, surmounted by a basket filled with bread,
butter, and cheese—is obviously fit for a comedy, one where mockery and
celebration (as with Falstaff) are held in delightful balance (fig. 2). The wit
of this design lies not only in its mock heroic mode but in the extreme
improbability of its ever being built: neither a notorious drunkard, nor his
family and friends could be expected to foot the bill for such a
commemoration. Once again, though now in a more pronounced and
unambiguous way, the design of the commemorative column undermines the
genre itself. This is quite literally a utopian project, a monument that could
be built nowhere, as Dürer himself suggests when he explains that he has
conceived the design von abenteur, for the sake of adventure or oddity.
[Latin translation of 1532 translates “Haec delectationis causa,” i.e., for
amusement's sake.4]
Most interesting of all, between the heroic and mock-heroic memorials,
and hence between the tragic and the comic, Dürer places the following
remarkable design whose description I will quote in full:
If someone wishes to erect a victory monument after vanquishing rebellious peasants, he might use
paraphernalia according to the following instructions: Place a quadrangular stone block measuring
ten feet in width and four feet in height on a quadrangular stone slab which measures twenty feet
in length and one foot in height. On the four corners of the ledge place tied-up cows, sheep, pigs,
etc. But on the four corners of the stone block place four baskets, filled with butter, eggs, onions,
and herbs, or whatever you like. In the center of this stone block place a second one, measuring
seven feet in length and one foot in height. On top of this second block place a strong chest four
feet high, measuring six and a half feet wide at the bottom and four feet wide at the top. Then
place a kettle upside down on top of the chest. The kettle's diameter should be four and a half feet
at the rim and three feet at its bottom. Surmount the kettle with a cheese bowl which is half a foot
high and two and a half feet in diameter at the bottom. Cover this bowl with a thick plate that
protrudes beyond its rim. On the plate, place a keg of butter which is three feet high and has a
diameter of a foot and a half at the bottom, and of only a foot at the top. Its spout should protrude
beyond this. On the top of the butter keg, place a well-formed milk jug, two and a half feet high,
and with a diameter which is one foot at its bulge, half a foot at its top, and is wider at its bottom.
Into this jug put four rods branching into forks on top and extending five and a half feet in height, so
that the rods will protrude by half a foot, and then hang peasants’ tools on it—like hoes, pitchforks,
flails, etc. The rods are to be surmounted by a chicken basket, topped by a lard tub upon which sits
a melancholy peasant with a sword stuck into his back. (fig. 3)
Figure 2 Albrecht Dürer. “Memorial to a Drunkard” (in The Painter's Manual, 1525).

How are we to take this? To our eyes, the monument seems to be the
overpowering commemoration not of a victory but of a vicious betrayal. The
life-sustaining fruits of the peasant's labor are depicted in scrupulous detail
—livestock, cheese, milk, butter, eggs, lard, vegetables—as are his tools,
carefully bound up, in Dürer's accompanying drawing, with a sheaf of ripe
grain. There, on top of it all, the peasant sits, alone, hunched over, unarmed,
stabbed in the back. In his solitude, misery, and helplessness, he is the very
opposite of the great ruling class nightmare in the Renaissance: the
marauding horde, the many-headed multitude, the insatiate, giddy, and
murderous crowd. And as there is no image of threat, so there seems to be no
image of triumph: no cross rises above the defeated figure, nor does the
column bear any symbol of secular order restored. Instead the column itself
is composed of all that the peasant provides, while the provider is run
through with a sword whose angle of entry suggests that the killer was
standing above as well as behind him, in other words, that the victim was
struck treacherously while sitting—resting, perhaps, after his labor.

Figure 3 Albrecht Dürer. “Monument to Commemorate a Victory over the Rebellious Peasants” (in
The Painter's Manual, 1525; in Karl-Adolf Knappe, Dürer: The Complete Engravings,
Etchings, and Woodcuts, London, Thames and Hudson, 1965, p. 369).

In sixteenth-century German art there is, of course, one supreme figure of

tragic betrayal, and it is precisely this figure that Dürer's drawing evokes: the
seated peasant, with his left arm wearily resting on his left thigh and his right
arm supporting his drooping head, is closely modelled on the iconographic
type known as “Christ in Distress.” Dürer himself used this figure on the title
page of the Little Passion (1511; fig. 4), and there is a moving example in
limewood by Hans Leinberger (fig. 5), possibly dating from the year of the
Painter's Manual. If one dressed Leinberger's bleeding Christ in tattered
clothes and substituted a soft cap for the crown of thorns, one would have
almost exactly Dürer's image of the murdered peasant.5
This is the historical monument that cries out to be built that never gets
built because only the victors pay for monuments: it must remain a sketch, a
design in a painter's manual, a dark fantasy. The sketch can speak bitterly
about more than one period in the history of the European peasantry, but in
1525, in Germany, it refers overwhelmingly to a single, cataclysmic event,
then near its bloody close: the Peasants’ War. In 1524 and 1525 thousands of
peasants and artisans rebelled throughout Swabia, Franconia, and Thuringia.
Aroused in part by the struggle of both spiritual and temporal rulers in
Germany to free themselves from servitude to Rome, the peasants determined
to free themselves from their own servitude. They attacked crucial elements
of the existing social, religious, and political system and set about to
transform the whole agrarian order. The famous Twelve Articles of the
Upper Swabian peasants demanded that the entire community have the power
to choose a pastor, that their tithes be distributed to the poor and needy in the
same villages in which these tithes were collected, that they be allowed to
hunt, fish, and gather wood, that rents be regulated and the death tax
abolished, that enclosures of common fields be stopped. Above all, as Luther
had proclaimed that Christ had purchased with his own blood the freedom of
all Christians, so the peasants proclaimed that they would no longer be
owned as property and demanded the abolition of serfdom and the feudal
corviée.6
 Figures 4 and 5

Figures 4 and 5 Top: Albrecht Dürer. “The Man of Sorrows Seated” (title page; proof, 1st state) from
The Little Passion, 1511; in Karl-Adolf Knappe, Dürer: The Complete Engravings,
Etchings, and Woodcuts, London, Thames and Hudson, 1965, p. 254. Bottom: Hans
Leinberger, “Christ in Distress,” ca. 1525 (in Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of
Renaissance Germany, 1475–1525, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, plate 99).
 Though he seemed at moments to sympathize with many of these
demands, Luther quickly spoke out against the rebels. “You assert that no one
is to be the serf of anyone else,” he writes to his “dear friends,” the peasants,
“because Christ has made us all free. That is making Christian freedom a
completely physical matter. Did not Abraham and other patriarchs and
prophets have slaves? Read what St. Paul teaches about servants, who, at
that time, were all slaves.”7 When the peasants persisted in confusing
spiritual and worldly freedom, collapsing the crucial distinction between the
Two Kingdoms, Luther wrote in 1525 his notorious pamphlet “Against the
Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.” The rebels, he declares, are
the agents of the devil, and their revolt is a prelude to the destruction of the
world: “Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or
openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish
than a rebel.”8
We may assume that the German princes—who saw to it that over
100,000 peasants were slaughtered in the crushing of the rebellion and its
aftermath—did not greatly need Luther's encouragement, but they
enthusiastically cited his treatise and may, for all we know, have found
genuine spiritual consolation in it. “These are strange times,” Luther
declares, “when a prince can win heaven with bloodshed better than other
men with prayer!”9 As for the rebel peasants and their sympathizers, those
who survived bitterly accused Luther of betraying them. And it is a sense of
betrayal, we have said, that suffuses Dürer's monument.
But it is precisely here, at the moment we begin to flesh out the historical
situation, that our understanding of Dürer's sketch begins to encounter
obstacles. For while it is possible that certain of his associates were
sympathetic with the peasants’ cause,10 there are no comparable indications
of solidarity, overt or covert, elsewhere in Dürer's art or writings. “Dürer
never wavered for a moment in his loyalty to Luther,” Panofsky claims,11 and
there is evidence, in a remarkable pen and watercolor sketch done in the year
of the Painter's Manual, that at the time of the Peasants’ War Dürer shared
Luther's fear of an impending apocalypse (fig. 6). Dürer writes under the
drawing:
In the year 1525, on the night between the Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsun, I dreamed that
I saw four great columns of water descending from heaven. The first fell most furiously, with a
dreadful noise, about four miles away from me, and flooded all the countryside. I was so terrified
 by it that I woke. Then the others fell. They were very great. Sometimes they fell far off,
sometimes near. And they descended from such a height that they seemed to fall slowly. The falls
were accompanied by so much wind and flying spray that when I awakened my whole body still
shook with fear. It was long before I regained my equanimity. On rising in the morning I painted
what I had seen. May God mend all.12

At the height of the Peasants’ War and haunted by such hallucinatory fears
of apocalyptic inundation, Dürer could have taken pleasure, unmixed by
sympathy or ambivalence, in imagining a monument to commemorate victory
over rebellious peasants. What we took for almost self-evident marks of
betrayal would, in such a mood, be the details of a wish-fulfillment fantasy:
the terrifying mobs have been shattered into defenseless individuals like the
unarmed peasant; the rebel no longer demands anything but sits in melancholy
resignation to his fate; and that fate is justly represented by the sword. “Now
look!” exclaims Luther, “A rebel is a man who runs at his head and lord with
a naked sword. No one should wait, then, until his lord commands him to
defend him, but the first person who can, ought to take the initiative and run
in and stab the rascal, and not worry about committing murder.” And as if he
too were thinking about designing a monument to commemorate such an act,
Luther remarks that in the kingdom of the world—that is, in the kingdom of
God's judgments upon the wicked—the appropriate “tool is not a wreath of
roses or a flower of love, but a naked sword; and a sword is a symbol of
wrath, severity, and punishment.”13
Figure 6 Albrecht Dürer. “Vision of an Inundation,” 1525. Water-color and manuscript. Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum.

If Dürer's design was conceived in the spirit of Luther's remarks—and I

think it probable that it was—then the artist did not intend to represent the
betrayal of the peasants. On the contrary, we may say that the monument
actually participates in that betrayal. The bitter irony we initially perceived
was constituted less by concrete evidence of Dürer's subversiveness than by
our own sympathy for the peasants, sympathy conditioned by our century's
ideology, by recent historical scholarship, and, no doubt above all, by our
safe distance from the fear and loathing of 1525. But this acknowledgment,
though necessary, seems inadequate, for our solidarity with early sixteenth-
century German peasants is of interest only insofar as it seems to have been
called forth by Dürer's monument and not simply read into it. The question
then is how Dürer could have created a brilliant, detailed, and coherent
design that could lend itself to a strong interpretation so much at odds with
his own probable intentions, a design that has become in effect two quite
different monuments.
Our interpretive strategy here must not be to disclaim our response as
anachronistic: there were those in 1525 who could have seen in Dürer's
design precisely what we initially saw in it. Still less should we attempt, in
the name of a “correct” response, to put aside sympathy for the peasants and
recreate in ourselves the murderous loathing that probably inspired the
monument. Rather we should try to understand more fully the historical and
aesthetic contingencies that led to the making of this odd and disturbing
design. Here we must return not to Dürer's own feelings but to the resources
and the pressures of genre. The generic situation will lead us to the elements
in Dürer's work that occasion both its radical discontinuity in relation to
ourselves— and hence make possible the transvaluation of interpretation—
and its continuity. If the latter is less striking than the former—if indeed it
seems all but invisible—it nonetheless makes possible the sense of
strangeness, even exhilaration, that arises from our recognition of the
reversal of meaning. For it is the survival into the late twentieth century of
the commemorative mode—our continued need to represent “historic”
events, to construct monuments in public spaces, to attach plaques to
buildings and erect markers by the roadside—that makes the vicissitudes of
Dürer's design available at all as a significant subject.14
Let us recall that in the Painter's Manual the monument we have been
considering is situated between the high heroic tribute to military victory and
the mock-heroic celebration of the drunkard, the former suited to tragedy and
the latter to comedy. What does the intermediate position signify? I suggest
that a monument to celebrate a victory over rebellious peasants created a
genre problem, a problem to which Dürer was particularly sensitive since he
had already, as we have seen, entertained playful doubts about the more
conventional victory monument. Indeed Dürer may have thought up the
problem as well as undertaken a solution to it because his was a book about
problem-solving: the design takes its place alongside such questions as how
to interlace two solids of the same size so that in each case one point pierces
the corresponding surface of the second solid.15
A victory over rebellious peasants calls for a commemorative column—
after all, the fate of worldly rule, that is human civilization itself, depends
upon this struggle—and yet the enemy is an object of contempt and derision.
The princes and nobles for whom such monuments were built could derive
no dignity from the triumph, any more than they could derive dignity from
killing a mad dog. A heroic encounter is a struggle for honor and must
conform to the code which requires that the combatants be of roughly equal
station. This requirement does not originate in some rudimentary sense of
“fair play” but rather in the symbolic economics of appropriation suggested
by the Church of England hymn: “Conquering Kings their titles take / From
the foes they captive make.”16 “I better brook the loss of brittle life,” gasps
the defeated Hotspur to Hal, “than those proud titles thou hast won of me” (I
Henry IV, 5.4.78–79). But the peasants, of course, have no titles to seize, and
can yield up no trophies fit to adorn the victor's monument. Indeed, in the
economy of honor they are not simply a cipher but a deficit, since even a
defeat at the hands of a prince threatens to confer upon them some of the
prince's store of honor, while what remains of the victorious prince's store
can be tarnished by the unworthy encounter.
Dürer then cannot dignify the peasants in his design by representing them
as worthy enemies, nor can he include an image of the triumphant nobleman,
for the image could only be tarnished by such a base encounter. He could, I
suppose, have chosen more symbolic modes of representation, such as
Hercules slaying the Hydra, but by doing so he would have robbed his design
of its wit, its sense of problem-solving. Dürer had in the surrounding
monuments committed himself to a kind of commemorative realism: the
victory column composed of cannons, the drunkard's of food and drink. To
have abandoned the mode in the peasant's column would, in effect, have
signalled the defeat of his art at the hands of history itself.
Instead Dürer depicts a peasant, but one utterly without signs of honor; he
has been killed in battle perhaps, but it may as well have been in an abattoir.
The victor is spared representation, and even his sword is untainted, for it
has not encountered a base adversary (which would imply face-to-face
combat) but has overtaken him from behind. In a culture sensitive to the
semiotics of execution, the weapon's position would not have gone
unnoticed.17
So extreme a humiliation of a single, unarmed man is difficult to
represent, however, without evoking Christ and hence risking semiotic
contamination of the entire commemorative exercise. Dürer heightens this
risk, as we have seen, by directly modelling his defeated peasant on the
iconographic type of Christ in Distress. This aesthetic decision may signal a
deep ambivalence on Dürer's part, a secret, subversive sympathy with the
vanquished encoded at the very pinnacle of the victor's monument. I do not
think we can rule out this possibility, one that satisfies a perennial longing
since Romanticism to discover that all great artists have allied themselves, if
only indirectly or unconsciously, with the oppressed and revolutionary
masses.18 What is poignant and powerful about Dürer's design is that the
identical signs can be interpreted as signifying both the radical irony of
personal dissent and the harsh celebration of official order. This uncanny
convergence is not, I would suggest, the theoretical condition of all signs, but
the contingent condition of certain signs as particular historical moments,
moments in which the ruling elite, deeply threatened, conjure up images of
repression so harsh that they can double as images of protest.
It is all too easy for us to perceive the possibility of ironic dissent in
Dürer's sketch; the difficult task is to perceive the celebration of order. Thus
the allusion to Christ in Distress at first seems unambiguously sympathetic to
the peasants, but Dürer may have chosen the iconographic type because it
conveyed more powerfully than any other image of the body available in his
culture a mood of utter forsakenness, desolation, and helplessness. He may
have expected his audience to register this mood without concluding that the
peasants were Christlike in innocence or ultimately destined to triumph over
their tormentors. More precisely, he may have felt that the manifest purpose
of the monument itself, the peasant dress, and above all the sword in the back
would abruptly check any drift toward a perception of the vanquished as the
scourged Christ and would leave the viewer with only the potent
representation of defeat.
This strategy depends, to be sure, upon the drastic splitting of a
traditional representation—the leaching-out of the sublime innocence of
Christ from the imagery of battered, weary mourning. But it is by comparable
strategies that the whole design is governed: thus, as we have seen, Dürer
sustains the honor code paradoxically by reversing or cancelling its principal
elements. Here too there is a risk: the reversal or cancellation of the
monument's genre. Far from avoiding this consequence, Dürer's strategy is to
embrace it: insofar as the victory monument suggests epic and tragedy, he
endows it, by composing the column of livestock, farm produce, and tools,
with the signs of pastoral and georgic and the implications of comedy. The
compositional elements have in addition a probable topical reference, for the
peasant's labor was a principal issue in the revolt. With the dead rebel at the
top of the column, the grain may suggest the violent reaffirmation of the
corvée system, while the cattle at the base may imply something akin to
Luther's observation that instead of rising up in revolt, the peasants hereafter
should thank God if they have to give up only one cow to enjoy the other cow
in peace.19
The broader generic implications here are as important as any topical
reference. The pastoral and georgic elements from which the column is
composed function as signs of the pacification of the peasants, a pacification
whose principal means is graphically depicted at the top, and of their
vulnerability and lowliness, their social distance from the armed defenders
of order. (I am reminded of the Fascist inscription still—or once again—
visible beneath the whitewash in Italian villages: “The plough furrows the
land, but the sword defends it.”) The comic implications arise from the
incongruous inclusion of pastoral and georgic elements on a victory column,
just as the humor of the drunkard's memorial consists in the solemn public
representation of the board game, drinking bowls, and bread basket. The lard
tub, butter churn, chicken basket and the like do not in this context suggest the
centrality and importance of agricultural production but rather the producer's
outlandishness, a marginality that insures that no honor will accrue to the
defeated peasant.
If pastoral, georgic, and comedy are both the logical outcome and the
cancellation of the monument's heroic and tragic codes when they are applied
to rebellious peasants, Dürer's design provokes a reciprocal cancellation:
neither the celebration of leisure nor the celebration of labor survives the
sword thrust in the peasant's back, and the laughter that the monument
generates is baffled in the instant it bursts forth. For, even as the occasion
banishes the normal symbolism of heroic commemoration, the very form of
the monument precludes genuinely comic treatment by continuing to insist
upon the tragic and epic dimensions of the victory.
 Such then are the interlocking pressures of history on genre and of
generic conventions on historical representation: a victory thought to be of
world-historical importance is commemorated in a column in which the
enemy is reduced to impotent absurdity, while the victor is entirely effaced.
Dürer cleverly solves the generic problems posed by the historical
circumstances of the representation only by creating a design that risks
collapse into its own antithesis. That collapse has, in fact, by now fully
occurred, so that we can recover Dürer's probable intentions only by setting
aside the manifest and “self-evident” imagery of betrayal. That imagery does
not vanish altogether; instead, it is self-consciously repressed, in an
interpretive strategy comparable to the repression for which Luther called,
when he advised his readers to set aside all sympathy for the peasants:
“There is no place for patience or mercy. This is the time of the sword, not
the day of grace.”20 Given the peculiarities of Dürer's surrounding designs—
a victory column that unsettles the ethos of the victory column itself and a
commemorative pillar that humorously mocks the man it professors to honor
—it may be that Dürer was wittily conscious of the need for this
reinterpretation. The risk would have seemed less grave in a country still in
the grip of intense fear and class hatred; readers would be inclined to
interpret the monument correctly, and the stifling of sympathy would be a
small, aestheticized model of the larger and more compelling historical task.
The symbolism of betrayal, generated by the historical pressures on the
generic codes, could be recuperated ideologically as a type of “false
consciousness,” a sentimental attitudinizing that must be overcome if the
rebellious peasants are to be defeated and if that defeat is to be properly
celebrated.
We have constructed then a reading of Dürer's design based upon the
complex interplay of three forces: the artist's intention, genre, and the
historical situation. By the latter I mean both the particular objects of
representation and the specific structure of ideology and event that renders
something—person, place, institution, thing, idea, or action—sufficiently
notable to be represented. Neither intention nor genre can be reduced to this
historical situation: a given genre, as Dürer's design powerfully
demonstrates, may have great difficulty accommodating a particular
representational object, and artistic intention has an arsenal of strategies—
including irony, laughter, open revolt, and subversive submission, to name
but a few—designed to differentiate it from the surrounding world. But this
differentiation is not the same as autonomy, and the most important lesson to
be learned from our discussion of Dürer's design is that intention and genre
are as social, contingent, and ideological, as the historical situation they
combine to represent. The genre of the monument is no more neutral and
timeless than the Peasants’ War, and Dürer's artistic intentions, as we have
been able to reconstruct them, express a specific mode of engagement with
the people and events to which his design refers.
If intention, genre, and historical situation are all equally social and
ideological, they by no means constitute a single socio-ideological
“language.” On the contrary, as Dürer's design suggests, they are, in effect,
separate forces that may jostle, enter into alliance, or struggle fiercely with
one another.21 What they cannot do, once they are engaged in a living work of
art, is to be neutral—“pure,” free-floating signifiers—for they are already, by
their very existence, specific points of view on the world. As such they make
demands upon us, as we do upon them: hence the possibility we have already
encountered in response to the peasant monument that our own intentions may
appropriate the work and transform its meaning. Dürer's design helps us see
that what is at stake in interpretation is never simply a passive submission to
the pure and unitary original meaning of a work of art. The production and
consumption of such works are not unitary to begin with; they always involve
a multiplicity of interests, however well organized, for the crucial reason that
art is social and hence presumes more than one consciousness. And in
response to the art of the past, we inevitably register, whether we wish to or
not, the shifts in value and interest that are produced in the struggles of social
and political life.
I want to turn now from early sixteenth-century Germany to late sixteenth-
century England and look briefly at several different artists encountering a
genre problem closely comparable to Dürer's, for concentration on a single
artist tends to conceal the range of “solutions” generated in response to
historical pressures on generic codes. The pressure in this case was not a
Peasants’ War but the unrest and class hostility that afflicted England
sporadically throughout Elizabeth's reign. Inflation, unemployment, and
periodic bad harvests, along with continuing religious and political
differences, led to a series of disturbances that alarmed the propertied class.
The depth of this alarm has been somewhat obscured by the fact that there
was no major conflagration, nothing comparable to the Armada, the
conspiracies surrounding Mary Queen of Scots, or Essex's abortive
rebellion, and hence little that could leave a mark upon the great chronicles
of the realm. But the patient work of local historians has revealed an official
concern sufficiently intense and wide-spread as to constitute something like a
national preoccupation.
For Essex alone, Emmison has culled a substantial number of cases of
alleged sedition that came before the Quarter Sessions and Assizes. When the
accused appeared to have been idly boasting or ranting in his cups, the
judges could be relatively lenient, though it is noteworthy that even in such
cases charges were actually brought and investigated. Thus in 1591 John
Feltwell, a laborer of Great Wenden, was pilloried for having declared that
“The Queen is but a woman and ruled by noblemen, and the noblemen and
gentlemen are all one, and the gentlemen and farmers will hold together so
that the poor can get nothing.”22 Feltwell's dark talk of a rising to make the
world “merry” again was clearly regarded as so much wind, noxious but not
a serious threat to anyone. When, however, the talk was not isolated, when,
in a season of discontent, there were signs of collaboration, the official
response was ferocious. “We can get no work,” Edward White, woolen-
weaver, was alleged to have said in 1566, “nor we have no money, and if we
should steal we should be hanged, and if we should ask, no man would give
us, but we will have a remedy one of these days, or else we will lose all, for
the commons will rise, we know not how soon, for we look for it every hour.
Then will up two or three thousand in Colchester and about Colchester, and
we look for it every day, for there is no more to do but one to ride on a horse
with a clap and cry, ‘They are up, they are up!’, and another to ring ‘Awake,’
for ye shall see the hottest harvest that ever was in England.”23 White and
three fellow workers who had spoken similarly were hanged.
“The poor hate the rich,” wrote Deloney in 1597, “because they will not
set them on work; and the rich hate the poor, because they seem
burdensome.”24 It is in the context of this hatred, and of its ally, fear, that we
must attempt to understand the frequent representations in Elizabethan
literature of the victory of the forces of property, order, and true religion over
the many-headed monster. These representations rarely depict the actual
method most often used to punish those whom the magistrates deemed serious
threats: the thousands of hangings carried out locally throughout Tudor and
Stuart England. Instead of depicting the ordinary operation of the law,
functioning to defend property, English artists most often narrate events at
once more menacing and more socially prestigious, events colored by the
feudal fantasies in which the sixteenth-century gentry dressed their craving
for honor.25 Thus instead of the assizes and a hempen rope, we have tales of
mass rebellion and knightly victories. But the victories are not
commemorated with the heroic solemnity normally associated with the Indian
summer of English chivalry; they echo instead with a strange laughter—not
belly laughter, not even the laughter that accompanies a sudden release from
menace, but a taut, cruel laughter that is at once perfectly calculated and, as
in a nightmare, out of control. A passage from Sidney's “New” Arcadia, the
version revised in the early 1580s, will serve as an example. Disguised as
the Amazon Zelmane and the shepherd Dorus, the two young princes,
Pyrocles and Musidorus, are fighting against “an unruly sort of clowns and
other rebels” who have risen up against foolish, ineffectual, but legitimate
King Basilius. The “mad multitude” forces the royal party to retreat, in the
course of which the heroes deftly dispatch a number of the churls. A sample
of Sidney's manner follows:
“O,” said a miller that was half drunk, “see the luck of a good-fellow” and with that word ran with
a pitchfork at Dorus; but the nimbleness of the wine carried his head so fast that it made it over-
run his feet, so that he fell withal just between the legs of Dorus, who, setting his foot on his neck
(though he offered two milch kine and four fat hogs for his life) thrust his sword quite through from
one ear to the other, which took it very unkindly, to feel such news before they heard of them,
instead of hearing, to be put to such feeling. But Dorus, leaving the miller to vomit his soul out in
wine and blood, with his two-hand sword strake off another quite by the waist who the night before
had dreamed he was grown a couple, and, interpreting it that he should be married, had bragged of
his dream that morning among his neighbours. But that blow astonished quite a poor painter who
stood by with a pike in his hands. This painter was to counterfeit the skirmish between the
Centaurs and Lapithes, and had been very desirous to see some notable wounds, to be able the
more lively to express them; and this morning, being carried by the stream of this company, the
foolish fellow was even delighted to see the effect of blows. But this last, happening near him, so
amazed him that he stood stock still, while Dorus, with a turn of his sword, strake off both his
hands. And so the painter returned well skilled in wounds, but with never a hand to perform his
skill.26

Hatred and fear of rebellion from below have many voices; why should
they adopt this particular tone in this particular work? Why should Sidney,
sensitive, generous, and idealistic, choose to depict the heroes of his
romance in this grotesque and lurid light? In part the explanation lies in
certain recurrent features of Sidney's style and in his personal circumstances:
the aggression that frequently makes itself felt in his writing, the impression
of anxiety masquerading as forced high spirits, the frustrations in his political
career and his longing for decisive action, even the fact that Penshurst, where
Sidney was raised, was itself the result of early sixteenth-century enclosures
bitterly resisted and resented by the poor.27 These factors are important in
any attempt to understand Sidney's tone, but they are insufficiently conscious
to account by themselves for his intentions and insufficiently public to
account for the broad appeal of his work.
Though it was not published during his lifetime, shortly after Sidney's
death Arcadia became one of the most celebrated literary achievements of the
age, the work that expressed more than any other the whole ethos of the
English aristocracy and of those— and they were a great part of the entire
propertied class—who fashioned themselves after that ethos.
What then is the public basis of a passage such as the one I have just
quoted? What social and aesthetic problems does Sidney's grotesque comedy
attempt to solve? The answer, I suggest, lies in the aesthetically codified
stock of social knowledge, that is, in genre, and we may begin by noting
certain similarities between Sidney's account of his heroes’ victory over the
“mad multitude” and Dürer's plan for a monument to commemorate a victory
over rebellious peasants. In both there is a conspicuous insistence upon
objects that would normally have no place in a battle; and in both an
exaggerated representation of the vulnerability of the social inferiors. Dürer's
monument protects the social status of the victors by effacing them entirely,
leaving only the avenging sword; Sidney cannot, of course, similarly protect
his heroes whose presence is essential to the narrative, but the romance
tradition provides the means for a partial effacement through disguise. As the
shepherd Dorus and the Amazon Zelmane—disguises conspicuously marginal
in class and gender—Musidorus and Pyrocles do not have their princely
honor compromised by a skirmish with unruly clowns. We may, of course,
observe that their honor was already compromised by the disguise itself—
and elsewhere in his work Sidney makes much of the potential stain of a
masquerade brought about by the power of love—but paradoxically the
heroes’ victory over the peasants at least partially restores the honor
tarnished by their disguise, while their disguise protects the honor that would
otherwise have been tarnished by such a victory.
Like the anonymous sword in Dürer's design, the heroes’ disguise in
Arcadia also functions to deprive the defeated peasants of any honor that
might accrue to them from the social distinction of the victors. And like
Dürer, Sidney carefully reinforces the boundaries of the honor code by means
of cruel laughter: the livestock at the base of the victory column and the lard
tub at its top find their narrative equivalent in the miller's offer of “two milch
kine and four fat hogs for his life” and in the grotesquely comic
appropriateness of each act of violence. Peasants are, of course, a staple of
laughter in Renaissance art, but it is important to distinguish between a
laughter that levels—that draws lord and clown together in the shared
condition of the flesh—and a laughter that attempts to inscribe ineradicable
differences.28 Laughter in an artist like Rabelais affirms the oneness of the
body with the earth and celebrates the crossing or destruction of boundaries;
Sidneian laughter, by contrast, draws sharp distinctions: only the others, the
defeated boors, are returned to the earth, while the noble victors soar above
it: “Zelmane made them perceive the odds between an eagle and a kite, with
such a nimble steadiness and such an assured nimbleness that while one was
running back for fear, his fellow had her sword in his guts” (379). In the
context of a battle, the rebels’ occupations are for Sidney inherently
ridiculous, and their fates are made to match not their misdeeds so much as
their social absurdity. A “dapper fellow, a tailor by occupation” and “suitor
to a seamster's daughter,” has his nose struck off and stoops down “because
he had heard that if it were fresh put to, it would cleave on again. But as his
hand was on the ground to bring his nose to his head, Zelmane with a blow
sent his head to his nose” (380). If we recall that the handsome princes are
suitors to the king's daughters, we can savor to the full the social
differentiation charted by such comic violence.
The climax of this episode, and of Sidney's strategy of marking status
boundaries, is the mutilation of the “poor painter,” and it is here that we can
most clearly observe Sidney, like Dürer, confronting the principal danger of
this particular representational enterprise: the inadvertent staining of the
noble victors and the ennobling of the base vanquished. The danger then is
the effacement or, alternatively, the redrawing of boundaries, so that we
perceive resemblance instead of difference or betrayal instead of victory.
The safest way to avoid this unsettling of the fixed ratios of praise and blame
is literally to dehumanize the rebels, thereby allowing them no hint of a
resemblance to either the victors or the artist himself. But Dürer, let us
recall, did not turn away from the sympathetic rendering of the peasant that
threatened to invalidate the purpose of his monument. Rather, in an act of
aesthetic bravado, he embraced the threat, facing it down by representing it.
Here, similarly, in the midst of his depiction of the skirmish, Sidney
introduces an artist on the side of—or at least in the orbit of—the rebels, a
lower-class artist then who is setting about to depict just such a skirmish.
The resemblance between Sidney and the poor painter would seem to be
heightened by the painter's theme—the battle between the Centaurs and the
Lapiths—since this favorite subject of Renaissance iconography is used by
several of the Arcadia's literary sources to describe exactly the type of
disorder that Sidney himself is depicting.29
But what threat would such an imaged resemblance represent? The threat
of a status loss to Sidney himself equivalent to that which threatens his
disguised heroes. The fear of such a loss haunts many of Sidney's literary
works, never more so perhaps than in the rhetorical urgencies and ironies of
the Defense of Poetry. Here in Arcadia, a work composed in the enforced
idleness of a humiliating rustication at the hands of the displeased Queen,
Sidney mirrors himself as a useless idler on the field of battle, one who has
fallen from the high heroic vocation to which he was born to the marginal
status of a foolish artisan,30 and then having let the image stand for a moment,
he mutilates it: “Dorus, with a turn of his sword, strake off both his hands.
And so the painter returned well skilled in wounds, but with never a hand to
perform his skill.” In the grim, tight-lipped laughter that such a passage seeks
to provoke, Sidney reaffirms the social and aesthetic differences that the
representation itself would seem to call into question: in effect, he attacks the
professional as opposed to the amateur, cutting the hands off the artist who
would allow himself to drift toward solidarity with the rebels—the painter
stood by “with a pike in his hands”—and blocking an art that might, through
this solidarity, compromise the comic mode in which the killing of tailors,
millers, butchers, and poor painters should be represented.31
Having thus by means of violence reestablished threatened boundaries,
the Arcadia goes on to attribute the defeat of the uprising not to the power of
the sword but to the power of the word. The sword is inadequate because of
the size of the multitude: the “very killing,” Sidney writes, begins to weary
the princes who fear “lest in long fight they should be conquered with
conquering” (380). Sidney then acknowledges the inability of superior force
alone to protect rulers against a popular rebellion; the heroes’ military
prowess suffices only to enable them and the royal party to withdraw from
the open country, where they are fully exposed to rebel attack, to the slightly
greater security of the princely lodge. This withdrawal quite literally images
the reaffirmation of status boundaries—the royal party is now walled off
from the surrounding populace—but the boundaries are vulnerable to attack:
the rebels “went about with pickaxe to the wall and fire to the gate to get
themselves entrance” (381).
Faced with the limitations of both offensive and defensive military
strategy, Sidney's heroes turn to what for Renaissance humanists was the
original and ultimate prop of the social order: rhetoric.32 Pyrocles, in his
disguise as Zelmane, bravely issues forth from the lodge, quickly ascends to
the nearby judgment-seat of the prince, and signals that he wishes to make a
speech. The multitude, at first unwilling to listen, is quieted by one of the
rebel leaders, a young farmer who “was caught in a little affection towards
Zelmane” (382). Unlike the more sanguine humanists, Sidney does not
pretend that, through the magical power of its tropes, Zelmane's speech is
able to pacify the crowd; rather its cunning rhetoric, piercing “the rugged
wilderness of their imagination” (386), reawakens the rebels’ dormant
divisions of economic, political, and social interest:
For the artisans, they would have corn and wine set at a lower price, and bound to be kept so still;
the ploughmen, vinelabourers and farmers would none of that. The countrymen demanded that
every man might be free in the chief towns: that could not the burgesses like of. The peasants
would have all the gentlemen destroyed; the citizens (especially such as cooks, barbers, and those
other that lived most on gentlemen) would but have them reformed. (383)

Before long the crowd falls apart, “each one killing him that was next for
fear he should do as much to him” (388), and with only a small additional
intervention by the royal party, the rebellion is crushed. The young farmer,
we might add, is killed in a final, parenthetical touch of the comic violence
that secures status boundaries and drives the rebels to the “frontiers”:
But then came down Zelmane, and Basilius with Dorus issued; and . . . made such havoc (among
the rest Zelmane striking the farmer to the heart with her sword, as before she had done with her
eyes) that in a while they of the contrary side were put to fight and fled to certain woods upon the
frontiers, where feeding wildly and drinking only water, they were disciplined for their drunken
riots. (389)

Sidney's solution to the problem of representing a victory over a popular

rebellion is a brilliant one, but it depends, as we have seen, upon the
disguise of the aristocratic heroes, a disguise whose stain to their princely
honor is only partially washed away by the rebels’ blood. If we turn from
Arcadia to the other massive achievement of late sixteenth-century English
literature, The Faerie Queene, we encounter an alternative solution that
manages, unlike Dürer, to represent the victor and, unlike Sidney, to
represent him in propria persona. In Canto 2 of Book 5—printed in 1596,
three years after the posthumous publication of Sidney's work— Spenser's
hero Artegall, the champion of Justice, and his companion, the iron man
Talus, come upon an immense crowd assembled to listen to a “mighty
Gyant.” The giant—“admired much of fooles, women, and boys”—stands on
a rock overlooking the sea and boasts that with a “huge great paire of
ballance in his hand,” he will weigh all the world and reduce everything to
its original state of equality. The vulgar flock about him “like foolish flies
about an hony crocke,” in hopes of obtaining “vncontrolled freedome”:
All which when Artegall did see, and heare,
How he mis-led the simple peoples traine,
In sdeignfull wize he drew unto him neare.33

Spenser's hero thus retains his proper shape and name, as he advances to
confront the nameless giant. By representing the radical leader as literally
monstrous—for in faery land, of course, such grotesqueries need not appear
merely the figurative excesses of political rhetoric—Spenser greatly reduces
the threat of an inadvertent ennobling of rebellion in the commemoration of
its defeat. The giant bears in the form of his body the ineradicable sign of his
disobedience, a sign that links him to the primal disobedience of the giants
who rebelled against Jove and hence, by traditional mythographic analogy, to
the rebel angels of the Christian story. These associations would seem to call
for the hero to attack, just as, earlier in the same Canto, he had destroyed the
mighty Saracen Pollente and as, at the book's close, he beheads the giant
Grantorto. Such warfare is a crucial and recurrent structural principle in
Spenser's epic which rests on the chivalric conviction, congenial to militant
Protestantism, that acts of violence against evil oppressors are necessary,
inevitable, and redemptive. But the Giant in Canto 2 is not an extorter or
oppressor; rather he bears, in the huge balances and in his project of
restoring all things to their just and ancient proportions, signs that link him to
Artegall himself and to Astraea who taught the knight, as Spenser writes, “to
weigh both right and wrong / In equall ballance” (V. i.7). And just at the point
when the hero seems to be girding himself for battle—“In sdeignfull wize he
drew vnto him neare”—he turns instead to rhetoric: “And thus vnto him
spake, without regard or fear” (V.ii.33).
 Artegall's purpose in the debate that follows is clearly to discredit the
Giant, to expose the fraudulence of his claims, and hence to distinguish firmly
between the demonic parody of social justice and the true exercise of justice
embodied in Artegall's own knightly vocation. But the distinction is achieved
paradoxically by the poem's insistence now not on the uncanny resemblance
between the Giant's iconographic sign and Artegall's, but on the still more
uncanny resemblance between the Giant's rhetoric and Spenser's own.
Artegall declares that the egalitarian social project is belied by the absolute
stability of the geocentric cosmos:
The earth was in the middle centre pight,
In which it doth immoueable abide,
Hemd in with waters like a wall in sight;
And they with aire, that not a drop can slide:
Al which the heauens containe, and in their courses guide.
Such heauenly justice doth among them raine,
That euery one doe know their certaine bound,
In which they doe these many yeares remaine,
And mongst them al no change hath yet beene found.
(35–36)

This stability—the perfection of objects “hemd in” and “bound” —is

decisive evidence of God's absolute power and hence of the need for all
creatures, men as well as planets, to submit passively to the divine will: “He
maketh Kings to sit in souerainty; He maketh subjects to their powre obay”
(41). The Giant indignantly appeals to the signs of vast observable change
both in the physical universe and in the social order—
Seest not, how badly all things present bee,
And each estate quite out of order, goth?—
(37)

to which Artegall replies with a blend of challenges reminiscent of the Book

of Job and arguments for the transcendent orderliness and ultimate self-
cancellation of all change. But these arguments, though fully sanctioned by
the outcome of the episode, are curiously at odds with the poet's own
perceptions, in the proem to Book 5, which seem to accord far more with the
Giant's:
Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square,
From the first point of his appointed sourse,
 And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.
(V.Pr.1)

How are we to account for this likeness and how then are we to explain
the contradiction between the positive value attached to the poet's own
account of disorder and the negative value attached to the Giant's quite
similar account? The likeness, we may suggest, derives from the critical,
even apocalyptic, strain that is recurrent in Spenser's work, from his
awareness of deep disorder in the human and natural realms, from his
nagging sense of social marginality, whether in relation to the Spencers of
Althorpe or to the court, and from his powerful conception of himself as a
prophetic moralist. These elements do not, of course, ever lead Spenser to a
call for rebellion or the redistribution of wealth, but they do lead to the
strong expression of arguments upon which such a call could be based. For
as the German peasant rebellion of 1525 suggests, radical protest in the early
modern period appealed not to perceptions utterly alien to those expressed in
official circles but rather drew unacceptable conclusions from those same
perceptions.34
Yet in Book 5, Artegall does not only object to the Giant's conclusions;
he objects as strenuously to the arguments on which the Giant professes to
base his program, arguments that, as we have seen, closely resemble the
poet's own. To explain this apparent inconsistency, we may argue, following
Paul Alpers’ sensitive account of Spenser's poetic practice, that the
rhetorical nature of The Faerie Queene obviates the necessity of strict
narrative consistency and appeals instead to the reader's “trust in the poem,”
that is, to his acceptance of the meanings made apparent in any particular
episode.35 But given the close proximity of Spenser's Proem and Artegall's
encounter with the Giant, we should add that his trust depends upon the
drawing of a firm boundary between acceptable and subversive versions of
the same perceptions and that this boundary is affirmed, as in Sidney and
Dürer, by the representation of violence:
Whom when so lewdly minded Talus found,
Approching nigh vnto him cheeke by cheeke,
He shouldered him from off the higher ground,
And down the rock him throwing, in the sea him dround.
Like as a ship, whom cruell tempest driues
Vpon a rocke with horrible dismay,
Her shattered ribs in thousand peeces riues,
 And spoyling all her geares and goodly ray,
Does make her selfe misfortunes piteous pray.
So downe the cliffe the wretched Gyant tumbled;
His battred ballances in peeces lay,
His timbered bones all broken rudely rumbled,
So was the high aspyring with huge ruine humbled.
(49–50)

Talus's violence, in destroying the Giant, exorcises the potentially dangerous

social consequences—the praxis—that might follow from Spenser's own
eloquent social criticism. The cosmological vision and the moral outrage
remain, but the “great expectations” of a radical reordering of wealth and
power are shattered. Indeed, from this perspective, the proximity of the
Proem and the episode is not an embarrassment but a positive achievement,
for Spenser's narrative can function as a kind of training in the rejection of
subversive conclusions drawn from licensed moral outrage.
This outrage, to be sure, is not licensed insofar as it is voiced by the
Giant; rather it is answered by Artegall's arguments for perfectly secure
cosmological and social boundaries. But as a further aspect of the reader's
training, Artegall's rhetoric is not allowed to undermine the Proem's
perception of injustice in the world; otherwise, the knight of justice would be
completely immobilized: in a divinely ordered universe in which “no change
hath yet been found” from the original state of perfection, there would be
nothing for him to do. Instead the arguments are understood to be true, but
only in relation to the Giant who is not himself persuaded by them and
impiously refuses the boundaries proposed by Artegall.36 Hence the
necessity for pushing the Giant out of bounds and hence, too, the necessity for
the push to come, unasked for, from Talus, agent of the inflexible execution of
the strict letter of the law. In the special context of this episode, Artegall must
be freed from the necessity of direct action, for his refutation of the Giant
suggests that active intervention in the universe is not justified.
What we are given then is a more rigorous and explicit version than in
Sidney of the separation of rhetoric and violence, a separation here
sufficiently strong to save the noble hero entirely from the threat of the strain
that would attend a base encounter. That threat is directly acknowledged
when, in the wake of the Giant's destruction, “the people” rise up for
revenge; seeing the “lawlesse multitude” coming toward him, Artegall “much
was troubled,” we are told, “ne wist what to doo”:
 For loth he was his noble hands t'embrew
In the base blood of such a rascall crew;
And otherwise, if that he should retire.
He fear'd least they with shame would him pursew.
Therefore he Talus to them sent, i'inquire
The cause of their array, and truce for to desire.

But soone as they him nigh approaching spide,

They gan with all their weapons him assay,
And rudely stroke at him one euery side:
Yet nought they could him hurt, ne ought dismay.
But when at them he with his flaile gan lay,
He like a swarme of flyes them ouerthrew;
Ne any of them durst come in his way,
But here and there before his presence flew,
And hid themselues in holes and bushes from his vew.
(52–53)

Artegall takes the nobler course which is to persuade and to negotiate; the
violence—characteristically unleashed on those who are represented as
pathetically vulnerable—is the prerogative of Talus who can no more
receive dishonor than can a Cruise missile.
Spenser's solution to the representational problem posed by a victory
over popular rebellion hinges then upon Talus, that is, upon the allegorical
separation of rhetoric and violence. In consequence, however, direct action
remains a problem for Spenser's hero through the rest of Book 5 which ends,
significantly, not with Artegall's glorious victory over the tyrant Grantorto,
but with the slanders heaped on the victor by Envy, Detraction, and the
Blatant Beast. Like Dürer and Sidney, Spenser saves the heroic as genre but
at a high cost to the hero himself: in Dürer the victor is absent, in Sidney
disguised, in Spenser split off from heroic actions imputed now to a
mechanical monster. If we turn now to our final example of a late sixteenth-
century artist grappling with this problem, we encounter a solution that
reconstitutes the social status of the hero and in so doing fundamentally alters
the heroic genre.
The artist is Shakespeare; the problem is the representation of Jack
Cade's rebellion in 2 Henry VI, a play probably first performed in 1590.
Shakespeare depicts Cade's rebellion as a grotesque and sinister farce, the
archetypal lower class revolt both in its motives and in its ludicrousness.37
Like Dürer and Sidney, Shakespeare calls attention to the comic humbleness
of the rebels’ social origins—“There's Best's son, the tanner of Wingham, . . .
And Dick the butcher, . . . And Smith the weaver” (4.2.21ff)—and like
Spenser, he wryly depicts their “great expectations”:
There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny; the three-hoop'd pot
shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer.
(4.2.62–5)

How can such buffoons be put down without embarrassment to the victors? In
part the answer lies, as for Spenser, in the separation of rhetoric and
violence. Cade and his “rabblement” reach London—“Up Fish Street! down
Saint Magnus’ Corner! kill and knock down! throw them into Thames!”
(4.8.1–2)—but are brought up short by the appearance of the Duke of
Buckingham and Lord Clifford. These noblemen come, as they say, as
“ambassadors from the King / Unto the commons” and pronounce “free
pardon” to all who will go home in peace. A few rousing speeches from the
aristocrats, with the invocation of the name of Henry V and the threat of a
French invasion, suffice; the rebellion instantly collapses, the state triumphs,
and Cade flees. But if the rebels can be easily reabsorbed into the ranks of
loyal Englishmen, only momentarily misled by a demagogue, the rebel leader
must still be destroyed, and the history play will not accommodate a
mechanical man to do the killing.
Shakespeare's solution is simple, effective, and, in its way, elegant. Cade
escapes to the country only to be threatened with starvation, “Wherefore,” he
conveniently tells us, “on a brick wall have I climb'd into this garden, to see
if I can eat grass, or pick a sallet” (4.10.6–8) The owner of the garden enters,
voicing to himself the familiar sentiments of retirement poetry:
Lord! who would live turmoiled in the court,
And may enjoy such quiet walks as these?
This small inheritance my father left me
Contenteth me, and worth a monarchy.
(4.10.16–19)

Beyond the familiar contrast of court and country, Shakespeare is careful to

note in these lines that the speaker is the garden's actual owner, that the
property is a modest inheritance, and that he is thus to be distinguished from
a tenant, on the one hand, and a great lord, on the other. This care in placing
the speaker in relation to property is underscored by Cade's immediate
response: “Here's the lord of the soil come to seize me for a stray, for
entering his fee-simple without leave” (4.10.24–25). This aside, which rests
on the legal right of a property owner with absolute title to his land to
impound stray animals that wander onto estate, makes it clear that the garden
is enclosed private property, not in any sense, then, a public or common
domain. And the owner's reply to Cade's grotesquely aggressive challenge—
“I'll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great
pin”—reiterates again the property rights that are at stake here:
Why, rude companion, whatso'er thou be,
I know thee not . . .
Is't not enough to break into my garden,
And like a thief to come to rob my grounds,
Climbing my walls in spite of me the owner,
But thou wilt brave me with these saucy terms?
(4.10.30–35)

What is happening, I suggest, is that status relations—“I say it was never

merry world in England since gentlemen came up” (4.2.7–9)—are being
transformed before our eyes into property relations, and the concern, as in
Sidney and Spenser, for maintaining social and even cosmic boundaries is
reconceived as a concern for maintaining freehold boundaries. Symbolic
estate gives way to real estate. And in this revised context, the context of
property rather than rank, the fear of stain in the representation of an unequal
encounter vanishes altogether. The owner of the garden does not hide his
name, nor does he look for someone else to do the killing. Quite the contrary,
he proudly names himself, as he prepares, with unembarrassed complacency,
for the unequal encounter:
Nay, it shall ne'er be said, while England stands,
That Alexander Iden, esquire of Kent,
Took odds to combat a poor famish'd man.
Oppose thy steadfast-gazing eyes to mine,
See if thou canst outface me with thy looks:
Set limb to limb, and thou art far the lesser;
Thy hand is but a finger to my fist;
Thy leg a stick compared with this truncheon.
(4.10.41–48)

Iden perceives Cade not as a social rebel but as a belligerent thief who has
tried to steal a salad; theirs is a contest not between an aristocrat and a churl
but between a well-fed owner of property and “a poor famished man.” Only
from Cade's dying words does Iden learn whom he has slain, and his reaction
enables us to gauge the extraordinary distance between Shakespeare's
representation of this victory and the others at which we have looked:
Is't Cade that I have slain, that monstrous traitor?
Sword, I will hallow thee for this thy deed,
And hang thee o'er my tomb when I am dead:
Ne'er shall this blood be wiped from thy point,
But thou shalt wear it as a herald's coat,
To emblaze the honour that thy master got.
(2.10.65–70)

The sword that Dürer had to depict without anyone to wield it becomes
Iden's proudest possession; the deed that Sidney's heroes had to perform in
disguise becomes a claim to distinction; and the blood that Spenser's knight
did not wish to get on his hands becomes a badge of honor. The aristocrat has
given way to the man of property, and heroic commemoration has been
absorbed into a new genre, the history play.

NOTES
1 Albrecht Dürer, The Painter's Manual [Unterweisung der Messung, 1525], translated by Walter
L. Strauss (New York: Abaris, 1977), p. 227.
2 Sebastiano Serlio, “Scena tragica,” in Architettura (1551) [The Book of Architecture (London,
1611), Fol. 25V].
3 Orlando Furioso, Canto 9: 88–91; also Canto 11: 21–28. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the
Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 108–109.
4 Painter's Manual, p. 233. The mock encomium recalls Erasmus's Praise of Folly.
5 This mode of depicting Christ seems to date from the late fourteenth century and probably derives
from a traditional representation of Job: the mourning figure would then suggest perfect patience in
humiliation as well as perfect innocence. See G. von der Osten, “Job and Christ,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institute 16 (1953), 153–58; Hans Kauffmann, “Albrecht Dürers
Dreikönigs-Altar,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch (Westdeutsches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte)
10 (1938), 166–78; Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 314. I am indebted to Professor Baxandall for suggesting to
me the connection between Dürer's peasant and the figure of Christ in Distress.
6 On the Peasants’ War, see especially Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525, translated by Thomas
A. Brady, Jr. and H. C. Erik Midelfort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981 [original
edition 1977]).
7 “Admonition to Peace, A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia [1525],” translated
by Charles M. Jacobs, revised by Robert C. Schultz, in Luther's Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, 55
vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), vol. 46, p. 39. See Hubert Kirchner, Luther and the
 Peasants’ War, translated by Darrell Jodock (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972); Mark U.
Edwards, Jr., Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 60–
81; Hans Althaus, Luthers Haltung im Bauernkrieg (Darmstadt, 1969 [1st ed., Tubingen, 1952];
Robert N. Crossley, Luther and the Peasants’ War (New York: Exposition Press, 1972).
8 “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants [1525],” in Luther's Works, vol. 46, p. 50.
On Luther's apocalyptic expectations at this time, see M. Greschat, “Luthers Haltung im
Bauernkrieg,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 56 (1965), 31–47. For a dissenting view, see
Hartmut Lehmann, “Luther und der Bauernkrieg,” in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht
20 (1969), 129–39.
9 “Against the Robbing . . .,” Luther's Works, vol. 46, pp. 53–54. See also “Whether Soldiers, Too,
Can Be Saved [1526],” in Luther's Works, vol. 46, pp. 89–137.
10 Thus in January, 1525, three young painters, all of whom had studied with Dürer, were called before
the Nuremberg City Council to answer charges of radicalism. One of them, Barthel Beham, was
reported to have declared that people should stop working until all property was divided equally, and
he reputedly told the City Council that he recognized no authority other than God's. Later in 1525
Hieronymus Andreae Formschneyder, who had cut many of Dürer's designs into wood, was
ostracized for openly supporting the rebellious peasants. See Walter L. Strauss, The Complete
Drawings of Albrecht Dürer (New York: Abaris Books, 1974), vol. 4, pp. 2269. Sebald Beham
seems, however, to have subsequently attacked the rebellious peasants in woodcuts executed in
1535; I have profited from an unpublished paper by Keith P. F. Moxey, “Sebald Beham's ‘Church
Anniversary Holidays’: Festive Peasants as Instruments of Repressive Humour.”
11 Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), vol. 1, p. 233.
On Dürer's admiration for Luther in the early 1520s, see Strauss, Complete Drawings, vol. 4, pp.
1903–1907. Dürer's admiration for Luther may not necessarily have extended to his social views at
the time of the Peasants’ War.
12 Quoted in Marcel Brion, Albrecht Dürer: His Life and Work, trans. James Cleugh (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1960), p. 269; see also Strauss, Complete Drawings, vol. 4, pp. 2280–81.
Dürer's exquisite watercolor is the record of a private experience that requires elaborate and careful
notation, as opposed to the public monument which is conceived as an object whose symbolism is
readily decipherable. Durer had earlier recorded his vision of the Apocalypse in his immensely
powerful illustrations to the book of Revelations.
13 “An Open Letter on the Harsh Book Against the Peasants [1525],” in Luther's Works, vol. 46, p. 70.
14 We seem to be in a period in which public commemorative monuments, though continually erected,
are extremely difficult to design successfully. Consider the national debate over the recently
dedicated monument to the Vietnam War dead or the controversy over Robert Arneson's bust of the
slain San Francisco mayor, George Moscone (particularly over the inclusion, on the pedestal, of a
hyper-realistic representation of the murder weapon). Dürer's monument is inadvertently recalled
and transformed in a Salvadorean poster, currently circulating in Berkeley, that depicts a peasant
crucified on farm implements.
15 The Renaissance displays a markedly increased sensitivity, nourished by classicism, to the theoretical
implications of genre differentiation. Dürer's designs imply, if only as a nostalgic and shadowy
recollection, the existence of a form of heroic commemoration in which there is a full sympathetic
relationship between the object that is represented and the representation itself. This form is at once
recalled and ironically (or at least playfully) represented in the design for a victory monument made
out of the objects that have given the victory: a monument that collapses the distance of
representation, but at the expense of the human victor. Set against this heroic commemoration, there
 is the comic monument which depends upon the continued force of the old heroic values, now
deliberately violated for amusement's sake. And in the middle, there is what we may call, following
Joel Fineman, the monument of praise paradox: at once an acknowledgment of the distance between
the monument and the original heroic values and an attempt to preserve those values precisely
through such an acknowledgment.
This praise paradox is in the middle in another sense: it is located between the symbolic and the
narrative modes. In the symbolic mode the elements are organized according to a conceptual
schema that provides a syntax; in the narrative mode the elements are organized to tell a story, and
this story too provides a syntax. But in the Dürer monument there is no syntax; the elements in the
monument are paratactic. Parataxis—the refusal of both paradigmatic organization according to a
schema of conceptual values and a syntagmatic organization according to a schema of narrative
values—is the perfect expression of the monument's intermediate, paradoxical position.
16 Quoted by Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and
Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p.
24.
17 On the semiotics of execution, see Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., “Maniera and the Mannaia: Decorum
and Decapitation in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Meaning of Mannerism, edited by Franklin W.
Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1972), pp.
67–103.
18 Even were scholars to discover a letter against the peasants written in Dürer's own hand, someone
could argue that in the wake of the public attacks upon his radical students and associates, he was
being ironic or self-protective. I should add that a radical letter would be subject to comparable
qualifications and doubts. We must understand that what is at stake is more than Dürer's personal
orientation, and the path to such an understanding is the study of the genre problem.
19 “Open Letter,” Luther's Works, vol. 46, p. 75.
20 “Against The Robbing. . . .,” op. cit., p. 53.
21 See Mikhail Bakhtin's important concept of “heteroglossia,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed
Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), pp. 288ff.
22 F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Disorder (Mainly from Essex Sessions and Assize Records)
(Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1970), p. 57.
23 Emmison, op. cit., pp. 63—64.
24 Thomas Deloney, Jack of Newberrie, quoted in Christopher Hill, “The Many-Headed Monster in
Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking,” in From the Renaissance to the Counter-
Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly, edited by Charles H. Carter (New York:
Random House, 1965), p. 302.
25 See Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1960); Frances A. Yates, “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts,”
in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975), pp. 88—111;
and Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pagentry (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1977).
26 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, edited by Maurice Evans (New York:
Penguin, 1977), pp. 380–81.
27 See Don Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison:
University of Wisconsin, 1984). On Sidney's social attitudes, see Richard McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney:
 Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979).
28 On carnivalesque laughter, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene
Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); on peasants and laughter, see Svetlana Alpers,
“Bruegel's Festive Peasants,” in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 6.
(1972/73), 163–76).
29 Jack Winkler, “Lollianos and the Desperadoes,” in Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980), 155–81.
30 Nashe cunningly replicates and parodies this imagined threat in his comical, sadistic account of the
slaughter of the Anabaptists: “This tale must at one time or other give up the ghost, and as good now
as stay longer. I would gladly rid my hands of it cleanly if I could tell how, for what with talking of
cobblers and tinkers and ropemakers and butchers and dirt daubers, the mark is clean gone out of
my muse's mouth” (The Unfortunate Traveler, in Elizabethan Prose Fiction, edited by Meritt
Lawlis [New York: Odyssey, 1967], p. 474).
31 For an illuminating account of the difference between the professional and amateur writers, see
Richard Helgerson, The Laureate in His Generation: Self-Presentation and the Renaissance
Literary System (forthcoming, U.C. Press). I am grateful to Professor Jonathan Goldberg for
valuable suggestions about the “poor painter.”
32 On rhetoric as social discipline, see for example Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique [1560]:
“Neither can I see that men could haue beene brought by any other meanes, to liue together in
fellowship of life, to maintaine Cities, to deale truely, and willingly obeye one an other, if men at the
first had not by art and eloquence, perswaded that which they full ofte found out by reason. For
what man I pray you, beeing better able to maintaine himself by valiaunt courage, then by liuing in
base subiection, would not rather looke to rule like a Lord, then to live like an vnderling: if by reason
he were not perswaded, that it behoueth euery man to liue in his owne vocation,” in English
Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1963), pp. 27–28.
33 Citations of the Faerie Queene are to The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, edited
by Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57). There is a brilliant
account of Book 5 in Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1971). See also the valuable commentary in Jane Aptekar, Icons of
Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of “The Faerie Queene” (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1969); T. K. Dunseath, Spenser's Allegory of Justice in Book Five of
“The Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
34 See my “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” in Glyph 8 (1981), 40–61.
35 Paul J. Alpers, “How to Read The Faerie Queene,” in Essays in Criticism 18 (1968), 440. Alpers
would not necessarily discount contradictions in passages so close together; moreover, he finds Book
V of The Faerie Queene the inferior work of an exhausted and demoralized poet.
36 The paradox is defused but not altogether resolved by the mythic stature of Spenser's narrative:
Book V is an account of the origin of disorder, and Artegall, who had been trained by Astraea, may
well have believed that no substantial change, physical or moral, had yet afflicted the universe.
37 All citations of 2 Henry VI are from the Arden edition of the play, edited by Andrew S. Cairncross
(London: Methuen, 1957). Shakespeare bases his depiction of Cade's rebellion less upon accounts of
the actual rising in 1449—1450 than upon accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
 7

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND
RENAISSANCE CULTURE

An experience recurs in the study of Renaissance literature and culture: an

image or text seems to invite, even to demand, a psychoanalytic approach and
yet turns out to baffle or elude that approach. The bafflement may only reflect
the interpreter's limitations, the melancholy consequence of ignorance or
resistance or both. But I will argue here that the mingled invitation and denial
has a more historical dimension; the bafflement of psychoanalytic
interpretation by Renaissance culture is evident as early as Freud's own
suggestive but deeply inadequate attempts to explicate the art of Leonardo,
Michelangelo, and Shakespeare. The problem, I suggest, is that
psychoanalysis is at once the fulfillment and effacement of specifically
Renaissance insights: psychoanalysis is, in more than one sense, the end of
the Renaissance.
Let me sketch what I mean by turning not to a literary text but to a series
of documents that constitute the historical record of the case of Martin
Guerre. This record, part of which formed the basis of a fine historical novel
by Janet Lewis, The Wife of Martin Guerre, has recently been amplified and
analyzed with great power by the historian Natalie Zemon Davis in a short
book called The Return of Martin Guerre and dramatized in a French film of
the same title.1
The story is this: Martin Guerre was the only son of a prosperous French
peasant who owned and farmed a property near the village of Artigat, in
southwestern France. In 1538, at the tender age of 14, Martin was betrothed
to Bertrande de Rols—a fine match for the Guerre family—but the marriage
was not consummated: Martin was thought to be the victim of sorcery, and
his humiliating impotence continued for eight years until the charm was
finally lifted by a series of religious rituals. Bertrande became pregnant and
gave birth to a son who was given Martin's father's Basque name, Sanxi.
Martin's problems were far from over. In 1548 he seems to have had a
terrible quarrel with his father, a quarrel that was almost certainly over the
control and management of the family property. Accused by his father of a
theft of grain, the troubled young man turned his back on parents, wife, son,
and patrimony and disappeared without a trace.
Years passed. Martin's mother and father died, and in the absence of the
heir the property was managed by his paternal uncle. Unable to remarry,
Bertrande raised her son and waited. Then, in the summer of 1556, Martin
Guerre returned. He had wandered across the Pyrenees, become a servant,
then enlisted as a soldier and fought in the Spanish wars in the Netherlands.
Now he seemed a changed man, kinder and less troubled. There is evidence
that his resumed marriage was more loving—recorded gestures of tenderness
and concern—and in the three years that followed Bertrande gave birth to
two daughters. But there were also signs of strain between himself and his
uncle, once again over the family property, and in 1559 this strain erupted
into a series of court battles that culminated in the accusation that this was
not in fact Martin Guerre but an imposter.
The extraordinary trial that followed had as its purpose the determination
of the identity of the man who claimed to be Martin Guerre. Most of the
inhabitants of Artigat and many from the surrounding villages were called as
witnesses—from Martin's four sisters who testified that the man on trial was
in fact their brother, to neighbors and friends who were divided: some
upholding his claim, others swearing that he was an imposter, still others
refusing to identify the prisoner one way or another. There were rumors,
eagerly backed by the uncle's party, that the real Martin Guerre had lost a leg
while serving as a soldier. Bertrande officially joined in the uncle's
complaint, but in court she refused to swear that the defendant was not Martin
Guerre, and she was seen during the period of the trial ministering to her
husband, even washing his feet. It appeared either that she had been forced to
become a plaintiff against her will or that she hoped that this trial would
settle once and for all the question of identity, and hence authority, in her
husband's favor. Her husband himself took the stand and recalled in great
detail events from his childhood and adolescence that only the real Martin
Guerre could have known.
 The case dragged on through this trial, at the end of which the prisoner
was found guilty, and then through an appeal before the Parlement of
Toulouse. Finally, all the evidence had been sifted, and the court prepared its
verdict, which seemed likely to be in favor of the accused and against the
uncle. At this point, and without warning, a man with a wooden leg appeared
in the courtroom. Bitterly upbraided Bertrande for having dishonored him,
the man declared that he was the real Martin Guerre. The accused insisted
that this was someone hired by the desperate uncle, but virtually all the
witnesses now agreed that the one-legged man was in fact Martin Guerre.
After the court found for the uncle, the accused man finally confessed that he
was an impostor, one Arnaud du Tilh, alias Pansette. At first, it seems, he had
merely intended to take advantage of his striking resemblance to Martin
Guerre in order to rob the gullible household, but he had fallen in love with
Bertrande and decided to assume forever the missing man's identity.
Bertrande herself denied any complicity, but it is difficult to know where
else Arnaud would have gone for the intimate family history, and though in
Janet Lewis's novel Bertrande only senses gradually and very belatedly that
her returned husband is an imposter, Natalie Davis suggests, with
considerable plausibility, that the wife would have known almost at once.
This certainly seems to have been Martin Guerre's own bitter conclusion.
On September 16, 1560, Arnaud du Tilh knelt barefoot in a white shirt
before the church in Artigat, formally repented of his crime, and asked the
forgiveness of all whom he had offended. This ritual of penitence completed,
he was led to the Guerre house in front of which a gibbet had been erected.
Mounting the ladder, he asked Martin Guerre to be kind to Bertrande who
had been, he declared, entirely innocent. He asked Bertrande's pardon.
Arnaud du Tilh, alias Pansette, was then hanged and his corpse burned.
This case, which interested Montaigne, among others, seems to solicit
psychoanalytic interpretation. Surrounded by his four sisters, his nurse, and
his mother, betrothed at an unusually early age, and thrust, with the familiar
rowdy folk rituals, toward adult sexuality, Martin had great difficulty
establishing himself in his masculine identity. He was only able to
consummate the marriage after he had radically externalized the psychic
threat by imagining that he had been bewitched and by undergoing a ritual
cure. And when his masculinity was finally confirmed by the birth of the son
to whom he gave his father's name, Martin evidently felt compelled to try to
displace his father altogether— with a theft, significantly, of his father's
grain, his seed. But the attempt was a disastrous failure: his father responded
violently, and Martin faced an assault not merely upon his fragile masculinity,
but upon his entire identity, an identity from which in effect he fled.
Not only are Martin's impotence, oedipal transgression, and flight the
classic materials of Freudian speculation, but the subsequent trial seems to
confirm a principle essential to the constitution of the Freudian subject: the
real Martin Guerre cannot be definitively robbed of his identity, even when
he has apparently abandoned it and even when its superficial signs have been
successfully mimicked by a cunning impostor. To be sure, this principle of
inalienable self-possession would appear far indeed from Freud's
characteristic concerns: the subject of Freud is most often encountered in
states of extreme alienation. Driven by compulsions over which it has little
or no control, haunted by repressed desires, shaped by traumatic experiences
that it can neither fully recall nor clearly articulate, the self as Freud depicts
it is bound up not with secure possession but with instability and loss. Such
articulation of identity as exists occurs in states of self-abandonment—in
dreams and parapraxes—and the self seems lost not only to others but to the
cunning representations of others within the self. No mere judicial procedure,
no simple execution of the impostor, could suffice to make restitution for this
theft of identity, for the criminal is already ensconced within the psyche of
the victim.
Yet the intensity of Freud's vision of alienation would seem, in much of
his writing, to depend upon the dream of authentic possession, even if that
possession is never realized and has never been securely established. There
is nothing radically new about an anthropology based upon the desire for the
recovery of what was lost and yet was never actually possessed: it is already
subtly articulated in Augustine for whom fallenness is defined in terms of an
innocence from which all existing humans, including infants, are by definition
excluded. What needs to be posited is not an actual, historical moment of
possession, but a virtual possession, a possession that constitutes a
structurally determinative pre-history. The hysteric in Freud may be alienated
from her own body—earlier centuries would postulate a demonic agent to
account for comparable symptoms—but the alienation implies at least a
theoretically prior stage of non-alienation. There are in fact moments in
Freud in which he appears to glimpse such a stage actually embodied in the
regal figure of His Majesty the Infant. And if the historical impact of Freud is
bound up with a sustained lese majesty, that is, with an assault on the
optimistic assumption of a centered, imperial self, the network of
psychoanalytic scandals—the unconscious, repression, infantile sexuality,
primary process—nevertheless confirms at least the romantic assumption
behind that discredited optimism: the faith that the child is the father of the
man and that one's days are bound each to each in biological necessity.
This necessity secures the continuity of the subject, no matter how self-
divided or dispersed, so that the Rat Man, for example, is still himself when
he is acting under compulsions he does not comprehend. Identity in Freud
does not depend upon existential autonomy; it is far more often realized
precisely at moments in which the executive agency of the will has been
relinquished. Freud's tormented subjects may lose everything, but, as Freud's
narrative case studies eloquently attest, they do not and cannot lose a primal,
creatural individuation. This irreducible identity is not necessarily a
blessing; on the contrary, it most often figures as a burden. Along with the
secret of incestuous fantasy, the Oedipus myth discloses the tragic
inescapability of continuous selfhood.
We may propose then that in Freud individuation characteristically
emerges at moments of risk or alienation and hence that those moments do not
so much disrupt as secure authentic identity. And with this perception we
may return to Martin Guerre, for the consequence of his self-loss was to
trigger a communal inquiry into the authentic Martin Guerre. This inquiry
was based upon—or helped to fashion—a communal conviction that there
was an authentic Martin Guerre, authentic even (or perhaps especially) in his
moments of flight and eclipse. Had the one-legged man never returned, the
impostor would nevertheless have remained an actor, forever at one remove
from his role. Arnaud du Tilh can manipulate appearances, he can draw the
surrounding world into complicity with a strategy of deception, he can
improvise the mannerisms and insinuate himself into the complex social
network of Martin Guerre, but he cannot seize the other man's inner life. The
testimony of the community is important—in the court of law, indispensable
—but the roots of Martin's identity lie deeper than society; they reach down,
as psychoanalysis would assure us, through the frail, outward memories of
his sisters and friends to the psychic experience of his infancy—the infancy
only he can possess and that even the most skillful impostor cannot
appropriate—and beneath infancy to his biological individuality.
It is here in the body's uniqueness and irreducibility, and in the psychic
structures that follow from this primary individuation, that the impostor's
project must come to grief. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the
same time; my body is mine until I die, and no improvisation, however
cunning, can ever overturn that elementary possession. The mind can play
strange tricks, but the body will not be mocked. Martin's identity is
guaranteed by the same bodily principle that guarantees the identity of
Freud's patients, twisting away from themselves in a thousand tormenting
ways, alienated and abused more cunningly by their own inward ruses than
ever Martin was abused by Arnaud, and yet permanently anchored, even in
their own horror, in the lived experience of their unique bodily being.
But these latter conclusions, though they are ones with which I myself
feel quite comfortable, are not ones drawn either explicitly or implicitly by
anyone in the sixteenth century. They are irrelevant to the point of being
unthinkable: no one bothers to invoke Martin's biological individuality or
even his soul, let alone an infancy that would have seemed almost comically
beside the point.2 This irrelevance need not in itself discourage us—the
universalist claims of psychoanalysis are unruffled by the indifference of the
past to its categories. It may in any case be argued that we are encountering
not indifference but either a technical exclusion of certain postulates from a
legal proceeding where they have no standing or a self-evidence so deep and
assured that the postulates quite literally go without saying. But I think it is
worth noting that the canniest Renaissance observer of the case, Montaigne—
also the canniest Renaissance observer of the self—draws conclusions that
are quite the opposite to those we have drawn. Far from concluding that the
trial vindicates or rests upon Martin Guerre's ultimate and inalienable
possession of his own identity—a possession intensified in the experience of
self-loss—Montaigne writes that the condemnation of the alleged impostor
seemed to him reckless. He would have preferred a still franker version of
the verdict that the Areopagites were said to have handed down in perplexing
cases: “Come back in a hundred years.” For, writes Montaigne, if you are
going to execute people, you must have luminously clear evidence—“A tuer
les gens, il faut une clarté lumineuse et nette”—and there was no such clarity
in the trial of Martin Guerre.3
I do not mean to suggest that psychoanalysis by contrast would have
supported the execution of Arnaud; on the contrary, by complicating and
limiting society's conception of responsibility, psychoanalysis would seem to
have made it more difficult to execute convicted murderers, let alone
nonviolent impostors. But diminished responsibility is not diminished
selfhood; indeed for psychoanalysis the self is at its most visible, most
expressive, perhaps most interesting at moments in which the moral will has
ceded place to the desires that constitute the deepest stratum of psychic
experience. The crucial historical point is that for Montaigne, as for the judge
at the trial, Jean de Coras, what is at stake in this case is not psychic
experience at all but rather a communal judgment that must, in extraordinary
cases, be clarified and secured by legal authority. Martin's body figured
prominently in the trial, but not as the inalienable phenomenological base of
his psychic history; it figured rather as a collection of attributes—lines,
curves, volumes (that is, scars, features, clothing, shoe size, and so on)—that
could be held up against anyone who claimed the name and property of
Martin Guerre. The move is not from distinct physical traits to the complex
life experience generated within, but outward to the community's
determination that this particular body possesses by right a particular identity
and hence a particular set of possessions. At issue is not Martin Guerre as
subject but Martin Guerre as object, the placeholder in a complex system of
possessions, kinship bonds, contractual relationships, customary rights, and
ethical obligations. Arnaud, the court ruled, had no right to that place, and the
state had the obligation to destroy him for trying to seize it. Martin's
subjectivity—or, for that matter, Arnaud's or Bertrande's—does not any the
less exist, but it seems peripheral, or rather, it seems to be the product of the
relations, material objects, and judgments exposed in the case rather than the
producer of these relations, objects, and judgments. If we may glimpse
analyzable services—identities that invite deep psychological speculation—
these selves seem brought into being by the institutional processes set in
motion by Arnaud's imposture. Psychoanalysis is, from this perspective, less
the privileged explanatory key than the distant and distorted consequence of
this cultural nexus.
In a remarkable essay Leo Spitzer observed years ago that medieval
writers seem to have had little or no “concept of intellectual property” and
consequently no respect for the integrity or propriety of the first-person
pronoun.4 A medieval writer would incorporate without any apparent
concern the experiences of another into his own first-person account; indeed
he would assume the “I” of another. In such a discursive system,
psychoanalytic interpretation seems to me crippled: it is only when
proprietary rights to the self have been secured—rights made most visible,
we may add, in moments of self-estrangement or external threat—that the
subject of psychoanalysis, both its method and the materials upon which it
operates, is made possible. The case of Martin Guerre is, to be sure, a
remarkable oddity, and I could scarcely claim that by itself it secured much
beyond the early death of a gifted impostor. But I suggest that the
accumulation of institutional decisions and communal pressures of the kind
revealed there did help to fashion the historical mode of selfhood that
psychoanalysis has tried to universalize into the very form of the human
condition.
This attempted universalization is not the result of a mere blunder or of
overwhelming hermeneutic ambition, for there exist, after all, complex forms
of self-consciousness and highly discursive personhood in the West long
before the sixteenth century. The sense of identity secured in the trial of
Arnaud du Tilh has its roots in an exceedingly rich and ancient tradition, a
tradition so dense and multifaceted that it provokes simultaneously an
historiographical paralysis and an interpretive license. The judicial decision
to terminate the life of a man who has tried to assume the identity of another
is a tiny episode in a vast history, a history without convenient narrative
lines, with too many precedents, with a bewildering network of contributing
and limiting factors: theology, philosophy, law, social ritual, family customs.
It is deeply tempting in the face of such a history to assume that it is, in effect,
no history at all, that the self is at its core a stable point of reference, a given
upon which to construct interpretations, psychoanalytic or other. Such
interpretations based upon a fixed value of identity offer the intellectual
gratification—consoling in the face of a frightening accumulation of traces
from the past or from other societies or from the dark corners of our own
lands— of a totalizing comprehension, a harmonious vision of the whole.
But this unitary vision is achieved, as Natalie Davis's book makes clear,
only by repressing history, or, more accurately, by repressing histories—
multiple, complex, refractory stories. Such stories become, in effect,
decorative incidents, filigrees enchased on the surface of a solid and single
truth, or (in subtler versions) interesting variants on the central and
irreducible universal narrative, the timeless master myth.
But what if we refuse the lure of a totalizing vision? The alternative
frequently proposed is a relativism that refuses to privilege one narrative
over another, that celebrates the uniqueness of each cultural moment. But this
stance—akin to congratulating both the real and the pretended Martin Guerre
for their superb performances—is not, I think, either promising or realistic.
For thorough-going relativism has a curious resemblance to the
universalizing that it proposes to displace: both are uncomfortable with
histories. Histories threaten relativism, though they seem superficially allied,
because the connections and ruptures with which historians are concerned
sort ill with the unorganized, value-neutral equivalences that would allow
each moment a perfect independence and autonomy. The power of the story
of Martin Guerre, as Natalie Davis helps us understand, lies not in an
absolute otherness that compels us to suspend all our values in the face of an
entirely different system of consciousness, but rather in the intimations of an
obscure link between those distant events and the way we are. The actual
effect of relativism is not to achieve a perfect ethical neutrality— as if we
could cleanly bracket all our beliefs and lift ourselves off our moral world—
but to block a disconcerting recognition: that our identity may not originate in
(or be guaranteed by) the fixity, the certainty, of our own body.
But if we reject both the totalizing of a universal mythology and the
radical particularizing of relativism, what are we left with? We are left with
a network of lived and narrated stories, practices, strategies, representations,
fantasies, negotiations, and exchanges that, along with the surviving aural,
tactile, and visual traces, fashion our experience of the past, of others, and of
ourselves. The case of Martin Guerre offers, in this context, neither a
universal myth nor a perfectly unique and autonomous event; it is a peculiarly
Renaissance story, the kind of story that the age told itself in a thousand
variations over and over again. The point of this telling is not to confirm a
truth always and already known, nor—as the fate of Arnaud poignantly
exemplifies—is the telling without consequences: in the judicial murder of
the impostor we witness in tiny compass part of the process that secures our
concept of individual existence. That existence depends upon institutions that
limit and, when necessary, exterminate a threatening mobility; the secure
possession of one's body is not the origin of identity but one of the
consequences of the compulsive cultural stabilizing unusually visible in this
story.
It is important to characterize the case of Martin Guerre as a story not
only in order to acknowledge the way that a record of these particular lives,
out of so many millions lost to our view, managed to survive in the sixteenth-
century narratives of Jean de Coras and Montaigne and the twentieth-century
narratives of Janet Lewis, Natalie Davis, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Daniel
Vigne, but also in order to make the crucial connection between this
relatively obscure, local series of events and the larger historical process in
which they participate. For it is in stories—above all, literary fantasies—
produced and consumed by those who had never heard of Martin Guerre, that
the issues raised by his case escape their immediate territorial and cultural
boundaries and receive their fullest rehearsal, elaboration, and exploration.
And conversely, the trial and execution of Arnaud du Tilh enables us to
understand aspects of the social significance of these literary fantasies that
would otherwise remain obscure.
Jean de Coras's account of the Guerre case was not translated into
English nor did Montaigne's brief recounting have substantial impact, but
sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English writers invented, in effect, dozens
of versions of this story. The drama is particularly rich in such versions, from
the larcenous impersonation of the missing husband in John Marston's play,
What You Will, to the romantic impersonations in Beaumont and Fletcher's
tragicomedies, from Perkin Warbeck's regal pretentions in John Ford's play
of that name to the sleazy tricks of Ben Jonson's rogues. (“But were they
gulled / With a belief that I was Scoto?” asks Volpone. “Sir,” replies the
parasite Mosca, “Scoto himself could hardly have distinguished.”) Above
all, there are the instances of imposture and loss of personal moorings in
Shakespeare: the buffoonery of the false Vincentio in The Taming of the
Shrew, the geometry of the paired twins in The Comedy of Errors, the more
impassioned geometry of Twelfth Night. Even when there is no malicious,
accidental, or natural double, Shakespeare's characters are frequently
haunted by the sense that their identity has been lost or stolen: “Who is it that
can tell me who I am?” cries the anguished Lear. And in the most famous of
the tragedies, the ghost of Old Hamlet—“Of life, of crown, of queen at once
dispatched”—returns to his land to demand that his son take the life of the
impostor who has seized his identity.
Not by accident is it in the drama that this exploration of the issue at stake
in the trial of Arnaud du Tilh is most intense, for the form of the drama itself
invites reflection upon the extent to which it is possible for one man to
assume the identity of another. Every theatrical performance at once confirms
and denies this possibility: confirms it with varying degrees of success
depending upon the skill of the actor and denies it because that skill is itself
perceived by virtue of the small but unbridgeable distance between the
actor's real and fictive identity. All Renaissance drama is in this sense a
playful enactment of the case of Martin Guerre: a convincing impersonation
before a large audience that is complicit with the deception only to bear
witness at the close to the imposture's end. In some instances the
impersonation seemed less playful, more dangerous than others: powerful
noblemen complained that they were themselves being represented on stage,
and they successfully sought a legal prohibition of the miming of living
notables. But even with fictive or long-dead characters, the drama
continually celebrates the mystery of Arnaud's art: the successful insertion of
one individual into the identity of another. And inevitably this celebration is
at the same time an anatomy, an exposing to view of the mechanisms of
imposture. What is entirely unacceptable—indeed punishable by death in the
everyday world—is both instructive and delightful in spaces specially
marked off for the exercise of impersonation. For in these spaces, and only in
these spaces, there is by a widely shared social agreement no imposture.
It is no accident too that in virtually all of these plays—and there are
other instances in Shakespeare's work and the work of his contemporaries—
the intrigue that arises from the willed or accidental mistaking of one person
for another centers on property and proper names: purse and person are here
inseparably linked as they were in the parish records that began to be kept
systematically in England only in the sixteenth century. Henry VIII's
insatiable craving for money to finance his military adventures abroad and
his extravagances at home led him to exact the so-called Loan of 1522, which
was based upon a survey undertaken at royal command earlier that year. The
survey, whose financial objectives were kept secret, required authorities in
the land to certify in writing the names of all the men above the age of sixteen
and “whom they belong to.” They were to record as well “who is the lord of
every town and hamlet . . . who be parsons of the same towns, and what the
benefices be worth by the year . . . also who be the owners of every parcel of
land within any town, hamlet, parish, or village . . . with the year value of
every man's land within the same.”5 The secrecy built into the survey—for
were its purpose known, there would have been widespread evasion and
concealment—had the effect of naturalizing the relationship between name
and wealth. A man's goods were to be recorded not for the specific purpose
of taxation but for the general purpose of identification: to enable the
kingdom to know itself and hence to know its resources and its strength.
To the momentous survey of 1522 must be added an innovation less
immediately spectacular but in the long run more important: the parish
records that Cromwell instituted in 1538.6 The parish chest, which is for
demography what the Renaissance English theater is for literary history,
signals, along with other innovative forms of Tudor record-keeping, a
powerful official interest in identity and property, and identity as property.
Precisely this interest is voiced, tested, and deepened throughout
Shakespeare's career. It is often said, with a sense of irony and resignation,
that though we possess a surprising amount of documentary evidence about
Shakespeare's life, virtually none of it is of real significance for an
understanding of his plays, for most of the surviving documents are notarial
records of real estate transactions. I think property may be closer to the
wellsprings of the Shakespearean conception of identity than we imagine.
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, to be sure, knew the difference
between a complex individual and what the Norwegian captain in Hamlet
calls “a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name.” Yet I
think that in all the literary instances I have cited, identity is conceived in a
way that renders psychoanalytic interpretations marginal or belated. For
what most matters in the literary texts, as in the documents that record the
case of Martin Guerre, are communally secured proprietary rights to a name
and a place in an increasingly mobile social world, and these rights seem
more an historical condition that enables the development of psychoanalysis
than a psychic condition that psychoanalysis itself can adequately explain.
In Renaissance drama, as in the case of Martin Guerre, the traditional
linkages between body, property, and name are called into question; looking
back upon the theatrical and judicial spectacle, one can glimpse the early
stages of the slow, momentous transformation of the middle term from
“property” to “psyche.”7 But that transformation had by no means already
occurred; it was on the contrary the result (not yet perfectly realized in our
own time) of a prolonged series of actions and transactions. The
consequence, I think, is that psychoanalytic interpretation seems to follow
upon rather than to explain Renaissance texts. If psychoanalysis was, in
effect, made possible by (among other things) the legal and literary
proceedings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then its interpretive
practice is not irrelevant to those proceedings, nor is it exactly an
anachronism. But psychoanalytic interpretation is causally belated, even as it
is causally linked: hence the curious effect of a discourse that functions as if
the psychological categories it invokes were not only simultaneous with but
even prior to and themselves causes of the very phenomena of which in
actual fact they were the results. I do not propose that we abandon the
attempts at psychologically deep readings of Renaissance texts; rather, in the
company of literary criticism and history, psychoanalysis can redeem its
belatedness only when it historicizes its own procedures.
There are interesting signs of this historicizing—perhaps most radically
in the school of Hegelian psychoanalysis associated with the work of
Jacques Lacan, where identity is always revealed to be the identity of
another, always registered (as in those parish registers) in language. But I
want to end with a glance at a much earlier and still powerful attempt to
formulate an historical conception of the self, an attempt that significantly
locates the origins of this conception in language and more specifically in
literary practice.
“A PERSON,” writes Hobbes,
is he whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or
actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by
Fiction. When they are considered as his owne, then is he called a Naturall Person: And when they
are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then is he a Feigned or Artificiall
person. The word Person is latine . . . as Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward
appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it,
which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any
Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person is the same
that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation.8

Psychoanalysis will in effect seize upon the concept of a “natural person”

and will develop that concept into a brilliant hermeneutical system centered
upon stripping away layers of strategic displacement that obscure the self's
underlying drives. But in Hobbes the “natural person” originates in the
“artificial person”—the mask, the character on a stage “translated” from the
theater to the tribunal. There is no layer deeper, more authentic, than
theatrical self-representation. This conception of the self does not deny the
importance of the body—all consciousness for Hobbes derives from the
body's responses to external pressure—but it does not anchor personal
identity in an inalienable biological continuity. The crucial consideration is
ownership: what distinguishes a “natural” person from an “artificial” person
is that the former is considered to own his words and actions. Considered by
whom? By authority. But is authority itself then natural or artificial? In a
move that is one of the cornerstones of Hobbes's absolutist political
philosophy, authority is vested in an artificial person who represents the
words and actions of the entire nation. All men therefore are impersonators
of themselves, but impersonators whose clear title to identity is secured by
an authority irrevocably deeded to an artificial person. A great mask allows
one to own as one's own face another mask.
If we conceive of a mask (as psychoanalysis has, in effect, taught us) as a
defensive strategy, a veneer hiding the authentic self beneath, then Hobbes's
conception must seem brittle and inadequate. But for Hobbes there is no
person, no coherent, enduring identity, beneath the mask; strip away the
theatrical role and you reach either a chaos of unformed desire that must be
tamed to ensure survival or a dangerous assembly of free thoughts (“because
thought is free,” 3.37.478) that must— again to ensure survival—remain
unspoken. Identity is only possible as a mask, something constructed and
assumed, but this need not imply that identity so conceived is a sorry
business. In our culture masks are trivial objects for children to play with
and discard, and theatrical roles have the same air of pasteboard
insubstantiality. But this is not always and everywhere the case; a man who
lived in the shadow of Shakespeare might have had a deeper sense of what
could be counterfeited on the stage or represented before a tribunal. In his
conception of a person as a theatrical mask secured by authority, Hobbes
seems far closer than Freud to the world of Shakespeare and, of course,
Arnaud du Tilh.

APPENDIX
The social fabrication of identity is, I have argued, particularly marked in the
drama where, after all, identity is fashioned out of public discourse, and even
soliloquies tend to take the form of rhetorical declamations. But nondramatic
literature is, in its own way, deeply involved in the prepsychoanalytic
fashioning of the proprietary rights of selfhood. Thus even in The Faerie
Queene, where property seems to be absorbed altogether into the landscape
of the mind, Spenser's concern with psychic experience is not manifested in
the representation of a particular individual's inner life but rather in the
representation of the hero's externalized struggle to secure clear title to his
allegorical attributes and hence to his name. If that struggle is itself a vision
of the inner life, it is one that suggests that for Spenser the psyche can only be
conceived as a dangerous, factionalized social world, a world of vigilance,
intrigue, extreme violence, and brief, fragile moments of intense beauty—just
such a world as Spenser the colonial administrator inhabited in Ireland.
 What does it mean that Spenser looks deep within himself and imagines
that realm as eerily like the outward realm in which he bustled? It means that
for him the noblest representation of the inner life is not lyric but epic—
hence the compulsion of Spenserean characters to secure their identity by
force of arms. And it means too that even the most well-defended existence is
extremely vulnerable to fraud—identity may be imitated, misused, falsely
appropriated, as Arnaud du Tilh appropriated the name and property and
wife of Martin Guerre.
Evil in The Faerie Queene has its large-boned, athletic champions, but
its most dangerous agents are the impostors, those who have the power to
assume with uncanny accuracy all the signs of virtue. Thus when the subtle
Archimago wishes to divide the Red Cross Knight from his beloved Una,
truth's allegorical embodiment, he contrives “the person to put on / Of that
good knight.” “And when he sate vpon his courser free,” Spenser concludes,
“Saint George himself ye would haue deemed him to be.” The disguise is
sufficiently effective to take in Una herself— even truth cannot unmask a
perfect falsehood—and the impostor's identity is only revealed after he is
half-killed by the pagan Sansloy. Conversely, Red Cross's own identity—his
name—is only revealed to him when he too has undergone the trials that
belong to the signs he wears. And that name, first disclosed to the reader as
the identity that Archimago falsely assumed, is paradoxically disclosed late
in the poem to Red Cross as his true origin, an origin he can only possess at
the end of his quest.
With the idea of an origin that is only conferred upon one at the end of a
series of actions and transactions, I return to the notion that psychoanalysis is
the historical outcome of certain characteristic Renaissance strategies.

NOTES
1 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Davis's text was originally published in French, together with a “recit romanesque” written by the
film's screenwriter and director, Jean-Claude Carrière and Daniel Vigne (Le Retour de Martin
Guerre [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982]).
2 The only conspicuous religious element in the story is at best equivocal: Bertrande and the false
Martin Guerre apparently frequented a Protestant conventicle. Natalie Davis speculates that the
couple may have been seeking, in the Protestant ethos of the companionate marriage, a kind of
ethical validation of their deception.
3 Montaigne, “Des boyteux” [Of Cripples], in Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1962),
2:478–79.
4 Leo Spitzer, “Notes on the Empirical and Poetic ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 (1946): 414–22.
5 Quoted in W.G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder: King Henry's England, 1500–1547 (London:
Longman, 1976), 20–21.
6 See William E. Tate, The Parish Chest: A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946).
7 It is important to grasp that this transformation is at once a revolution and a continuation; “psyche” is
neither a mere mystification for “property” nor a radical alternative to it.
8 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin, 1968), 1.16.217.
 8

TOWARDS A POETICS OF
CULTURE

I feel in a somewhat false position, which is not a particularly promising way

to begin, and I might as well explain why.1 My own work has always been
done with a sense of just having to go about and do it, without establishing
first exactly what my theoretical position is. A few years ago I was asked by
Genre to edit a selection of Renaissance essays, and I said OK. I collected a
bunch of essays and then, out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction
done, I wrote that the essays represented something I called a “new
historicism.” I've never been very good at making up advertising phrases of
this kind; for reasons that I would be quite interested in exploring at some
point, the name stuck much more than other names I'd very carefully tried to
invent over the years. In fact I have heard—in the last year or so—quite a lot
of talk about the “new historicism” (which for some reason in Australia is
called Neohistoricism); there are articles about it, attacks on it, references to
it in dissertations: the whole thing makes me quite giddy with amazement. In
any case, as part of this peculiar phenomenon I have been asked to say
something of a theoretical kind about the work I'm doing. So I shall try if not
to define the new historicism, at least to situate it as a practice—a practice
rather than a doctrine, since as far as I can tell (and I should be the one to
know) it's no doctrine at all.
One of the peculiar characteristics of the “new historicism” in literary
studies is precisely how unresolved and in some ways disingenuous it has
been—I have been—about the relation to literary theory. On the one hand it
seems to me that an openness to the theoretical ferment of the last few years
is precisely what distinguishes the new historicism from the positivist
historical scholarship of the early twentieth century. Certainly, the presence
of Michel Foucault on the Berkeley campus for extended visits during the last
five or six years of his life, and more generally the influence in America of
European (and especially French) anthropological and social theorists, has
helped to shape my own literary critical practice. On the other hand the
historicist critics have on the whole been unwilling to enrol themselves in
one or the other of the dominant theoretical camps.
I want to speculate on why this should be so by trying to situate myself in
relation to Marxism on the one hand, and poststructuralism on the other. In the
1970s I used to teach courses with names like “Marxist Aesthetics” on the
Berkeley campus. This came to an inglorious end when I was giving such a
course—it must have been the mid-1970s—and I remember a student getting
very angry with me. Now it's true that I tended to like those Marxist figures
who were troubled in relation to Marxism—Walter Benjamin, the early
rather than the later Lukács, and so forth—and I remember someone finally
got up and screamed out in class “You're either a Bolshevik or a Menshevik
— make up your fucking mind,” and then slammed the door. It was a little
unsettling, but I thought about it afterwards and realized that I wasn't sure
whether I was a Menshevik, but I certainly wasn't a Bolshevik. After that I
started to teach courses with names like “Cultural Poetics.” It's true that I'm
still more uneasy with a politics and a literary perspective that is untouched
by Marxist thought, but that doesn't lead me to endorse propositions or
embrace a particular philosophy, politics or rhetoric, faute de mieux.
Thus the crucial identifying gestures made by the most distinguished
American Marxist aesthetic theorist, Fredric Jameson, seem to me highly
problematic. Let us take, for example, the following eloquent passage from
The Political Unconscious:
the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that
are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the
reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that structural,
experiential, and conceptual gap between the public and the private, between the social and the
psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the “individual,” which
—the tendential law of social life under capitalism—maims our existence as individual subjects and
paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from our speech
itself.2

A working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political
and those that are not—that is, an aesthetic domain that is in some way
marked off from the discursive institutions that are operative elsewhere in a
culture—becomes for Jameson a malignant symptom of “privatization.” Why
should the “private” immediately enter into this distinction at all? Does the
term refer to private property, that is, to the ownership of the means of
production and the regulation of the mode of consumption? If so, what is the
historical relation between this mode of economic organization and a
working distinction between the political and the poetic? It would seem that
in print, let alone in the electronic media, private ownership has led not to
“privatization” but to the drastic communalization of all discourse, the
constitution of an ever larger mass audience, the organization of a
commercial sphere unimagined and certainly unattained by the comparatively
modest attempts in pre-capitalist societies to organize public discourse.
Moreover, is it not possible to have a communal sphere of art that is distinct
from other communal spheres? Is this communal differentiation, sanctioned
by the laws of property, not the dominant practice in capitalist society,
manifestly in the film and television industries, but also, since the invention
of movable type, in the production of poems and novels as well? Would we
really find it less alienating to have no distinction at all between the political
and the poetic—the situation, let us say, during China's Cultural Revolution?
Or, for that matter, do we find it notably liberating to have our own country
governed by a film actor who is either cunningly or pathologically indifferent
to the traditional differentiation between fantasy and reality?
For The Political Unconscious any demarcation of the aesthetic must be
aligned with the private which is in turn aligned with the psychological, the
poetic, and the individual, as distinct from the public, the social, and the
political. All of these interlocking distinctions, none of which seems to me
philosophically or even historically bound up with the original “working
distinction,” are then laid at the door of capitalism with its power to “maim”
and “paralyze” us as “individual subjects.” Though we may find a
differentiation between cultural discourses that are artistic and cultural
discourses that are social or political well before the European seventeenth
century, and in cultures that seem far removed from the capitalist mode of
production, Jameson insists that somehow the perpetrator and agent of the
alleged maiming is capitalism. A shadowy opposition is assumed between
the “individual” (bad) and the “individual subject” (good); indeed the
maiming of the latter creates the former.
 The whole passage has the resonance of an allegory of the fall of man:
once we were whole, agile, integrated; we were individual subjects but not
individuals, we had no psychology distinct from the shared life of the
society; politics and poetry were one. Then capitalism arose and shattered
this luminous, benign totality. The myth echoes throughout Jameson's book,
though by the close it has been eschatologically reoriented so that the totality
lies not in a past revealed to have always already fallen but in the classless
future. A philosophical claim then appeals to an absent empirical event. And
literature is invoked at once as the dark token of fallenness and the
shimmering emblem of the absent transfiguration.
But, of course, poststructuralism has raised serious questions about such
a vision, challenging both its underlying oppositions and the primal organic
unity that it posits as either paradisal origin or utopian, eschatological end.3
This challenge has already greatly modified, though by no means simply
displaced, Marxist discourse. I could exemplify this complex interaction
between Marxism and poststructuralism by discussing Jameson's own most
recent work in which he finds himself, from the perspective of
postmodernism, deploring the loss of those “working distinctions” that at
least enabled the left to identify its enemies and articulate a radical
program.4 But to avoid confusions, I want to focus instead on the work of
Jean-François Lyotard. Here, as in The Political Unconscious, the
distinction between discursive fields is once again at stake: for Lyotard the
existence of proper names makes possible
the co-existence of those worlds that Kant calls fields, territories, and domains—those worlds
which of course present the same object, but which also make that object the stakes of
heterogenous (or incommensurable) expectations in universes of phrases, none of which can be
transformed into any other.5

Lyotard's model for these differentiated discourses is the existence of

proper names. But now it is the role of capitalism not to demarcate
discursive domains but, quite the opposite, to make such domains untenable.
“Capital is that which wants a single language and a single network, and it
never stops trying to present them” (p. 55). Lyotard's principal exhibit of this
attempt by capital to institute a single language—what Bakhtin would call
monologism—is Faurisson's denial of the Holocaust, and behind this denial,
the Nazis’ attempt to obliterate the existence of millions of Jews and other
undesirables, an attempt Lyotard, characterizes as the will “to strike from
history and from the map entire worlds of names.”
The immediate problem with this account is that the Nazis did not seem
particularly interested in exterminating names along with the persons who
possessed those names; on the contrary, they kept, in so far as was
compatible with a campaign of mass murder, remarkably full records, and
they looked forward to a time in which they could share their
accomplishment with a grateful world by establishing a museum dedicated to
the culture of the wretches they had destroyed. The Faurisson affair is at
bottom not an epistemological dilemma, as Lyotard claims, but an attempt to
wish away evidence that is both substantial and verifiable. The issue is not
an Epicurean paradox—“if death is there, you are not there; if you are there,
death is not there; hence it is impossible for you to prove that death is
there”—but a historical problem: what is the evidence of mass murder? How
reliable is this evidence? Are there convincing grounds for denying or
doubting the documented events? And if there are not such grounds, how may
we interpret the motives of those who seek to cast doubt upon the historical
record?
There is a further problem in Lyotard's use of the Faurisson affair as an
instance of capitalist hostility to names: the conflation of Fascist apologetics
and capitalism would seem to be itself an instance of monologism, since it
suppresses all the aspects of capitalism that are wedded to the generation and
inscription of individual identities and to the demarcation of boundaries
separating those identities. We may argue, of course, that the capitalist
insistence upon individuality is fraudulent, but it is difficult, I think, to keep
the principle of endlessly proliferated, irreducible individuality separate
from the market place version against which it is set. For it is capitalism, as
Marx suggested, that mounts the West's most powerful and sustained assault
upon collective, communal values and identities. And it is in the market
place and in the state apparatus linked to the circulation and accumulation of
capital that names themselves are forged. Proper names, as distinct from
common names, seem less the victims than the products of property—they are
bound up not only with the property one has in oneself, that is, with the theory
of possessive individualism, but quite literally with the property one
possesses, for proper names are insisted upon in the early modern period
precisely in order to register them in the official documents that enable the
state to calculate and tax personal property.6
 The difference between Jameson's capitalism, the perpetrator of separate
discursive domains, the agent of privacy, psychology, and the individual, and
Lyotard's capitalism, the enemy of such domains and the destroyer of privacy,
psychology, and the individual, may in part be traced to a difference between
the Marxist and poststructuralist projects. Jameson, seeking to expose the
fallaciousness of a separate artistic sphere and to celebrate the materialist
integration of all discourses, finds capitalism at the root of the false
differentiation; Lyotard, seeking to celebrate the differentiation of all
discourses and to expose the fallaciousness of monological unity, finds
capitalism at the root of the false integration. History functions in both cases
as a convenient anecdotal ornament upon a theoretical structure, and
capitalism appears not as a complex social and economic development in the
West but as a malign philosophical principle.7
I propose that the general question addressed by Jameson and Lyotard—
what is the historical relation between art and society or between one
institutionally demarcated discursive practice and another?—does not lend
itself to a single, theoretically satisfactory answer of the kind that Jameson
and Lyotard are trying to provide. Or rather theoretical satisfaction here
seems to depend upon a utopian vision that collapses the contradictions of
history into a moral imperative. The problem is not simply the
incompatibility of two theories—Marxist and poststructuralist—with one
another, but the inability of either of the theories to come to terms with the
apparently contradictory historical effects of capitalism. In principle, of
course, both Marxism and poststructuralism seize upon contradictions: for
the former they are signs of repressed class conflicts, for the latter they
disclose hidden cracks in the spurious certainties of logocentrism. But in
practice Jameson treats capitalism as the agent of repressive differentiation,
while Lyotard treats it as the agent of monological totalization. And this
effacement of contradiction is not the consequence of an accidental lapse but
rather the logical outcome of theory's search for the obstacle that blocks the
realization of its eschatological vision.
If capitalism is invoked not as a unitary demonic principle, but as a
complex historical movement in a world without paradisal origins or
chiliastic expectations, then an inquiry into the relation between art and
society in capitalist cultures must address both the formation of the working
distinction upon which Jameson remarks and the totalizing impulse upon
which Lyotard remarks. For capitalism has characteristically generated
neither regimes in which all discourses seem coordinated, nor regimes in
which they seem radically isolated or discontinuous, but regimes in which
the drive towards differentiation and the drive towards monological
organization operate simultaneously, or at least oscillate so rapidly as to
create the impression of simultaneity.
In a brilliant paper that received unusual attention, elicited a response
from a White House speech-writer, and most recently generated a segment on
CBS's “Sixty Minutes,” the political scientist and historian Michael Rogin
recently observed the number of times President Reagan has, at critical
moments in his career, quoted lines from his own or other popular films. The
President is a man, Rogin remarks, “whose most spontaneous moments—
(‘Where do we find such men?’ about the American D-Day dead;‘I am
paying for this microphone, Mr. Green,’ during the 1980 New Hampshire
primary debate)—are not only preserved and projected on film, but also turn
out to be lines from old movies.”8 To a remarkable extent, Ronald Reagan,
who made his final Hollywood film, Hellcats of the Navy, in 1957,
continues to live within the movies; he has been shaped by them, draws much
of his cold war rhetoric from them, and cannot or will not distinguish
between them and an external reality. Indeed his political career has
depended upon an ability to project himself and his mass audience into a
realm in which there is no distinction between simulation and reality.
The response from Anthony Dolan, a White House speechwriter who was
asked to comment on Rogin's paper, was highly revealing. “What he's really
saying,” Dolan suggested, “is that all of us are deeply affected by a uniquely
American art form: the movies.”9 Rogin had in fact argued that the
presidential character “was produced from the convergence of two sets of
substitutions which generated Cold War countersubversion in the 1940s and
underlie its 1980s revival—the political replacement of Nazism by
Communism, from which the national security state was born; and the
psychological shift from an embodied self to its simulacrum on film.” Both
the political and the psychological substitution were intimately bound up
with Ronald Reagan's career in the movies. Dolan in response rewrites
Rogin's thesis into a celebration of the power of “a uniquely American art
form” to shape “all of us.” Movies, Dolan told the New York Times reporter,
“heighten reality rather than lessen it.”
Such a statement appears to welcome the collapse of the working
distinction between the aesthetic and the real; the aesthetic is not an
alternative realm but a way of intensifying the single realm we all inhabit.
But then the spokesman went on to assert that the President “usually credits
the films whose lines he uses.” That is, at the moment of appropriation, the
President acknowledges that he is borrowing from the aesthetic and hence
acknowledges the existence of a working distinction. In so doing he respects
and even calls attention to the difference between his own presidential
discourse and the fictions in which he himself at one time took part; they are
differences upon which his own transition from actor to politician in part
depends, and they are the signs of the legal and economic system that he
represents. For the capitalist aesthetic demands acknowledgments—hence
the various marks of property rights that are flashed on the screen or
inscribed in a text—and the political arena insists that it is not a fiction. That
without acknowledgment the President delivers speeches written by Anthony
Dolan or others does not appear to concern anyone; this has long been the
standard operating procedure of American politicians. But it would concern
people if the President recited speeches that were lifted without
acknowledgment from old movies. He would then seem not to know the
difference between fantasy and reality. And that might be alarming.
The White House, of course, was not responding to a theoretical
problem, but to the implication that somehow the President did not fully
recognize that he was quoting, or alternatively that he did realize it and chose
to repress the fact in order to make a more powerful impression. In one
version he is a kind of sleepwalker, in the other a plagiarist. To avoid these
implications the White House spokesman needed in effect to invoke a
difference that he had himself a moment before undermined.
The spokesman's remarks were hasty and ad hoc, but it did not take
reflection to reproduce the complex dialectic of differentiation and identity
that those remarks articulate. That dialectic is powerful precisely because it
is by now virtually thoughtless; it takes a substantial intellectual effort to
separate the boundaries of art from the subversion of those boundaries, an
effort such as that exemplified in the work of Jameson or Lyotard. But the
effect of such an effort is to remove itself from the very phenomenon it had
proposed to analyze, namely, the relation between art and surrounding
discourses in capitalist culture. For the effortless invocation of two
apparently contradictory accounts of art is characteristic of American
capitalism in the late twentieth century and an outcome of long-term
tendencies in the relationship of art and capital: in the same moment a
working distinction between the aesthetic and the real is established and
abrogated.
We could argue, following Jameson, that the establishment of the
distinction is the principal effect, with a view towards alienating us from our
own imaginations by isolating fantasies in a private, apolitical realm. Or we
could argue, following Lyotard, that the abrogation of the distinction is the
principal effect, with a view towards effacing or evading differences by
establishing a single, monolithic ideological structure. But if we are asked to
choose between these alternatives, we will be drawn away from an analysis
of the relation between capitalism and aesthetic production. For from the
sixteenth century, when the effects for art of joint-stock company organization
first began to be felt, to the present, capitalism has produced a powerful and
effective oscillation between the establishment of distinct discursive
domains and the collapse of those domains into one another. It is this restless
oscillation rather than the securing of a particular fixed position that
constitutes the distinct power of capitalism. The individual elements—a
range of discontinuous discourses on the one hand, the monological
unification of all discourses on the other—may be found fully articulated in
other economic and social systems; only capitalism has managed to generate
a dizzying, seemingly inexhaustible circulation between the two.
My use of the term circulation here is influenced by the work of Derrida,
but sensitivity to the practical strategies of negotiation and exchange depends
less upon poststructuralist theory than upon the circulatory rhythms of
American politics. And the crucial point is that it is not politics alone but the
whole structure of production and consumption—the systematic organization
of ordinary life and consciousness—that generates the pattern of boundary
making and breaking, the oscillation between demarcated objects and
monological totality, that I have sketched. If we restrict our focus to the zone
of political institutions, we can easily fall into the illusion that everything
depends upon the unique talents—if that is the word—of Ronald Reagan, that
he alone has managed to generate the enormously effective shuttling between
massive, universalizing fantasies and centerlessness that characterizes his
administration. This illusion leads in turn to what John Carlos Rowe has
called the humanist trivialization of power, a trivialization that finds its local
political expression in the belief that the fantasmatics of current American
politics are the product of a single man and will pass with him. On the
contrary, Ronald Reagan is manifestly the product of a larger and more
durable American structure—not only a structure of power, ideological
extremism and militarism, but of pleasure, recreation, and interest, a structure
that shapes the spaces we construct for ourselves, the way we present “the
news,” the fantasies we daily consume on television or in the movies, the
entertainments that we characteristically make and take.
I am suggesting then that the oscillation between totalization and
difference, uniformity and the diversity of names, unitary truth and a
proliferation of distinct entities—in short between Lyotard's capitalism and
Jameson's—is built into the poetics of everyday behavior in America.10 Let
us consider, for example, not the President's Hollywood career but a far
more innocent California pastime, a trip to Yosemite National Park. One of
the most popular walks at Yosemite is the Nevada Falls Trail. So popular,
indeed, is this walk that the Park Service has had to pave the first miles of
the trail in order to keep them from being dug into trenches by the heavy
traffic. At a certain point the asphalt stops, and you encounter a sign that tells
you that you are entering the wilderness. You have passed then from the
National Forests that surround the park—forests that serve principally as
state-subsidized nurseries for large timber companies and hence are not
visibly distinguishable from the tracts of privately-owned forest with which
they are contiguous—to the park itself, marked by the payment of admission
to the uniformed ranger at the entrance kiosk, and finally to a third and
privileged zone of publicly demarcated Nature. This zone, called the
wilderness, is marked by the abrupt termination of the asphalt and by a sign
that lists the rules of behavior that you must now observe: no dogs, no
littering, no fires, no camping without a permit, and so forth. The wilderness
then is signalled by an intensification of the rules, an intensification that
serves as the condition of an escape from the asphalt.
You can continue on this trail then until you reach a steep cliff onto which
the guardians of the wilderness have thoughtfully bolted a cast-iron stairway.
The stairway leads to a bridge that spans a rushing torrent, and from the
middle of the bridge you are rewarded with a splendid view of Nevada
Falls. On the railing that keeps you from falling to your death as you enjoy
your vision of the wilderness there are signs—information about the
dimensions of the falls, warnings against attempting to climb the treacherous,
mist-slickened rocks, trail markers for those who wish to walk further—and
an anodyzed aluminum plaque on which are inscribed inspirational, vaguely
Wordsworthian sentiments by the California environmentist John Muir. The
passage, as best I can recall, assures you that in years to come you will
treasure the image you have before you. And next to these words, also etched
into the aluminum, is precisely an image: a photograph of Nevada Falls taken
from the very spot on which you stand.
The pleasure of this moment—beyond the pleasure of the mountain air
and the waterfall and the great boulders and the deep forests of Lodgepole
and Jeffrey pine—arises from the unusually candid glimpse of the process of
circulation that shapes the whole experience of the park. The wilderness is at
once secured and obliterated by the official gestures that establish its
boundaries; the natural is set over against the artificial through means that
render such an opposition meaningless. The eye passes from the “natural”
image of the waterfall to the aluminum image, as if to secure a difference (for
why else bother to go to the park at all? Why not simply look at a book of
pictures?), even as that difference is effaced. The effacement is by no means
complete—on the contrary, parks like Yosemite are one of the ways in which
the distinction between nature and artifice is constituted in our society—and
yet the Park Service's plaque on the Nevada Falls bridge conveniently calls
attention to the interpenetration of nature and artifice that makes the
distinction possible.
What is missing from this exemplary fable of capitalist aesthetics is the
question of property relations, since the National Parks exist precisely to
suspend or marginalize that question through the ideology of protected public
space. Everyone owns the parks. That ideology is somewhat bruised by the
actual development of a park like Yosemite, with its expensive hotel, a
restaurant that has a dress code, fancy gift shops and the like, but it is not
entirely emptied out: even the administration of the right-wing Secretary of
the Interior James Watt stopped short of permitting a private golf course to be
constructed on park grounds, and there was public outrage when a television
production company that had contracted to film a series in Yosemite decided
to paint the rocks to make them look more realistic. What we need is an
example that combines recreation or entertainment, aesthetics, the public
sphere, and private property. The example most compelling to a literary
critic like myself is not a political career or a national park but a novel.
In 1976, a convict named Gary Gilmore was released from a federal
penitentiary and moved to Provo, Utah. Several months later, he robbed and
killed two men, was arrested for the crimes, and convicted of murder. The
case became famous when Gilmore demanded that he be executed—a
punishment that had not been inflicted in America for some years, due to
legal protections— and, over the strenuous objections of the American Civil
Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, had his way. The legal maneuvers and the eventual firing-
squad execution became national media events. Well before the denouement
the proceedings had come to the attention of Norman Mailer and his
publisher Warner Books which is, as it announces on its title pages, “a
Warner Communications Company.” Mailer's research assistant, Jere
Herzenberg, and a hack writer and interviewer, Lawrence Schiller,
conducted extensive interviews and acquired documents, records of court
proceedings, and personal papers such as the intimate letters between
Gilmore and his girlfriend. Some of these materials were in the public
domain but many of them were not; they were purchased, and the details of
the purchases themselves become part of the materials that were reworked by
Mailer into The Executioner's Song,11 a “true life novel” as it is called, that
brilliantly combines documentary realism with Mailer's characteristic
romance themes. The novel was a critical and popular success—a success
signalled not only by the sheaves of admiring reviews but by the Universal
Product Code printed on its paperback cover. It was subsequently made into
an NBC-TV miniseries where on successive evenings it helped to sell cars,
soap powder, and deodorant.
Mailer's book had further, and less predictable, ramifications. While he
was working on The Executioner's Song, there was an article on Mailer in
People magazine. The article caught the attention of a convict named Jack H.
Abbott who wrote to offer him first-hand instruction on the conditions of
prison life. An exchange of letters began, and Mailer grew increasingly
impressed not only with their detailed information but with what he calls
their “literary measure.” The letters were cut and arranged by a Random
House editor, Erroll McDonald, and appeared as a book called In the Belly
of the Beast. This book too was widely acclaimed and contributed, with
Mailer's help, to win a parole for its author.
“As I am writing these words,” Mailer wrote in the Introduction to
Abbott's book, “it looks like Abbott will be released on parole this summer.
It is certainly the time for him to get out.”12 “I have never come into bodily
contact with another human being in almost twenty years,” wrote Abbott in
his book, “except in combat; in acts of struggle, of violence” (63). Shortly
after his release, Abbott, now a celebrity, approached a waiter in an all-night
restaurant and asked to use the men's room. The waiter— Richard Adan, an
aspiring actor and playwright—told Abbott that the restaurant had no men's
room and asked him to step outside. When Adan followed him on to the
sidewalk, Abbott, apparently thinking that he was being challenged, stabbed
Adan in the heart with a kitchen knife. Abbott was arrested and convicted
once again of murder. The events have themselves been made into a play,
also called In the Belly of the Beast, that recently opened to very favorable
reviews.
Literary criticism has a familiar set of terms for the relationship between
a work of art and the historical events to which it refers: we speak of
allusion, symbolization, allegorization, representation, and above all
mimesis. Each of these terms has a rich history and is virtually
indispensable, and yet they all seem curiously inadequate to the cultural
phenomenon which Mailer's book and Abbott's and the television series and
the play constitute. And their inadequacy extends to aspects not only of
contemporary culture but of the culture of the past. We need to develop terms
to describe the ways in which material—here official documents, private
papers, newspaper clippings, and so forth—is transferred from one
discursive sphere to another and becomes aesthetic property. It would, I
think, be a mistake to regard this process as uni-directional—from social
discourse to aesthetic discourse—not only because the aesthetic discourse in
this case is so entirely bound up with capitalist venture but because the
social discourse is already charged with aesthetic energies. Not only was
Gilmore explicitly and powerfully moved by the film version of One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but his entire pattern of behavior seems to have
been shaped by the characteristic representations of American popular
fiction, including Mailer's own.
Michael Baxandall has argued recently that “art and society are
analytical concepts from two different kinds of categorization of human
experience. . . . unhomologous systematic constructions put upon
interpenetrating subject-matters.” In consequence, he suggests, any attempt to
relate the two must first “modify one of the terms till it matches the other, but
keeping note of what modification has been necessary since this is a
necessary part of one's information.”13 It is imperative that we acknowledge
the modification and find a way to measure its degree, for it is only in such
measurements that we can hope to chart the relationship between art and
society. Such an admonition is important— methodological self-
consciousness is one of the distinguishing marks of the new historicism in
cultural studies as opposed to a historicism based upon faith in the
transparency of signs and interpretive procedures—but it must be
supplemented by an understanding that the work of art is not itself a pure
flame that lies at the source of our speculations. Rather the work of art is
itself the product of a set of manipulations, some of them our own (most
striking in the case of works that were not originally conceived as “art” at all
but rather as something else—votive objects, propaganda, prayer, and so on),
many others undertaken in the construction of the original work. That is, the
work of art is the product of a negotiation between a creator or class of
creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of
conventions, and the institutions and practices of society. In order to achieve
the negotiation, artists need to create a currency that is valid for a
meaningful, mutually profitable exchange. It is important to emphasize that
the process involves not simply appropriation but exchange, since the
existence of art always implies a return, a return normally measured in
pleasure and interest. I should add that the society's dominant currencies,
money, and prestige, are invariably involved, but I am here using the term
“currency” metaphorically to designate the systematic adjustments,
symbolizations and lines of credit necessary to enable an exchange to take
place. The terms “currency” and “negotiation” are the signs of our
manipulation and adjustment of the relative systems.
Much recent theoretical work must, I think, be understood in the context
of a search for a new set of terms to understand the cultural phenomenon that
I have tried to describe. Hence, for example, Wolfgang Iser writes of the
creation of the aesthetic dimension through the “dynamic oscillation”
between two discourses; the East German Marxist Robert Weimann argues
that
the process of making certain things one's own becomes inseparable from making other things (and
persons) alien, so that the act of appropriation must be seen always already to involve not only self-
projection and assimilation but alienation through reification and expropriation . . .

Anthony Giddens proposes that we substitute a concept of textual

distanciation for that of the autonomy of the text, so that we can fruitfully
grasp the “recursive character” of social life and of language.14 Each of these
formulations—and, of course, there are significant differences among them—
pulls away from a stable, mimetic theory of art and attempts to construct in
its stead an interpretive model that will more adequately account for the
unsettling circulation of materials and discourses that is, I have argued, the
heart of modern aesthetic practice. It is in response to this practice that
contemporary theory must situate itself: not outside interpretation, but in the
hidden places of negotiation and exchange.

NOTES
1 This is the text of a lecture given at the University of Western Australia on 4 September 1986. A
slightly different version appeared in Murray Krieger, ed., The Aims of Representation:
Subject/Text/History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 257–73.
2 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 20.
3 See Mark Poster, “Foucault, Poststructuralism, and the Mode of Information,” in The Aims of
Representation.
4 Jameson himself does not directly account for the sudden reversal in his thinking; he suggests rather
that it is not his thinking that has changed but capitalism itself. Following Ernest Mandel, he suggests
that we have moved into late capitalism, and in this state cultural production and consumption
operate by wholly different rules. In the cultural logic of postmodernism, the working distinctions
Jameson earlier found paralyzing and malignant have in fact vanished, giving way to an organization
of discourse and perception that is at once dreadful and visionary. Dreadful because the new
postmodern condition has obliterated all the place markers—inside and outside, culture and society,
orthodoxy and subversion—that made it possible to map the world and hence mount a critique of its
power structures. Visionary because this new multi-national world, a world with intensities rather
than emotions, elaborated surfaces rather than hidden depths, random, unreadable signs rather than
signifiers, intimates a utopian release from the traditional nightmare of traditional history. The
doubleness of the postmodern is perfectly figured for Jameson by contemporary architecture, most
perfectly by the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles.

The rapidity of the shift between modern and postmodern charted in Jameson's shift from The
Political Unconscious (1981) to “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New
Left Review, No. 146 (July–August 1984), 53–93, is, to say the least, startling.
5 J.-F. Lyotard, “Judiciousness in Dispute or, Kant after Marx,” in The Aims of Representation, p. 37.
6 See, for example, William E. Tate, The Parish Chest: A Study in the Records of Parochial
Administration in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946).
7 Alternatively, of course, we can argue, as Jameson in effect does, that there are two capitalisms.
The older, industrial capitalism was the agent of distinctions; the new, late capitalism is the effacer of
distinctions. The detection of one tendency or the other in the phase of capitalism where it does not
theoretically belong can be explained by invoking the distinction between residual and emergent. I
find this scholastic saving of the theory infinitely depressing.
8 Michael Rogin, “ ‘Ronald Reagan’: The Movie” and other Episodes in Political Demonology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
9 Quoted by reporter Michael Tolchin in the New York Times account of Rogin's paper, headlined.
“How Reagan Always Gets the Best Lines,” New York Times, 9 September 1985, p. 10.
10 I borrow the phrase “the poetics of everyday behavior” from Iurii M. Lotman. See his essay in The
Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. A.D. Nakhimovsky and A.S. Nakhimovsky (Cornell:
Cornell University Press, 1985).
11 N. Mailer, The Executioner's Song (New York: Warner Books, 1979).
12 Introduction to Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison (New York:
Random House, 1981), p. xviii.
13 Michael Baxandall, “Art, Society, and the Bouger Principle,” Representations, 12(1985), 40–41.
14 All in The Aims of Representation.
 9

RESONANCE AND
WONDER

In a small glass case in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, there is a round,
broad-brimmed cardinal's hat; a note card identifies it as having belonged to
Cardinal Wolsey. It is altogether appropriate that this hat should have wound
up at Christ Church, for the college owed its existence to Wolsey, who had
decided at the height of his power to found in his own honor a magnificent
new Oxford college. But the hat was not a direct bequest; historical forces,
as we sometimes say—in this case, taking the ominous form of Henry VIII—
intervened, and Christ Church, like Hampton Court Palace, was cut off from
its original benefactor. Instead, as the note informs us, after it had passed
through the hands of various owners—including Bishop Burnet, Burnet's son,
Burnet's son's housekeeper, the Dowager Countess of Albemarle's butler, the
countess herself, and Horace Walpole—the hat was acquired for Christ
Church in the nineteenth century, purchased, we are told, for the sum of sixty-
three pounds, from the daughter of the actor Charles Kean. Kean is said to
have worn the hat when he played Wolsey in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. If
this miniature history of an artifact is too slight to be of much consequence, it
nonetheless evokes a vision of cultural production that I find compelling. The
peregrinations of Wolsey's hat suggest that cultural artifacts do not stay still,
that they exist in time, and that they are bound up with personal and
institutional conflict, negotiations, and appropriations.
The term culture has, in the case of the hat, a convenient material referent
—a bit of red cloth stitched together—but that referent is only a tiny element
in a complex symbolic construction that originally marked the transformation
of Wolsey from a butcher's son to a prince of the church. Wolsey's gentleman
usher, George Cavendish, has left a remarkably circumstantial contemporary
account of that construction, an account that enables us even to glimpse the
hat in its place among all the other ceremonial regalia:
And after Mass he would return in his privy chamber again and, being advertized of the furniture
of his chamber without with noblemen and gentlemen . . ., would issue out into them apparelled all
in red in the habit of a Cardinal; which was either of fine scarlet or else of crimson satin, taffeta,
damask, or caffa [a rich silk cloth], the best that he could get for money; and upon his head a round
pillion with a neck of black velvet, set to the same in the inner side. . . . There was also borne
before him first the Great Seal of England, and then his Cardinal's hat by a nobleman or some
worthy gentleman right solemnly, bareheaded. And as soon as he was entered into his chamber of
presence where was attending his coming to await upon him to Westminster Hall, as well
noblemen and other worthy gentlemen as noblemen and gentlemen of his own family; thus passing
forth with two great crosses of silver borne before him, with also two great pillars of silver, and his
sergeant at arms with a great mace of silver gilt. Then his gentlemen ushers cried and said, ‘On
my lords and masters, make way for my lord's grace!’”1

The extraordinary theatricality of this manifestation of clerical power did

not escape the notice of the Protestant reformers who called the Catholic
church “the Pope's playhouse.” When the Reformation in England dismantled
the histrionic apparatus of Catholicism, they sold some of its gorgeous
properties to the professional players—not only a mark of thrift but a
polemical gesture, signifying that the sanctified vestments were in reality
mere trumpery whose proper place was a disreputable world of illusion-
mongering. In exchange for this polemical service, the theatrical joint-stock
companies received more than an attractive, cut-rate wardrobe; they acquired
the tarnished but still potent charisma that clung to the old vestments,
charisma that in paradoxical fashion the players at once emptied out and
heightened. By the time Wolsey's hat reached the library at Christ Church, its
charisma must have been largely exhausted, but the college could confer upon
it the prestige of an historical curiosity, as a trophy of the distant founder.
And in its glass case it still radiates a tiny quantum of cultural energy.
Tiny indeed—I may already have seemed to make much more of this
trivial relic than it deserves. But I am fascinated by transmigrations of the
kind I have just sketched here—from theatricalized rituals to the stage to the
university library or museum—because they seem to reveal something
critically important about the textual relics with which my profession is
obsessed. They enable us to glimpse the social process through which
objects, gestures, rituals, and phrases are fashioned and moved from one
zone of display to another. The display cases with which I am most involved
—books—characteristically conceal this process, so that we have a
misleading impression of fixity and little sense of the historical transactions
through which the great texts we study have been fashioned. Let me give a
literary example, an appropriately tiny textual equivalent of Wolsey's hat. At
the close of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, the Fairy King
Oberon declares that he and his attendants are going to bless the beds of the
three couples who have just been married. This ritual of blessing will ensure
the happiness of the newlyweds and ward off moles, harelips, and other
prodigious marks that would disfigure their offspring. “With this field-dew
consecrate,” the Fairy King concludes,
Every fairy take his gait,
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace,
And the owner of it blest
Ever shall in safety rest.
(5.1.415–20)

Oberon himself, we are told, will conduct the blessing upon the “best bride-
bed,” that of the ruler Theseus and his Amazon queen Hippolyta.
The ceremony—manifestly the sanctification of ownership and caste, as
well as marriage—is a witty allusion to the traditional Catholic blessing of
the bride-bed with holy water, a ceremony vehemently attacked as pagan
superstition and banned by English Protestants. But the conventional critical
term “allusion” seems inadequate, for the term usually implies a bloodless,
bodiless thing, while even the tiny, incidental detail of the field dew bears a
more active charge. Here, as with Wolsey's hat, I want to ask what is at stake
in the shift from one zone of social practice to another, from the old religion
to public theater, from priests to fairies, from holy water to field dew, or
rather to theatrical fairies and theatrical field dew on the London stage. When
the Catholic ritual is made into theatrical representation, the transposition at
once naturalizes, denaturalizes, mocks, and celebrates. It naturalizes the
ritual by transforming the specially sanctified water into ordinary dew; it
denaturalizes the ritual by removing it from human agents and attributing it to
the fairies; it mocks Catholic practice by associating it with notorious
superstition and then by enacting it on the stage where it is revealed as a
histrionic illusion; and it celebrates such practice by reinvesting it with the
charismatic magic of the theater.
 Several years ago, intending to signal a turn away from the formal,
decontextualized analysis that dominates new criticism, I used the term “new
historicism” to describe an interest in the kinds of issues I have been raising
—in the embeddedness of cultural objects in the contingencies of history—
and the term has achieved a certain currency. But like most labels, this one is
misleading. The new historicism, like the Holy Roman Empire, constantly
belies its own name. The American Heritage Dictionary gives three
meanings for the term “historicism”:

1. The belief that processes are at work in history that man can do little to
alter.
2. The theory that the historian must avoid all value judgments in his
study of past periods or former cultures.
3. Veneration of the past or of tradition.

Most of the writing labelled new historicist, and certainly my own work, has
set itself resolutely against each of these positions.

1. The belief that processes are at work in history that man can do little
to alter. This formulation rests upon a simultaneous abstraction and
evacuation of human agency. The men and women who find themselves
making concrete choices in given circumstances at particular times are
transformed into something called “man.” And this colorless, nameless
collective being cannot significantly intervene in the “processes . . . at work
in history,” processes that are thus mysteriously alienated from all of those
who enact them.
New historicism, by contrast, eschews the use of the term “man”; interest
lies not in the abstract universal but in particular, contingent cases, the selves
fashioned and acting according to the generative rules and conflicts of a
given culture. And these selves, conditioned by the expectations of their
class, gender, religion, race and national identity, are constantly effecting
changes in the course of history. Indeed if there is any inevitability in the new
historicism's vision of history it is this insistence on agency, for even inaction
or extreme marginality is understood to possess meaning and therefore to
imply intention. Every form of behavior, in this view, is a strategy: taking up
arms or taking flight is a significant social action, but so is staying put,
minding one's business, turning one's face to the wall. Agency is virtually
inescapable.
Inescapable but not simple: new historicism, as I understand it, does not
posit historical processes as unalterable and inexorable, but it does tend to
discover limits or constraints upon individual intervention. Actions that
appear to be single are disclosed as multiple; the apparently isolated power
of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social
energy; a gesture of dissent may be an element in a larger legitimation
process, while an attempt to stabilize the order of things may turn out to
subvert it. And political valences may change, sometimes abruptly: there are
no guarantees, no absolute, formal assurances that what seems progressive in
one set of contingent circumstances will not come to seem reactionary in
another.
The new historicism's insistence on the pervasiveness of agency has
apparently led some of its critics to find in it a Nietzschean celebration of the
ruthless will to power, while its ironic and skeptical reappraisal of the cult
of heroic individualism has led others to find in it a pessimistic doctrine of
human helplessness. Hence, for example, from a Marxist perspective one
critic characterizes the new historicism as a “liberal disillusionment” that
finds that “any apparent site of resistance ultimately serves the interests of
power” (33), while from a liberal humanist perspective, another critic
proclaims that “anyone who, like me, is reluctant to accept the will to power
as the defining human essence will probably have trouble with the critical
procedures of the new historicists and with their interpretive conclusions.”2
But the very idea of a “defining human essence” is precisely what new
historicists find vacuous and untenable, as I do the counter-claim that love
rather than power makes the world go round. The Marxist critique is more
plausible, but it rests upon an assertion that new historicism argues that “any
apparent site of resistance” is ultimately coopted. Some are, some aren't.
I argued in an essay published some years ago that the sites of resistance
in Shakespeare's second tetralogy are coopted in the plays’ ironic, complex,
but finally celebratory affirmation of charismatic kingship. That is, the formal
structure and rhetorical strategy of the plays make it difficult for audiences to
withhold their consent from the triumph of Prince Hal. Shakespeare shows
that the triumph rests upon a claustrophobic narrowing of pleasure, a
hypocritical manipulation of appearances, and a systematic betrayal of
friendship, and yet these manifestations of bad faith only contrive to heighten
the spectators’ knowing pleasure and the ratification of applause. The
subversive perceptions do not disappear, but insofar as they remain within
the structure of the play, they are contained and indeed serve to heighten a
power they would appear to question.
I did not propose that all manifestation of resistance in all literature (or
even in all plays by Shakespeare) were coopted— one can readily think of
plays where the forces of ideological containment break down. And yet
characterizations of this essay in particular, and new historicism in general,
repeatedly refer to a supposed argument that any resistance is impossible.3 A
particularizing argument about the subject position projected by a set of plays
is at once simplified and turned into a universal principle from which
contingency and hence history itself is erased.
Moreover, even my argument about Shakespeare's second tetralogy is
misunderstood if it is thought to foreclose the possibility of dissent or change
or the radical alteration of the processes of history. The point is that certain
aesthetic and political structures work to contain the subversion perceptions
they generate, not that those perceptions simply wither away. On the contrary,
they may be pried loose from the order with which they were bound up and
may serve to fashion a new and radically different set of structures. How else
could change ever come about? No one is forced—except perhaps in school
—to take aesthetic or political wholes as sacrosanct. The order of things is
never simply a given: it takes labor to produce, sustain, reproduce, and
transmit the way things are, and this labor may be withheld or transformed.
Structures may be broken in pieces, the pieces altered, inverted, rearranged.
Everything can be different than it is; everything could have been different
than it was. But it will not do to imagine that this alteration is easy,
automatic, without cost or obligation. My objection was to the notion that the
rich ironies in the history plays were themselves inherently liberating, that to
savor the tetralogy's skeptical cunning was to participate in an act of political
resistance. In general I find dubious the assertion that certain rhetorical
features in much-loved literary works constitute authentic acts of political
liberation; the fact that this assertion is now heard from the left, where in my
college days it was more often heard from the right, does not make it in most
instances any less fatuous and presumptuous. I wished to show, at least in the
case of Shakespeare's histories and in several analogous discourses, how a
set of representational and political practices in the late sixteenth century
could produce and even batten upon what appeared to be their own
subversion.
To show this is not to give up on the possibility of altering historical
processes—if this is historicism I want no part of it— but rather to eschew
an aestheticized and idealized politics of the imagination.
2. The theory that the historian must avoid all value judgments in his
study of past periods or former cultures. Once again, if this is an essential
tenet of historicism, then the new historicism belies its name. My own
critical practice and that of many others associated with new historicism was
decisively shaped by the American 1960s and early 70s, and especially by
the opposition to the Viet Nam War. Writing that was not engaged, that
withheld judgments, that failed to connect the present with the past seemed
worthless. Such connection could be made either by analogy or causality; that
is, a particular set of historical circumstances could be represented in such a
way as to bring out homologies with aspects of the present or, alternatively,
those circumstances could be analyzed as the generative forces that led to the
modern condition. In either mode, value judgments were implicated, because
a neutral or indifferent relation to the present seemed impossible. Or rather it
seemed overwhelmingly clear that neutrality was itself a political position, a
decision to support the official policies in both the state and the academy.
To study the culture of sixteenth-century England did not present itself as
an escape from the turmoil of the present; it seemed rather an intervention, a
mode of relation. The fascination for me of the Renaissance was that it
seemed to be powerfully linked to the present both analogically and causally.
This doubled link at once called forth and qualified my value judgments:
called them forth because my response to the past was inextricably bound up
with my response to the present; qualified them because the analysis of the
past revealed the complex, unsettling historical genealogy of the very
judgments I was making. To study Renaissance culture then was
simultaneously to feel more rooted and more estranged in my own values.4
Other critics associated with the new historicism have written directly
and forcefully about their own subject position and have made more explicit
than I the nature of this engagement.5 If I have not done so to the same extent,
it is not because I believe that my values are somehow suspended in my study
of the past but because I believe they are pervasive: in the textual and visual
traces I choose to analyze, in the stories I choose to tell, in the cultural
conjunctions I attempt to make, in my syntax, adjectives, pronouns. “The new
historicism,” someone has written in a lively critique, “needs at every point
to be more overtly self-conscious of its methods and its theoretical
assumptions, since what one discovers about the historical place and function
of literary texts is in large measure a function of the angle from which one
looks and the assumptions that enable the investigation.”6 I am certainly not
opposed to methodological self-consciousness, but I am less inclined to see
overtness—an explicit articulation of one's values and methods—as
inherently necessary or virtuous. Nor, though I believe that my values are
everywhere engaged in my work, do I think that there need be a perfect
integration of those values and the objects I am studying. On the contrary,
some of the most interesting and powerful ideas in cultural criticism occur
precisely at moments of disjunction, disintegration, unevenness. A criticism
that never encounters obstacles, that celebrates predictable heroines and
rounds up the usual suspects, that finds confirmation of its values everywhere
it turns, is quite simply boring.7

3. Veneration of the past or of tradition. The third definition of

historicism obviously sits in a strange relation to the second, but they are not
simply alternatives. The apparent eschewing of value judgments was often
accompanied by a still more apparent admiration, however cloaked as
objective description, of the past. One of the more irritating qualities of my
own literary training had been its relentlessly celebratory character: literary
criticism was and largely remains a kind of secular theodicy. Every decision
made by a great artist could be shown to be a brilliant one; works that had
seemed flawed and uneven to an earlier generation of critics bent on
displaying discriminations in taste were now revealed to be organic
masterpieces. A standard critical assignment in my student years was to
show how a text that seemed to break in parts was really a complex whole:
thousands of pages were dutifully churned out to prove that the bizarre
subplot of The Changeling was cunningly integrated into the tragic mainplot
or that every tedious bit of clowning in Doctor Faustus was richly
significant. Behind these exercises was the assumption that great works of art
were triumphs of resolution, that they were, in Bakhtin's term, monological—
the mature expression of a single artistic intention. When this formalism was
combined, as it often was, with both ego psychology and historicism, it
posited aesthetic integration as the reflection of the artist's psychic
integration and posited that psychic integration as the triumphant expression
of a healthy, integrated community. Accounts of Shakespeare's relation to
Elizabethan culture were particularly prone to this air of veneration, since
the Romantic cult of poetic genius could be conjoined with the still older
political cult that had been created around the figure of the Virgin Queen.
Here again new historicist critics have swerved in a different direction.
They have been more interested in unresolved conflict and contradiction than
in integration; they are as concerned with the margins as with the center; and
they have turned from a celebration of achieved aesthetic order to an
exploration of the ideological and material bases for the production of this
order. Traditional formalism and historicism, twin legacies of early
nineteenth-century Germany, shared a vision of high culture as a harmonizing
domain of reconciliation based upon an aesthetic labor that transcends
specific economic or political determinants. What is missing is psychic,
social, and material resistance, a stubborn, unassimilable otherness, a sense
of distance and difference. New historicism has attempted to restore this
distance; hence its characteristic concerns have seemed to some critics off-
center or strange. “New historicists,” writes a Marxist observer, “are likely
to seize upon something out of the way, obscure, even bizarre: dreams,
popular or aristocratic festivals, denunciations of witchcraft, sexual treatises,
diaries and autobiographies, descriptions of clothing, reports on disease,
birth and death records, accounts of insanity.”8 What is fascinating to me is
that concerns like these should have come to seem bizarre, especially to a
critic who is committed to the historical understanding of culture. That they
have done so indicates how narrow the boundaries of historical
understanding had become, how much these boundaries needed to be broken.
For none of the cultural practices on this list (and one could extend it
considerably) is or should be “out of the way” in a study of Renaissance
literature or art; on the contrary, each is directly in the way of coming to
terms with the period's methods of regulating the body, its conscious and
unconscious psychic strategies, its ways of defining and dealing with
marginals and deviants, its mechanisms for the display of power and the
expression of discontent, its treatment of women. If such concerns have been
rendered “obscure,” it is because of a disabling idea of causality that
confines the legitimate field of historical agency within absurdly restrictive
boundaries. The world is parcelled out between a predictable group of
stereotypical causes and a large, dimly lit mass of raw materials that the
artist chooses to fashion.
 The new historicist critics are interested in such cultural expressions as
witchcraft accusations, medical manuals, or clothing not as raw materials but
as “cooked”—complex symbolic and material articulations of the
imaginative and ideological structures of the society that produced them.
Consequently, there is a tendency in at least some new historicist writings
(certainly in my own) for the focus to be partially displaced from the work of
art that is their formal occasion onto the related practices that had been
adduced ostensibly in order to illuminate that work. It is difficult to keep
those practices in the background if the very concept of historical background
has been called into question.
I have tried to deal with the problem of focus by developing a notion of
cultural negotiation and exchange, that is, by examining the points at which
one cultural practice intersects with another, borrowing its forms and
intensities or attempting to ward off unwelcome appropriations or moving
texts and artifacts from one place to another. But it would be misleading to
imagine that there is a complete homogenization of interest; my own concern
remains centrally with imaginative literature, and not only because other
cultural structures resonate powerfully within it. If I do not approach works
of art in a spirit of veneration, I do approach them in a spirit that is best
described as wonder. Wonder has not been alien to literary criticism, but it
has been associated (if only implicitly) with formalism rather than
historicism. I wish to extend this wonder beyond the formal boundaries of
works of art, just as I wish to intensify resonance within those boundaries.

It will be easier to grasp the concepts of resonance and wonder if we

think of the way in which our culture presents to itself not the textual traces of
its past but the surviving visual traces, for the latter are put on display in
galleries and museums specially designed for the purpose. By resonance I
mean the power of the object displayed to reach out beyond its formal
boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic
cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which as metaphor or more
simply as metonymy it may be taken by a viewer to stand. By wonder I mean
the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his tracks, to convey
an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.
The new historicism obviously has distinct affinities with resonance; that
is, its concern with literary texts has been to recover as far as possible the
historical circumstances of their original production and consumption and to
analyze the relationship between these circumstances and our own. New
historicist critics have tried to understand the intersecting circumstances not
as a stable, prefabricated background against which the literary texts can be
placed, but as a dense network of evolving and often contradictory social
forces. The idea is not to find outside the work of art some rock onto which
literary interpretation can be securely chained but rather to situate the work
in relation to other representational practices operative in the culture at a
given moment in both its history and our own. In Louis Montrose's convenient
formulation, the goal has been to grasp simultaneously the historicity of texts
and the textuality of history.
Insofar as this approach, developed for literary interpretation, is at all
applicable to visual traces, it would call for an attempt to reduce the
isolation of individual “masterpieces,” to illuminate the conditions of their
making, to disclose the history of their appropriation and the circumstances
in which they come to be displayed, to restore the tangibility, the openness,
the permeability of boundaries that enabled the objects to come into being in
the first place. An actual restoration of tangibility is obviously in most cases
impossible, and the frames that enclose pictures are only the ultimate formal
confirmation of the closing of the borders that marks the finishing of a work
of art. But we need not take that finishing so entirely for granted; museums
can and on occasion do make it easier imaginatively to recreate the work in
its moment of openness.
That openness is linked to a quality of artifacts that museums obviously
dread, their precariousness. But though it is perfectly reasonable for
museums to protect their objects—I would not wish it any other way—
precariousness is a rich source of resonance. Thomas Greene, who has
written a sensitive book on what he calls the “vulnerable text,” suggests that
the symbolic wounding to which literature is prone may confer upon it power
and fecundity. “The vulnerability of poetry,” Greene argues, “stems from four
basic conditions of language: its historicity, its dialogic function, its
referential function, and its dependence on figuration.”9 Three of these
conditions are different for the visual arts, in ways that would seem to reduce
vulnerability: painting and sculpture may be detached more readily than
language from both referentiality and figuration, and the pressures of
contextual dialogue are diminished by the absence of an inherent logos, a
constitutive word. But the fourth condition— historicity—is in the case of
material artifacts vastly increased, indeed virtually literalized. Museums
function, partly by design and partly in spite of themselves, as monuments to
the fragility of cultures, to the fall of sustaining institutions and noble houses,
the collapse of rituals, the evacuation of myths, the destructive effects of
warfare, neglect, and corrosive doubt.
I am fascinated by the signs of alteration, tampering, even destructiveness
which many museums try simply to efface: first and most obviously, the act of
displacement that is essential for the collection of virtually all older artifacts
and most modern ones—pulled out of chapels, peeled off church walls,
removed from decaying houses, seized as spoils of war, stolen, “purchased”
more or less fairly by the economically ascendent from the economically
naive, the poor, the hard-pressed heirs of fallen dynasties and impoverished
religious orders. Then too there are the marks on the artifacts themselves: the
attempt to scratch out or deface the image of the devil in numerous late-
medieval and Renaissance paintings, the concealing of the genitals in
sculptured and painted figures, the iconoclastic smashing of human or divine
representations, the evidence of cutting or reshaping to fit a new frame or
purpose, the cracks or scorch marks or broken-off noses that indifferently
record the grand disasters of history and the random accidents of trivial
incompetence. Even these accidents—the marks of a literal fragility—can
have their resonance: the climax of an absurdly hagiographical Proust
exhibition several years ago was a display case holding a small, patched,
modest vase with a notice, “This vase broken by Marcel Proust.”
As this comical example suggests, wounded artifacts may be compelling
not only as witnesses to the violence of history but as signs of use, marks of
the human touch, and hence links with the openness to touch that was the
condition of their creation. The most familiar way to recreate the openness of
aesthetic artifacts without simply renewing their vulnerability is through a
skillful deployment of explanatory texts in the catalogue, on the walls of the
exhibit, or on cassettes. The texts so deployed introduce and in effect stand in
for the context that has been effaced in the process of moving the object into
the museum. But insofar as that context is partially, often primarily, visual as
well as verbal, textual contextualism has its limits. Hence the mute eloquence
of the display of the palette, brushes, and other implements that an artist of a
given period would have employed or of objects that are represented in the
exhibited paintings or of materials and images that in some way parallel or
intersect with the formal works of art.
 Among the most resonant moments are those in which the supposedly
contextual objects take on a life of their own, make a claim that rivals that of
the object that is formally privileged. A table, a chair, a map, often seemingly
placed only to provide a decorative setting for a grand work, become oddly
expressive, significant not as “background” but as compelling
representational practices in themselves. These practices may in turn impinge
upon the grand work, so that we begin to glimpse a kind of circulation: the
cultural practice and social energy implicit in map-making drawn into the
aesthetic orbit of a painting which has itself enabled us to register some of
the representational significance of the map. Or again the threadbare fabric
on the old chair or the gouges in the wood of a cabinet juxtapose the
privileged painting or sculpture with marks not only of time but of use, the
imprint of the human body on the artifact, and call attention to the deliberate
removal of certain exalted aesthetic objects from the threat of that imprint.
For the effect of resonance does not necessarily depend upon a collapse
of the distinction between art and non-art; it can be achieved by awakening in
the viewer a sense of the cultural and historically contingent construction of
art objects, the negotiations, exchanges, swerves, exclusions by which
certain representational practices come to be set apart from other
representational practices that they partially resemble. A resonant exhibition
often pulls the viewer away from the celebration of isolated objects and
toward a series of implied, only half-visible relationships and questions.
How have the objects come to be displayed? What is at stake in categorizing
them as of “museumquality”? How were they originally used? What cultural
and material conditions made possible their production? What were the
feelings of those who originally held these objects, cherished them, collected
them, possessed them? What is the meaning of my relationship to these same
objects now that they are displayed here, in this museum, on this day?
It is time to give a more sustained example. Perhaps the most purely
resonant museum I have ever seen is the State Jewish Museum in Prague.
This is housed not in a single building but in a cluster of old synagogues
scattered through the city's former Jewish Town. The oldest of these—known
as the Old-New Synagogue—is a twin-nave medieval structure dating to the
last third of the 13th century; the others are mostly Renaissance and Baroque.
In these synagogues are displayed Judaica from 153 Jewish communities
throughout Bohemia and Moravia. In one there is a permanent exhibition of
synagogue silverworks, in another there are synagogue textiles, in a third
there are Torah scrolls, ritual objects, manuscripts and prints illustrative of
Jewish beliefs, traditions, and customs. One of the synagogues shows the
work of the physician and artist Karel Fleischmann, principally drawings
done in the Terezin concentration camp during his months of imprisonment
prior to his deportation to Auschwitz. Next door in the Ceremonial Hall of
the Prague Burial Society there is a wrenching exhibition of children's
drawings from Terezin. Finally, one synagogue, closed at the time of my visit
to Prague, has simply a wall of names— thousands of them—to
commemorate the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in Czechoslovakia.
“The Museum's rich collections of synagogue art and the historic
synagogue buildings of Prague's Jewish town,” says the catalogue of the State
Jewish Museum, “form a memorial complex that has not been preserved to
the same extent anywhere else in Europe.” “A memorial complex”—this
museum is not so much about artifacts as about memory, and the form the
memory takes is a secularized kaddish, a commemorative prayer for the
dead. The atmosphere has a peculiar effect on the act of viewing. It is mildly
interesting to note the differences between the mordant Grosz-like
lithographs of Karel Fleischmann in the pre-war years and the tormented
style, at once detached and anguished, of the drawings in the camps, but
aesthetic discriminations feel weird, out-of-place. And it seems wholly
absurd, even indecent, to worry about the relative artistic merits of the
drawings that survive by children who did not survive.
The discordance between viewing and remembering is greatly reduced
with the older, less emotionally charged artifacts, but even here the ritual
objects in their glass cases convey an odd and desolate impression. The
oddity, I suppose, should be no greater than in seeing a Mayan god or, for that
matter, a pyx or a ciborium, but we have become so familiarized to the
display of such objects, so accustomed to considering them works of art, that
even pious Catholics, as far as I know, do not necessarily feel disconcerted
by their transformation from ritual function to aesthetic exhibition. And until
very recently the voices of the tribal peoples who might have objected to the
display of their religious artifacts have not been heard and certainly not
attended to.
The Jewish objects are neither sufficiently distant to be absorbed into the
detached ethos of anthropological display nor sufficiently familiar to be
framed and encased alongside the altarpieces and reliquaries that fill
Western museums. And moving as they are as mnemonic devices, most of the
ritual objects in the State Jewish Museum are not, by contrast with Christian
liturgical art, particularly remarkable either for their antiquity or their
extraordinary beauty. They are the products of a people with a resistance to
joining figural representation to religious observance, a strong anti-iconic
bias. The objects have, as it were, little will to be observed; many of them
are artifacts—ark curtains, Torah crowns, breastplates, pointers, and the like
—whose purpose was to be drawn back or removed in order to make
possible the act that mattered: not vision but reading.
But the inhibition of viewing in the Jewish Museum is paradoxically
bound up with its resonance. This resonance depends not upon visual
stimulation but upon a felt intensity of names, and behind the names, as the
very term resonance suggests, of voices: the voices of those who chanted,
studied, muttered their prayers, wept, and then were forever silenced. And
mingled with these voices are others—of those Jews in 1389 who were
murdered in the Old-New Synagogue where they were seeking refuge; of the
great sixteenth-century Kabbalist, Jehuda ben Bezalel, known as Rabbi
Loew, who is fabled to have created the Golem; of the twentieth-century's
ironic Kabbalist, Franz Kafka.
It is Kafka who would be most likely to grasp imaginatively the State
Jewish Museum's ultimate source of resonance: the fact that most of the
objects are located in the museum—were displaced, preserved, and
transformed categorically into works of art—because the Nazis stored the
articles they confiscated in the Prague synagogues that they chose to preserve
for this very purpose. In 1941 the Nazi Hochschule in Frankfurt had
established an Institute for the Exploration of the Jewish Question which in
turn had initiated a massive effort to confiscate Jewish libraries, archives,
religious artifacts, and personal property. By the middle of 1942 Heydrich,
as Hitler's chief officer within the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia, had chosen Prague as the site of the Central Bureau for Dealing
with the Jewish Question, and an SS officer, Untersturmführer Karl Rahm,
had assumed control of the small existing Jewish museum, founded in 1912,
which was renamed the Central Jewish Museum. The new charter of the
museum announced that “the numerous, hitherto scattered Jewish possessions
of both historical and artistic value, on the territory of the entire Protectorate,
must be collected and stored.”10
During the following months, tens of thousands of confiscated items
arrived, the dates of the shipments closely coordinated with the “donors’”
deportation to the concentration camps. The experts formally employed by
the original Jewish museum were compelled to catalogue the items, and the
Nazis compounded this immense task by also ordering the wretched,
malnourished curators to prepare a collections guide and organize private
exhibitions for SS staff. Between September 1942 and October 1943 four
major exhibitions were mounted. Since these required far more space than
the existing Jewish Museum's modest location, the great old Prague
synagogues—made vacant by the Nazi prohibition of Jewish public worship
—were partially refurbished for the occasion. Hence in March 1943, for
example, in the seventeenth-century Klaus Synagogue, there was an
exhibition of Jewish festival and life-cycle observances; “when
Sturmbannführer Günther first toured the collection on April 6, he demanded
various changes, including the translation of all Hebrew texts and the
addition of an exhibit on kosher butchering” (Precious Legacy, p. 36). Plans
were drawn up for other exhibitions, but the curators—who had given
themselves to the task with a strange blend of selflessness, irony,
helplessness, and heroism—were themselves at this point sent to
concentration camps and murdered.
After the war, the few survivors of the Czech Jewish community
apparently felt they could not sustain the ritual use of the synagogues or
maintain the large collections. In 1949 the Jewish Community Council
offered as a gift to the Czechoslovak government both the synagogues and
their contents. These became the resonant, impure “memorial complex” they
are—a cultural machine that generates an uncontrollable oscillation between
homage and desecration, longing and hopelessness, the voices of the dead
and silence. For resonance, like nostalgia, is impure, a hybrid forged in the
barely acknowledged gaps, the cesurae, between words like State, Jewish,
and Museum.

I want to avoid the implication that resonance must be necessarily linked

to destruction and absence; it can be found as well in unexpected survival.
The key is the intimation of a larger community of voices and skills, an
imagined ethnographic thickness. Here another example will serve: in the
Yucatan there is an extensive, largely unexcavated late-Classic Maya site
called Coba, whose principal surviving feature is a high pyramid known as
Nahoch Mul. After a day of tramping around the site, I was relaxing in the
pool of the nearby Club Med Archaeological Villa in the company of a genial
structural engineer from Little Rock. To make conversation, I asked my pool-
mate what he as a structural engineer thought of Nahoch Mul. “From an
engineer's point of view,” he replied, “a pyramid is not very interesting—it's
just an enormous gravity structure.” “But,” he added, “did you notice that
Coca Cola stand on the way in? That's the most impressive example of
contemporary Maya architecture I've ever seen.” I thought it quite possible
that my leg was being pulled, but I went back the next day to check—I had, of
course, completely blocked out the Coke stand on my first visit. Sure enough,
some enterprising Mayan had built a remarkably elegant shelter with a
soaring pyramidal roof constructed out of ingeniously intertwining sticks and
branches. Places like Coba are thick with what Spenser called the Ruins of
Time—with a nostalgia for a lost civilization, in a state of collapse long
before Cortés or Montejo cut their paths through the jungle. But, despite
frequent colonial attempts to drive them or imagine them out of existence, the
Maya have not in fact vanished, and a single entrepreneur's architectural
improvisation suddenly had more resonance for me than the mounds of the
“lost” city.
My immediate thought was that the whole Coca Cola stand could be
shipped to New York and put on display in the Museum of Modern Art. And
that impulse moves us away from resonance and toward wonder. For the
MOMA is one of the great contemporary places not for the hearing of
intertwining voices, not for historical memory, not for ethnographic
thickness, but for intense, indeed enchanting looking. Looking may be called
enchanted when the act of attention draws a circle around itself from which
everything but the object is excluded, when intensity of regard blocks out all
circumambient images, stills all murmuring voices. To be sure, the viewer
may have purchased a catalogue, read an inscription on the wall, switched on
a cassette, but in the moment of wonder all of this apparatus seems mere
static.
The so-called boutique lighting that has become popular in recent years
—a pool of light that has the surreal effect of seeming to emerge from within
the object rather than to focus upon it from without—is an attempt to provoke
or to heighten the experience of wonder, as if modern museum designers
feared that wonder was increasingly difficult to arouse or perhaps that it
risked displacement entirely onto the windows of designer dress shops and
antique stores. The association of that lighting—along with transparent
plastic rods and other devices to create the magical illusion of luminous,
weightless suspension—with commerce would seem to suggest that wonder
is bound up with acquisition and possession, yet the whole experience of
most art museums is about not touching, not carrying home, not owning the
marvelous objects. Modern museums in effect at once evoke the dream of
possession and evacuate it.11 (Alternatively, we could say that they displace
that dream onto the museum gift shop, where the boutique lighting once again
serves to heighten acquisition, now of reproductions that stand for the
unattainable works of art.)
That evacuation or displacement is an historical rather than structural
aspect of the museum's regulation of wonder: that is, collections of objects
calculated to arouse wonder arose precisely in the spirit of personal
acquisition and were only subsequently detached from it. In the Middle Ages
and Renaissance we characteristically hear about wonders in the context of
those who possessed them (or who gave them away). Hence, for example, in
his Life of Saint Louis, Joinville writes that “during the king's stay at Saida
someone brought him a stone that split into flakes”:
It was the most marvelous stone in the world, for when you lifted one of the flakes you found the
form of a sea-fish between the two pieces of stone. This fish was entirely of stone, but there was
nothing lacking in its shape, eyes, bones, or colour to make it seem otherwise than if it had been
alive. The king gave me one of these stones. I found a tench inside; it was brown in colour, and in
every detail exactly as you would expect a tench to be.12

The wonder-cabinets of the Renaissance were at least as much about

possession as display. The wonder derived not only from what could be seen
but from the sense that the shelves and cases were filled with unseen
wonders, all the prestigious property of the collector. In this sense, the cult of
wonder originated in close conjunction with a certain type of resonance, a
resonance bound up with the evocation not of an absent culture but of the
great man's superfluity of rare and precious things. Those things were not
necessarily admired for their beauty; the marvelous was bound up with the
excessive, the surprising, the literally outlandish, the prodigious. They were
not necessarily the manifestations of the artistic skill of human makers:
technical virtuosity could indeed arouse admiration, but so could nautilus
shells, ostrich eggs, uncannily large (or small) bones, stuffed crocodiles,
fossils. And, most importantly, they were not necessarily objects set out for
careful viewing.
 The experience of wonder was not initially regarded as essentially or
even primarily visual; reports of marvels had a force equal to the seeing of
them. Seeing was important and desirable, of course, but precisely in order
to make reports possible, reports which then circulated as virtual equivalents
of the marvels themselves. The great medieval collections of marvels are
almost entirely textual: Friar Jordanus's Marvels of the East, Marco Polo's
Book of Marvels, Mandeville's Travels. Some of the manuscripts, to be sure,
were illuminated, but these illuminations were almost always ancillary to the
textual record of wonders, just as emblem books were originally textual and
only subsequently illustrated. Even in the sixteenth century, when the power
of direct visual experience was increasingly valued, the marvelous was
principally theorized as a textual phenomenon, as it had been in antiquity.
“No one can be called a poet,” writes the influential Italian critic Minturno in
the 1550s, “who does not excel in the power of arousing wonder.”13 For
Aristotle wonder was associated with pleasure as the end of poetry, and in
the Poetics he examined the strategies by which tragedians and epic poets
employ the marvelous to arouse wonder. For the Platonists too wonder was
conceived as an essential element in literary art: in the sixteenth century, the
Neo-Platonist Francesco Patrizi defined the poet as principal “maker of the
marvelous,” and the marvelous is found, as he put it, when men “are
astounded, ravished in ecstasy.” Patrizi goes so far as to posit marvelling as
a special faculty of the mind, a faculty which in effect mediates between the
capacity to think and the capacity to feel.14
Modern art museums reflect a profound transformation of the experience:
the collector—a Getty or a Mellon—may still be celebrated, and market
value is even more intensely registered, but the heart of the mystery lies with
the uniqueness, authenticity, and visual power of the masterpiece, ideally
displayed in such a way as to heighten its charisma, to compel and reward
the intensity of the viewer's gaze, to manifest artistic genius. Museums
display works of art in such a way as to imply that no one, not even the
nominal owner or donor, can penetrate the zone of light and actually possess
the wonderful object. The object exists not principally to be owned but to be
viewed. Even the fantasy of possession is no longer central to the museum-
gaze, or rather it has been inverted, so that the object in its essence seems not
to be a possession but rather to be itself the possessor of what is most
valuable and enduring.15 What the work possesses is the power to arouse
wonder, and that power, in the dominant aesthetic ideology of the West, has
been infused into it by the creative genius of the artist.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to account for the transformation of
the experience of wonder from the spectacle of proprietorship to the
mystique of the object—an exceedingly complex, overdetermined history
centering on institutional and economic shifts—but I think it is important to
say that at least in part this transformation was shaped by the collective
project of Western artists and reflects their vision. Already in the early
sixteenth century, when the marvelous was still principally associated with
the prodigious, Dürer begins, in a famous journal entry describing Mexican
objects sent to Charles V by Cortés, to reconceive it:
I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new golden land: a sun all of gold a
whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of the armour of
the people there, and all manner of wondrous weapons of theirs, harness and darts, wonderful
shields, strange clothing, bedspreads, and all kinds of wonderful objects of various uses, much more
beautiful to behold than prodigies. These things were all so precious that they have been valued at
one hundred thousand gold florins. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that has gladdened
my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled
at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands. Indeed, I cannot express all that I thought there.16

Dürer's description is full of the conventional marks of his period's sense of

wonder: he finds it important that the artifacts have been brought as a kind of
tribute to the king, that large quantities of precious metals have been used,
that their market value has been reckoned; he notes the strangeness of them,
even as he uncritically assimilates that strangeness to his own culture's
repertory of objects (which include harness and bedspreads). But he also
notes, in perceptions highly unusual for his own time, that these objects are
“much more beautiful to behold than prodigies.” Dürer relocates the source
of wonder from the outlandish to the aesthetic, and he understands the effect
of beauty as a testimony to creative genius: “I saw amongst them wonderful
works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of men in foreign lands.”
It would be misleading to strip away the relations of power and wealth
that are encoded in the artist's response, but it would be still more
misleading, I think, to interpret that response as an unmediated expression of
those relations. For Dürer gives voice to an aesthetic understanding—a form
of wondering and admiring and knowing—that is at least partly independent
of the structures of politics and the marketplace.
 This understanding—by no means autonomous and yet not reducible to
the institutional and economic forces by which it is shaped—is centered on a
certain kind of looking, a looking whose origins lie in the cult of the
marvelous and hence in the art work's capacity to generate in the spectator
surprise, delight, admiration, and intimations of genius. The knowledge that
derives from this kind of looking may not be very useful in the attempt to
understand another culture, but it is vitally important in the attempt to
understand our own. For it is one of the distinctive achievements of our
culture to have fashioned this type of gaze, and one of the most intense
pleasures that it has to offer. This pleasure does not have an inherent and
necessary politics, either radical or imperialist, but Dürer's remarks suggest
that it originates at least in respect and admiration for the ingenia of others.
This respect is a response worth cherishing and enhancing. Hence, for all of
my academic affiliations and interests, I am skeptical about the recent attempt
to turn our museums from temples of wonder into temples of resonance.
Perhaps the most startling instance of this attempt is the transfer of the
paintings in the Jeu de Paume and the Louvre to the new Musée d'Orsay. The
Musée d'Orsay is at once a spectacular manifestation of French cultural
dépense and a highly self-conscious, exceptionally stylish generator of
resonance, including the literal resonance of voices in an enormous vaulted
railway station. By moving the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist
masterpieces into proximity with the work of far less well-known painters—
Jean Béraud, Guillaume Dubuffe, Paul Sérusier, and so forth—and into
proximity as well with the period's sculpture and decorative arts, the museum
remakes a remarkable group of highly individuated geniuses into engaged
participants in a vital, conflict-ridden, immensely productive period in
French cultural history. The reimagining is guided by many well-designed
informative boards—cue cards, in effect—along, of course, with the
extraordinary building itself.
All of this is intelligently conceived and dazzlingly executed— on a cold
winter day in Paris, the museum-goer may look down from one of the high
balconies by the old railway clocks and savor the swirling pattern formed by
the black and gray raincoats of the spectators below, as they pass through the
openings in the massive black stone partitions of Gay Aulenti's interior. The
pattern seems spontaneously to animate the period's style—if not Manet, then
at least Caillebotte; it is as if a painted scene had recovered the power to
move and to echo.
 But what has been sacrificed on the altar of cultural resonance is visual
wonder centered on the aesthetic masterpiece. Attention is dispersed among
a wide range of lesser objects that collectively articulate the impressive
creative achievement of French culture in the late nineteenth century, but the
experience of the old Jeu de Paume—intense looking at Manet, Monet,
Cézanne and so forth—has been radically reduced. The paintings are there,
but they are mediated by the resonant contextualism of the building itself and
its myriad objects and its descriptive and analytical plaques. Moreover,
many of the greatest paintings have been demoted, as it were, to small spaces
where it is difficult to view them adequately—as if the design of the museum
were trying to assure the triumph of resonance over wonder.

But is a triumph of one over the other necessary? I have, for the purposes
of this exposition, obviously exaggerated the extent to which these are
alternative models for museums (or for the reading of texts): in fact, almost
every exhibition worth the viewing has strong elements of both. I think that
the impact of most exhibitions is likely to be greater if the initial appeal is
wonder, a wonder that then leads to the desire for resonance, for it is easier
to pass from wonder to resonance than from resonance to wonder. Why this
should be so is suggested by a remarkable passage in his Commentary on the
Metaphysics of Aristotle by Aquinas's teacher, Albert the Great:
wonder is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the
sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual, that the heart suffers a
systole. Hence wonder is something like fear in its effect on the heart. This effect of wonder, then,
this constriction and systole of the heart, spring from an unfulfilled but felt desire to know the cause
of that which appears portentous and unusual: so it was in the beginning when men, up to that time
unskilled, began to philosophize. . . . Now the man who is puzzled and wonders apparently does not
know. Hence wonder is the movement of the man who does not know on his way to finding out, to
get at the bottom of that at which he wonders and to determine its cause. . . . Such is the origin of
philosophy.17

Such too, from the perspective of the new historicism, is the origin of a
meaningful desire for cultural resonance. But while philosophy would seek
to supplant wonder with secure knowledge, it is the function of the new
historicism continually to renew the marvelous at the heart of the resonant.

NOTES
1 George Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, in Two Early Tudor Lives, ed.
Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962),
pp. 24–25. We get another glimpse of the symbolism of hats later in the text, when Wolsey is
beginning his precipitous fall from power: “And talking with Master Norris upon his knees in the
mire, he would have pulled off his under cap of velvet, but he could not undo the knot under his chin.
Wherefore with violence he rent the laces and pulled it from his head and so kneeled bareheaded”
(p. 106). I am grateful to Anne Barton for correcting my description of the hat in Christ Church and
for transcribing the note card that details its provenance.
2 Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in
History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York and London:
Methuen, 1987), p. 33; Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents,” in PLMA 102
(1987), p. 301.
3 “The new historicists and cultural materialists,” one typical summary puts it, “represent, and by
representing, reproduce in their new history of ideas, a world which is hierarchical, authoritarian,
hegemonic, unsubvertable. . . . In this world picture, Stephen Greenblatt has poignantly asserted,
there can be no subversion—and certainly not for us!” Poignantly or otherwise, I asserted no such
thing; I argued that the spectator of the history plays was continually tantalized by a resistance
simultaneously powerful and deferred.
4 See my Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 174–75: “We are situated at the close of the cultural movement initiated in
the Renaissance; the places in which our social and psychological world seems to be cracking apart
are those structural joints visible when it was first constructed.”
5 Louis Adrian Montrose, “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” in English
Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), pp. 5–12; Don Wayne, “Power, Politics, and the Shakespearean
Text: Recent Criticism in England and the United States,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text
in History and Ideology, ed. Howard and O'Connor, pp. 47–67; Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism
and the New Historicism,” in The New Historicism, ed. Harold Veeser (New York and London:
Routledge, 1989).
6 Jean E. Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” in Renaissance Historicism:
Selections from “English Literary Renaissance,” ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. 32–33.
7 If there is then no suspension of value judgments in the new historicism, there is at the same time a
complication of those judgments, what I have called a sense of estrangement. This estrangement is
bound up with the abandonment of a belief in historical inevitability, for, with this abandonment, the
values of the present could no longer seem the necessary outcome of an irreversible teleological
progression, whether of enlightenment or decline. An older historicism that proclaimed self-
consciously that it had avoided all value judgments in its account of the past—that it had given us
historical reality wie es eigentlich gewesen—did not thereby avoid all value judgments; it simply
provided a misleading account of what it had actually done. In this sense the new historicism, for all
its acknowledgment of engagement and partiality, may be slightly less likely than the older
historicism to impose its values belligerently on the past, for those values seem historically
contingent.
8 Cohen, in Shakespeare Reproduced, pp. 33–34.
9 Thomas Greene, The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), p. 100.
10 Quoted in Linda A. Altshuler and Anna R. Cohn, “The Precious Legacy,” in David Altshuler, ed.,
The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections (New York:
Summit Books, 1983), p. 24. My sketch of the genesis of the State Jewish Museum is largely
paraphrased from this chapter.
11 In effect that dream of possessing wonder is at once aroused and evacuated in commerce as well,
since the minute the object—shoe or dress or soup tureen—is removed from its magical pool of
light, it loses its wonder and returns to the status of an ordinary purchase.
12 Joinville, Life of Saint Louis, in Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. M.R.B. Shaw (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1963), p. 315.
13 Quoted in J.V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy
(Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960; orig. ed. 1951), p. 82.
14 Hathaway, pp. 66–69. Hathaway's account of Patrizi is taken largely from Bernard Weinberg, A
History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961).
15 It is a mistake then to associate the gaze of the museum-goer with the appropriative male gaze about
which so much has been written recently. But then I think that the discourse of the appropriative
male gaze is itself in need of considerable qualification.
16 Quoted in Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the
Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 28.
17 Quoted in Cunningham, pp. 77–78.
 INDEX

Please note that SG stands for Stephen Greenblatt. References to notes are
indicated by the page number followed by the letter ‘n’ and then the note
number. Any page references to figures are in italic print
Abbott, Jack H. 211–12
Abraham (biblical figure of) 141
absolutism 122, 128, 129, 192
Adan, Richard 211
aesthetics: and capitalism 206; carnival motifs, representation 88; discourse 212; Dürer on 241;
experience 68; and historicism 223; Marxist 3; masterpieces 229, 240, 242, 243; and realism 205;
theatrical pleasure 15; western ideology 240
agency, human, and new historicism 220–3
alien cultures, observation of 80
alienation, Christian practice of 62
Allen, Woody 12
American Baptiste Magazine 105
American Civil Liberties Union 210
Ancient Mariner, The (S. T. Coleridge) 10
anecdotes, and new historicism 6–7
anthropology 3
anti-Semitism: audiences, anti-Semitic feeling of 54; depiction in literature 52–76; Jew-baiting 59; and
Marlowe 59, 65, 74n4; modern strain of 53; persistence of 54; stereotypes 57; see also Jews and
Judaism; The Jew of Malta (C. Marlowe); “On the Jewish Question” (K. Marx)
anxiety, salutary 122–3, 130
aphorisms 63, 65–6
Arabian Nights 10
Arcadia (P. Sidney) 153–5, 156, 157–9
architecture 133
Ariosto 133
Aristotle 239; Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle (Albert the Great) 243–4
Armada 152
Arnaud du Tilh see du Tilh, Arnaud (alias Pansette)
art: Bakhtin on 119; Baxandall on 212; Christian liturgical 234; English (late sixteenth-century) 151–2;
German (sixteenth-century) 139; and non-art 232; works of see works of art
artifacts, cultural/religious 3, 217, 229, 230, 231, 234
artificial person, concept 192
Artigat 178
Aubrey, John 124
Augustine, Saint 24, 180
Aulenti, Gay 243
Australia, Neohistoricism 196
Avila, bishop of 23

Babel, tower of 41
Bacon, Francis 111
Bakhtin, Mikhail 5, 84–5, 87–8; on art 119; on grotesque body 84–5, 90, 96, 97; on monologism 201–2,
203, 226; Rabelais and His World 84
Barthes, Roland: on reality-effect 19
Baxandall, Michael 212
Beham, Barthel 171n10
ben Bezalel, Jehuda (Rabbi Loew) 234
Benjamin, Walter 197
Berkeley campus (University of California) 5–6, 197
Best, George 25
betrayal, imagery of 137, 142, 144, 149–50
Bloch, Ernst 73
body products see wastes, human Bolsheviks 197
Bourke, John G. 77–9, 83, 88; Scatologic Rites of All Nations 79, 81, 82
boutique lighting 237–8
Brenta, Andrea (of Padua) 28
Brown, John Russell 74n5
Brown, Norman O. 96
Burke, Kenneth 5

California: University of 5–6, 197; Yosemite National Park 208–10

Cambridge, SG as Fulbright Scholar at 2, 10
capitalism: and aesthetic production 206; and discursive domains 201; historical effects 203; and
imperialism 18; and individuality 202; Jameson on 199, 202–3, 214–15n4 215n7; and literature 200;
Lyotard on 201–2, 202–3; Marx on 202; new and old 215n7
Carrière, Jean-Claude 187
Cartier, Jacques 26, 30
Cashing, Frank H. 77
Catholicism, in England 218, 219–20
Cavendish, George 217
Central Jewish Museum (Prague) 235
Cenú Indians, caciques of 36–7
Changling, The (T. Middleton and W. Rowley) 226
Charles I 98
Charles V 240–1
Chaumonot, Fater 33
Chiappelli, Fredi x
children, beating of 81
Christ Church (Oxford) 216–19
“Christ in Distress” (iconographic type) 139, 147–8
Christianity: and Columbus 24; and infidels 58; and Judaism 52, 54, 61, 63; Luther on 139, 141; mockery
of 86, 87; More on 95, 96; and Wayland, Francis 120; and Wild Man 29
Cicero 27, 29, 31
citizenship, concept 53
Civil Liberties Union (United States) 210
civil society, Marx on 59, 66
Coba (late-Classic Maya site) Yucatan 236, 237
Cohen, J.M. 86
Coke, Sir Edward 17, 126
Cold War 204
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Ancient Mariner 10
colonialism, linguistic (sixteenth-century) 22–51; continental writers on 23; eloquence 22, 27–8, 44;
Indian languages 25–6, 27; New World 22–3, 24, 27, 28, 29, 33; own language, speaking of 24–5; and
theatrical imagination 34; Wild Man, medieval figure of 29, 30, 31; see also language
Columbus, Christopher x, 24
Comedy of Errors (W. Shakespeare) 188
Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle (Albert the Great) 243–4
Communism, and Nazism 204
concentration camps 233, 235
concrete universal, theory of 1
conquistadores 37
contempt, Marlowe and Marx on 60
contingency, and historical anecdote 7
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (P. Sidney) 153–5, 156, 157–9
Cromwell, Oliver 190
cultural poetics see poetics, cultural
currency, terminology 213
Czechoslovakia, and Judaism see Prague

Daniel, Samuel 22, 23, 24

Das Prinzip Hoffnung (principle of hope) 73
Davis, Natalie Zemon 177, 179, 186, 187
de Certeau, Michel 5
de Coras, Jean 183–4, 187
de Laudonnière, René de 42
de Minaya, Bernadino 31–2
de Nebrija, Antonio 23
de Olmos, Andrés 26
De oratore (Cicero) 27
de Rols, Bertrande (later Guerre) 177
deconstruction theory 4
defecation, act of 93, 94; see also excrement; scatology; wastes, human
deference: marks of in medieval/early modern families 124; public 130
degradation, acts of 87
del Castillo, Bernal Díaz 81
della Casa, Giovanni, Galateo 80
Deloney, Thomas 153
Derrida, Jacques 207
differentiation, and identity 206
Diggers 97–8, 100
diminished responsibility 183
disasters, festivals commemorating 82–3
discursive fields, distinction between 200
disobedience, economic consequences 114–15
Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann) 226
Dolan, Anthony 204–5
Domingo, Friar 32
du Tilh, Arnaud (alias Pansette) 193; appropriation of Martin Guerre's identity by 177–9, 183, 189, 194;
confession by 178; execution 179, 183, 185, 187; trial 178–9, 184, 185, 187, 188
Dürer, Albrecht 169, 240–1, 242; genre problem 151; and Luther 142, 144; monuments proposed see
monuments, civil (A. Dürer); Painter's Manual 132, 139, 142, 145; peasant, depiction of 146–7; and
Shakespeare 166; and Sidney, Sir Philip 157
Duret, Claude 33

East India Company (Bantam) 15, 18

Elias, Norbert 91
Elizabeth I, reign of 151–2
Elizabethan Club 1
Elizabethan theater 110
eloquence 22, 27–8, 44
emancipation, Marx on 53, 59, 71, 73, 76n20
Emmison, F. G. 152
England: artists (late sixteenth-century) 151–2; Catholicism in 218, 219–20; early modern 108; hangings
in 153; Jews in 53; primogeniture in 114; Reformation 89, 218; sixteenth-century 224
Erasmus 80, 86
Erickson, Erik H. 96
Essex, Earl Robert Devereux 152
ethnography 79, 81, 82
Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East
Indians (E. Scott) 15, 18–19, 20
excrement 91–2, 96, 97; consumption of 78–9, 85, 87; see also defecation, act of; wastes, human
Executioner's Song, The (N. Mailer) 210–11

Fabian, Robert 25
Faerie Queene, The (E. Spenser) 29, 160–6, 169, 193; Giant 161–5; and psychic experience 193–4;
violence 165, 166
fallenness, defined (Augustine) 180
Family, Sex and Marriage in England, The (L. Stone) 110
Faurisson, Robert, on Holocaust denial 201
Feast of Fools 84, 89
Feltwell, John 152
fiction, and reality 15–20
Fifth Commandment 111
films, and politics 204–5
Fineman, Joel 6, 172n15
first-person accounts 184–5
Fleischmann, Karel 232–3
Florida of the Inca 38
Ford, John 188
foreign cultures, revulsion in relation to 80, 81, 82
formalism 4, 226
Foster, Sir William 17
Foucault, Michel 5, 197
Franconia, rebellion in 139
Frankfurt, Nazi Hochschule in 234–5
Freud, Sigmund: alienation, vision of 180; case studies 181; on displacement 87; on “excremental
things”/“sexual things” 102n8; on id 31; on identity 181; on Martin Guerre case 180

Galateo (G. della Casa) 80

Gallagher, Catherine xii
García, Gregorio 25
Gargantua and Pantagruel (F. Rabelais): birth of Gargantua 85–6, 87–8; carnivalesque, portrayal of
88, 90; excrementalism represented in 97; festive representations 89–90; parody of the sacred 87;
Renaissance popular culture 88; see also Rabelais, François
Geertz, Clifford 36
Genesis 41
genre, artistic 134, 135, 145, 148, 149, 155
geometry (applied), instruction in 132
Germany: art 139, 151–2; Jews of (nineteenth-century) 53; Peasants’ War (1525) 139–40, 142, 146,
148, 151, 163
Giddens, Anthony 213–14
Gilmore, Gary 210, 212
God and sinners 116–17
Golden Age 30
Golem 234
Gramática (A. de Nebrija) 23
Greenblatt, Harry J. (father of SG) 8–9, 10, 12
Greenblatt, Joseph H./J. Harry (second cousin of SG) 8–9, 10
Greene, Thomas 229–30
Groom of the Stool 92, 93
grotesque body, festive celebrations of 84–5, 90, 96, 97
Guerre, Bertrande (previously de Rols) 177, 178, 179
Guerre, Martin (case of) 176–87; authentic person 178, 180, 181–2; disappearance 177; documentation
recording 190; execution of imposter 179, 183, 185, 187; historical record 176; identity issues 182;
 impersonation of 177–9, 183, 189, 194; leg, loss of 178; psychoanalytic interpretation 179–80; and
Renaissance drama 188; as Renaissance story 187; as story 187; subjectivity of Martin Guerre 184;
trial of imposter 178–9, 184, 185, 187, 188

Hakluyt Society x, xix, 16

Hamlet (W. Shakespeare) 188, 190
Hampton Court Palace 216
hangings, in Tudor and Stuart England 153
Hawkes, Terence 33, 50n43
Hellcats of the Navy (film) 204
helplessness, doctrine of 221
Henry VI (W. Shakespeare) 166–9; status relations 168
Henry VII 25
Henry VIII 92, 95, 189, 216
Henry VIII (W. Shakespeare) 216
Herzenberg, Jere 210
Heydrich, Reinhard 235
Hippocrates 85
historicism: definitions 220–8; new see new historicism; and traditional formalism 226
history: and anecdotes 7; Marxist 17; and new historicism 221, 222, 223
History of the World (W. Ralegh) 39
Hobbes, Thomas 191–2, 193
Holocaust: concentration camps 233, 235; denial of 201; see also Nazis
Holy Roman Empire, and new historicism 220
hope, principle of 73
Hopkins, John xi
human wastes see wastes, human
humanists 90
Hurons 33

id (Freudian) 31
identity: appropriation of (Martin Guerre case) 177–9, 183, 189, 194; and differentiation 206; Freud on
181; as mask 193; Shakespeare on 188, 190; and story-telling 8, 10, 11
imperialism, and capitalism 18
Impressionists 242
In the Belly of the Beast (J. H. Abbott) 211
Indian languages 24–6, 27, 36, 42, 44
Indians: Cenú 36–7; physical appearance 24; as Wild Men 30, 31; Zuñi 77, 78, 81–4, 88
Institute for the Exploration of the Jewish Question (Prague) 235
intellectual property, concept 184
intellectual structure, Berkeley 5
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (K. Marx) 12–13
Iser, Wolfgang 213
Isocrates 28

Jacobean theater 110

Jameson, Frederic 206; on capitalism 199, 202–3, 214–15n4 215n7; Lyotard's ideas distinguished 202–3,
207; The Political Unconsciousness 198, 199, 200
Java, present-day inhabitants of 35–6
Jeu de Paume 242, 243
Jew-baiting 59
Jewish Museum (Prague) xiv, 232–4
Jewish Town (Prague) 232
Jews and Judaism: and Christianity 52, 54, 61, 63; crime of Jews 53–4; emancipation from 52; language
of Jews 64; and Marx xi, 52–5, 59, 65–7, 71, 73, 74n4; in medieval England 53; and Merchant of
Venice, imagery of 55–7; political power, exclusion from 65; property ownership 55–6; self-
estrangement (Marxist theory of) 73; Tisha b'Av festival 82; see also anti-Semitism
The Jew of Malta (C. Marlowe) 52–3; alienation in 62, 65; audience, silence of 67; and Merchant of
Venice 57; and “On the Jewish Question” (Marx) 52–3, 55, 73; plot/characterization 52, 57–63, 65–
70, 72; proverbs 63–4, 65; spiritual egoism in 62; values expressed in 58; violence in 61
Joinville, Jean de 238
Josselin, Ralph 113–14

kaddish (commemorative prayer for the dead) 233

Kafka, Franz 108, 234
Kant, Immanuel 200
Katz, Jacob 55
Kean, Charles 216
King Lear xi; American nineteenth century contrasted 108–18, 119, 130; authority depicted in 124;
characterization 19, 109, 112–13, 114–15, 116, 128–9; disobedience, economic consequences 114–15;
identity issues 188; and literary pleasure 12; love test 108–9, 110, 123–4; and maintenance agreement,
lack of 128, 129; mode and content 121; parental powers 114–15; paternal observation of the young
112–13; privacy issues 111; public deference, demand for 130; punishment techniques 109; retirement
of the old 125–6, 127; role reversal 116; and salutary anxiety 123; social world 127; as tragedy 121
Klaus Synagogue (Prague) 235
Kroeber, Alfred 83
Kupperman, Karen 88

Lacan, Jacques 191

Lane, Frederic 61
language: and empire 23; familiarity of 24–5; Indian 24–6, 27, 36, 42, 44; jargon 25; of Jews 64; men and
beasts, distinguishing between 31; and monologism 201–2, 203, 226; and reality 38; Shakespeare on
63; see also colonialism, linguistic (sixteenth century)
Las Casas, Bartolomé de 26–7, 34, 37, 40
laughter: cruel 156; festive 84, 87, 88
Lear see King Lear
Leinberger, Hans 139
Leo X (Pope) 23
Lescarbot, Marc 26
Lewis, Janet 177, 179, 187
Life of Saint Louis (J. de Joinville) 238
linguistic colonialism see colonialism, linguistic (sixteenth century)
literary criticism 2–3, 4, 211–12, 225, 228
Literary Criticism: A Short History (W. Wimsatt and C. Brooks) 2
literary studies, new historicism in 3, 4, 6–7, 19, 196–7, 212
literature: anti-Semitism depicted in 52–76; and capitalism 200; Elizabethan 153; and historical
understanding 12–15; Marx on 53, 71; resistance in 222; rhetorical devices in 53, 54, 55, 71
Little Passion (A. Dürer) 139
Loew, Rabbi (Jehuda ben Bezalel) 234
logocentrism 203
longue durée 108
Louvre 242
love test, in theater 108–9, 110, 123–4, 130
“lower bodily stratum” 91–2, 93, 96, 97
Luther, Martin 139, 141–2, 148; “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants” 141; and
Dürer 142, 144; “excremental vision” 96; on scatology 95–7
Lyotard, Jean-François 200–1, 206; on capitalism 201–2, 202–3; Jameson's ideas distinguished 202–3,
207

McDonald, Erroll 211

Macfarlane, Alan 126
McGann, Jerome 3
Mailer, Norman 210–11, 212
Malinowski, Bronislaw 81
“man” term 220, 221
Mandel, Ernest 214n4
Mann, Thomas 226
Marlowe, Christopher: on anti-Semitism 59, 65, 74n4; on contempt 60; on Jews and Judaism 53, 54, 57–
8; The Jew of Malta see The Jew of Malta (C. Marlowe)
Marston, John 188
Martyr, Peter 23, 26, 30
marvels, reports of 239
Marx, Karl: aphorisms of 65–6; on civil society 59, 66; on emancipation 53, 59, 71, 73, 76n20;
Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy 12–13; on Jews and Judaism xi, 52–5, 59, 65–7,
71, 73, 74n4; on literature 53, 71; on play 70; revolutionary society, image of 71
Marxism: aesthetics 3; capitalism 202; history, traditional Marxist 17; literary criticism 2, 4; and new
historicism 221–2; and poststructuralism 197, 200, 203; and systematic thought 4
Mary Queen of Scots 152
mass psychology 54
Massée, Pierre 32
masterpieces 229, 240, 242, 243
maturity, sexual/social 110
Measure for Measure (W. Shakespeare) 123
Mensheviks 197
Merchant of Venice: characterization 56–7, 63; and Jew, image of 55–7, 65
Middleton, Thomas 226
Midsummer Night's Dream (W. Shakespeare) 218–19
Milton, John 25; Paradise Lost 121
Minturno (sixteenth-century Italian critic) 239
Mishnah Brurah xvin2
money, pursuit of 59, 60, 189–90
moneylending 55, 56, 58
monologism 201–2, 203, 226
Montaigne, Michel de 26, 34, 179, 183–4, 187
Monte di Caritá (Christian lending institutions) 55
monuments, civil (A. Dürer): betrayal, imagery of 137, 142, 144, 149–50; designs 133–7, 144, 145–7,
149–51, 156, 172n15; generic implications 135; “Memorial to a Drunkard” 135, 136; military
ordnance, triumph over heroism 133; “Monument to Commemorate a Victory” 132–5, 134, 150;
“Monument to Commemorate a Victory over the Rebellious Peasants” 135, 137–8, 138, 146–7, 148–
9; peasants, labor of 137–8; proposals for 132–52; realism 146; social status of victors, protecting
155; “Vision of an Inundation” 143; see also Dürer, Albrecht
More, Thomas 86, 93, 94–5, 96
mortar cannon 133
movies, and politics 204–5
Muir, John 208–9
Musée d'Orsay 242
Museum of Modern Art (New York) 237
museums 229–31, 238, 243; Central Jewish 235; function of 230; modern art 237, 240; State Jewish
Museum (Prague) xiv, 232–4
Musophilus (D. Samuel) 22, 24

Nahoch Mul (pyramid) 236

Nahuatl (Indian language) 26
narrative, and story-telling 11
Nashe, Thomas 19
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, United States 210
National Parks 208, 209
“natural person” concept of 192
Nazis 201, 204, 234, 235; see also Holocaust
negotiation, terminology 213
Neohistoricism (Australia) 196
Nevada Falls (Yosemite National Park) 208, 209
new historicism 3–4, 196–7, 244; and agency 220–3; anecdotes 6–7; characteristics 197; critics 224–5,
226–9; definitions 220–8; and history 221, 222, 223; and individual intervention, limits on 221; and
Marxism 221–2; and methodological self-consciousness 212, 225; past, veneration of 225–8; and
resonance 228–9, 244; and United States 224; value judgments, avoiding 224–5; value of 19–20; and
works of art 227, 228, 231
New Science (G. Vico) 43–4
New World 24, 27; Daniel on 22–3; and poetry 28; savages in early accounts of 38; and Tempest 33;
and Wild Man 29
Ne'wekwe dances 77, 78, 79, 83–4, 88, 91

Of Children and Their Education (J. Robinson) 118

Old Testament 41, 126
Old-New Synagogue (Prague) 232, 234
“On the Jewish Question” (K. Marx) xi, 66, 67, 71; and Jew of Malta (C. Marlowe) 52–3, 55, 73
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film) 212
Orgel, Stephen 3
Origins of English Individualism (A. Macfarlane) 126
Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernandez de 27
Oxford, Christ Church 216–19
Painter's Manual (A. Dürer) 132, 139, 142, 145
Panofsky, Erwin 142
para que aprendan a hablar (that they may learn to speak) 24
Paradise Lost (J. Milton) 121
parish chest 190
parody 78, 86, 87, 88
Parry, John H. 26
Patrizi, Francesco 239–40
Paul III (Pope) 32
Pearce, Roy Harvey 25
peasants: Arcadia (P. Sidney), depicted in 156; labor of 137–8; solidarity with 144; victory over 146
Peasants’ War (Germany, 1525) 139–40, 142, 146, 148, 151, 163
Penn, William 26
People magazine 211
perspective, instruction in 132
Platonists 239
playfulness 70
pleasure: aesthetic 15; bodily 93–4; elusiveness 14–15; literary 12–15; and Shakespeare 222; theatrical
14
Plowden, Edmund 111
poetics, cultural xiv, 1, 3, 198–215; political and poetic 198–9; United States, everyday behavior in 207–8
poetry, and prose 28
Political Unconsciousness, The (F. Jameson) 198, 199, 200
post-structuralism 3, 18–19, 20
postmodernism 200
poststructuralism 197, 200, 203
power, humanist trivialization of 207
Practicing New Historicism xii
Prague: Burial Society, Ceremonial Hall 233; Central Bureau for Dealing with the Jewish Question 235;
Institute for the Exploration of the Jewish Question 235; Old-New Synagogue 232, 234; State Jewish
Museum in xiv, 232–4
Pretty, Francis 30
primogeniture, in England 114
privatization/private ownership, and cultural texts 198–9
proper names 200, 201, 202
prose, and poetry 28
Protestants, English 219
Proust, Marcel 230–1
proverbs 63–4, 65, 90
psychic experience 193–4
psychoanalysis: critics 12; Martin Guerre case 179–80; on masks 193; “natural person” concept of 192;
and Renaissance 176, 191; universalist claims of 183, 185
Pullan, Brian 55
Purchas, Reverend Samuel x, 17
Puttenham, George 28, 48n22

Quintilian 28
Rabelais, François: fantasy of 91; on folk culture 90; Gargantua and Pantagruel see Gargantua and
Pantagruel (F. Rabelais); on “lower bodily stratum” 91–2, 93; on parody 87, 88; power of 89; and
Sorbonists 88
Rabelais and His World (M. Bakhtin) 84
Rahm, Karl 235
Ralegh, Sir Walter 2, 3, 26; History of the World 39
Ramusio x
Rat Man 181
Reagan, President Ronald 204–5, 207
Real Presence, doctrine of 87
reality: and aestheticism 205; and fiction 15–20; and language 38; reality-effect 19; single 40
rebellion, by peasants 139–40, 142, 146, 148, 151
Reformation, England 89, 218
relativism 186
remembering, and viewing 233–4
Renaissance: child-rearing techniques 112; culture, and literature 176; on family and public life 111; and
Feast of Fools 89; genre differentiation 172n15; iconography 157; impersonation in drama 188–9;
international relations 61; and psychoanalysis 176, 191; theater 117, 118, 119; on tragedies 121;
wonder-cabinets of 238–9
renewal, acts of 87
Requerimiento 39, 40–2
resonance xiii–xiv, 228–38; effect 232; and new historicism 228–9, 244; and State Jewish Museum
(Prague) 234; and unexpected survival 236; and wonder, cult of 238
Return of Martin Guerre, The (N. Z. Davis) 177, 179, 186, 187
rhetorical devices, in literature 53, 54, 55, 71; rhetoric and violence 166
Robinson, John 118
Rogin, Michael 204
Romans, architecture of 133
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 110
Rowe, John Carlos 207
Rowley, William 226

sadism 18
St. George's Hill (Surrey), Diggers on 97–8, 100
St. Paul 87, 141
salutary anxiety, practice of 122–3, 130
savages 38; of America 28–9
Scarry, Elaine 20
scatology 85, 91, 92–3; Luther on 95–7; Scatologic Rites of All Nations (J. G. Bourke) 79, 81, 82; see
also defecation, act of; excrement; wastes, human
Schiller, Lawrence 210
Scott, Edmund 16, 17, 81; as Agent for East India Company (Bantam) 15, 19; Exact Discourse of the
Subtilties, Fashions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians 15, 18–19, 20
Second Shepherd's Play 87
self-consciousness, methodological: and new historicism 212, 225
self-destructiveness 72, 73
self-expression, and writing 11
Self-Portrayals by the Zuñi People 83
Serlio, Sebastiano 133
Shakespeare, William: and class fears 50n46; class of origin 125; Comedy of Errors 188; documentation
on life of 190; and Elizabethan culture 226; Hamlet 188, 190; Henry VI 166–9; Henry VIII 216;
history plays 223; and Hobbes 193; identity, conception of 188, 190; impersonation in work of 189;
King Lear see King Lear; Measure for Measure 123; Merchant of Venice see Merchant of
Venice; Midsummer Night's Dream 218–19; Renaissance themes, literary exploration 32; resistance
in plays of 222; second tetralogy of 222, 223; and Sidney 166; Taming of the Shrew 124, 188; The
Tempest see Tempest, The; Twelfth Night 188; and Wild Man 35; Winter's Tale xiii, 89
Shakespeare's Talking Animals (T. Hawkes) 33
Sidney, Sir Philip 2, 155, 169; Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia 153–5, 156, 157–9; Defense of Poetry
157; and Dürer 157; heroes of 158, 159, 160; and Shakespeare 166; status boundaries, marking of
157; victory over rebellion, representation of 160
Simboleography (W. West) 126–7
slave market 62
Smithsonian conference xv
Smithsonian Museum, Washington xiii
Society for the Suppression of Vice 89
Sorbonists 87, 88
Spenser, Edmund: on psyche 193–4; on Ruins of Time 237; The Faerie Queene 29, 160–6, 169, 193–4
Spitzer, Leo 184
stadium humanitatis 28
State Jewish Museum (Prague) xiv, 232–4
status boundaries 157, 158
Stone, Lawrence 110
story-telling 6–12; anecdotes 6–7; and identity 8, 10, 11; and narrative 11
Sublimis Deus 32
Swabia, rebellion in 139
synagogues (Prague) 232–3, 234

Taming of the Shrew (W. Shakespeare) 124, 188

Tempest, the (W. Shakespeare): and human nature 35–6; language xi; and linguistic colonialism 32–6;
and literary pleasure 12, 13–14; and New World 33; plot/characterization 34–6, 42–3
Terezin concentration camp 233
Terrible Stanley 8, 10
textual distanciation, concept 213–14
theater: absolutist 129; Elizabethan 110; Jacobean 110; Renaissance 117, 118, 119; self-representation
192; as social event 118; tragedy, use of 121
Thélème, Abbey of 90, 97
Thomas, Keith 110 Thresor de d'histoire des langves de cest univers (C. Duret) 33
Thuringia, rebellion in 139
Tisha b'Av festival 82
Tivitivas of Guiana 26
torture, practice of (early modern Europe) 18
tragedy, literary 121, 133; see also King Lear
treason, torture of Catholics accused of 18
trivialization of power, humanist 207
Twelfth Night (W. Shakespeare) 188
Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian peasants 139
Ugo of Siena, Andrea 28
uncertainty 2
Unfortunate Traveller (T. Nashe) 19, 20
United States: capitalism of 206; Civil Liberties Union 210; everyday behavior, poetics 207–8; National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People 210; and new historicism 224; nineteenth-
century evangelism see United States (nineteenth-century); savages 28; and Viet Nam War 5, 224;
White House 204, 205
United States (nineteenth-century): age groups 110; child-rearing techniques 110, 112, 117–18, 122; and
monarchy 122; paternal behavior (evangelical) 108; privacy issues 112; public life 111; punishment
techniques 109, 111; see also Wayland, Reverend Francis (on toddler son, Heman Lincoln)
usury 55, 56, 58
Utopia (T. More) 93, 94
Utopians 93, 97

verbal icons 3
Vico, Giambattista 43–4
victory column (A. Dürer) 133–5, 150
Viet Nam War, opposition to 5, 224
viewing, and remembering 233–4
Vigne, Daniel 187
Virgin Birth, doctrine of 87
Virginia, colonial policy in 88
visual experience, and wonder 239
voyages, English 17
“vulnerable text” 229–30

warfare, modern, and victory column 134–5

Washington, Smithsonian Museum in xiii
wastes, human: acts of degradation 87; behavioral codes 79, 80; disagreeable thoughts relating to 80, 81;
“lower bodily stratum” 91–2, 93, 96, 97; mucus, carrying in handkerchiefs 81; revulsion in relation to
80, 81, 82; see also defecation, act of; excrement; scatology
Watt, James 209
Wayland, Heman Lincoln 131; father on see Wayland, Reverend Francis (on toddler son, Heman
Lincoln)
Wayland, Reverend Francis (on toddler son, Heman Lincoln) xi; child-rearing techniques 122; and
Christianity 120; and death of Francis 131; King Lear comparison 108–18, 119, 130; love test 108–9,
130; mother, absence or displacement 119–20; narrative of social practice, quotation of 105–8;
nursery, use as prison 130; parental observation 112, 113; parental powers 115, 120; punishment
techniques 109; see also United States (nineteenth-century)
wealth, attachment to 93
Weimann, Robert 213
West, William 126
What You Will (J. Marston) 188
White, Edward 152
White House 204, 205
Wife of Martin Guerre, The (J. Lewis) 177, 179, 187
Wild Man, medieval figure of 29, 30, 31; Shakespeare 35
wilderness, Yosemite National Park (California) 208, 209
will to power, and new historicism 221
Williams, Raymond 2, 3, 5
Wimsatt, William K. 1–2
Winstanley, Gerrard 98, 99, 100
Winter's Tale (W. Shakespeare) xiii, 89
Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, hat of 216–19
wonder, concept of 228, 238–40
Wordsworth, William 110
works of art 118–19, 151, 212–13; formal 231; and King Lear 123; museums, displayed by 240; and
new historicism 227, 228, 231
writing, practice of 11

Yosemite National Park (California) 208–10

Yucatan, Coba (late-Classic Maya site in) 236, 237

Zuñi Indians 77, 78, 81–4, 88

 Routledge Classics
Get inside a great mind
Judgements on History and Historians
Jacob Burckhardt
“Unlike other ‘universal historians,’ Burckhardt never closed his mind to new possibilities. He
imposed no system on history. He believed, with all the real ‘liberals,’ ultimately in the freedom
of the human will...” – Hugh Trevor-Roper

Western Civilisation was in its pomp when Jacob Burckhardt delivered his Judgements on
History and Historians; European Empires spanned the globe, while the modern age was being
forged in the nationalist revolutions of 1848. As a tutor to the young Friedrich Nietzsche as well
as one of the first historians to take ‘culture’ as his subject rather than the triumphs and travails
of kings and generals, Burckhardt was at the vanguard of this modern sensibility. Ambitious in its
scope, ranging from the days of Ancient Egypt, through the Reformation to the time of Napoleon,
this is indeed a history of ‘Western Civilisation’, written before two monstrous world wars threw
such a concept into disrepute.

ISBN10: 0-415-41293-5 ISBN13: 978-0-415-41293-3

In Other Worlds
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
“Gayatri Spivak's In Other Worlds is admirably intellectually honest.” – National Review

Combining intellectual ease with a belief that practical political change can be affected by theory,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has become one of the leading literary theorists and cultural critics
of our times. This wide-ranging collection of early essays marks a trajectory that saw her
concerns become mainstream-Spivak was writing about the post-colonial before anyone had
named it as such. If you want to get to the very heart of feminist deconstructionist epistemology,
then this has to be one of the main conduits. Analysing the relationship between language,
women, and culture in both Western and non-Western contexts, In Other Worlds has become an
invaluable tool for studying culture-both our ‘own’ and ‘Other’.

ISBN10: 0-415-38956-9 ISBN13: 978-0-415-38956-3

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 Routledge Classics
Get inside a great mind
Signatures of the Visible
Fredric Jameson
“Jameson aptly demonstrates why he remains among the most significant literary theorists of the
late twentieth century.” – Philosophy and Literature

In such celebrated works as Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric
Jameson has established himself as one of America's most sharp-eyed cultural commentators. In
Signatures of the Visible Jameson turns his attention to the cinema: the artform that has
replaced the novel as the defining cultural form of our time. Historicizing a form that has
flourished in a post-modern and anti-historical culture, he explores the allegorical and ideological
dimensions of such films as The Shining, Dog Day Afternoon and the works of Alfred
Hitchcock, among many others. Fifteen years on from its original publication, this remains a
piercing and original analysis of film from a writer and thinker whose influence continues to be
felt long after that of the fashionable post-modernists he has always critiqued.

ISBN10: 0-415-77161-7 ISBN13: 978-0-415-77161-0

The Location of Culture

Homi K. Bhabha
“Homi Bhabha is one of that small group occupying the front rank of literary and cultural
theoretical thought.” – Toni Morrison

Terry Eagleton once wrote in The Guardian, “Few post-colonial writers can rival Homi Bhabha
in his exhilarated sense of alternative possibilities”. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha uses
concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is
always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speaking in a voice that combines
intellectual ease with the belief that theory itself can contribute to practical political change,
Bhabha has become one of the leading post-colonial theorists of this era.

ISBN 10: 0-415-33639-2 ISBN 13: 978-0-415-33639-0

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