Abstract
When the Prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry V calls upon spectators to “[p]eece out our imperfections with your thoughts,” he invokes a familiar trope: audience members must use their imaginations to compensate for deficiencies in theatrical performance. This model of dramatic practice is predicated on the assumption that verisimilitude is the representational ideal. Theatre, it presumes, aims for a facsimile of reality. By supplementing onstage actions with mental pictures, audiences “fill out” the material inadequacies of the playhouse, so as to make the fiction seem more “real.” For early modern spectators, however, “[p]eece[ing] out” the actor’s “imperfections” was not always quite so simple.
O pardon: since a crooked Figure may
Attest in little place a Million,
And let vs, Cyphers to this great Accompt,
On your imaginarie Forces worke.
Suppose within the Girdle of these Walls
Are now confin’d two mightie Monarchies,
Whose high, vp-reared, and abutting Fronts,
The perillous narrow Ocean parts asunder.
Peece out our imperfections with your thoughts:
Into a thousand parts diuide one Man,
And make imaginarie Puissance.
Thinke when we talke of Horses, that you see them
Printing their prowd Hoofes i’th’receiuing Earth:
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our Kings.
—Shakespeare, Prologue to Henry V
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Notes
Quoted in Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 59.
R. A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 317, 319.
I use mimesis to refer to dramatic representation that privileges verisimilitude—a limited and specific use of a term with a rich and diverse history. Other philosophical applications and meanings are summarized in Jonathan Holmes and Adrian Streete, eds., introduction to Refiguring Mimesis: Representation in Early Modern Literature (Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005), 1–13.
Modern usage is undeniably influenced by Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).
See also Seth Lerer, ed., Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Although thoroughly refuted in O. B. Hardison Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), this teleological historical narrative is still widely influential.
Roslyn Lander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 42.
On allegory’s continuing impact in later centuries, see Jane K. Brown, The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
Frederick Kiefer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 43.
James L. Calderwood, To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in “Hamlet” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 30.
Bob Scribner, “Ways of Seeing in the Age of Dürer,” in Dürer and His Culture, ed. Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99.
Eamon Duffy, “Devotion to the Crucifix and Related Images in England on the Eve of the Reformation,” in Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Bob Scribner (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1990), 26.
On affective piety and visual devotion, see chapter 2; here I summarize only key points related to my current discussion. On the cult of images, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Quoted in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 101–2.
Gail Kern Paster, “Nervous Tension,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 111;
and Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 8.
William N. West, “‘But this will be a mere confusion’: Real and Represented Confusions on the Elizabethan Stage,” Theatre Journal 60 (2008): 228–29.
Of extensive work on revenge tragedy conventions, see especially Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940);
and the recent overview in Tanya Pollard, “Tragedy and Revenge,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 58–72.
Intermissions between acts did not spread to the amphitheatres until after 1607. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 177.
Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 7.
Ibid., 2–3. In Allegory and Violence, Gordon Teskey remarks that critical approaches to allegory may be divided into two camps, one analyzing it as a mode, another as a genre, with Fletcher as the primary example of the former and Maureen Quilligan of the latter. Those who treat allegory as a mode, he suggests, contend that allegory is “a means of encoding any discourse whatever” (10); those who consider it a genre argue that it is “an altogether separate category of discourse” through which “ideological structures, determined more or less in advance, are inserted into narratives by adventitious encoding in such a way that those narratives become formally distinct from all others” (ibid.). Because my interests lie in theatrical signifiers and the cultural discourses that contributed to performance practices, my own methodology focuses on allegory as a mode and is thus aligned more closely with the view Teskey ascribes to Fletcher. However, I find persuasive Quilligan’s emphasis on the way allegory as a genre responds to, constructs, and reproduces broader social formations. In this sense, her account of allegory squares with my own, since both are interested in the way literary form is constituted through the cultural discourses embedded within it. My work thus differs from Quilligan’s not so much in our views of the connections between form and history but rather in the focus of our studies: I emphasize what Quilligan refers to as “allegorical modalities,” whereas she centers her discussion on that “pure strain” of allegory “among all the multitudinous works displaying allegorical modalities … that is, a group of works which reveal the classic form of a distinct genre” (Language of Allegory, 14–15). Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996);
and Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).
See also Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s “Cité des dames” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
and Quilligan, “Freedom, Service, and the Trade in Slaves: The Problem of Labor in Paradise Lost,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 213–34.
For additional views, see Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Allegory and Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
Ben Jonson, The alchemist (London, 1612), E2r; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 2.3.203–7.
On the interplay between the bodily and the religious, see also Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), who argues that even as Aristotelian and Arabic understandings of the physical origins of dreams circulated widely, traditional Christian beliefs could not be entirely displaced.
Carole Levin, Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 27–31.
Thomas Wright, The passions of the minde (London, 1601), 111 [H8r]. See also Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “Sleep: Theory and Practice in the Late Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 41 (1986): 431–32.
Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 304. See also Levin, Dreaming the English Renaissance, 72–86;
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971; repr., London: Penguin, 1973), 151;
and Michelle O’Callaghan, “Dreaming the Dead: Ghosts and History in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night, ed. Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Susan Wiseman (New York: Routledge, 2008), 81–95.
Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 8.
David Bevington, “Asleep Onstage,” in From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama, ed. John A. Alford (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 53.
Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), 79; emphasis in original.
For typical readings of metatheatricality, see, for example, Calderwood, To Be and Not to Be; François Laroque, ed., The Show Within: Dramatic and Other Insets: English Renaissance Drama (1550–1642), 2 vols. (Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 1992);
Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Representation: Mimesis and Modernity in Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977);
and Anne Righter [Barton], Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962).
Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 213–14, 248. See also Michael Cole, “The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium,” Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 621–40.
See Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 716–17, for examples extending to the late seventeenth century. On Purgatory, see Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 232–64; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 701–24; and Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 206–35.
See Clark, Vanities of the Eye; and Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 167–72.
Kristen Poole, “The Devil’s in the Archive: Doctor Faustus and Ovidian Physics,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 192–96.
Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 96–106.
Marissa Greenberg, “The Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and The Roman Actor,” Renaissance Drama 39 (2011): 163–96.
John D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 194.
Lukas Erne, Beyond “The Spanish Tragedy”: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 16–20.
Anne Lancashire, ed., The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 5.2.152.s.d.
On costuming ghosts, see also Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 100.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 245–56.
R. B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 19–20.
On revenge and daggers, see Kiefer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre, 50. On daggers and murder, see James I, By the King, a proclamation against steelets, pocket daggers, pocket dagges and pistols (London, 1616). On the Vice’s dagger of lath as juxtaposed with God’s sword of just vengeance, see Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer’s Eye (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 36–42.
On Kyd’s Senecan influences, see Erne, Beyond “The Spanish Tragedy”, 79–84; and Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 126–36.
On the integration of classical and morality traditions, see Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts & Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 199–248.
Such blocking would be similar to that of the ghost in Hamlet. On Andrea’s stage location, see Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 115.
See also David Willbern, “Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus,” English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 177, which cites Richard Hosley’s suggestion that Tamora, disguised as Revenge, may have entered from the stage trap.
Mazzio, Inarticulate Renaissance, 110; Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 186–87; and West, “Real and Represented Confusions,” 229–32.
On the complex publication history of Peirce’s work, see Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, published online 2010, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/peirce/.
See also W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 25–31.
On the theological and political implications of Babel/Babylon in Kyd’s play, see S. F. Johnson, “The Spanish Tragedy, or Babylon Revisited,” in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962), 23–36;
and Frank Ardolino, “‘Now Shall I See the Fall of Babylon’: The Spanish Tragedy as Protestant Apocalypse,” Shakespeare Yearbook 1 (1990): 93–115.
J[ohn] B[ulwer], Chirologia, or, The naturall language of the hand composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof: whereunto is added Chironomia, or, The art of manuall rhetoricke … (London, 1644). On Bulwer and acting practices, see B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964);
and Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 23–57.
See Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 173–229, for other examples of the kinds of dynamics found in Bulwer’s text.
J. R. Mulryne, ed., The Spanish Tragedy, 2nd ed., The New Mermaids (London: A&C Black, 1989; repr., New York: Norton, 2000), 4.1.172n.
Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie (London, 1582), quoted in Carla Mazzio, “Staging the Vernacular: Language and Nation in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 38 (1998): 208. Mazzio’s article offers a useful discussion of tensions over linguistic hybridity in early modern England.
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© 2012 Erika T. Lin
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Lin, E.T. (2012). Imaginary Forces: Allegory, Mimesis, and Audience Interpretation in The Spanish Tragedy. In: Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006509_4
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