Shakespeare and the Origins of English

Shakespeare and the Origins of English This page intentionally left blank Shakespeare and the Origins of English NEIL RHODES 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Neil Rhodes 2004 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 First published in paperback 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–924572–7 (Hbk.) 978–0–19–923593–3 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk 3 FOR A LICE AND P ETER with love This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements This book has its own origins in an earlier work about Renaissance eloquence and my subsequent thoughts about the fate of rhetoric after that period. These took the form of an essay called ‘From Rhetoric to Criticism’ which appeared in Robert Crawford (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to use this material in revised form as part of Chapter 6. At the same time I was thinking about an alternative model of eloquence to the one discussed in the earlier book and this resulted in an article, ‘The Controversial Plot: Declamation and the Concept of the Problem Play’, published in Modern Language Review 95.3 (2000). I am grateful to the Modern Humanities Research Association and the editors of MLR for permission to redeploy this in Chapter 3. Meanwhile, the plan of the present book had become clear to me and I am greatly indebted to Sophie Goldsworthy at Oxford University Press for her faith in the project at this stage. Most of the work for the book was done in 2001, and I would like to thank the School of English at St Andrews and the AHRB for funding a period of research leave that enabled me to concentrate on that. More recently, parts of Chapters 4 and 5 have appeared separately, in earlier versions, as ‘Shakespeare the Barbarian’, in Jennifer Richards (ed.), (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and ‘Shakespeare’s Computer: Commonplaces/Databases’, in The Shakespearean International Yearbook, 3 (2004). I am grateful to Macmillan and Ashgate for permission to reuse this material. Many people have helped me to complete this work, directly or indirectly, and I would like to thank the following: Michael Alexander, Sarah Annes Brown, Robert Crawford, Ian Donaldson, Jill Gamble, Andrew Hadfield, Tom Healy, Lorna Hutson, Tom Jones, Laurie Maguire, Leah Marcus, Frances Mullan, Anne Lake Prescott, Elizabeth Prochaska, Jennifer Richards, Nick Roe, Jonathan Sawday, Fred Schurink, Helen Smith, and Jane Sommerville. I have been fortunate in having an exceptionally congenial environment, both physically and in human terms, in which to write this book, viii Acknowledgements and it is a pleasure to acknowledge the contribution of my colleagues and students at St Andrews towards creating that environment. But I would like to give particular thanks, not just for that, but for their close reading of successive drafts of the book, to Alex Davis, Rachel Heard and Andrew Murphy. They have saved me from many errors and suggested many improvements. Finally, I am grateful in countless ways to my wife, Shirley Rhodes, both for her advice and good judgement and for her personal support in the course of what has been a long and absorbing project. While this is a book about origins it also looks to the present and to the future, so it is appropriate that it should be dedicated to our children. Contents INTRODUCTION 1. RENAISSANCE ARTICULATIONS 1.1 Language as Living Speech 1.2 Hamlet’s Media Studies 2. DID SHAKESPEARE STUDY CREATIVE WRITING? 2.1 School Ties 2.2 Writing against the Academy 3. BOTH SIDES NOW 3.1 Speech-Writing 3.2 Problems at Work 3.3 Shakespeare’s Controversial Plots 4. VERNACULAR VALUES 4.1 Native Feet 4.2 Shakespeare the Barbarian 5. COMMONPLACE SHAKESPEARE 5.1 Shakespeare’s Computer 5.2 Resources for English 6. THE ORIGINS OF ENGLISH 6.1 From Rhetoric to Criticism 6.2 Shakespeare and the Language of the Heart AFTERWORD SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 1 5 5 29 45 45 68 85 85 88 98 118 118 134 149 149 168 189 189 208 227 233 255 This page intentionally left blank Introduction This book is about what there was before there was a subject called English and about how that became English. It may have something in common with those searches for origins that proliferated in the mideighteenth century, rather brusquely dismissed by Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith’s first biographer, as ‘conjectural histories’. Those dubious investigations would certainly include Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, but perhaps also Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the first English Studies textbook and a work that derives from similar sources. The present book is focused specifically on Shakespeare’s role in the origins of the subject, and is therefore very much concerned with Shakespeare and education, though it concentrates on the early modern period, up to the late eighteenth century, before his canonical status became absolutely secure. It deals with the kinds of literary and educational practice that would have formed his experience and shaped his work. What it attempts to do is to trace the origins of English in certain aspects of the educational regime that existed before English literature became an established part of the curriculum. It then presents Shakespeare as both a product of those disciplines in the Renaissance and, in the eighteenth century, as an agent of their transformation into the subject that emerged as the modern study of English. At the same time my intention has been to address this earlier historical period from the point of view of the present state of English as a subject. Since there has recently been an almost obsessive devotion to the popularization of history through appealing anachronisms (the Gunpowder Plot as Jacobean 9/11 and so on) this part of my project requires some explanation. I do indeed hope to appeal to readers other than specialists, which is why I have tried to write in an accessible style; to do otherwise would, anyway, be humiliatingly inappropriate in a book that is so much concerned with expression. But the analogies I make between modern and early modern cultural practices serve a different purpose. The point of my transferring terms such as ‘media studies’ and ‘creative writing’, or the technology of computing, to 2 Introduction earlier cultural contexts is both to invite further reflection on the nature of the practices themselves and also to offer new ways of thinking about their relationship to English as a subject. Conversely, I have also offered older explanations of what might appear to be specifically modern phenomena; for example, by redescribing radical or ‘problematizing’ approaches to Shakespeare in terms of Renaissance rhetoric. So my aim has been not just to attempt an explanation of where English came from, but also to suggest how some of the things that we do now under the name of ‘English’ might usefully be understood in a wider historical perspective. It is just possible that by extending our view of its past we may achieve a clearer view of its future. But what of Shakespeare’s own education? We know that he didn’t do English at school because the subject wasn’t then in existence, but, while he would have had to spend a great deal of his time learning Latin, it would be misleading to describe what he studied as ‘Classics’. It is true that Latinity was an end as well as a means. However, Latinity in this context is best regarded as covering a range of active, expressive skills that we can group under ‘rhetoric’, and the study of literature and drama was certainly seen as an important way of acquiring those skills. So we might say that, without studying English Shakespeare nonetheless had a literary education. At the same time, given its intensely rhetorical character, this was a regime that paid particular attention to the arts of speech as distinct from writing. So as well as being literary it was a curriculum orientated towards drama. How this regime and the wider cultural contexts that it reflects evolved into the subject that we now call English is the theme of the later chapters of this book. I begin, however, with speech, the original medium of communication, and with the related terms ‘expression’ and ‘articulation’. The first chapter is concerned with speech-based skills and with the Renaissance literary and educational values associated with these, notably ‘liveliness’. The issues raised in the first part of the chapter are then developed in a discussion of Hamlet, a play (and character) much concerned with the problems of the media, with the relations between the oral and the written, print and performance. Echoing this, the second chapter moves from speech to writing and looks briefly into the Elizabethan classroom. I argue that we should understand what went on there in terms of process rather than content and also in terms of what we would now call transferable skills. But what was the point of the impressive training in eloquence acquired there, and what was its Introduction 3 effect? I turn for an answer to Love’s Labour’s Lost, the play where Shakespeare specifically tackles the question of educational aims and objectives, or ‘the end of study’, as he more succinctly puts it. The third chapter brings together the themes of the first two in a discussion of the element in Elizabethan education that undoubtedly had a practical objective: speech-writing. I focus here on the technique of arguing on both sides of the question and suggest how this may have been responsible for Shakespeare’s well-known even-handedness and for the radical perspectives he creates in much of his drama. I end with a discussion of Measure for Measure and two other ‘problematic’ plays. These first three chapters, then, highlight the principal aspects of the educational regime that Shakespeare would have experienced and show how they informed his plays. They also offer a prospectus for the subsequent development of English. The second part of the book deals with the rise of the vernacular. Chapter 4 extends the theme of moral relativism discussed in the previous chapter into the cultural sphere and describes the shifting perceptions of classical civility and native English babarity. I discuss specifically the Renaissance belief in poetry as part of the civilizing process and the importance for the English of developing a native English metre. The second part of the chapter then looks at the relations between eloquence and barbarity in two plays from the beginning and end of Shakespeare’s career, Titus Andronicus and The Tempest, which reflect the nation’s change in status and anticipate the replacement of Latin by English as the imperial tongue. The triumph of the vernacular is of course the precondition for the rise of English Studies. Chapter 5 takes one central aspect of the educational curriculum mentioned earlier, the commonplace method, and shows first the creative uses to which Shakespeare put this, and then how his own texts are transformed into commonplace material in a new vernacular tradition. The evolution of commonplace-book into anthology creates resources for English Studies at the same time as the mantle of classical authority is handed over to the vernacular. Like many other practices described in this book, the commonplace method is an aspect of rhetoric. The final chapter shows how English Studies sprang from the transformation of rhetoric into criticism in the mid-eighteenth century and concentrates particularly on England’s neighbours to the north and south, Scotland and France. I argue that (paradoxically) it was French belles-lettres that was responsible for the institutionalization of English Studies in Scotland, and later abroad, as 4 Introduction England’s imperial partner aimed to acquire the cultural capital represented by English taste and the English national poet. Yet at the moment of the inception of English Studies the French connection was being broken, in Europe, as the new cult of Shakespeare and the language of the heart swept away the old neoclassical values. That cult found its formal exponent in Henry Home, Lord Kames, whose Elements of Criticism, first published in 1762, uses Shakespeare as its critical touchstone. Kames’s work marks the point that English arrives as an academic subject. What follows, then, is a kind of history, but one that operates with some degree of synchronicity and anachronicity. It is intended to be suggestive, not exhaustive, and to stimulate debate rather than to pose as an authoritative guide to the subject. It is in part also a work of literary criticism, since it seemed important, in view of the central role I give to ‘expression’ in literary study, that I should attempt to say at least something about the expressive qualities of those works of Shakespeare that I have chosen to illustrate my argument. 1 Renaissance Articulations 1.1 LANGUAGE AS LIVING SPEECH Once we expressed, but now we articulate. Articulating our thoughts seems more precise and more professional than merely expressing them. The language of English Studies resounds with articulations. While older English textbooks and subject boards gave prominence to the concept of expression, one consequence of its eclipse has been the demand from more recent institutions for ‘clearer articulation of aims and learning objectives’ in English. Looking more closely at some of the nuances of ‘expression’ and ‘articulation’ offers the most direct point of entry into the subject, and should help to clarify those aims and objectives, for the term which ‘articulation’ so frequently replaces is intrinsic to the discipline both at its most elementary and its most sophisticated levels. Expression and expressiveness, the language arts, remain at the centre of English, however widely and deeply they may be informed by their cultural contexts. To use a historic formulation, it is clear and effective speech, moving and affective speech, that constitutes the materials of study. For centuries the language arts went by the name of rhetoric, and it is from rhetoric that English emerges as a distinct subject. Rhetoric is the source of the active, compositional and creative, element in the subject, but in the eighteenth century, as educational values shifted, very slowly, towards the vernacular, its remit extended to the more passive business of the interpretation and evaluation of texts. Rhetoric evolved into criticism. Rhetoric textbooks still continued to appear well into the Victorian era, looking increasingly moribund, until they were reinvented and revitalized in the name of ‘self-expression’.1 At first self-expression concerned itself with voice 1 The first citation in the OED for ‘self-expression’ is from 1892, where the concept is associated with Walt Whitman, appropriately enough. From c.1900 onwards the term seems to have been used first in a physical sense (e.g. Emily M. Bishop, Self-Expression and Health (1895); Eustace Hamilton Miles, A Boy’s Control and Self-Expression (1904) ), then of speech and composition (e.g. John Bennett, Self-Expression in English 6 Renaissance Articulations and gesture (originally the final part of rhetoric, known as pronuntiatio), then later with creative writing. Criticism and self-expression are rhetoric’s joint legacy to English in the twentieth century and beyond. The present book travels in the direction just outlined, but it will be concerned with Shakespeare’s part in the earlier stages of that development and, immediately, with these two apparently interchangeable terms, ‘expression’ and ‘articulation’. If the corpse of rhetoric continued to be propped up on dusty Victorian bookshelves, in the following century the keynote of Cambridge English was vitality. In the midtwentieth century, when Leavis’s influence was at its most powerful, literary language was held to be expressive in the degree that it was able to communicate ‘felt life’, and in an oddly Romantic twist all literary forms were expected to aspire to the condition of poetry.2 Perhaps the most succinct formulation of this view of literary expression as being intimately connected with life was provided by the title of Isobel Armstrong’s study, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, which I have adapted for the present section heading, though paradoxically this was also a book which contributed to the theorydominated criticism of the 1980s and 1990s. (Armstrong’s quotation of Blake’s remark that ‘living form is Gothic’3 has implications that will be explored in Chapter 4.) More recently still, the concept survives in a new era of electronic textuality, as Kathryn Sutherland shows when she argues that in the digital world ‘what is copyrighted to the author is the interest in expression as original and organic form’.4 While these statements about the relationship between expressive language and life have (1931); Elizabeth Avery, Self-Expression in Speech (1933) ), and finally with reference to individual creativity (e.g. Johannes Plokker, Artistic Self-Expression in Mental Disease, trans. Ian Finlay (1964) ). Some of these meanings were conflated in Ernest James Burton, Teaching English through Self-Expression: A Course on Speech, Mime and Drama (1950). 2 See, most recently, Paul Binding, ‘Leavis, Lawrence and the Reverence for Life’, TLS, 11 April 2003, 14–15, and compare F. R. Leavis, ‘James as Critic’ in The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975). A representative example of the point about poetry would be G. D. Klingopulos, ‘The Novel as Dramatic Poem II: Wuthering Heights’, Scrutiny, 14 (1946–7), 269–86, which compares the novel with Macbeth, arguing that it ‘makes the same claim as poetry’. Leavis himself said of Macbeth that ‘it has life and body which are the pervasive manifestation of Shakespeare’s genius in his verse’ (Education and the University: A Sketch for an ‘English School’ (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943), 77. 3 Isobel Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. xi. Blake’s piece ‘On Virgil’ was the source of her title. 4 Kathryn Sutherland (ed.), Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 14. Renaissance Articulations 7 a common Romantic ancestry, they also have their counterpart in the Renaissance where the association is given a physiological basis. ‘If words be made of breath, | And breath of life, I have no life to breathe’, says Gertrude in Hamlet (3.4.181–2).5 So breath becomes a metonym for speech, as in Bolingbroke’s observation on the power of the royal sentence, ‘such is the breath of kings’, in Richard II (1.3.208) or in Richard’s own claim that ‘The breath of worldly men cannot depose | The deputy elected by the Lord’ (52–3). The streamers that issue from the mouth in medieval and early Renaissance art, the original speech bubbles, provide the visual image with a text message, but as they curl skywards in the air they also represent speech as breath. The painting that Lucrece remembers, where ‘from his [Nestor’s] lips did fly | Thin winding breath which purled up to the sky’ (ll. 1406–7) probably used that device. In these representations language becomes inseparable from the animating principle itself, a point that Roland Barthes extended to rhetoric when he observed that it had ‘an animating function: the “proper” state of language is inert, the secondary state [rhetoric] is “living” . . . the ornaments are on the side of passion, the body; they render speech desirable’.6 This is some distance from Leavis’s moralistic concept of ‘life’, but it is very much part of our map of the subject. If speech is life, it is also uniquely capable of recreating life. This is established in classical rhetoric by the concept of enargeia. The idea that effective expression depends on the speaker’s ability to communicate felt life was forcefully outlined by Quintilian, who used the Greek term to mean ‘vivid illustration, or as some prefer to call it, representation’, which can display the ‘living truth to the eyes of the mind’. The high style of the most eloquent speaker can bring the gods down from heaven and even raise the dead.7 This is a power shared by the dramatist, as Thomas Nashe recorded fourteen hundred years later, after 5 Except where stated all references to Shakespeare are to The Complete Works, eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), though I have sometimes preferred the more traditional versions of play titles and character names. 6 Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994), 84–5. 7 Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 8. 3. 61–2; 12. 1. 61–2. Translations from Quintilian are based on those of H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1924) and Donald A. Russell, (The Orator’s Education) 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001). Enargeia was often confused in the Renaissance with energia (vigour), by Puttenham for example; see Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 224–5. 8 Renaissance Articulations watching Talbot resurrected on the English stage in 1 Henry VI.8 Shakespeare himself seems to have self-consciously advertised the dramatist’s power of animation in the moment at the end of The Winter’s Tale when the statue of Hermione moves and speaks. So if it appears unremarkable, even obvious, to point out that the favoured epithet for ‘expression’ in the Renaissance is ‘lively’, it should be understood in the contexts just described. For example: Richard Rainolde describes the related figure of ethopoeia as ‘the lively expression of the maner and affeccion of any thyng’ and Roger Ascham stipulates that ‘naturall wordes, in well joyned sentences do lyvely expresse the matter’; Gabriel Harvey writes about an earthquake which ‘is excellently, and very lively expressed of Ovid’, Sidney claims that quantitative verse is ‘more fit lively to express divers passions’ than rhyme, while Puttenham says that a poet is called ‘a follower or imitator, because he can expresse the true and lively of every thing is set before him’; and in his commentary on Spenser Sir Kenelm Digby explains that Spenser’s archaisms ‘serve to expresse more lively and more concisely what he would say’.9 Renaissance uses of the term ‘expression’ underline the vitality or, we might say, the livingness of speech. But is it appropriate to allow the term ‘speech’ itself to stand for both oral and written forms of expression, as I have just done? Although the debate about the authenticity of speech over writing goes back at least as far as Plato,10 for classical rhetoric this need not be controversial, since Cicero and Quintilian both regarded speech training as the basis of education. In the early modern period, however, the situation is complicated by the arrival of print, which lent greater authority to writing. Most of the observations quoted above refer to written discourse, and the last specifically to a printed text. Nonetheless, as 8 On Nashe’s enthusiasm for Talbot see below pp. 31–2 and Ch. 3, p. 100. Bringing a dead character to life was specifically the business of prosopopoeia. 9 Richard Rainolde, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (London, 1563), 49; Roger Ascham, ‘A Report . . . of the Affairs and State of Germany’, in English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 127; Gabriel Harvey, A Pleasant and Pithy Familiar Discourse, of the Earthquake in Spenser’s Prose Works, ed. Rudolph Gottfried (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949), 454; Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. R. W. Maslen, 3rd edn. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 115; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936; repr. 1970), 3; Kenelm Digby, ‘A Discourse concerning Edmund Spencer’, in R. M. Cummings (ed.), Spenser: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 148. 10 See Plato, Phaedrus, esp. 274–9. Renaissance Articulations 9 several scholars have emphasized, late sixteenth-century England remained in many ways a deeply oral culture and it is especially important, from our own somewhat remote perspective, that we keep in view the primacy of speech.11 Any account of Shakespeare’s part in the origins of English has to start with this fact about the culture of his own time. Language was conceived in oral terms and in petty school (the elementary level) English was taught on that basis; the child learned to pronounce the words, or voces, then wrote down the letters that signified the sounds. The first book devoted exclusively to English pronunciation, Robert Robinson’s Art of Pronunciation, appeared in 1617.12 Robinson reasserts the vitality of speech at the same time as he describes its evanescence: And though the voice be a more lively kind of speech [than writing], yet in respect it is but onley a sleight accident made of so light a substance as the ayre, it is no sooner uttered but it is dissolved, every simple sound doth expell and extinguish the sound going before it, so that the eare can have but one touch of the ayre beating upon it to declare the speech unto the mind.13 And later he observes that ‘The vitall sound . . . is onely used in composition, with the others of different qualities to expresse them more lively to the eares of the auditors’.14 In fact, Robinson subsumes both oral and written expression under ‘speech’ or ‘voice’, dividing his book into two parts, vox audienda and vox videnda (the audible voice and the visible voice), where the second is ‘writing, or the Characters of Mans voice’.15 For Robinson, then, the term ‘speech’ would clearly be serviceable for both media, and this is also true of the way in which poetry was conceived. In 1600 Philemon Holland translated Plutarch’s well-known essay as ‘How a Yoong Man Ought to Heare Poets’ (my emphasis), and earlier William Webbe had made the point more explicitly when he wrote that ‘the arte of making . . . hath alwaies beene especially used of the best of our English Poets to expresse the very faculty of speaking or wryting Poetically’.16 Poetic expression in the 11 Notably Bruce R. Smith in his outstanding The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago, Ill., and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 12 John Hoskyns’s Directions for Speech and Style, written, though not published, in 1599, had given an account of English pronunciation before the section on the penning of letters, but it is unfortunately now lost. 13 14 Robert Robinson, The Art of Pronuntiation (London, 1617), A3v. Ibid. B2r. 15 Ibid. B9r. Hoskyns used the term ‘penned speech’ in Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), 13. 16 William Webbe, ‘A Discourse of Englishe Poetrie’ [1586], in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), i. 230. 10 Renaissance Articulations Renaissance is at least as much about sounded language as it is about the words on the page, and even today we still refer to a writer as ‘saying’ something. Robinson’s almost wistful reflections on the transience of spoken words and the vital moment at which the air vibrates on the eardrum lead him to comment on ‘the charactering of the voice’ on the page as a means of prolonging its life. The problem with this, he explains, in a passage which is of obvious relevance to the debate over pirated play-texts, copied from performance, is that all the errors produced in transcription make speech and writing seem like different kinds of language. So the business of translating voice into script to preserve that fleeting moment of audibility becomes fraught with anxieties of loss, which is what prompted Robinson’s book in the first place. His aim was to formulate a universally intelligible system of pronunciation that would enable vocal utterance to be transcribed more accurately. This sense of loss is echoed very pointedly by John King in the preface to the printed version of his lectures which appeared in 1598. There he apologizes for having ‘changed my tongue into a pen, and whereas I spake before with the gesture and countenance of a living man, have now buried myself in a dead letter of less effectual persuasion’.17 While we might notice the paradox here that lectures (like plays) are texts which tend to be written before they are delivered orally, what is striking about this passage is the quite explicit way in which verbal expression is represented as life, breath, vital being—language as living form— and the words on the page as a dead letter.18 The notion of speech as life is best summed up by Erasmus in the Adagia, one of the great compilations of gnomic lore that supplied generations of Tudor schoolchildren, and adult writers, with matter for literary composition. Under the heading ‘Viva vox/The living word’ Erasmus says that this was the term used in old times for anything not written, but taken straight from the mouth of the speaker, lifelike, as it were, and effectual. Often the term ‘living’ 17 John King, Lectures upon Jonas delivered at Yorke (Oxford, 1597), 4, quoted by Keith Thomas in ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’ in Gerd Baumann (ed.), The Written Word, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 113. There are further striking examples of this common trope in D. F. McKenzie, ‘Speech—Manuscript—Print’, in Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 237–58. 18 Although Milton says in Areopagitica (1644) that a ‘good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit’, the title page describes the work as a ‘speech’. Renaissance Articulations 11 is applied to things when they are in their native condition, not artificial, as ‘from the living marble’, and ‘seats cut in the living rock’. Natural things, in fact, have some quality of genuine grace which no artistic imitation can hope to copy.19 All writing, he goes on to say, is merely a copy of living speech because it lacks a physical dimension. He offers an extended physiological metaphor, likening the different parts of rhetoric to the human body, and he claims movement as the principal sign of life. Passing on to education, he quotes various authorities—Cicero, the younger Pliny, Seneca, and St Jerome—to the effect that the voice and presence of the teacher has a far more lasting impact on students than their passive reading of a text; an assertion that would, incidentally, help to justify the extraordinary survival of the lecture in the twenty-first-century university. The phrase viva vox itself survives, in an academic context, in the oral or viva voce examination. All this, and Quintilian’s metaphor especially, brings expression and expressiveness directly back to the human body itself. What is expressed is inward because ex-pressing is a matter of pressing or pushing out whatever is within; this may, of course, be breath. Latin exprimere, from which the English word derives, means just that. Shakespeare uses the word in this sense in Measure for Measure, when Lucio says that Juliana’s ‘plenteous womb | Expresseth his [Claudio’s] full tilth and husbandry’ (1.4.42–3), and Donne likewise, though less biologically, when he laments in ‘A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day’ that love’s ‘art did express | A quintessence even from nothingness’ (ll. 14–15).20 Language has the same function: John Hewes, for example, observes that ‘speech is the character of man, or the express image of his heart and mind’,21 where the term ‘character’ has shaded from its sense of ‘representation in writing’, as used by Robinson, to the more modern sense of ‘personality’. The most famous version of this is Ben 19 Erasmus, Adages Ii1 to 1v100, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, annotated R. A. B. Mynors, in Collected Works of Erasmus, xxxi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 162. 20 Cf. Donne’s letter to George Gerrard: ‘If I shall at any time take courage by your Letter, to expresse my meditations of that Lady in writing . . . yet I cannot hope for better expressings than I have given of them’, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (London, 1651), 260. 21 John Hewes, A Perfect Survey of the English Tongue (London, 1624), X4r. For a modern discussion of the relationship between voice and selfhood see Steven Connor’s fascinating Dumbstruck—A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 7. 12 Renaissance Articulations Jonson’s, culled from Vives and recorded in Timber, or Discoveries: ‘Language most shows a man: speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind’.22 This suggests that speech reveals or discloses an inner self, but the emphasis on display (‘shows a man’) seems also to translate speech into writing, Robinson’s ‘visible voice’. If Jonson is indeed thinking as much about written as about oral expression here, it is associated nonetheless with his formulation of discourse as a living body that follows immediately. After stature, figure, and skin, ‘the flesh, blood, and bones come into question. We say it is a fleshy style, when there is much periphrasis . . . There be some styles, again, that have not less blood, but less flesh and corpulence. These are bony and sinewy’.23 Assembling these various conceptions of speech and expression produces a view of language, and therefore of literature, that is very much at odds with the modern erasure of ‘self’ and ‘essence’. For Renaissance writers expression is the means by which inner life (the baby in Shakespeare, Donne’s ‘quintessence’) and inward self (‘heart and mind’) are communicated to the listener. When the listener becomes a reader there is all the more insistence upon the ability of language to remain ‘lively’, in Jonson’s case by resorting to an elaborate physiological metaphor that would transfer the pristine vitality of speech to the lifeless words on the page. To say that Shakespeare’s value lies in the expressive qualities of his language, in the verbal fabric of the plays, is to risk banality. But since a generation of academic writing about Shakespeare has largely been occupied with other matters it seems worth taking the risk. In what is still one of the best books on the language arts in the English Renaissance, Madeleine Doran points out that ‘Above all things, the Renaissance is an age of eloquence. But its verbal eloquence is only part of an intense expressiveness that manifests itself in many ways.’24 The verbal aspect of that expressiveness is the reason for Shakespeare’s preeminence as a writer and also why he remains central to English Studies. Unlike Jonson’s Discoveries, Shakespeare’s commonplace-book, assuming that he kept one, has not survived, so we have less direct access to what he may have thought about questions of expression. Still, 22 Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 574. 23 Ibid. 575–6. 24 Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), 25. Renaissance Articulations 13 the OED gives Shakespeare as the first citation for ‘express’ as meaning ‘to put ones thoughts into words’: ‘it charges me in manners the rather to express myself’, Sebastian says in Twelfth Night (2. 1.12–3), and Shakespeare is also cited for the first instance of ‘expressive’ as meaning ‘open or emphatic in expressing [feelings]’: ‘Use a more spacious ceremony to the noble lords . . . Be more expressive to them’, Parolles advises Bertram in All’s Well (2.1.49–51). The term ‘expressure’, meaning ‘expression by words or signs’ is another Shakespearean coinage, again from Twelfth Night, where Maria describes the letter she will write to deceive Malvolio ‘wherein by . . . the expressure of his eye, forehead, and complexion, he shall find himself most feelingly personated’ (2.3.150–3). Shakespeare not only coined a great number of expressions, but also some expressions about expression, though ‘expression’ in the sense just used (i.e. a word or phrase) is not one of them. According to the OED, it first appears in 1646 in Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Even later is the sense of facial or vocal expression, for which the OED gives 1774 for its first citation. Shakespeare’s own expressive capacity was registered by Heminge and Condell in their preface to the First Folio, where they refer to him as ‘a happy imitator of nature, [and] a most gentle expresser of it’. Jonson spoke of his ‘brave notions, and gentle expressions’ in Discoveries. And the Victorian scholar David Masson offered the simple and emphatic judgement that ‘he was the greatest expresser that ever lived’.25 Until some point in the 1970s, when theory emerged from the black lagoon of English Studies, most scholars were happy enough with ‘felt life’, or ‘language as living form’, or something similar, as approximate terms for the expressive qualities of the literature they studied. The moment at which the shadow of doubt passed over the subject came with the appearance of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, translated into English in 1974, which is probably also the source of the modern preference for ‘articulation’ over ‘expression’. The part of the book that deals with articulation is the chapter called ‘Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages’. Since this is actually a commentary on Rousseau’s commentary on Charles Pinot Duclos’ commentary on the Port-Royal Grammar of 1660, in Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues, Derrida’s account of articulation, which I take to 25 Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. Wells and Taylor, p. xlv; Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, 539; David Masson, ‘Shakespeare and Goethe’ in Essays Biographical and Critical (London: Macmillan, 1856), 23. 14 Renaissance Articulations be a principal agent of the intellectual shift in English Studies at the end of the 1970s, is directly involved in the earlier historical moments of the late eighteenth century (Rousseau) and the late seventeenth century (Port-Royal). The French connection in the historical origins of English as a subject is another issue that I shall discuss more fully (and, I hope, less circuitously) later in this book. Derrida, meanwhile, points to ‘the system of oppositions that controls [Rousseau’s] entire Essay . . . of articulation over accentuation, of consonant over vowel, of northern over southern, of the capital over the province’.26 According to Rousseau, harmonious language was lost at the time of the barbarian invasions of the Roman empire, when harshly consonanted articulation took the place of accent, inflection, passion, the murmurs of the heart—everything, in fact, that we might classify as ‘expression’.27 This is in turn an echo of Duclos, who saw in ancient Greece and Rome a perfect marriage of language and political culture: ‘It is a people in a body that makes a language . . . A people is thus the absolute master of the spoken language, and it is an empire they possess unawares.’28 For Duclos, as for Rousseau, unity and freedom are identified with speech, while ‘writing is the very process of the dispersal of peoples unified as bodies and the beginning of their enslavement’.29 The purpose of Derrida’s critique of Rousseau’s essay is to turn this version of the Babel myth inside out, and his understanding of the term ‘articulation’ is crucial in this respect. Rousseau’s central thesis, he says, is that ‘Our language, even if we are pleased to speak it, has already substituted too many articulations for too many accents, it has lost life and warmth, it is already eaten by writing.’ Derrida’s point, however, is that all language is necessarily dependent upon articulation, ‘difference [differance] within language’. Rousseau complains that ‘articulation is the becoming-writing of language’, but it is really, Derrida says, ‘the becoming-language of language’.30 As a system of making things distinct, articulation is the precondition of language. This position has a number of consequences. The first is, of course, a rejection of the primacy of speech. Others, now quite familiar, are the 26 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 201–2. 27 Ibid. 225; see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’, in On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago, Ill., and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chs. 10 and 11. (I am paraphrasing Rousseau here.) 28 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 169–70. 29 Ibid. 170. 30 Ibid. 226, 225, 229. Renaissance Articulations 15 denial of an individualized human self with an inner being which is capable of being expressed through language, and the denial also of any relationship between language and the objective, physical world or ‘life’. In certain senses Derrida’s concept of articulation leads also to the disappearance of expression. It is not just a matter of articulation replacing the language of the heart, as Rousseau would have it, but of its sweeping away one of the core elements of rhetoric itself. Rhetoric presents language as action. The object of expression was to create an impression, out there, on somebody else, and for expression to make an impression the speaker must express something felt within as an emotional truth. As Thomas Wright puts it, in his discussion of rhetoric and the passions in The Passions of the Minde (1601), ‘if we intend to imprint a passion in another it is requisite first it be stamped in our hearts’.31 This is why Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, the educationalist Roger Ascham, writing in The Scholemaster (1570), is so anxious to emphasize the importance of expression, arguing, in his well-known caution, that ‘Ye know not, what hurt ye do to learning, that care not for wordes, but for matter, and so make a devorse betwixt the tong and the hart’.32 And if expression constitutes the persuasive power of rhetoric, it also constitutes the affective power of literature. Its virtual disappearance from the agenda of a great deal of modern academic criticism has necessarily led to the neglect of the affective qualities of literature in English Studies. Such a development would have been unintelligible in the Renaissance, when humanism was absolutely clear about the priority and vitality of speech, on which the power of eloquence and the importance of expression are premised. Jonson even defines grammar as ‘the art of true, and well speaking a Language: the writing is but an Accident’.33 For Renaissance writers the priority of speech and the sympathetic union of heart and tongue create the basis for the immense prestige enjoyed by the language arts, not least in education. So it looks as though we have reached a distinction between an early modern position that views language in highly personalized terms as a mode of self-expression, and a modern or post-modern position that 31 Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General, ed. William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland, 1986), 212. 32 English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), 265. 33 Jonson, English Grammar, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–53), viii, 467. 16 Renaissance Articulations views language as an utterly impersonal system of difference. However, this convenient antithesis needs to be qualified in ways that will already have become apparent. It is true that many Renaissance writers link the notion of expression to some sort of inner life. But the term ‘self-expression’ was not then in use, and this modern version of expression as the aimless or object-free effusion of inner selfhood would clearly be in conflict with the more directed functions of rhetoric.34 To take a more cynical line, one reason why Renaissance writers are so eager to emphasize the importance of speaking from the heart is that it gives a moral underpinning to the more ambiguous arts of eloquence. While Jonson’s observation tries to elide the persuasive purpose of rhetoric in favour of a robust statement about language as a marker of personal integrity, Thomas Wright’s claim exposes the potential division between these two aspects of expression at the same time as it tries to heal it. The central anxiety about expression in the early modern period, the fault-line in the humanist educational programme, is that the prestige of the language arts may really have been down to their success in teaching people to speak with divorced hearts and tongues.35 Functionless self-expression may be true, but useless, while language with a purpose can never be trusted. This anxiety is at the centre of Hamlet, as we shall see. There is, of course, some difference between what ‘expression’ and ‘articulation’ mean to us now and what they meant to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But there is also an underlying continuity that will help to clarify certain issues in the origins of English and Shakespeare’s part in that development. ‘Expression’ goes back to the fourteenth century. The OED cites Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale as the first instance of the verb ‘express’ being used in the sense prevalent today, as ‘to rep34 Two excellent studies of selfhood and inwardness in the early modern period are Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago, Ill., and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), though they do not address the specific concept of self-expression. Richard Rambuss has discussed the ‘daringly experimental expressive project’ of metaphysical poetry, focusing on images of bodily effusion, but it is not clear whether his frequent use of the term ‘expression’ is intended in its physical sense (Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1). 35 This view of the matter is represented in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986). For a rather more positive view see Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). Renaissance Articulations 17 resent in language, to put into words’. ‘Articulation’, however, appears at roughly the same time as Shakespeare himself. Here the OED gives Pierre de La Primaudaye’s French Academy for its first citation of ‘articulate’ as a verb meaning ‘to divide (vocal sound) into distinct parts’ and as an adjective in the same sense: ‘The philosophers, diligent searchers out of the reason of all things, saie that speech is made by aire, beaten and framed with articulate and distinct sound’,36 where language is imagined as being fashioned like metal in the hands of a craftsman. Perhaps the earliest form of the word appears, appropriately enough, in an educational context and with reference to the English language itself. Sir Thomas Elyot says in The Governor that women responsible for small children should ‘speak none English but that which is clean, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced’.37 Significantly, this very early usage carries with it precisely those associations of elocution and social class which have survived to the present day. On the other hand, at the very end of the Renaissance, the anonymous play Marcus Tullius Cicero uses the term in a way which appropriates many of the qualities of expression: Nature writes In our hearts fleshy Tables, therefore did she Articulate the undistinguisht murmurings of his chain’d tongue.38 This admittedly rather opaque passage produces an interesting variant on Thomas Wright’s advice about imprinting passions on the heart. Here the heart seems to make intelligible what the tongue cannot, and it is nature that liberates the (literally) tongue-tied speaker by making distinct his or her unformed thoughts and feelings. The conceit anticipates a post-Renaissance culture of sensibility, but it also participates in the same tradition that represented Shakespeare’s language as the voice of nature. There is no doubt that the terms ‘expression’ and ‘articulation’ overlap in the Renaissance. Both are aspects of eloquence; that is to say, ‘speaking out’ (from e-loquor). But where expression is concerned with pressing out inner life in order to impress, and with the verbal 36 Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. Thomas Bowes, 2nd edn. (London, 1589), 120. 37 Thomas Elyot, The Book named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), 18. 38 Anon., The Tragedy of that Famous Roman Oratour Marcus Tullius Cicero (London, 1651), Act 3. 18 Renaissance Articulations techniques that would enable that effect to be achieved, articulation remains first a matter of distinct utterance. Both have a physiological basis, but it is articulation that signifies the actual process of vocalization. Articulation operates at the more basic level: ‘no expressing of words, no articulating of syllables’ is how one Renaissance writer distinguishes between them. The earliest appearance in English of the word ‘articulate’ is not, in fact, in La Primaudaye, as the OED records, but in the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster’s book, The Elementarie (1582). Mulcaster, who was Spenser’s teacher, set out to demonstrate ‘the right writing of our English tongue’ and at the same time promote the virtues of English as both a learned and expressive language. The Elementarie has as good a claim as any to be called the first textbook for English. (Shakespeare was eighteen when it was published.) In order to demonstrate how English should be written Mulcaster constructs a fable in which ‘Sound’ is described as ‘a restrained not banished Tarquinius’.39 By presenting Sound as a tyrant he is certainly not attempting to elevate written over spoken English (he expects ‘writing, whereunder I comprehend both the print & pen [to] fullie expresse the pith of the voice’40), but to show that it should be joined in authority by Reason and Custom. Voice still has priority: ‘As for consent this I have to saie, that it did both beget letters and gave them their forces, at the verie first, to expresse the sound of the articulate voice’.41 This leaves us in no doubt that Mulcaster believes, like all his contemporaries, that speech comes before writing, though it is perhaps less clear as to whether or not he believes that articulation comes before expression. Where the concept of articulation really differs from that of expression is in its double meaning. Although Derrida refers to ‘the double articulation of language: into sounds and into words’, this apparent distinction actually conflates expression and articulation. He barely acknowledges its other, crucial meaning, which is the anatomical one of a system of connection by joints.42 This sense of the word also starts to appear in English around 1600. The Glasgow surgeon Peter Lowe 39 Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, ed. E. T. Campagnac (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), 71. 40 41 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 114. 42 See Marjorie Garber, ‘Out of Joint’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds.) The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, (London and New York, Routledge, 1997), 23–51. Renaissance Articulations 19 writes in his Art of Chyrurgerie (1597) that ‘All bones are joyned generally two wayes, to wit, by Arethron, that is, by Articulation, and by . . . naturall Union’, while Edward Topsell refers to a ‘Body straight, and articulate’ in The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (1607).43 So what we have in ‘articulation’ is a term that can be used either to mean a distinct utterance, where it operates principally in the field of language, or to mean ‘connected by joints’, where it operates principally in the field of the body. At the same time, the body is itself connected with language, as we saw in Jonson’s anatomy of style. The OED again cites Shakespeare, as it often does, for its first citation of ‘body’ in the sense of ‘the main part of a collection’, the example being Benedick speaking to Don Pedro in Much Ado: ‘The body of your discourse is sometime guarded with fragments, and the guards are but slightly basted on neither’ (1.2.268–70), though Mulcaster had also spoken of ‘the hole bodie of learning’, and, a little later, of ‘blemishes’ on that body.44 (The use of the term corpus to refer to a collection of writings or body of literature is not recorded in English until the eighteenth century.) The representation of literary discourse as an articulate structure, a body constructed of joints and members, is, anyway, absolutely pervasive in discussions of composition among Shakespeare’s contemporaries. We have already seen Ascham’s reference to ‘well joyned sentences’, and he also speaks of authors who ‘medle onelie with some one peece and member of eloquence’ and others who ‘perfitelie make up the whole bodie’.45 In a letter to Gabriel Harvey, Spenser writes of ‘the knitting of sentences, whych they call the joynts and members therof’, while Richard Stanyhurst points out in the preface to his translation of Virgil that without the Latin conjunctions ‘many good verses would bee ravelde and dismembred that now cary a good grace among theym, having theyre joynctes knit with theese copulative sinnewes’.46 43 Peter Lowe, A Discourse of the Whole Art of Chyrurgerie, 3rd edn. (London, 1634), 360; Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), 231. 44 Mulcaster, Elementarie, ed. Campagnac, 252, 260. 45 Ascham, English Works, ed. Wright, 283. 46 Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 28; Richard Stanyhurst, ‘On the Translation of Virgil’, in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, i. 143. For more on this see Smith, ‘Re: Membering’, in Acoustic World, 96–129 and Neil Rhodes, ‘Articulate Networks: The Self, the Book and the World’, in Neil Rhodes and Jonathon Sawday (eds.), The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 184–96. 20 Renaissance Articulations In his Defence of Rhyme Daniel speaks of ‘excellent conceits, whose scattered limbs we are fain to look out and join together’.47 And, at the risk of creating another discourse of slightly basted fragments, I offer one final example. In classical literature rhetoric was often represented by an open hand and logic by a closed fist. The image is not difficult to read, at least as far as rhetoric is concerned, in view of the importance it attached to gesture. But in The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), one of the earliest English rhetorics, Richard Rainolde offers an anatomical interpretation: ‘Rhetorike is like to the hand set at large, wherein every part and joint is manifeste.’48 The point about rhetoric, he seems to be saying, is that you can see how it works. Rhetoric and logic constituted two parts of the trivium, the first stage of the academic curriculum in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The third part was grammar, and it is grammar that relates the two meanings of articulation even more effectively than rhetoric, for it operates both as a system of separation and of joining up. Grammar is responsible for dividing language into parts of speech, a process similar to that of anatomical dissection, but it also provides the means by which language can be reconstituted into whole sentences. In this respect Rainolde’s metaphor of the hand would have worked better for grammar than for rhetoric. The parallel functions of grammar and anatomy are everywhere apparent. It is significant that in pictorial representations of Grammatica and Anatomia a common attribute is the scalpel, an instrument of division. In the early modern period we can find Mulcaster saying that grammar ‘serveth in the natur of an anatomie, for the resolving of writen spech’ and Helkiah Crooke describing the human skeleton as ‘a Syntax’, adding that ‘The manner of this Syntax or composition is double, for it is made either by Articulation or by Coalition.’49 But there is also a negative aspect to articulation in that it is usual to practise dissection on dead bodies, and this link between textual analysis and death is implied in humanist attacks on scholastic methods of argumentation. Erasmus observes sarcastically in Praise of Folly that ‘though [St Paul] gives the best description of charity . . . he neither divides nor defines it according to 47 Samuel Daniel, Selected Poetry and ‘A Defense of Rhyme’, ed. Geoffrey G. Hiller and Peter L. Groves (Asheville, NC: Pegasus, 1998), 206. 48 Rainolde, Foundacion, A1v. 49 Mulcaster, Elementarie, ed. Campagnac, 55; Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia (London, 1615), 930. Renaissance Articulations 21 the rules of dialectic’,50 where St Paul’s other precept, ‘The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ seems to hover in the background. It becomes explicit in the Romantic period, notably in Wordsworth’s lines, ‘Our meddling intellect | Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:— | We murder to dissect’.51 But in the present context it is Charles Lamb’s remark on the fate of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy that offers the best illustration of the point. He is no longer able to tell whether the speech is any good or not, he complains, because ‘it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member’.52 Lamb’s description of the dislocated soliloquy as dead utterance traces Romantic notions of organic form back to Renaissance physiological metaphors and the vital relationship between parts and wholes. Ultimately it suggests that if the central question with regard to expression hangs on the issue of truth and deception, in the case of articulation it hangs on the even more fundamental matter of life and death. If that is so, then expression becomes the sign of life in the articulate body.53 What we now have is a series of antitheses that nonetheless operate with some degree of overlap: expression and articulation, oral and written, rhetoric and grammar, all of which draw upon the physiological metaphor to signal vitality or its opposite.54 Broadly speaking, we might think of expression as covering the territory of rhetoric and articulation the territory of grammar, but we don’t have to be scholastically precise about these distinctions. The real point at issue is to 50 Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 157. 51 William Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’, ll. 26–8. 52 Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, in Jonathan Bate (ed.), The Romantics on Shakespeare, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 113. 53 The alternative case for articulation as a vital element in poetry was cogently made, pre Derrida, by Donald Davie in Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). 54 Two opposing accounts of the primacy of speech (humanist and Derridean) can be found in Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), who argues that in Gregory of Nyssa (and Aristotle and Erasmus) ‘the primacy of speech is retrospectively recast as the secondary effect of the rational hand’, (p. 182). I am indebted here to Elsky’s work. 22 Renaissance Articulations establish what might be regarded as the underlying features of the discipline that eventually emerged as English. For the moment these would seem to be the primacy of speech, the physiological basis of its manifestations in expression and articulation, and the relation of these to at least two of the three elements in the foundational stage of the early modern curriculum, rhetoric and grammar. And always we come back to speech, voice, sound. Robert Robinson points to ‘the simple and distinct parts, and members of the whole voice’, while Mulcaster says that ‘letters can expresse sounds withall their joynts & properties’.55 Robinson and Mulcaster are not, however, referring here to parts of speech in the grammatical sense, but to syllables or units of sound. Renaissance grammar and rhetoric, working together through articulation, were responsible for creating what we would now call a sound system. And if articulation is responsible for the grammatical wiring of the sound system at the level of syllables and parts of speech, at the level of the sentence, expression (more precisely, rhetoric) gives us the soundbite in the form of quotable ‘sayings’ that could function either as self-contained, gnomic utterances or as prefabricated parts of a larger body of discourse. Almost the first book to be printed in England, Caxton’s The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (1477), translated from the French by the Earl Rivers, was a compilation of exactly this kind. So was William Baldwin’s A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie, containing the sayings of the wyse, one of the longestlived books of the English Renaissance, first published in 1547 and reprinted with additions some twenty-four times to 1640. The majority of such volumes were, however, in Latin and designed for educational use, the most celebrated being Erasmus’ Adagia, Apophthegmata, and Parabolae. These elegant anthologies were in turn appropriated and reissued in a more highly processed form by textbook artisans such as Conrad Lycosthenes. They presented the student with the disarticulated corpus of Latin literature in a form that could be conveniently reassembled into new wholes. The commonplace tradition, the literary anthology, and their role in the origins of English Studies will be discussed in Chapter 5. Here, though, they point us to the role of speech in an earlier period of education. The soundbite, or memorable fragment of discourse, was a key element in Renaissance pedagogy, and collections of these commonplaces became a vital aid to teaching in sixteenth-century England, 55 Robinson, Art of Pronuntiation, A8r; Mulcaster, Elementarie, 110. Renaissance Articulations 23 as they did throughout Europe. They tell us a great deal about Renaissance techniques of composition and the relationship between parts and wholes, but their status as ‘sayings’ also underlines the oral basis of education. And this is apparent in other, more obvious ways. Boys learned how to speak Latin—were in fact required to speak Latin to each other at playtime, as well as in class. At The King’s School, Canterbury, where Lyly and Marlowe were pupils and where the rule about Latin speaking was in force, the headmaster and his assistant were to ‘endeavour to teach their pupils to speak openly, finely and distinctly, keeping due decorum both with their body and their mouth’.56 At Merchant Taylors’ Richard Mulcaster taught voice projection, encouraging his pupils in the art of ‘lowd speaking’ and explaining in his book Positions (1581) ‘How necessarie, and how proper an exercise it is for a scholler’.57 Erasmus himself devoted a whole work, De Recta Pronuntiatione (1528), to the correct and effective speaking of the classical languages. The last of these takes the form of a dialogue in which two characters, Lion and Bear (Erasmus), discuss education. ‘The quality of its education is the main factor in a country’s progress or decline’, Bear opines, with the convenient result that Lion makes Bear dictator of his Republic of Letters. Bear cites Quintilian to the effect that you have to be able to speak Latin not just by following the rules, ‘but also with the usage of actual daily speech’; and he points out that since poetry is the first thing taught to children to help them with reading and reciting, ‘the poet can be said to “form boys’ mouths” ’.58 The value placed upon good pronunciation extended also to the vernacular. Elyot wanted a small boy’s nurses to speak English ‘articulately’ so that the child’s capacity for good pronunciation in Latin should not be spoiled. But at a later date, the progressive Leicestershire schoolmaster John Brinsley allowed spoken English a more positive function in the classroom itself: cause them to utter every dialogue lively, as if they themselves were the persons which did speake in that dialogue, and so in every other speech, to imagine themselves to have occasion to utter the very same things. 56 See Arthur F. Leach, Educational Charters and Documents 598 to 1909 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 467. 57 Richard Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children, ed. William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 65. 58 Erasmus, The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek: A Dialogue, trans. and annotated Maurice Pope, in Collected Works of Erasmus, xxvi, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 370–1. 24 Renaissance Articulations What they cannot utter well in Latine, cause them first to do it naturally and lively in English . . .59 As well as indicating that the ban on the vernacular was not at all consistently applied, Brinsley’s rubric, with its repeated reference to liveliness, emphasizes again that the object of articulation is animated expression. If the role of the mother tongue here is principally to revitalize the dead language, the lifeline between the two nonetheless has the effect of validating the vernacular. The importance attached to speech skills in education is the reason why drama was encouraged in both schools and universities. Tacit mastery of grammar was insufficient, since humanism tended to regard taciturnity as a dismal inadequacy rather than as a mark of discretion. The end of eloquence was action. Drama offered a means to this end by providing experience in role-playing and by developing self-confidence. Role-playing, in fact, is exactly what Brinsley is describing in his instructions on speech, though this is an aspect of education that had been promoted long before his day. Early sixteenth-century humanist textbooks used Roman comedy to teach Latin as speech, so that knowledge of grammar was acquired from sermo or conversation, as Erasmus (and Quintilian) had recommended. At Eton Nicholas Udall produced his Floures for Latine Spekynge (1553), ‘selected and gathered out of Terence’. Listing conversational phrases in Latin and English, extracted scene by scene from the Andria and other plays, this was a pioneering and practical textbook that stayed in print for half a century. Udall’s Terentian flowers would certainly have been available to Shakespeare, and also to Mulcaster himself, who was a product of Udall’s regime. Part of the point of this tradition, at both school and university, was to develop self-confidence. One of Mulcaster’s own pupils, Sir James Whitelocke, remembers that ‘yeerly he presented sum playes to the court, in whiche his scholers wear only actors, and I on among them, and by that meanes taughte them good behaviour and audacitye’.60 This is amplified by Thomas Heywood, writing about his time at Cambridge in An Apology for Actors (1612), where he argues that academic learning has to be coupled with the capacity for public performance. All the tragedies, comedies, histories, pastorals and 59 John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, or The Grammar Schoole [1612], ed. E. T. Campagnac (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1917), 212. 60 See Richard L. DeMolen, Richard Mulcaster (c.1531–1611) and Educational Reform in the Renaissance (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1991), 89. Renaissance Articulations 25 ‘shewes’ that he has seen acted at the university, he says, were ‘held necessary for the emboldening of their junior schollers to arme them with audacity, against they come to bee employed in any publicke exercise . . . [acting] teacheth audacity to the bashfull grammarian’.61 While Heywood, as a professional dramatist, is engaged here in some special pleading on behalf of the public theatre, he is also drawing upon the humanist principle that the language arts provide, in effect, a training for life. Because we are familiar with Puritan broadsides against the iniquities of the professional theatre, and because we have been taught by modern criticism to regard the plays performed there as subversive in a rather different sense, it may come as a surprise to see how deeply rooted drama was in the educational system of Tudor England. Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (c.1552), often styled the first English comedy, was written for schoolboys, though after he had been dismissed from Eton in scandalous circumstances. While in post in the late 1530s he had probably authored the interludes Thersites and Ezekias, both now lost, and the dramatic tradition was continued by a subsequent Eton headmaster, William Malim.62 Christmas plays were performed at Winchester and Westminster, while at Shrewsbury, where Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville were educated, it was laid down that ‘Everie thursdaie the Schollers of the first forme before they goo to plaie, shall for exercise declaime and plaie one acte of a comedie’.63 These are all major schools, but more modest establishments, comparable with Stratford Grammar, also incorporated drama into the curriculum. At Hitchin School in Buckinghamshire, where George Chapman is likely to have studied, the boys performed plays, which may have been in English, written for them by their master Ralph Radcliffe. These included the Chaucerian subjects of patient Griselda and Melibee, ‘The Most Firm Friendship of Titus and Gisippus’, and a play on the 61 28. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London: Shakespeare Society, 1841), 62 For listings of school plays see Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd edn. (London: Routledge, 1989). On Udall see Charles W. Whitworth (ed.), Three Sixteenth Century Comedies, (London: Ernest Benn, 1984), pp. xxxii–xxxix. Malim defended drama on the grounds that ‘nothing is more conducive to fluency of expression’ (H. Maxwell Lyte, A History of Eton College, 1440–1875 (London, 1875), 157). 63 See B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 13–14. 26 Renaissance Articulations destruction of Sodom.64 In view of Udall’s misdemeanours the last of these strikes a suitably cautionary note. But however moral its intentions, school drama was indeed blasted by Puritans alongside its professional counterpart. As late as 1626 a character called Censure in Jonson’s play The Staple of News grumbles that I would have ne’er a cunning schoolmaster in England. I mean a cunning-man, a schoolmaster; that is a conjuror, or a poet, or that had any acquaintance with a poet. They make all their scholars play-boys! . . . Do we pay our money for this? We send them to learn their grammar, and their Terence, and they learn their play-books. (3, third intermean, ll. 39–44) Censure’s failure to recognize Terence as a dramatist shows how effectively Udall managed his dismemberment, but the real force of his complaint is to establish just how standard the practice of school drama had become by the early seventeenth century. From hesitant phrases in classroom dialogue to the staged performance of a five-act comedy, drama was present throughout the school system, developing the speech skills of articulation and expression and reinforcing the point that rhetoric was to issue in action. In fact, in the earlier part of Elizabeth’s reign, before 1576, when The Theatre opened in Shoreditch, most of the plays staged in and around London were performed by schoolboys. Generally speaking, choristers played in English and regular schoolboys in Latin, and these were not just academic exercises but commercial ventures, open to the paying public. The activities of Paul’s Boys and the Children of the Chapel are well known, but Merchant Taylors’ was also prominent in the early Elizabethan theatre. During Mulcaster’s headmastership from 1561 to 1586 classical histories such as Timoclea at the Siege of Thebes by Alexander or Perseus and Andromeda and romances such as Ariodante and Genevora were staged in the hall of the Merchant Taylors Company before being transferred to court, as Sir James Whitelock recalled. References in literary histories to Ralph Roister Doister as the first English comedy don’t emphasize the point that the sixteenth-century dramatic tradition was an educational tradition. In addition to Spenser, the dramatists Thomas Kyd and Thomas Lodge both studied under Udall’s pupil Mulcaster. As well as his enormously popular The Spanish Tragedy, Kyd seems likely to have been responsible for the 64 See F. P. Wilson, The English Drama, 1485–1585, ed. G. K. Hunter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 153. Renaissance Articulations 27 earlier Hamlet, the ‘Ur-Hamlet’, and it was certainly Lodge who reported the ghost’s lugubrious commands to revenge in that play. The boys’ companies disappeared in the late 1580s; when Paul’s Boys reopened in 1600 Mulcaster was in charge of the school, and their reemergence prompted Hamlet to quiz Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the subject in Shakespeare’s own version of the play. This is not to construct a factitious genealogy from Udall to Mulcaster to Shakespeare, but simply to indicate something of the relationship between educational practice and the professional stage in the Elizabethan period. It is also to point out that the author of the first textbook for English was also the greatest advocate of drama in Elizabethan education. All these aspects of sixteenth-century education, from lively verbal expression to dramatic performance, reflect a more general awareness of the confluence of poetry (literature), rhetoric (oratory), and acting in Renaissance cultural theory. The affinity between poetry and rhetoric was represented in the figure of Orpheus, whose powerful song was said to constitute the origins of civilization. The fable is recounted in Horace’s Art of Poetry, much quoted by Renaissance writers. Puttenham follows up his Horatian account of Orpheus with the claim that poets invented rhetoric, because theirs was the first example of persuasive speech. Sidney points out the close relations between poetry and oratory, in the Apology, and William Webbe describes the ancient performance of verses at feasts known as Panegeryca, commenting that ‘it appeareth both Eloquence and Poetrie to have had their beginning and originall from these exercises, beeing framed in such sweete measure of sentences and pleasant harmonie called Rythmos’.65 Orpheus comes in different versions, and this model, rather different from the one in which the singer is torn to pieces in a Bacchic frenzy, or from the wild, Thracian Orpheus, provided convenient authority for a humanist pedagogy that linked up poetry and rhetoric. The combination was improving, civilizing, and therefore educational. Poetry had also influenced the teaching of rhetoric in antiquity, evident in Quintilian, but at the same time rhetoric was allied to acting, because its last element, pronuntiatio, was concerned with performance skills. In fact, pronuntiatio was divided into two parts, the first dealing with speech or ‘pronunciation’ itself, and the second, actio, dealing with gesture. Quintilian explains: 65 Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, 8; Sidney, Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, 115; Webbe in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, 231. 28 Renaissance Articulations Delivery [pronuntiatio] is often styled action. But the first name is derived from the voice, the second from the gesture. For Cicero in one passage speaks of action as being a form of speech [quasi sermonem], and in another as being a kind of physical eloquence. Nonetheless, he divides action into two elements, which are the same as the elements of delivery, namely, voice and movement.66 The passages in Cicero that Quintilian refers to, then, are concerned with body language. As the term ‘lively’ is used repeatedly of expression in poetry, so it is used of physical expression. (Mulcaster pointed out that Demosthenes’ enemy Aeschines had admitted that he was ‘sorer wounded with the force of his action, which gave life to his words, than with the strength of his words’.67) The similarity of oratory and acting in this respect was acknowledged by Cicero, though perhaps a little reluctantly, when he wrote in De Oratore: ‘how important that [actio] is wholly by itself, the actor’s trivial art and the stage proclaim’.68 In the Renaissance Abraham Fraunce makes the same connection in The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), while adding that the orator should use ‘action’ (‘or gesture of the whole bodie’) less ‘parasiticallie’ than the professional actor.69 Action in this sense collapses the distinction between expression and articulation entirely. Both terms bear witness to the physiological basis of speech, but here the articulated body is itself a voice, its different parts working in concert to express inward thoughts and feelings. This double voice, of speech and gesture, constitutes the affective power of both rhetoric and drama. The writer who best draws together the main elements in this discussion is Thomas Wright. Wright took from Cicero his point about the importance of an emotion being printed on the heart as a prelude to its expression, and Cicero is indeed his main source throughout the section on ‘How Passions are moved by action’, but he has given it a Christian (specifically Catholic) inflection. He is particularly concerned here with the relation between inward truth and outward gesture in terms that recall Ascham’s fear of a divorce between heart and tongue. 67 Institutio oratoria, 11. 3. 1. Mulcaster, Elementarie, 21. De Oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1942), 1. 5. 18. On Cicero’s views on the relationship between oratory and acting see Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 14–25. 69 Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike, ed. Ethel Seaton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950), 120. Fraunce uses ‘parasiticallie’ to refer to the Greek parasitos or professional buffoon. 66 68 Renaissance Articulations 29 Wright’s reminder that ‘through our voices, eyes, and gestures the world will pierce and thoroughly perceive how we are affected’ offers actio as a window on the soul, and it may also help us to understand why Ascham’s interest is not merely in promoting Ciceronian eloquence as a kind of stylistic haute couture. But the key passage, which again cites Cicero, as Quintilian had done, is this: For action is either a certain visible eloquence, or an eloquence of the body, or a comely grace in delivering conceits, or an external image of an internal mind, or a shadow of affections, or three springs which flow from one fountain, called vox, vultus, vita, ‘voice, countenance, life’ . . .70 If the best poetry presents language as living form, ‘action’ presents living form as language, and one that provides direct access to the inner self. The passage manages to embrace articulation and expression, speech and the body, in a profoundly optimistic statement about the transparency of human communication. It also makes a statement about the uniquely expressive capacities of drama.71 As William Webbe had pointed out fifteen years earlier, the difference between poetry for the stage and poetry for the library is that ‘those on stages have speciall respect to the motions of the minde’.72 Finally, the passage points us in the direction that English Studies would eventually take. In its concern with rhetoric, emotion, and inner life, Wright’s book, which is contemporary with Hamlet, can be seen as a conduit between the teachings of Cicero and Quintilian in antiquity and the transformation of rhetoric in the eighteenth century and beyond; in particular, through the engagement of the new rhetoric with passion psychology and through later concepts of ‘self-expression’. And so can Hamlet itself. 1.2 . HAMLET ’ S MEDIA STUDIES Media Studies is viewed with some disdain, especially in the older seats of learning, and this view has become a journalistic stereotype. This is 70 Wright, Passions of the Mind, ed. Newbold, 212–13. On passion psychology and the language of the body see Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana, Ill.,: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 56–105. 71 Pauline Kiernan has argued that the role of the human body and the power of performance are central to Shakespeare’s understanding of the dramatic medium (see Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ). 72 Webbe in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, 300. 30 Renaissance Articulations partly because Media Studies focuses on contemporary popular culture but also because of the perceived superiority of the book over the screen, since ‘media’ in this context is usually understood to mean ‘television’. Watching TV has long assumed the role that novel-reading did in the early nineteenth century, carrying the stigma of indolence or self-indulgence, while in some quarters reading a book now seems to be almost as arduous an activity as writing was in the bone-chilling abbeys of the eleventh century. There is no doubt that the book and the screen are in competition with each other, and that people read less because they watch more, but this is not a reason for ignoring the fact that our experience is mediated through different technological forms. Nor should we use the contemporary bias of modern Media Studies to obscure the fact that the term ‘technology’ can be understood in a variety of ways and that Media Studies has a long history. My subject in this chapter so far has been the vitality of speech. But we could also say that, in another sense, the chapter has been concerned with the media, the first and most fundamental of which is speech. Articulation and expression, the relationship between the oral and the written, the dimension of drama, and the human body as an instrument of communication are all aspects of Media Studies. Rhetoric is Media Studies. There is no reason to suppose that Media Studies is in some way inseparable from the birth of the moving image, though it is, surely, inseparable from English, if we clear away some of the prejudices attaching to this disparaged academic label. Shakespeare was profoundly interested in the subject, not least in the play that the Cambridge professor of rhetoric Gabriel Harvey thought would ‘please the wiser sort’: Hamlet.73 No other play of this period is more obviously concerned with the business of articulation, in its double sense of vocalization and structure, or with expression, the process by which inner life becomes public utterance. And it is also concerned with the media of expression, the different forms which the representation of that inner life might take. At the same time this is also the play whose early printed texts appear in the most intriguingly distinct states. So the questions that the play raises in thematic terms, those questions that constitute our experience of Hamlet in whatever version or state we receive it, are compounded by the fact that they are reproduced externally in our evaluation of the different records left to us of the play 73 See Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 127. Renaissance Articulations 31 itself. And the issue is complicated by a third factor that erases the distinction between ‘the play itself’ and the forms in which it has been preserved. This is the haunting presence of a number of other plays. Hamlet is shaped by its author’s response to the old play, the so-called Ur-Hamlet, which certainly did exist, and also by the plays which appear within the text and which probably never existed in any independent capacity outside it. There are many things that make Hamlet unique, but it is this combination of factors that makes the play supremely interesting for an account of Shakespeare’s role in the origins of English. The great strength of Tudor education lay in its integration of the language arts in a programme that combined poetry, oratory, and (in a modest way) drama. Here indeed was a synthesis with clearly defined aims and objectives. We must imagine Hamlet, Shakespeare’s only university student, as a product of this system rather than as the pupil of an early medieval Danish court tutor. But whatever he was doing at university, which might include Media Studies, if we are relaxed with our terminology, it seems to have provoked considerable anxiety about external forms of representation and their ability to communicate what he understands as inward truth. This leads to a mistrust of the language arts in general and to a suspicion that rhetoric, drama, and the painted words of poetry have been disconnected from ‘felt life’. Although we can only infer the style of the lost Hamlet (stiff-jointed Senecan maxims and a bloodbath catastrophe), it seems fairly clear that in his Hamlet Shakespeare set out to deconstruct a genre. In doing so he brought into question almost every aspect of his own dramatic art. Thomas Nashe is the main source of information about the Ur-Hamlet, which he mocks, but he also wrote with wide-eyed, uncomplicated enthusiasm about the power of this new medium, the public theatre, to immortalize the valiant dead. It is another instance of the dramatist’s power of resurrection and animation mentioned at the start of this chapter. Speaking of Talbot in I Henry VI, Nashe celebrates an audience ‘of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times), who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding’, adding that ‘I will defend it against any Collian, or clubfisted Usurer of them all, there is no immortalitie can be given a man on earth like unto Playes’.74 74 Pierce Penilesse, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), i. 212. Interestingly, in the context of Hamlet, Nashe goes on to say that it is the function of drama to expose ‘all coosonages, all cunning drifts over-guylded with outward holinesse’ (ibid. 213). 32 Renaissance Articulations Nashe is perfectly clear that the purpose of playing, as Hamlet would call it, is to stimulate virtue through the conjuring up of live presence on the stage: theatrical enargeia. Yet less than ten years later the (re-) creator of Talbot produced a character who fails to act on the words of the valiant dead, deliberately ignores the conventions of the revenge play in which he is supposed to be performing, and instead gives elocution lessons and drama tutorials. An extraordinary proportion of the first three acts of this tragedy is occupied with passages from other plays and Hamlet’s deliberations over matters of articulation and expression: the Troy play, he lays down, is ‘well-digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning’ (2.2.435); he notes the striking turn of phrase (‘mobbled queen’); and later, for ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, he instructs the Players on delivery: ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you—trippingly on the tongue’ (3.2.1–2). In a move which veers between inspiration and decadence, Shakespeare has turned his hero into a critic, and a critic consumed with doubts about the relationship between rhetoric (in its broadest sense) and real life. Hamlet represents the first crisis in English Studies. Although the subject had not yet been invented, the crisis, as Derrida might have said, was always already inscribed within it. So it is entirely appropriate that this play should be concerned with the original and apparently most authentic medium of communication—speech. Back to basics, as Derrida would not have said. The ghost of Hamlet’s father, however, is a rather dubious example of the vitality of oral expression, since he is already dead, which means he can only speak when spoken to.75 The first act begins and ends with urgent requests to the ghost to ‘speak’, Horatio at one point repeating the demand five times in twelve lines (1.1.130-42). When Hamlet himself renews the demand in Act 1, Scene 5 the ghost responds with his own injunctions. These scenes constitute an exchange of imperatives or, in the terms of speech-act theory, an exchange of performative utterances: speak/revenge/remember.76 Hamlet’s father may be dead, but he can still do things with words. The last in this series of commands is 75 Harold Jenkins explains that this is why it is as well that the person addressing a ghost should be someone of ‘superior learning’, a ‘scholar’, as Marcellus suggests (Hamlet, ed. Jenkins (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 424–5). 76 Speech-act theory seems not to have made much impact on literary criticism, presumably because Austin excluded literature (and drama) from his frame of reference, but see most recently Peter Robinson, Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), esp. pp. 109–61. Renaissance Articulations 33 Hamlet’s insistence that the group of witnesses swears never to speak of what they have seen. The end of the sequence, then, and consumingly so in the case of Hamlet himself, is a vow to bottle it all up. He has already concluded his first soliloquy with the self-denying ordinance, ‘But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue’; in the Hecuba soliloquy, after he has seen the ghost, the frustration he voices in response to the Player’s speeches is that he ‘can say nothing’. While the key utterances in the scenes with the ghost are themselves performative, in Austin’s classification, not only do they lead to nothing being performed, except plays, but they also have the effect of sealing up further kinds of utterance. Everything is driven inwards. To switch from 1950s to 1590s speech theory, La Primaudaye offers this observation on inward speech: In the writings of the learned we finde mention made of a double speech or reason: the one internall, or of the minde, called the divine guide: the other uttered in speech, which is the messenger of the conceits and thoughts of man. The end of the first is friendship towards a mans selfe . . . The end of the other reason or uttered speech, is friendship towards others . . . .77 This double voice, conceived as a separation between speech as truthtelling and speech as performance, is an obvious feature of Hamlet. The normal routes and currents of conversation are short-circuited. It is a theme that even edges towards parody in Polonius’ advice to Laertes: ‘Give thy thoughts no tongue, | Nor any unproportioned thought his act’ (1.3.59–60). The first crisis in English Studies was not about ‘theory’, but about rhetoric. Though in so far as we can loosely align rhetoric with expression and grammar with articulation—or oppose speech-act theory to Derridean grammatology—the more recent crises were too. Hamlet’s meeting with his father’s ghost hardens the sense of disconnection from his immediate environment which has already been evident from the first words we hear him speak to his mother: ‘Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems’’ ’ (1.2.76). His mistrust of all external forms of expression, from dress to dramatic verse, feeds on the supernatural encounter to produce further withdrawal, new strategies of evasion. Hamlet’s refusal to cooperate deconstructs not only the genre of the revenge play but, more fundamentally, the humanist educational programme which aimed to integrate poetry, rhetoric, and 77 La Primaudaye, French Academie, trans. Bowes, 119–20. 34 Renaissance Articulations drama and which directed the language arts towards performance and action. The disintegration is apparent everywhere in the play. Indeed, it is even described, quite literally, as a disarticulation, when Hamlet complains that ‘The time is out of joint’. But the word that best captures what it is that he has lost is ‘frame’. In fact, ‘frame’ is really the native English version of ‘articulation’. It can be used to mean ‘distinct utterance’, as we have seen in the remarks of Pierre de La Primaudaye (or rather his translator) quoted earlier in the chapter, and the same sense appears in Edmund Coote’s The English Schoole-maister in the phrase ‘the framing and sweete tuning of thy voyce’.78 In Hamlet itself it tends to carry the other meaning of ‘structure’, as in Hamlet’s reference to ‘this goodly frame, the earth’, which now seems to him to have dissipated into pestilent vapours. It is explicitly linked to the anatomical sense of articulation in Claudius’ description of the kingdom’s being ‘disjoint and out of frame’ (1.2.20) after old Hamlet’s death. But it is also used of language, as when Guildenstern reproachfully urges Hamlet to ‘put your discourse into some frame’ (3.2.295–6). A year or so before Shakespeare’s play was first acted John Hoskyns wrote in his Directions for Speech and Style (a book title that Hamlet himself might have wanted to borrow): ‘Yet cannot his mind be thought in tune whose words do jar, nor his reason in frame whose sentences are preposterous; nor his fancy clear and perfect whose utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties.’79 The sentiment is echoed in Ophelia’s lament after the nunnery scene for ‘that noble and most sovereign reason | Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh’ (3.1.160–1). But Ophelia both tracks and overtakes Hamlet, and her own descent into madness is reflected in the verbal disintegration described in detail by Horatio, who points out that although ‘Her speech is nothing, | Yet the unshaped use of it doth move | The hearers to collection’ (4.5.7–9). Her reason lost, Ophelia’s speech has become inarticulate, but, crucially, it remains expressive. The distinction is important not because Shakespeare wants to show that authentic speech can only be achieved in madness, but because it suggests that the power to move need not depend on the structural devices of framing. This reaches its logical conclusion in the aporias of King Lear, which is why the last speech in that play carries the Hamlet-like injunction, ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’. 78 79 Edmund Coote, The English Schoole-maister (London, 1596), A4r. Hoskyns, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hudson, 2. Renaissance Articulations 35 Ophelia’s (and Lear’s) is the extreme condition towards which Hamlet is tending but which he does not reach. His retreat from articulate public utterance, from external to internal speech—private expression—is part of an all-consuming self-protectiveness that for most of the play exhausts the possibility of other action. But is all this a disgusted reaction to ‘seeming’? Hamlet’s first words to his mother are not, to be precise, about seeming, as I said a moment ago, but about commonness. The two subjects might even be seen as opposites, since the first is a courtly vice, to do with the construction of a cosmetic self, while the second is what it is: just common. ‘Ay, madam, it is common’, Hamlet replies, and may well pause before contemptuously spitting out the final word. But both seeming and commonness are, at least in Hamlet’s eyes, the means of falsification. Commonness falsifies what is special, private, too deep for utterance, by reducing it to the commonplace. Besides, the notion of vulgar ostentation shows how easily these two apparent opposites may be conflated. Claudius’ slickly ceremonious speech in Act 1, Scene 2. has something of this quality, especially in the unctuous professions to Laertes. What he professes to Hamlet, when he turns his attention to him, is a faith in the commonplace, claiming that his failure to grasp a simple platitude shows An understanding simple and unschooled; For what we know must be, and is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense . . . (1.2.97–9) There is an underlying sarcasm here, reinforced by the reference to the death of fathers as nature’s ‘common theme’. Claudius implies that his overeducated stepson has failed to take in the more elementary school exercises. In the next scene both Laertes and Ophelia are subjected to a bullet-point memorandum of stale precepts from their father, including the one that Hamlet himself wants so desperately to live up to: ‘above all—to thine own self be true’ (1.3.78), which Polonius manages to empty of any significance. So it is not surprising, in the face of all this parental devotion to cliché, that Hamlet should be determined to eradicate the commonplace from his mind in order to accommodate his true father: from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there . . . (1.5.98–101) 36 Renaissance Articulations But the frustrating part of this is that truisms are also true. The unspoken commonplace that Hamlet himself lives out is curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupet: ‘great griefs are silent, petty sorrow speaks’.80 Commonness and seeming, or, to put it another way, vulgarization and misrepresentation, are the charges constantly levelled at the modern media. In view of his distaste for public display, Hamlet would surely have been another critic of the media, as indeed he is. That distaste colours his response to the most powerful medium in his own culture, which is, of course, the theatre. After being cast in what seems to have been an exceptionally crude representation of his story, this Hamlet has every right to be discriminating. The first audiences of Shakespeare’s Hamlet would have found their expectations fulfilled, briefly. The play does indeed begin with a sighting of the ghost who had, in the old play, memorably issued the command, ‘Hamlet, revenge’. But the satisfying sense of familiarity would have evaporated very quickly. Instead of those reassuring Senecan soundbites, such as ‘Blood is a beggar’, which Nashe records as a feature of the earlier Hamlet, there is an assault on the commonplace. Instead of a proactive avenger, there is an inactive avenger. And as well as presenting us with a quite new style of introspection on the part of the hero, the proportion of the first three acts devoted to an exhibition and discussion of the dramatic arts might suggest a comparable degree of self-scrutiny on the part of the author himself. This play comes with a built-in critique of the medium in which it is presented. The fact that this does not seem obtrusive, or extraneous, demonstrates the success with which Shakespeare has managed to engage questions of expression and performance in the theatre with questions of expression and performance in life itself. Shakespeare’s play responds to the earlier dramatization of the Hamlet story, but it can also be measured against the two plays embedded within it, the Troy play and ‘The Murder of Gonzago’. The play about the fall of Troy, which Hamlet selects for the Players to show their quality, as he puts it, appeals to him because it did not appeal to the general public. ‘Caviare to the general’, it rises above commonness. Its style is distinctive, but quite hard to identify, as many scholars have found. Early commentators described it as good tragedy written on the ancient rules (Warburton), admired its ‘superb lyric vehemence and epic pomp’ (Coleridge), and pointed out that it has to appear more 80 See Ch. 5, p. 159. Renaissance Articulations 37 elevated than the play itself (Schlegel); though one, rather absurdly, argued that Hamlet’s approval of it was consistent with his feigned madness (Steevens).81 Modern scholars have thought it might be an imitation of Lucan (Emrys Jones) or of Ben Jonson (Roy Battenhouse), both of which are plausible suggestions.82 Coleridge’s description of the Troy play happens also to match Lucan’s style quite precisely, while in the case of Jonson it is worth remembering that as early as 1598 Francis Meres placed him among the ‘best for Tragedie’, though the plays have not survived.83 The style of these passages is certainly stately, with strong midline breaks acting as the blank-verse equivalent of caesuras, slowing the pace of the lines. Pictorially, the emphasis is on boldly contrasting colours (black, red, and the ‘milky’ white of Priam’s head) idealized by the heraldic terms ‘sable’ and ‘gules’. The episode itself is divided into three movements: a description of the ferocious Pyrrhus, Pyrrhus’ killing of Priam, and Hecuba’s discovery of her husband’s body. The second of these, largely omitted in Q1, is particularly interesting, because it presents a moment in which the scene is suddenly frozen: So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, And, like a neutral to his will and matter, Did nothing. (2.2.460–2) Here, at the still centre of the scene, lies the appeal of it to Hamlet. It is a neoclassical tableau, the warrior poised in vengeful attitude, but motionless, briefly exempted from having to do the deed. Hamlet is interested in performance as well as in verbal style, as we see in the preparations for ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, and the question of performance is fundamental because it lies at the heart of his dilemma. That dilemma can be located in the ambivalence of the words ‘act’ and ‘action’, terms which have applications in both drama and rhetoric. From the start Hamlet is determined to separate his inward self, ‘that within which passes show’, from all the externals, ‘those actions that a man might play’, as he tells his mother. At the same time 81 See A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Hamlet, ed. Horace Howard Furness, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott, 1877), i. 180–6. 82 See Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 273–7; Roy Battenhouse, ‘The Significance of Hamlet’s Advice to the Players’, in Elmer M. Blistein (ed.), The Drama of the Renaissance: Essays for Leicester Bradner, (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1970), 3–26. 83 Francis Meres, ‘Palladis Tamia’, in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, ii. 319. 38 Renaissance Articulations he is quite prepared to use theatrical terminology to describe the situation he faces in his own life and the pressure which that places upon him to ‘act’. He speaks of his father’s murder as a ‘cue for passion’, for example, and says that he is ‘prompted to [his] revenge by heaven and hell’. But the feeling that what the revenge code requires him to do is, in the end, only a theatrical gesture is what inhibits him from acting in any sense of the word. With the Ur-Hamlet as a point of departure, Shakespeare uses the Troy play and ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ to extend his critique of drama as action movie (the revenge-play genre) to its logical conclusion.84 What this means is that Thomas Wright’s ideal of actio as an integrated language of speech and gesture that can provide direct access to the inner self completely falls apart in Hamlet. Any external form of expression becomes a demonstration of hypocrisy, and instead we have soliloquy, or what La Primaudaye would call internal speech. Internal speech allows Hamlet to nurse his integrity and is a mode of self-expression which can be set against rhetoric as well as drama. It is anti-rhetorical because it is without practical effect. Quintilian, the principal classical authority on rhetoric, divided the arts into the theoretical and the practical, the second being concerned with action: this is their end, which is realized in action, so that, the action once performed, nothing remains to do . . . In view of these facts we must come to the conclusion that, in the main, rhetoric is concerned with action, for in action it accomplishes that which it is its duty to do.85 Hamlet’s interiority makes him a bad humanist. Turning away from eloquence as action, he turns his back on the principal aim of the Tudor education system. Quintilian’s words may weigh heavily upon Hamlet, for his presence is certainly detectable elsewhere in the play. His account of the Troy play’s having ‘no sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury’ sounds rather like Quintilian’s remarks on the salt (sales) of wit.86 But the most striking echo is in the Hecuba soliloquy, where Hamlet works up his anger over the difference between the emotions fabricated by actors for the theatre and those produced by intense personal experience. The 84 Though it might be said that the logical conclusion was reached in the Hamlet parody in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero (1993). 85 Institutio oratoria, 2. 18. 1–4. Quintilian goes on to qualify this in ways that are also highly relevant to Hamlet, acknowledging that rhetoric may sometimes be content with theory; that there is rhetoric in silence; and that there is reward in private study. 86 Ibid. 6. 3. 19. Renaissance Articulations 39 speech draws upon a passage in Quintilian which is designed to show the superiority of oratory to acting: I have often seen actors, both in tragedy and comedy, leave the theatre still drowned in tears after concluding the performance of some moving role. But if the mere delivery of words written by another has the power to set our souls on fire with fictitious emotions, what will the orator do whose duty it is to picture to himself the facts and who has it in his power to feel the same emotion as his client whose interests are at stake?87 Quintilian wants to distinguish between the actor’s mimicry of emotion and the orator’s more profound ability to reproduce within himself the emotions experienced by the person on whose behalf he is speaking. And although Hamlet’s anger is directed against any kind of simulation, it is not completely inappropriate for him to allude to the principal classical authority on rhetoric at this point. As an individual Hamlet is determined to distance himself from the media. As a critic, however, he has views on speech and style, and these are really quite conventional: ‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature’ (3.2.17–19), he instructs the Players, following Quintilian again. Hamlet is repeating a standard prescription for theatrical decorum, echoed, for example, by Thomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors, where he explains that rhetoric ‘instructs him to fit his phrases to his action, and his action to his phrase, and his pronuntiation to them both’.88 Modern debate about Elizabethan acting techniques has not yielded many firm conclusions, but it must surely have been the case that a more naturalistic style of acting developed as the plays themselves became more dramatically sophisticated.89 More naturalistic in this context means less dependent upon rhetorical prescriptions for delivery, which would certainly have determined the performance of academic drama. Heywood’s remarks follow immediately from his discussion of drama at Cambridge. If the poetic style of the inserted plays 87 Ibid. 6. 2. 35. The passage is also cited by Montaigne in the essay ‘On Diversion’ (III, 4). (See Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane 1987), 944.) 88 Heywood, Apology for Actors, 29. 89 For a concise survey of the subject see Peter Thomson, ‘Rogues and Rhetoricians: Acting Styles in Early English Drama’ in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 321–35. The discussion by Christy Desmet of the role of rhetoric in the construction of character is also relevant here (see Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), esp. pp. 10–34). 40 Renaissance Articulations in Hamlet has to be more elevated in order to mark out their theatricality from the style of the play in which they appear, so too does their performance.90 Hamlet’s directions demand a neoclassical restraint in gesture and academic manner, anchored in oratory, which indicates several degrees of remoteness from real life. His donnish tastes are entirely consistent with a mistrust of the media in general, but they also allow Shakespeare to showcase the dazzlingly inventive naturalism of his own drama. In its intricate negotiations with other plays—and its obsessive search for authenticity—Hamlet is surely Shakespeare’s most selfconscious engagement with the theatrical medium in which he worked; an attempt, as it were, to scrub clean the dyer’s hand. But at the same time the different states in which the play has come down to us open up some fascinating perspectives on the nature of the medium itself. While there is still no consensus as to the provenance of Q1, the first printed text of Hamlet, it has at least shaken off some of the stigma of the label ‘bad quarto’ and come into its own as a version with a distinctively oral character, by contrast with the more deliberately ‘written’ versions of Q2 and the Folio.91 Q1 is shorter, rougher-edged, more colloquial, more performative, and more improvized than the later texts. The Troy play that Hamlet so admired was too refined for comic adulteration, and each of the three texts has him warn against comic improvization in ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, but only in Q1 does he refer to the clown with such a limited repertoire that the ‘gentlemen quote his jests down in their tables before they come to the play’.92 The essential difference between Q1 and the two other early versions of Hamlet is that it is a performance text rather than a reading text. That is one reason why it omits so many of those complicating reflections on expression, utterance, and representation which are prominent in Q2 and F and which largely define the individuality both of Hamlet the character and the play as a whole. We do not hear Claudius’ remarks on the commonplace and Hamlet’s inadequate education in Act 1, Scene 2 nor his knowing observation that ‘not th’ exterior nor the 90 See Kiernan, Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama, 121–6, though my own conclusion is slightly different from hers. 91 See Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 132–76. On the ‘bad’ quartos see Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 92 The First Quarto of Hamlet, ed. Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.23. Renaissance Articulations 41 inward man | Resembles that it was’ (2.2.6–7). ‘To be or not to be’ comes before, not after, the scene with the Players and the Hecuba soliloquy; the speeches from the Troy play and ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ are both truncated and the account of Pyrrhus’ hesitation disappears, as we noticed earlier. We do not get the text of Hamlet’s letter to Horatio in Act 4, Scene 6, nor his parody of Osric in Act 5, Scene 2 (‘his definement suffers no perdition in you . . .’), though the latter is also omitted in F. Perhaps most significantly, Hamlet does not tell the Players in Act 3, Scene 2, ‘let your own discretion be your tutor’ and ‘Suit the action to the word’, nor does he comment on ‘the purpose of playing’. Q1 is said to be effective on stage, but it is not constructed in such a way as to invite the audience to reflect upon its own status as a dramatic text. As a literary composition it is not particularly selfconscious. Q2 and F, on the other hand, are texts for the silent reader, like Hamlet himself, separated from the world of doing and performing, inwardly digesting, pondering the discrepancies between all forms of expression and the inarticulate truth within. John Lee has argued that we can see the Folio Prince as a revision of the Quarto Prince, since many of the revisions ‘are seen to aim to create a greater degree of self-constituting interiority’.93 Extending the metaphor, we might also see the Prince as anxious to proceed from Quarto to Folio, desperate not to be sent back to the Ur-Hamlet, but with a secret desire to be transferred to the Troy play. In the event of this last scenario, however, we would have no access to what Donne described, with beautifully compressed simplicity, as ‘A naked thinking heart, that makes no show’.94 Donne’s words, with their hint of the autopsy, point to an aspect of Hamlet which is quite literally introspective, and this new style of introspection is set in contrast to the performative. What the different states of the play reveal to us is a process of internalization, the transition from an oral to a literate culture, reflected in the characterization of Hamlet himself. Keith Thomas points out that with the advance of literacy ‘We also see the emergence, or rather the greater prevalence, of two distinct psychological types: the silent reader, “lost in a book”, antisocial and oblivious to his surroundings . . . and the private diarist, entrusting his secret thoughts to papers which were intimately his’.95 Hamlet is a composite of these two 93 John Lee, Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and the Controversies of Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2 (see also 228–39). 94 John Donne, ‘The Blossom’, l. 27. 95 Thomas, ‘Meaning of Literacy’, in Banmann (ed.), The Written Word, 116. 42 Renaissance Articulations types. The image of Hamlet as a silent reader is presented explicitly in Q1 where, immediately before ‘To be or not to be . . .’, the King says ‘See where he comes poring upon a book’. In all versions of the text Ophelia is also given a book to read by her father—to ‘colour | Your loneliness’, Polonius says in the Folio—so in many, if not most, early performances of Hamlet the scene of this most famous soliloquy shows a true silent reader being observed by a pretend silent reader. The speech itself begins with reflections on ‘being’ and winds round to end with ‘action’, though only to confess that the result of too much thinking is that great enterprises ‘lose the name of action’. The antithesis of being and action in Hamlet is as close to the heart of the mystery as we are likely to get, and it is also, rather interestingly in the present context, an aspect of the divide between orality and literacy. According to E. A. Havelock , the use of the copula ‘to be’ is the hallmark of a new philosophical Greek prose which replaces the old oral poetry with its reliance on verbs of action and ‘doing’.96 The silent reader exchanges the sphere of doing for the sphere of being. From Hamlet’s point of view the fact that the Troy play ‘was never acted, or, if it was, not above once’ is a point in its favour. Poetry for the library is preferable, on balance, to poetry for the stage. But this is presumably not Shakespeare’s view. Having said that, the problem with putting some distance between author and character in this particular play is that the special intimacy which readers (and audience) have experienced with Hamlet seems inevitably grounded in a similar intimacy between the author and his creation. In simple terms, if each of us ‘is’ Hamlet, how can Shakespeare not be? More precisely, can we accept a Hamlet whose opinions are implicitly criticized by the author, but whose feelings are shared by both author and readers to a degree that has traditionally been regarded as unparalleled?97 The reason why it is possible to answer ‘yes’ to these questions lies in the subject already discussed: commonness. Hamlet’s sense of his own distinctiveness, and his rejection of commonness, almost compels sympathetic identification from the reader. Few people would describe themselves 96 See E. A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 98–116. 97 These and related questions have been rigorously analysed by Robert Weimann in Helen Higbee and William West (eds.), Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 131–79, in ways that intersect usefully with Kiernan, Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama. Renaissance Articulations 43 as ‘common’, and fewer still ‘vulgar’, however strong their democratic instincts, since to deny one’s own uniqueness is tantamount to a denial of selfhood altogether. In Hamlet, however, this sense of personal distinctiveness is accompanied by a taste for refinement that affects his judgement both of the theatre and of the media in general. This is why he would prefer the Troy play to a play performed on the ‘common stages’ by the ‘common players’, as he calls them. It is also why his line on speech might have come straight out of the courtesy books. For Thomas Hoby, translating Castiglione’s Courtier into an English gentleman, the greater permanence of writing over speech means that we should ‘make it more trimme and better corrected . . . that speech is most beautifull, that is like unto beautifull wrytings’.98 And Richard Brathwait, constructing a native English gentleman, notes that ‘though discretion of Speech be more than Eloquence, these preferre a little unseasoned Eloquence before the best temper of discretion’.99 Shakespeare’s attitude to the oral world, and to the character he created in Hamlet, can be gauged at least in part by the fact that Hamlet’s antic dispositi