The Hare

               —E. Maunde Thompson1

At the height of Sir Thomas More’s political success in the play that bears his name, Sir Thomas Palmer presents King Henry VIII’s Lord High Chancellor with “these Articles enclosde, first to be viewde, | and then to be subscribed to.”2 “The nature of the articles is never specified,” note Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori, “But M[unday] identifies them with the Oath of Supremacy and Act of Succession submitted to More on 13 April 1534 at Lambeth Palace.”3 In response to the king’s demand, More says: “Subscribe these Articles? stay, let vs pause, | our conscience first shall parley with our lawes” (ll. 1238–39). While the Bishop of Rochester flatly refuses to sign and is arrested for “this capitall contempt” (l. 1249), More decides with more temperance to resign his office and, by a “prepared order from the King” (l. 1258), happily departs to house arrest in Chelsea. The signature that Henry wants More to affix to the unnamed articles would obviously function as a sign of his submission to the king’s authority. More than this, however, the signature and the name would stand in for, take the place of, More’s person, a doubling or duplication which could be carried to the king in More’s absence, and its subscripted position on the document would affirm a hierarchy of power to which More would have fully capitulated. Yet More’s refusal to sign the articles, I would argue, still functions as a signature because the absence of his name becomes a subscription to his conscience, which would seem to follow a power higher than Henry’s earthly one.

In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida examines the operation of the signature’s power, which it exercises through the singular context in which it is written, writing:

Despite the spatiotemporal restrictions that bind the signature to its context, the written name must also move beyond the event of its writing to assert its power within future contexts: “one can always lift a written syntagma from the interlocking chain in which it is caught or given without making it lose every possibility of functioning, if not every possibility of ‘communicating,’ precisely. Eventually, one may recognize other such possibilities in it by inscribing or grafting it into other chains. No context can enclose it.”5 Derrida speaks here about the “iterability” of the written sign, which must be legible to and replicable by others in order to signify, but which must also therefore break with and exceed the specific context of writing that it claims to represent, that “set of presences which organize[s] the moment of its inscription.”6 When Sir Thomas Palmer—himself acting as the king’s hand, even in name—presents Henry’s articles, More finds himself within a “set of presences” meant to organize such an inscription. But, as More withholds his hand, the absence of his signature becomes for Henry a mobile, disembodied sign of defiance and, eventually, of high treason. More’s signature continues to organize his relationship with the king, who remains offstage throughout the play’s action, for when Shrewsbury and Surrey visit him at Chelsea to ask once again for his signature lest he be arrested and committed to the Tower, More says that he will “now satisfye the Kings good pleasure,” to which Shrewsbury says, “Come then, subscribe my Lord” (ll. 1575, 1577). This is but one of his many jests, however, and More adheres again to his conscience while also submitting himself to the king: “Oh pardon me, | I will subscribe to goe vnto...

Dido Queen of Carthage, Christopher Marlowe’s earliest play, revolves around the romance of Æneas and Dido as related in the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid. Although in many respects Marlowe adheres very closely to his source material, the play features a number of deviations from Virgil, most notably a conspicuously homoerotic introduction and a borderline farcical conclusion, neither of which has any obvious bearing on the narrative. While critics have often been eager to dismiss either or both of these elements, such dismissals seem to be implicitly predicated on the premise that Marlowe’s project is little more than an essentially faithful dramatic rendering of the most memorable episode of the Aeneid–a problematic assumption that can by no means be taken for granted. Against this tradition, I want to propose a reading that views these deviations as crucial to–and contextualizing of–a distinct narrative project at work in the play. Specifically, I will argue that the central tension in Dido, Æneas’s vacillation between his men and their destiny in Italy on the one hand, and Carthage and his marriage to Dido on the other, can be understood as a tension between the demands of the feminized heteronormative order in which he finds himself and the utopian allure of a masculine homosexual alternative.1

Evidence of such a project abounds in Marlowe’s text. It includes the compromised characterization of Æneas, whose heroic stoicism is substituted for an exaggerated indecisiveness by Marlowe’s invention of an aborted attempt to flee Carthage, and whose failure to save his wife is compounded by the further failures to avert the rape of Cassandra and the sacrifice of Polyxena.2 It also is evident in Marlowe’s abridgement of the Virgilian narrative, which invokes Æneas’s Italian destiny as a catalytic plot device while simultaneously undermining its relevance by consigning it to the margins of the play. Thus neither Æneas’s teleological military triumph, nor the heteronormative marriage from which the legendary founders of Rome will spring, finds representation in Dido; rather, Virgil’s epic is reduced to a melodrama of indecision in which the immediate choice is not between love or empire so much as masculine or feminine society, the adventure of martial existence versus the tedium of a sedentary life. In this respect Dido conforms to a type, identified by Mario DiGangi in a number of late-sixteenth-century texts, most notably the plays of Fletcher and Lyly, wherein “a male character forgoes women, redirecting his social and erotic energies back into orderly–and potentially homoerotic–military relations.”3 The homoeroticism of the play’s introduction, by this interpretation, serves not only to foreshadow, but eroticize, such tensions, establishing the competing spaces in which they play out; the culminating suicides of a chain of jilted heterosexual lovers, meanwhile, confirms the fanciful triumph of the “orderly–and potentially homoerotic” masculinity of Æneas and his men, who are thereby freed to pursue their utopian homoerotic destiny.

Marlowe’s reimagining of the Aeneid begins, unexpectedly, with “JUPITER dandling GANYMEDE upon his knee, and MERCURY lying asleep,” as the hedonistic Jupiter implores, “Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me” (1.1.1).4 But instead Ganymede chastises Jupiter for failing to protect him from the jealous Juno’s “shrewish blows” (1.1.4). Jupiter is incensed at the treatment his boy lover has received at the hands of his wife, and threatens, should it happen again, “To hang, her meteor like, ‘twixt heaven and earth, / And bind her, hand and foot, with golden cords” (1.1.13-14). He then proceeds to bestow gifts on Ganymede, first feathers plucked directly from the slumbering Mercury, and then Juno’s own wedding jewels. The lovers’ reverie is interrupted, though, when Venus bursts onto the scene, castigating Jupiter for “playing with that female wanton boy, / Whiles my Æneas wanders on the seas, / And rests a prey to every billow’s pride” (1.1.51-53).

Critics have tended to take either of two approaches to this scene. The first has been befuddlement and consequent rejection, treating it, in the words of Jonathan Goldberg, “as an embarrassment, a joke, or a symptom of [Marlowe’s] ‘pathological’ condition.”5 The alternative has been to interpret the scene precisely as its context demands, as a framing device according to which...

In Pericles, fire incinerates two pairs of villains:  Antiochus and Daughter are struck by “fire from heaven” in scene 8, and Cleon and Dionyza are burned in their palace in scene 22.1 The shocking events are welcome news for the play’s hero, though he need not have traveled as often nor as far to encounter such fire.  Shortly after the play’s probable date of composition, in late 1608, fire from heaven reportedly consumed the house in Flanders in which lived a woman who birthed three monsters.2 In 1613, fire from heaven burned John Hittchell of Southhampton, whose body smoldered for three days and nights before finally extinguishing itself.3  These startling combustions bear a striking resemblance to the deaths in Pericles, a play preoccupied by the elemental intersections of narrative and fire.  This essay considers, first, the strange ease with which something as familiar and dangerous as fire moves between the playhouse stage and the newssheet catastrophes of everyday life; and, second, how fire’s uncanny habitation in Pericles and others of Shakespeare’s plays link those texts in a conspiracy of intertextual flame.

Though fire performs spectacular works of justice in Pericles, fire in its as deadly but more banal appearances would have been familiar to anyone browsing the bookstalls.  The 1613 pamphlet describing Hitchell’s death also included an account of “the fearefull burning of the towne of Dorchester vpon friday the 6 of August,” and similar reports of fires occupied broadsheet ballads, newssheets, pamphlets, and volumes panting with news of scorched barns, destroyed markets, and deceased victims.  So numerous are these fiery texts that they might consistitute a genre of their own: pyroreportage, literature describing the daily reality of combustion in English life and imagination.  A quick survey of some pamphlets, broadsheets, and ballads memorializing these disasters shows how ruthless and resourceful fire proved to be in Renaissance England:  A doleful discourse and ruthfull reporte of the greate spoyle and lamentable losse, by fire, in the towne of East Dearham… (1581); A briefe sonet declaring the lamentation of Beckles, a market towne in Suffolke which was…pitifully burned with fire to the value by estimation of tweentie thousande pounds… (1586); A short, yet a true and faithfull narration of the fearefull fire that fell in the towne of Wooburne, in the countie of Bedford (1595); The True lamentable discourse of the burning of Teuerton in Deuon-shire…At what time there was consumed to ashes about the number of 400 houses…and fyftie persons burnt aliue through the vehemencie of the same fyer (1598); and The woefull and lamentable wast and spoile done by a suddaine fire in S. Edmonds-bury in Suffolke (1608).  And on July 9, 1614, Stratford-upon-Avon caught fire.  The town burned with a speed and ferocity that startled and stunned witnesses.  The “sodaine and terrible fire” incinerated, in less than two hours, more than 50 homes and numerous barnes, stables, offices, and other structures in the tinderish town that had already suffered other fires in the 20 years prior to this blaze. So extensive was the damage to the town, that the fire came to the attention of James I.  According to the broadsheet proclaiming the king’s sympathy and support, the fire drove the the town to “great hazard to be overthrowne and undone...”  Stratford was a town stinking of smoke, smothering in cinders, “ruinated & decayed.”4

Both the broadsheet fires and the fires in Shakespeare’s plays appear as the fire next time—a fire that is itself a quotation.  The fire of Pericles is a repetition on-stage of what happened in Flanders; the fire in off-stage Southhampton is a repetition of what happens in Pericles.  In plays as in pyroreportage, where sparks leap out to and absorb the cinders of other texts, fire tends to duplicate itself.5 Through processes of creative or destructive reduplication—repetition, allusion, quotation—texts present fire itself as a phenomenon as familiar and unsettling as uncanniness itself.  The same pamphlet reporting John Hittchell’s incineration, for example, includes an account of “the fearefull burning of the towne of Dorchester,” an account that concludes by likening the damage of the...

Performance mythologies associated with Othello—from the vehemence of audience reactions to the violence of actors playing Othello—make the final scene a daunting one for an actor playing Desdemona.  The enduring image she leaves with the audience (and critics) may have more to do with her post-murder posture than any other aspect of her performance, as reflected in Henry Jackson’s frequently cited observation that the Desdemona of a 1610 production moved the audience “more after she was dead, when, lying on her bed, she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance.”1 In Othello and elsewhere, Shakespeare is one of the “many early modern dramatists” who “chose to blatantly showcase the female corpse.”2 Being an active (living) object of the audience’s gaze and being a passive (dead) one are, for both actor and character, different things.  For the actor, embodying a passive presence on stage frustrates the creative impulse to play action, to work toward objectives and to pursue goals (as actors are trained to do).  For the character, being “dead” means not only ending an on-stage life, but also losing the advocacy of the actor—that is, being embodied by a performer with no agency.   Partially drawing on my recent experience playing Desdemona in a professional Shakespeare festival production, I wish to investigate the implications of performing death and explore some ways in which its convergence with desire might be conceptualized (and complicated).3

The day that we blocked the murder scene was the first time I considered how long I was going to have to be dead onstage (in bed, in a nightie, in a spotlight).  As we discussed the difficulties of performing death, particularly for such a lengthy scene, the director shared a story of a drunken audience member on the front row during a performance of Hamlet of which he had been a part.  Moments after the death of Laertes, the man said, in a deeply southern   accent and an exaggerated whisper that reverberated throughout the house and stage, “La-er-tes!  La-er-tes!  I see you breathin’.  You ain’t dead.  I see you breathin’!”  Of course, whether this parallels the “blurring of boundaries between life and art” that Lois Potter observes in Othello’s performance history (1), or simply affirms Cassio’s assertion that when men “put an enemy in their mouths” it can “steal away their brains” is debatable.4 What it does emphasize is the impossibility—and the absurdity—of the job for the actor playing dead. 

But once she is dead, there must the “divine Desdemona” lie looking lovely.  The scene exemplifies Dympna Callaghan’s assertion that “female corpses are constructed as focal points for ocular inspection by other characters on stage and by the audience in a way that male bodies are not”—Desdemona’s (the actor’s) body is scrutinized, covered, uncovered, touched, groped, kissed, and sweated upon as the remainder of the plot unravels.5 In this way, playing Desdemona dead emblematizes many of the difficulties of playing Desdemona alive.  Victorian actress Ellen Terry acknowledged such challenges in an 1881 production that featured Henry Irving and Edwin Booth alternating the roles of Othello and Iago.  Working with two actors who approached the role of Othello differently alerted Terry to the constraints of her own role.  As Potter notes, “playing opposite two different Othellos in quick succession made her aware of the extent to which her performance depended on theirs” (55). Even with only one Othello, if the actor playing Desdemona is not matched with a director predominantly invested in her particular plight, her characterization can be as conditional as volitional.  Approaches to the role neatly worked out in the isolation of study cannot always be precisely materialized in the collaboration of rehearsal and performance. That is, despite her predetermined goals and tactics, the actor can only behave believably if she responds to what her Othello actually does—if he is “raving and stamping under her nose,” as Terry described Irving in the role, then she must react as a woman confronted with (and threatened by) such rage.6 In this way, the actor’s position mirrors the character’s when she says to Othello, “Whate’er you be, I am obedient” (3.3.89).  Whatever Othello...

Shakespeare’s creation is often at odds to customary ideas of lives and worlds, which presume extension in time and space (her life, that world), a communally agreed physical presence (the life can be seen, the place can be entered), and a public name to accord with this essentially single entity (Juliet, Verona).1 There is more to life than this. Though it is true that everything in playworlds is spoken by named characters, there can be abundant life that is not possessed by or attributable to these characters. Think of how impoverished our sense of life must be, if we understood it only as human life, and then only as that element of human life that could be seen, now, like serried commuters at a bus-stop, and which could be downloaded in present time to a spectator who instantly understands everything. What would such a world be like? No memory, no confusion, no completing planes, nothing unfinishable; no birdsong, no moss, no germs or bones or smells. Just these more or less finished exemplar, telling us what they are for. The dead plays do pretty much this, the ones that only scholars bother with, for completeness sake. But not the living ones, the ones that remain possible, because they are alive, like any ecology is, with potentiality.

In Shakespeare, the named things are invariably patterned with variations and discontinuities, constituted by all kinds of parts and planes and vectors. Very often they exist in more than one place, and more than one time, even as they appear to be just where we can see them. Very often location is metaphysical, a thing of memory or projection, as well as physical. It is easy enough to think of a world as a potential concatenation of lives. But the converse is true: each life is a potential concatenation of worlds. Then there are worlds within worlds, and lives within lives. A world needn’t have its own geography or weather, just as a life need not have its own name. If such an artform is indeed mimetic, then it is not imitating anything that can be vouched for by the unanimous public eye:

Each substance of a greefe hath twenty shadows
Which shewes like greefe it selfe, but is not so:
For sorrowes eye, glazed with blinding teares,
Divides one thing intire, to many objects,
Like perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon
Shew nothing but confusion, ey’d awry,
Distinguish form.   (Richard II, TLN 966-72)

This is Shakespearean mimesis, less a rectilinear mirror, more a faceted tear, dividing the single substance into swarming differentials, every one a kind of fate. Only the eye awry will distinguish form; look too head-on and you will miss it. We always need to be shifting our position, wielding a virtual mirror to see things right, or to see how one thing inverts or extends or reflects another. In Shakespeare, every space, however miniscule, is a plenum.

His truly is a strange form of mimesis. It is Hamlet who says that a play holds a mirror up to nature. The thought perhaps seems straightforward. But there are various kinds of mirror; and as for nature, who knows where it begins or ends?  Here is another take on the theme:

But man, proud man,
Drest in a little briefe authoritie,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,
(His glassie Essence) like an angry Ape
Plaies such phantastique tricks before high heaven,
As makes the Angels weepe: who with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortall.
(Measure for Measure, TLN 874-80)

Isabella is railing here against Angelo, the “pelting petty Officer” who has condemned her brother Claudio to death. Her theme is the inordinate exercise of power. But as her temper heightens, the speech moves somewhat beyond its immediate rhetorical purpose (to dissuade Angelo from executing sentence) into this embracing indictment of humankind. It is a multi-pleated allegory, its swift movement between apes and angels tightly tuned to the playworld’s unstable ethics and permeable ontologies. Isabella’s speech is self-evidently risky, even reckless. But this isn’t only because of her perilous situation as helpless suitor to an autocrat. Her speech conjures a kind of phylogenetic obscenity: man stripped naked, bent before a mirror, exposed as an ape before the weeping eyes of angels. The risk is partly in the imputation of some kind of...

Famously, in the climactic moment of the puppet play within Ben Jonson’s Bartholmew Fair, the puppet Dionysius hikes up his skirt to reveal his lack of genitalia, proving by “plain demonstration” (5. 5. 96) a verity of his fellow performing objects: “we have neither male nor female amongst us” (93-4).1 Thus the Puritans’ “old stale argument against the players”—that their cross-dressing makes abominations of them—is answered (92). Playing to a Puritan assumption of continuity between biological sex and gender, Dionysius appeals to his essential sexlessness to exculpate himself from the charge of gender transgression. Laura Levine argues that, in addition to casting doubt on assumptions about sex and gender, Dionysius’s anatomical incorrectness entails a foreclosure of erotic experience: “The puppet presents a world devoid not only of sexual difference but of the very possibility of erotic experience itself.”2 She makes explicit a presumed continuity between genitally determined sex and erotic acts and gestures: “The puppet cannot be implicated in the world of sexuality, not because he is superior to it but simply because he lacks the equipment. He stands outside the world of erotic desire not because he is able to resist its temptations but simply because he lacks the capacity to perform its actions” (emphases mine, 100).3 The too easy conflation of the erotic and sexual here implies that copulative consummation is the orbit of erotic experience. Far from confirming such a notion, the puppet theater opens up possibilities of erotic experience that not only do not require genital gratification, but also do not proceed from a sexed body. The puppet—or performing object (as current discourse calls it), or motion (as the Renaissance called it)—offers an alternative conception of eroticism free from anatomic and copulative sex. Lacking the equipment does not mean the puppet lacks the capacity. As one puppet performance of a Shakespearean text has demonstrated, the very lack of bodily equipment can contribute to a puppet’s performance of erotic action.

Although the motions at Bartholmew Fair intend to perform a vulgarized version of Christopher Marlowe’s erotic epyllion Hero and Leander, their farcical descent into pugilism denies their audience the chance to witness the erotic possibilities of performing objects in motion. In the Fall of 2004, however, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Little Angel Theater gave serious attention to performing objects with the staging of another erotic epyllion, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Director Greg Doran staged the poem with various forms of puppetry, but his eponymous characters were inspired by Japanese bunraku, in which one or more puppeteers directly manipulate the life-like objects without the mediation of strings. A tabletop provided the main playing space, backed by a diorama-like woodland setting, the frame of which surprisingly would become a performing object itself. The five puppeteers, dressed in black with black hats, often showed in their faces the emotions of the puppets they operated. They contributed sighs, neighs, and halloos, but as with traditional bunraku, the Venus and Adonis puppeteers tended to disappear, or become subsumed by the life of the puppet they operated. The performing objects moved with such a lightness and grace that they seemed to initiate movement in the puppeteers, not the other way around, as they floated through the stanzas of Shakespeare’s poem, narrated by Michael Pennington. Guitarist Steve Russell, a Westernized version of the Japanese samisen-player, accompanied the reading musically. Venus and Adonis previewed in October, 2004, at Little Angel Theatre in Islington before moving to The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in November.4 The show was revived in 2007. The production offers insight into how sexless objects can be shaped for erotic experience, and how puppets question the genitally-governed teleology of eroticism.

Venus and Adonis is among the most erotically charged poetry of the canon, despite (or perhaps because of) Venus’s failure to engage Adonis sexually.5 While critics have noted the poem’s eroticism and near-pornography,6 copulation is not the highest or most urgently pursued erotic expression in the poem. Rather, the kiss governs erotic acts, abounding in various forms: kisses “sweet” (84), kisses “long...