Alison Thorne Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare Looking Through Language 2000

Vision and Rhetoricin ShakespeareLooking through Language

Alison Thorne

Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare

10.1057/9780230597266 - Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare, Alison Thorne

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Vision and Rhetoric inShakespeareLooking through Language

Alison Thorne


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First published in Great Britain 2000 byMACMILLAN PRESS LTDHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and LondonCompanies and representatives throughout the world

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

ISBN 0–333–65939–2

First published in the United States of America 2000 byST. MARTIN’S PRESS, LLC,Scholarly and Reference Division,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 0–312–22657–8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataThorne, Alison, 1959–Vision and rhetoric in Shakespeare : looking through language / Alison Thorne.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0–312–22657–8 (cloth)1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Technique. 2. English language—Earlymodern, 1500–1700—Rhetoric. 3. Art and literature—England—History—16thcentury. 4. Art and literature—England—History—17th century. 5. Englishdrama—Italian influences. 6. Visual perception in literature. 7. Ut pictura poesis(Aesthetics) 8. Point of view (Literature) 9. Perspective in literature. 10. Vision inliterature. 11. Aesthetics, Italian. 12. Aesthetics, British. I. Title.

PR2995 .T55 2000822'.3'3—dc21

99–055927

© Alison Thorne 2000

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be madewithout written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with writtenpermission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the CopyrightLicensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable tocriminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustainedforest sources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 109 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00

Printed and bound in Great Britain byAntony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire


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In memory of my fatherChristopher Guy Thorne, 1934–92


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Contents

List of Plates viii

Acknowledgements x

Bibliographical Note xi

Preface xii

1 Alberti, As You Like It, and the Process of Invention 1

2 English Beholders and the Art of Perspective 32

3 Ut Pictura Poesis and the Rhetoric of Perspective 57

4 Hamlet and the Art of Looking Diversely on the Self 104

5 Troilus and Cressida, ‘Imagin’d Worth’ and the‘Bifold Authority’ of Anamorphosis 134

6 Antony and Cleopatra and the Art of Dislimning 166

7 The Tempest and the Art of Masque 198

Notes 226

Select Bibliography 273

Index 285

vii


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List of Plates

01 Diagram of visual rays traversing the intersection fromJacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Le Due regole della prospettivapratica (Rome, 1583), British Library, London

02 Diagram of the ‘velo’ from Albrecht Dürer,Underweyssung der Messung, 2nd edition(Nuremberg, 1538), British Library, London

03 Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in his Study (1514),British Library, London

04 Francesco Parmigianino, Madonna delCollo Luongo (1534–6), Uffizi, Florence

05 Vitruvius’s ‘tragic scene’ from Sebastiano Serlio, Il Primolibro d’architettura (Paris, 1545), British Library, London

06 Nicholas Hilliard, Sir Anthony Mildmay (1585),Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

07 Isaac Oliver, The Browne Brothers (1598),Burghley House Collection, Lincolnshire

08 Robert Peake, Henry, Prince of Wales and His Friend John,2nd Lord Harington of Exton (1603), The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, New York. Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest,1944 (44.27)

09 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Captain ThomasLee (1594), Tate Gallery, London

10 Engraving of The Dioscuri (otherwiseknown as Alexander and Bucephalus),from Antoni Lafreri, Speculum RomanaeMagnificentiae (1573–77?), photograph fromWarburg Institute, London

11 Roman copy of Myron’s Discobolos (c.450 BC),Museo Nazionale delle Terme, Rome

12 Engraving of the proportions of the human bodyafter Dürer from Richard Haydocke, A Tracte containingthe Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge & Buildinge(Oxford, 1598), British Library, London

13 Francesco Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in aConvex Mirror (1524), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

viii


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14 Erhard Schön, Aus, du alter Tor! (1530s),Albertina Museum, Vienna

15 Michelangelo, The Prophet Daniel (1511–12),Sistine Chapel, Vatican

16 Inigo Jones’s perspective scenery for Prince Henry’sBarriers (1610), showing St George’s Portico,Duke of Devonshire’s Collection, Chatsworth

List of Plates ix


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Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to record my gratitude to those who have helped tobring this project to fruition. Some of the ideas investigated here beganto germinate in a PhD thesis completed at University College Londonunder the careful tutelage of Professor David Daniell. My first tentativeexcursions into the field of art history were given direction by Dr PatriciaRubin, who supplied a reading list on the literature of ut pictura poesis,and by Dr Nigel Llewellyn, who saved me a from a number of pitfallsinto which I would otherwise have strayed through ignorance of thesubject, and whose comments on Chapter 3 were particularly construc-tive. Professor René Weis and Dr Michael Bath worked their waypainstakingly through many drafts of the book, and gave much-neededadvice and encouragement throughout its long gestation. For anyremaining deficiencies I am, of course, alone responsible. Specialthanks must also go to Joanne King for lending her skills as a pictureresearcher, and to Dottoressa Marinella Salari, who not only helped meget to grips with some difficult sixteenth-century Italian texts, but overseveral summers generously made available her flat in Perugia, that‘little City of the Infinite View’ as Henry James so aptly called it, thusproviding an ideal environment in which to mull over the issues dis-cussed in this book. During the writing of it I have also been sustainedin incalculable ways by family and friends. My greatest debt, however,is to my husband, George Biddlecombe. Always willing to act as asounding-board for ideas or to hunt down obscure references in far-flung libraries, in the final months he gave me the time and space Ineeded to complete revisions to the book by putting aside his ownresearch to assume the care of our small daughter.

x


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Bibliographical Note

Unless otherwise stated, all citations of Shakespeare’s work are takenfrom the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1997)edited by G. Blakemore Evans. The following abbreviations of periodi-cal titles have also been used:

EC Essays in CriticismELH English Literary HistoryJWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld InstitutesPMLA Publications of the Modern Language AssociationPQ Philological QuarterlyRORD Research Opportunities in Renaissance DramaSEL Studies in English LiteratureSh. Studs Shakespeare StudiesSQ Shakespeare QuarterlySS Shakespeare Survey

xi


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Preface

This book examines how visual and verbal modes of figuring theworld, ways of seeing and ways of talking, are brought into productiverelationship in Shakespeare’s work. In its double emphasis on visionand rhetoric, it engages with two main areas of intellectual inquiry:comparative criticism of the arts and studies of dramatic viewpoint. Itis well documented that the interconnectedness of the arts was takento be an axiomatic and unquestionable truth across much of WesternEurope from the fifteenth through to the eighteenth century. Historiansof both literature and the visual arts have demonstrated just howrelentlessly the implications of the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesisor Simonides’s assertion that ‘Painting is a dumme Poesie, and Poesie aspeaking picture’ were explored and codified during this period. Andthanks to their scholarly labours, it is now generally accepted that atti-tudes to literature and painting were deeply informed by the belief inan essential commonality between the arts. Attempts by modern criticsto retrieve this cultural outlook by mimicking the comparative habitsof mind it once nurtured have not always produced happy results,however. Indeed they have too often led to the kind of arbitrary, over-generalized and facile analogizing whose excesses Gotthold Lessing andRené Wellek among others tried at various times to curb, but whichcontinue, to some extent, to give interarts criticism a bad name.1

Admittedly, the last two decades have seen a general shift away fromthe ambitious system-building which characterized the work of cul-tural historians such as Wylie Sypher and Arnold Hauser, from thebreathtaking assurance that allowed them to sweep everything fromcathedrals to epic poems into the maw of their preferred definition of astyle or period.2 The totalizing approach they espoused has beenlargely displaced by studies on a smaller, more modest or more localscale which take a less cavalier attitude to the problems of corroborat-ing shared influences upon or borrowings between different types ofartefact. An increased sensitivity to cultural difference has simultane-ously challenged the concept of the Zeitgeist, previously supposed toguarantee the underlying homogeneity of any given historical periodand its multifarious cultural products. We are thus being compelled torethink, among other things, the long-held assumption that theEnglish Renaissance, especially where it touched the visual arts, was

xii


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merely an inferior and belated offshoot of its Italian predecessor.Despite these welcome developments, however, the field of interartscriticism still has to be entered cautiously and with a commitmentto specificity, and I have tried to be mindful of this when writing thepresent book.

In exploring questions of vision in Shakespeare, I have also had tonegotiate some well-trodden critical terrain. No student of literaturenowadays would be likely to dissent from the proposition that thisdramatist, more than any other perhaps, was profoundly concernedwith problems of viewpoint. Norman Rabkin’s Shakespeare and theCommon Understanding (1967), which influenced a whole generation ofShakespearean critics writing in the 1970s and 1980s, did much toincrease our awareness that the plays are typically structured in termsof opposing perspectives in such a fashion as to resist or preclude anysimple resolution of the issues raised. Rabkin argued that these play-texts share a ‘characteristic mode of vision’, which, borrowing a termfrom modern physics, he called ‘complementarity’; by this he meantthat they set up conflicting value-systems, each of which offers a ‘totalway of seeing which excludes the other’, yet each of which, paradoxi-cally, ‘makes equally compelling claims on us’.3 What I have to say onthe subject is in broad agreement with Rabkin’s approach. At the sametime, it needs to be emphasized that plays are primarily verbal con-structs that may be said to embody a ‘mode of vision’ not in anystrict or literal sense, but only by virtue of a process of rhetorical sug-gestion and inference. When Rabkin and like-minded critics talk ofShakespeare’s plays presenting different ‘ways of seeing’, or when theyadmire his ‘poetic-dramatic perspectivism’, they are relying, explicitlyor implicitly, upon a metaphor that has been casually appropriatedfrom art historical discourse without giving sufficient thought to itsvisual (or pictorial) origins.4 With the sole but stimulating exception ofErnest Gilman’s The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in theSeventeenth Century (1978), which deals mostly with anamorphosis as aform of witty conceit, little attempt has been made to open up toscrutiny the visual and verbal interconnections encoded within suchcritical discourse. This omission is especially odd given Shakespeare’smany allusions to pictorial perspective, which attest not only to hisabiding interest in the device, but also to his habit of using this as ameans of reflecting upon his own handling of dramatic viewpoint.

Accordingly this book seeks to bring a new precision, a greater sharp-ness, to our use of such metaphors as analytical tools. It endeavours toexplain how certain kinds of visual experience might be reproduced in

Preface xiii


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a verbal medium, by referring to the methods and assumptions thatgoverned such transactions between the arts. One way it does this is byfocusing on classical rhetoric as the main discursive agency throughwhich the visual and verbal arts were welded together and whichthereby facilitated the translation of particular effects from one type oflanguage to another. Apart from providing a common denominatorbetween poetry and painting, rhetorical theory proposed a model ofpersuasive discourse in which language could be understood to operateas if it were a mode of perception. This possibility was implicit in thevisual and spatial tropes employed by classical and Renaissance rhetori-cians as a means of describing particular linguistic functions, just as itunderpinned the development of rhetorical techniques of invention(inventio) and expression (elocutio) that were specifically designed toenable the speaker (and his/her listeners) to frame different viewpointson a given subject. On the evidence of the plays it seems clear thatShakespeare was aware of, and indeed at times consciously exploited,these visual tropes when employing the rhetorical procedures associ-ated with them. Hence I shall argue that within his plays language hasthe capacity to function as a rhetorical equivalent or analogue for per-spective that can be manipulated to achieve similar effects or workupon an audience in similar ways. As well as attending to the more‘literary’ aspects of perspective, I have been concerned to locate its sig-nificance as an artistic technique. Thus the second and third chaptersdraw upon art history in order to show how the meanings and valuesattached to this spatial concept altered according to the context inwhich it was interpreted. Particular emphasis is given to the ways inwhich the principles of linear perspective, and the associated theories,rules and aesthetic canons transmitted with them from Italy toEngland, were adapted to fit a visual culture founded upon largelyalien premises.

This is also the place to alert the reader to what the book does notattempt to address. In choosing to focus on perspective as a function ofpoetic-pictorial relationships, I have set aside other, non-artistic appli-cations of this device, most notably the so-called ‘perspective glass’.A term that encompassed a range of optical instruments, by the earlyseventeenth century it was used primarily to designate various types ofrefracting lens developed by the new experimental science, particularlythe microscope and the telescope. As Gilman has shown, the possibil-ity of exploiting these inventions as a figurative resource was not loston English writers of the period, yet Shakespeare makes no direct refer-ence to them. And although there is a significant connotative overlap

xiv Preface


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between the painter’s perspectiva artificialis and the natural philoso-pher’s ‘perspective glass’, arising chiefly from their shared distortiveand deceitful properties, the latter constitutes a topic in its own right,one that lies beyond the parameters of this study. The decision torefrain from any detailed analysis of questions of staging when dis-cussing individual plays calls perhaps for a fuller explanation. I wouldcertainly not wish to deny that the way a certain scene was or might bestaged, or where the actors are situated in relation to each other or thetheatre audience, has a direct bearing on what the dramatic languageinvites us to ‘see’ at any moment and may have helped to foregroundthe perspectival analogy, though such matters are notoriously difficultto pin down. Consideration of these questions is, however, largelyexcluded by the discursive emphasis of the book. On the other hand, Ido think it is important to bear in mind – and have assumed through-out – that we relate to these play-texts as members of an audience, inthat they implicitly position or define us as such whether we readthem or see them performed. Moreover, our consciousness of that factand of what it entails is continually revitalized by the presence of spec-tators on stage. My reading of the plays therefore takes account of theparticipatory role imposed on us as witnesses in the real or imaginarysense to the dramatic action.

The following chapters do not pursue a single linear argument, norare they intended to suggest any clear chronological development inthe Shakespearean oeuvre. Instead each chapter, or in some cases groupof chapters, is organized around a different aspect of perspective or aparticular topos with which it was closely identified in ut pictura dis-course. Chapter 1 seeks to establish the relevance of visual/linguisticparallels to Shakespeare by analysing the ways in which the spatialimplications of the loci communes, or commonplaces, are exploredin As You Like It. Both in this text and in Leon Battista Alberti’s DePictura, I argue, such rhetorical methods of invention are presented ashaving an equal capacity to generate a unity or diversity of viewpoints.Chapters 2 and 3 trace the adoption of linear perspective into Englishculture, firstly as a revolutionary artistic technique, and secondly as amode of spatial representation which, through the intervention of utpictura analogizing, could be assimilated to a rhetorical model. Here thekey issue is not simply how perspective was creatively transformed inorder to accommodate it to a different cultural milieu, but how itbecame intimately bound up with certain concepts such as illusionand decorum, and with specific values including rationality, propriety,regulated order and their imaginative obverse, in ways that would

Preface xv


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condition and enrich Shakespeare’s treatment of dramatic viewpoint.His growing preoccupation in the early years of the seventeenth cen-tury with disjunctive perspectives and with the consequences of thisfracturing of perception for subjectivity and epistemology is the maintheme of Chapters 4 and 5. In Chapter 4 these issues are examined inthe context of Hamlet’s obsessive interest in self-reflection, his desire tobring the invisible ‘inmost part’ of himself into view, and the corre-spondences between his introspective strategies and those deployedin Renaissance self-portraiture. Chapter 5 compares the modes of seeing/praising adopted by both Greeks and Trojans in Troilus and Cressida toanamorphic images in their power to perplex, and shows how theybecome the vehicle for a sceptical inquiry into the relativity of percep-tion and evaluation. The remaining chapters consider two later playsin which the contending impulses towards an integration or prolifera-tion of viewpoints are reformulated in terms of a politicized strugglebetween a neoclassical aesthetic and other, more fantastical ways ofseeing and imaging the world excluded or suppressed by that aesthetic.In Antony and Cleopatra, a Roman hegemony predicated on the values of‘measure’ and ‘rule’ is radically undermined by the lovers’ imaginativeproductions and their use of rhetorical amplification to construct analternative kind of space not subject to these restrictive laws. Similarly,Prospero’s attempt to recreate the centralized (and overtly autocratic)perspective of the court masque in The Tempest founders, as a result ofcoming up against what to him are the barbarous modes of perceivingand representing reality embodied in Caliban’s grotesquely misshapenform.

xvi Preface


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1Alberti, As You Like It, and theProcess of Invention

1

As part of his bid to transform the status of painting from that of lowlycraft into an exalted intellectual discipline, Leon Battista Alberti urgesthe painter, in his pioneering treatise on the subject, to becomeacquainted with all the liberal arts. A working knowledge of geometrymust first be acquired, for without this the painter will fail to masterthe technicalities of Alberti’s demonstration of Euclidean optics andhow this may be applied to the problem of constructing pictorialspace. But he is also advised to cultivate the company of poets and ora-tors, ‘for these have many ornaments in common with the painter’,among which Alberti singles out for particular emphasis the capacityfor invention, that is, for finding apt and striking subject matter.1 It isto these men of letters, to their imaginative conceits and methods ofelaborating them, that the painter is directed to look for assistancewhen devising his own historia, whose chief ‘virtue’ is similarly said toreside in the quality of its invention.2

Alberti’s assertion that painting has much to learn both from the sci-entific analysis of vision inaugurated by the great mathematicians oflate antiquity and from the arts of rhetoric and poetry marked thebeginning of a new chapter in the history of Western art. On a moremodest level, it offers a convenient point of entry into the concerns ofthis book, which, in their own way, also revolve around the creativetechniques or ‘ornaments’ common to poets and painters and theirmutual, if differently manifested, engagement with the perceptualprocesses codified in the pages of De Pictura. There are several reasonswhy Alberti’s treatise, the Latin text of which was completed in 1435 tobe followed by an Italian translation a year later, may serve as a fittingintroduction to a study of the intricate relationships forged betweenthe visual and verbal arts during the Renaissance. The earliest attempt


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to formulate a theoretical rationale for painting, it was also the firsttext to expound the geometrical methods for producing an illusion ofthree dimensions on a flat surface and the first to undertake a radicaloverhaul of pictorial composition in the light of the humanists’ rhetor-ical interests. The organization of the treatise, which comprises threebooks, reflects these multiple aims. Book I deals with the principles oflinear perspective, the second with the making of the historia (a termthat eludes precise translation, but corresponds broadly to narrative orhistory painting), while the third has to do with artistic training. Itshistorical status as a foundational text in more than one sense meansthat we shall often have occasion to refer back to De Pictura. If themathematical rules for depicting spatial forms set out in Book I pro-vided the basis for all subsequent refinements of perspective techniquedown to the eighteenth century at least, Book II, with its strong literaryorientation, established the main terms and parameters within whichthe discourse of ut pictura poesis – the habit of fabricating analogiesbetween the ‘sister arts’ of poetry and painting – evolved over the sameperiod.3 In both areas, the ideas propagated by Alberti had a decisiveimpact on the theory and practice of painting.

From the standpoint of this book, however, the most significantaspect of De Pictura is its bringing together of vision and rhetoric,whose interactions in Shakespeare’s writings and in the aestheticthought of his cultural milieu are the central issue I propose to explore.Ostensibly, these twin elements are handled entirely separately in thetreatise, each being assigned its own book, but closer examinationreveals that they are bound up in a complex relationship. Not onlydoes Alberti clearly intend his perspective scheme to subserve theexpressive requirements of the historia, but they are drawn into a moresubtle dialogue with one another owing to a continual cross-referencingbetween his optical and rhetorical interests. Moreover, his handlingof the mathematical and literary portions of the treatise is, as we shallsee, informed by a consistent set of priorities and goals. What seems tome so peculiarly suggestive about Alberti’s approach to painting, inother words, is that it juxtaposes a scientific inquiry into the nature ofvision with a model of composition capable, by virtue of its linguisticprovenance, of mediating between poetry and painting, in ways thatinvite the reader to make connections between spatial and rhetoricalmodes of representation. In this sense, De Pictura provides an impor-tant context for the argument that will be developed here and inensuing chapters: the proposition that rhetorical devices acquired theability to function within the literary text – and, more specifically,

2 Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare


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in Shakespeare’s plays – as a recognizable substitute for pictorialperspective.

The first chapter is intended as an initial case-study in which thissame proposition is put to the test by comparing the productive over-lappings and substitutions of rhetorical and visual forms in Alberti’s DePictura and Shakespeare’s As You Like It, written over a hundred andfifty years later. The details of Alberti’s perspective construction will notdirectly concern us here. Instead the focus will be on the rhetoricallyinflected model of composition formulated in Book II of De Pictura andits self-conscious affinities with methods of invention available to writ-ers like Shakespeare. It may be helpful, however, to cast a preliminaryglance over certain features of Alberti’s handling of perspective thatadumbrate some key aesthetic and moral principles more fully workedout in Book II. By far the most salient of these is the overriding preoc-cupation with unity. The geometrical rules expounded in Book I pro-vided a formula for achieving a completely coherent spatial field inwhich, for the first time in the history of painting, all perpendicularlines would converge to a single vanishing point. Heavy emphasis wasplaced on the beholder’s role in the production of this unified space;the location of the viewing eye served as the main point of referencewhen determining the relative size and distance of objects in the paint-ing. Yet, despite its scientific credentials, the resulting spatial configura-tion can be thought of as an imaginary construct, in that, as will beshown below, it diverges in various ways from the optical processesit claimed to reproduce.4 The priority given to achieving spatial uni-formity in Book I is echoed in Book II, though couched now in thelanguage of classical rhetoric, since painting is no longer being viewedin the context of a ‘Euclidean’, but of a ‘Ciceronian’ paradigm.5

Accordingly, perspective is replaced as the instrument with which thepainting’s ideal unity is realized by the historia and the morally edify-ing image of human actions it seeks to project. But here too thebeholder’s participation (suitably reformulated to fit the new, more lit-erary context) is seen as a pivotal factor in generating the harmoniousrelationships of which the painting is ideally composed.

Alberti’s programme for the integration of every element within thehistoria, secured not through the intervention of mathematics but by anarray of linguistic devices, takes up most of Book II. The processesinvolved in the making of the historia are analysed by Alberti in terms ofthree distinct stages: circumscriptio, or sketching the outline of objectsand figures in the painting; compositio, the putting together of the sur-faces depicted; and receptio luminum, describing the effects of colour

Alberti, As You Like It, and the Process of Invention 3


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modified by light on these surfaces. As several commentators havenoted, this tripartite procedure bears more than a passing resemblanceto the first three stages of rhetorical composition, which tradition-ally entailed the searching out of subject matter (inventio), the suitablearrangement of this matter (dispositio), and its enhancement through theapplication of tropes and figures, commonly referred to as colores rhetorici(elocutio).6 With a tact notably lacking in later theorists who laboriouslyhammered out these correspondences, Alberti refrains from pressingthe parallel. Yet, for all its oblique understatement, his policy of graft-ing rhetorical techniques onto painting signals a new rapprochementbetween these disciplines, lending weight and precision to his claim thatpoets and painters have much in common, especially when it comes toinvention. In Book II, however, Alberti is less interested in invention assuch – whether we take this to mean the selection of a particular narra-tive subject or the drawing in which this idea is worked out – than withthe second stage of the creative process: namely, compositio or themethod ‘whereby the parts are composed together in the picture’ (p.71).

Starting from a detailed analysis of the constitutive elements of thehistoria, Alberti describes how these should be assembled into a coher-ent totality directed towards a single didactic and expressive end:‘The principal parts of the work are the surfaces, because from thesecome the members, from the members the bodies, from the bodies the“historia”, and finally the finished work of the painter’ (p.71). That thishierarchical ordering of parts also had its source in humanist rhetoricwas first pointed out by Michael Baxandall, who showed it to involvethe ingenious transposition onto painting of the four-level organiza-tion of the Ciceronian periodic sentence, in which ‘words go to makeup phrases, phrases to make clauses, clauses to make sentences’.7 Butthis is by no means the last of the imaginative transactions whichAlberti conducts with the arts of language. He supplements this syntac-tical model by bringing in another and still more powerful rhetoricalprinciple to underpin the structural coherence of the historia. Painters,he observes, must take care when composing the members of the bodythat these ‘accord well with one another’ in terms of their ‘size, func-tion, kind, colour, and other similar respects’,

for it would be ridiculous if the hands of Helen or Iphigenia lookedold and rustic, or if Nestor had a youthful breast and soft neck, orGanymede a wrinkled brow and the legs of a prize-fighter…Therefore,every part should agree in kind.

(p.74)



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Similarly, at a higher level, ‘all the bodies should conform in size andfunction to the subject of the action’, as depicted in the historia (p.75).The law of correspondence that is being invoked here is decorum: thatform of judgement which determines what is appropriate in a givencontext, and which was deemed, on Horace’s authority, to be an indis-pensable means of ensuring the internal consistency of a work of artfor poets and painters alike.8

This tightly wrought unity appears to be put at risk, however, whenAlberti proceeds in accordance with rhetorical prescription to advisethe painter to embellish his composition with a pleasurable variety.9 Inlanguage reminiscent of Cicero and Quintilian, he affirms that

The first thing that gives pleasure in a ‘historia’ is plentiful variety.Just as with food and music, novel and extraordinary things delightus for various reasons but especially because they are different fromthe old ones we are used to, so with everything the mind takes greatpleasure in variety and abundance.

(p.75)

According to Alberti, such variety is best attained by juxtaposingcontrasting forms (human and animal) or colours. Alternatively, thepainter may choose to depict a diversity of figures in dissimilar atti-tudes or movements, so that some are ‘visible full-face, with their handsturned upwards and fingers raised, and resting on one foot’, while‘others should be seated, or resting on bended knee, or almost lyingdown’ (p.76). This passage could be said to epitomize the assimilationof optical and rhetorical values that is being quietly but purposefullyenacted in De Pictura. For if, on one level, it offers itself as a simpledescription of the repertoire of postures available to painters of thehuman figure, on another level, the reader is expected to register anallusion to figurative discourse, which Quintilian had famously com-pared to corporeal movement. Thus, in Book IX of his InstitutioOratoria, he states that figures may be used for the sake of variety and‘with a view to the avoidance of monotony’, because they ‘producealterations in language’ by giving it a ‘conformation other than theobvious and ordinary’, a change Quintilian likens to ‘that involved bysitting, lying down on something or looking back’.10 Whether we aredealing with rhetorical or with human figures, Alberti suggests, thepleasure they excite depends on artful deviations from our customarymodes of expression.

The other main property ascribed to rhetorical figures, ethopoeia orthe projection of emotion in a manner designed to elicit a sympathetic



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response from the listener, is similarly appropriated for painting.11

Remarking that ‘feelings are known from movements of the body’,Alberti urges the painter to master the difficult art of ‘vary[ing] themovements of the body in accordance with the almost infinite move-ments of the heart’ (p.77). Apart from extending the painter’s expres-sive range (as illustrated, for Alberti, by the gestural richness of Giotto’sNavicella, the one contemporary painting he mentions by name), hesees this as having the added benefit of encouraging the beholder’saffective involvement with the image. Indeed, he recommends theinclusion of a choric figure in order to channel this emotional identifi-cation and so consolidate the relationships created not only within thepicture itself, but between it and the beholder:

I like there to be someone in the ‘historia’ who tells the spectatorswhat is going on, and either beckons them with his hand tolook … or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture,or by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them.

(pp.77–8)

What requires noting here, over and beyond the rhetorical bias thatallows Alberti to redefine corporeal movement as a subcategory ofelocutio, capable of imparting a graceful and expressive variety to awork of art, is the effect this has in modifying the type of connectionshe seeks to forge between the painting and those who view it. Whereasin Book I these connections were mathematically produced, a purelyspatial relationship, in Book II they have become primarily affective innature, rooted in the ‘sense of pleasure and emotion’ with which thehistoria captivates the spectator’s eye (p.75). Taking its underlyingdidactic thrust into account, it is clear that the historia has, in effect,been charged with the task of manipulating the beholder’s response inline with the established rhetorical aims of teaching, moving andpleasing. This shift from a visual to a predominantly verbal frame ofreference has the further crucial consequence – whose implicationsI shall attempt to unpack at various stages of my argument – of elidingthe beholder posited by Alberti’s perspective scheme with the addresseeof rhetorical discourse. In each case the aim is to elicit a certainresponse from the beholder/listener by positioning him in similarways.

Alberti’s attitude to copious variety is one of guarded ambivalence.Despite extolling its delightful qualities, he is quick to condemn what



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he sees as the licentious propensities inherent in such compositionalmethods:

I would praise any great variety, provided it is appropriate to what isgoing on in the picture … But I would have this abundance not onlyfurnished with variety, but restrained and full of dignity and mod-esty. I disapprove of those painters who, in their desire to appearrich or to leave no space empty, follow no system of composition,but scatter everything about in random confusion with the resultthat their ‘historia’ does not appear to be doing anything but merelyto be in a turmoil.

(p.75)

Varying is seen as admissible only where it serves the narrative ends ofthe historia, or on condition that it does not violate the rule of deco-rum which, while it respects the natural diversity of things, subordi-nates this to the larger totality. Alberti is determined, that is, to bringsuch pictorial embellishment under the same discipline as had longbeen applied to the more lavish forms of verbal ornamentation.12

Without these curbs, he fears that the pursuit of copiousness may alltoo easily degenerate into ‘random confusion’. Given the wider associ-ations invested in the historia, such ‘chaos’ is evidently regarded aspresenting as great a threat to the moral and social order as to any aes-thetic ideal. The ‘turmoil’ let loose by uncontrolled copia is, by implica-tion, an affront to a divinely given harmony and its reflection in civilsociety. Unity (as manifested across these different registers) is thusprivileged over diversity in Alberti’s analysis of pictorial composition,as it was in his perspective construction. Yet the anxiety concerningthe potential risks of varying which momentarily ruffles the urbanesurface of Alberti’s text, along with the battery of rules he introduces tohold its dispersive tendencies in check, tells a more complex story.It betrays the precariousness of this unity, its involvement with cen-trifugal forces it can barely contain. Viewed in this light, the orderedharmony of the historia is not the foregone conclusion it appears, butrather the product of a dynamic and thus unstable interaction betweencontending principles.

Alberti’s assumption that poets and painters employ the same cre-ative vocabulary gains in substance when we compare the principlesinforming Book II of De Pictura with those at stake in As You Like It. Inputting Shakespeare’s comedy alongside Alberti’s treatise I do not wishto imply any specific debt to the latter, with which the dramatist is



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unlikely to have been familiar. My purpose is simply to draw attentionto the shared concerns and compositional techniques animating thesetexts, a commonality that must ultimately be seen as the product of atrans-European rhetorical culture which subsumed poetry and paintingalong with a whole plethora of arts. Like Alberti’s historia, As You Like Itis involved in the construction of an imaginary harmony, capable ofabsorbing and resolving into a single focus an extraordinarily diversetreatment of its themes. Although accomplished by formal means, thisharmony takes on specific moral and social resonances in that it is for-mulated in response to the socio-political disintegration outlined inthe play’s opening scenes, as well as to the more oblique threat ofhedonistic individualism. And, as a utopian and finally unrealizableideal, it proves vulnerable to being undermined from within in muchthe same fashion as the historia. Another, less obtrusive way in whichShakespeare’s comedy invites comparison with De Pictura is in its inter-weaving of optical and rhetorical ideas. Where Alberti had invoked aset of linguistic analogues for the unitary space of his perspectivescheme, the play, as we shall see, foregrounds some key visual (or spa-tial) tropes within rhetorical theory in the process of enlisting these inthe production of its complex unity.

* * *

Of all Shakespeare’s plays As You Like It comes closest to fulfilling theAlbertian ideal of compositio, in which a regulated variety is successfullyaccommodated within an overall unity of design. The play’s movementtowards a social concord ratified by Hymen’s blessing and the harmo-nious measures of the wedding dance has been reflected in whatamounts to a critical consensus that a rare harmony is achieved here,an ‘inclusive poise’ or ‘equilibrium’, whereby apparent antinomies aremiraculously made to ‘atone together’.13 At the same time, this unity isrecognized as being forged, paradoxically, out of the ‘numerous shiftsin angle, alternating valuations, and variations in mood’ that springfrom the play’s technique of juxtaposing different characters, or sets ofcharacters, and their contrasting views on a range of topics.14 It is onthe contrapuntal relationship between these tendencies – the one con-ducive to unity, and the other to dispersal – that the following readingof the play focuses. It will attempt to identify the rhetorical strategiesinvolved in generating this plurality of viewpoints and, on the otherhand, in ensuring that the play’s multiple perspectives collaborate inits teleological drive towards integration, instead of becoming a recipe



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for ‘random confusion’ or moral chaos. What emerges from such ananalysis is that the same linguistic devices that help to create thismultivalent harmony also threaten to undo it.

One way of approaching the play’s negotiation of its opposingimpulses towards unity and variety, cohesion and dissolution, is interms of its sustained reflection on the processes of its own composi-tion. Like Book II of De Pictura, the play is profoundly concerned withthe nature of invention and, in particular, with the methods wherebythe old and customary may be varied, reworked or transmuted intosomething at once familiar and arrestingly new. For an Englishmanwriting at the turn of the sixteenth century, the obvious authority toconsult as to how this might be done was Erasmus’s De duplici copia ver-borum ac rerum, where alternative techniques for varying one’s subjectmatter and the received topoi in which this was grounded were conve-niently assembled. Written in 1512 for the recently founded St Paul’sSchool in London, Erasmus’s textbook rapidly became a staple compo-nent of the Tudor grammar school curriculum.15 Its influence was feltfar beyond the classroom, however; the indelible traces left by theexpressive methodology it propounded in the mature creative habitsof writers like Shakespeare who were the beneficiaries of this humanis-tic educational system have been widely remarked.16 Indeed, as NeilRhodes states, ‘it is no exaggeration to say that sixteenth-centuryrhetoric in England is dominated by the Erasmian ideal of copia’.As You Like It is by no means exceptional, then, in attesting to theformative effects of De Copia on the literary production of the period.But, like the earlier Love’s Labours’ Lost, it does bring a playful yet pecu-liarly rigorous attention to bear on the sorts of basic rhetorical skillsthat were drilled into every grammar school pupil.17

Erasmus’s subject, as his title implies, is the ‘abundant style’ and howit may be acquired. The basic trick, as he sees it, lies in knowing how toexpress one’s meaning in as many different ways as possible; a tech-nique that he explains, significantly, by recourse to visual analogy asrequiring an ability to ‘clothe our thought in other colours or otherforms’, and so ‘turn one idea into more shapes than Proteus himself issupposed to have turned into’.18 Such transformations, he says, may beperformed with the help of ‘words’ and ‘things’; that is, by calling onthe resources of both inventio and elocutio. One might set about elabo-rating a proposition by altering its grammatical structure, for example,by substituting synonyms amassed for the purpose, reshaping it into avariety of figurative forms or employing it in different argumentativecontexts. Among the many benefits of cultivating these compositional



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skills is being able to avoid the tedium of simple repetition (no smallasset, given that ‘just as the eyes fasten themselves on some new spec-tacle, so the mind is always looking round for some fresh objectof interest’) and improving one’s fluency in speaking and writing. ForErasmus, such fullness and versatility of expression is eminently desir-able, providing it is exercised responsibly, with judgement and duecaution, since he is no less conscious than Alberti that ‘the pursuit ofspeech like this involves considerable risk’.19 There is always a dangerthat verbal abundance will become an end in itself, the pretext for adisplay of empty verbosity or facile dexterity where words are no longerguaranteed, as they should be, by intellectual substance or ‘matter’.

It is in precisely the kind of rhetorical Proteanism advocated byErasmus that the courtly exiles in the forest of Arden find their chiefrecreation. Seeking to exploit the rich discursive possibilities presentedby their experience of love and country living, they constantly reworkthese themes by visiting all the sources of eloquence mapped in DeCopia (a process parodied by Touchstone’s comic display of varying atV.1.45–57). As they do so, the perceptual implications towards whichErasmus’s descriptive metaphors gestured are consciously explored andbrought to light. But we are, of course, not dealing here with some aca-demic exercise conducted in isolation from any particular topogra-phical or social context. On the contrary, the nature of the play’sinvestment in copious invention cannot be properly grasped withoutreference to its dramatic setting. It is therefore as well to begin by ask-ing what sort of place Arden is and why it should be so hospitable tothis sort of rhetorical activity. Like Navarre’s park or the woods outsideAthens, the forest operates on the most accessible level as a version ofthe so-called ‘green’ world of Shakespearean comedy, where the charac-ters, temporarily released from normal cares, are free to indulge their‘holiday humour’ in verbal combat and display. As we have come toexpect of such milieux, reality proves to be much more fluid andaccommodating in Arden than in the law-bound, ‘workaday’ condi-tions of Duke Frederick’s court or the de Boys estate. The ‘liberty’ itoffers the fugitives from these harsh environments is primarily of animaginative or linguistic order; the leisure to redress the injustices offortune by exercising their wits about inventing alternative versionsof reality in sympathy with their own desires. However, as I shall tryto show, the play goes beyond such typical generic functions to estab-lish a more precise connection between such witty behaviour and itsphysical location.



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One incident is especially revealing in this respect. In II.7, Jaquesrecounts how, on his rambles through the forest, he unexpectedlymet a fool,

Who laid him down, and bask’d him in the sun,And rail’d on lady Fortune in good terms,In good set terms, and yet a motley fool …And then he drew a dial from his poke,And, looking on it, with lack-lustre eye,Says very wisely, “It is ten a’clock.Thus we may see,” quoth he “how the world wags.‘Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,And after one hour more ‘twill be eleven,And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,And then from hour to hour, we rot and rot;And thereby hangs a tale.”

(II.7.15)

The Fool, Jaques goes on to explain, was once a courtier,

and in his brain,Which is as dry as the remainder biscuitAfter a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’dWith observation, the which he ventsIn mangled forms.

(II.7.38)

At this point, the Arden editor informs us that Jaques’s remark about‘strange places cramm’d / With observation’ refers to the ‘common-places or stock topics of rhetoric’.20 It adverts, in other words, to thosewell-worn themes and modes of expression in which all texts of theperiod are saturated, and none more so than this play.21 The common-places (topoi, loci communes, both denoting ‘place’) were regarded asnecessary props to invention in that they provided a rich repository ofsubject matter and of stylistic formulae for developing this. One mightchoose, like Touchstone, to store them in the memory or, as Erasmusand other humanist pedagogues recommended, in the pages of a com-monplace book where excerpts from one’s reading of classical textscould be jotted down under the relevant subject-heading in prepara-tion for their use in amplifying and enriching one’s own compositions.



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This system, writes Erasmus, has the advantage of

getting you into the habit of using the riches supplied by your read-ing … [so] that whatever the occasion demands, you will have thematerials for a speech ready to hand, as you have all the pigeon-holes duly arranged so that you can extract just what you wantfrom them.22

Construed thus, Jaques’s intriguing description of the morphology ofthe Fool’s brain offers an illuminating gloss on the verbal antics ema-nating from it. A deceptively literate courtier and master of wittyinventions, Touchstone has all the materials for a speech ready to hand,conveniently ‘pigeonholed’ in his mind. Moreover, as his railing onLady Fortune and his moralizing on the time demonstrate, he knowsprecisely what kind of discourse the occasion demands, which themeshave traditionally arranged themselves under the heading of the pas-toral life.23 With characteristically iconoclastic wit, however, he reworkshis commonplace matter, defamiliarising this, as it were, by giving it asardonic twist or (in Jaques’s apt phrase) by venting it in ‘mangledforms’. The pastoral world, mythically immune from time’s deprada-tions, becomes a place where man may ‘rot and rot’.

Alternatively, Jaques’s suggestive remark can be taken to refer to thedialectical ‘places’ (topoi, loci), also known, somewhat confusingly, as thecommonplaces. Since Aristotle these had been associated with modes ofargument grounded not in scientifically verifiable premises, but in prob-abilities or ‘generally accepted opinions’.24 As such, their usage wasproperly confined to the treatment of controversial subjects that do notadmit of strict certainty and therefore ‘require the encounter of dis-putants for clarification’.25 Jaques’s casual nod in the direction of theseargumentative tools is less incongruous than it may seem, when webear in mind the taste for debate that the play has inherited from theinveterately dialogic mode of pastoral, or the degree to which it issteeped in proverbial wisdom and hypothetical forms of reasoning (asevidenced by the pervasive use of ‘if’), all of which seem to signal that ittoo inhabits the realm of approximative or popularly conceived truth.Equally germane to the play’s concerns is the manner in which thesetopoi were put to work. The ‘places’ consisted of a series of labelled com-partments into which arguments were classified and whence they couldbe drawn forth at need. One consulted the headings – which variedaccording to the writer, but usually included genus, species, property,difference, cause, effect, similarities, contraries, comparison – for proofs



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that would enable one to carry a point or simply to find out whatmight be said about a given subject. ‘A place’, declares Thomas Wilsonin his Rule of Reason, the first English textbook on dialectic (or logic, ashe calls it), is a ‘restyng corner of an argumente, or els a marke whichegeveth warnyng to our memorie what wee maie speake probably, eitherin the one parte, or the other, upon all causes that fal in question’, andhe expands on its function with a vivid exemplum:

the Huntesman in huntyng the foxe, wil soone espie when he seetha hole, whether it be a foxe borough, or not. So he that will takeprofeicte in this parte of Logique, must bee like a hunter, and learneby labour to knowe the boroughes. For these places bee nothingelles, but covertes or boroughes, wherin if any one searche dili-gently, he maie finde game at pleasure … Therefore if any one willdooe good in this kinde, he must goe from place to place, & bysearchyng every borough he shal have his purpose undoubtedly inmoste parte of them, if not in al.26

By diligently searching the ‘places’ one might thus discover or invent(invenire meaning to ‘come upon’ or ‘find’) suitable arguments to con-firm or refute the point in question, and, by the same token, a plentifulsupply of matter. It has become something of a truism that Renaissancetheorists tended to blur the distinction between dialectical and rhetori-cal invention, valuing the topoi less as instruments of formal (i.e. syllo-gistic) reasoning than as an additional source of copious eloquence.27

Erasmus himself lists the ‘accumulation of proofs and arguments’among the means of obtaining an abundance of subject matter.28

Consistent with this trend, Wilson notes that with the help of the‘places’, ‘not onely shal any one be hable [sic] to speake right, aptely,and very wel to the purpose … but also he shal largelie set out hismatier, with moche delite’.29 On both counts, the ‘places’ would belikely to hold a special allure for a disputatiously inclined ‘materialfool’ such as Touchstone. What his meeting with Jaques highlights, inshort, is the play’s reflexive preoccupation with the process of invention;it shows us pastoral discourse in the making.

In pursuing the rhetorical implications of Jaques’s speech, however,we should not overlook its more superficial meanings. The spatial con-notations of ‘place’, developed in ‘voyage’, ‘observation’ and ‘forms’,generate a semantic confusion between the rhetorical and topographi-cal senses of that word – and, more broadly, between the verbal andvisual domains – which, I would argue, is crucial to our understanding



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of the play’s overall effect. A related cluster of images is used by Jaquesto describe his own peculiar brand of melancholy:

it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples,extracted from many objects, and, indeed, the sundry contempla-tion of my travels, in which [my] often rumination wraps me in amost humorous sadness.

(IV.1.15)

Jaques presents his sombre wisdom as the fruit of having travelledwidely and ‘seen much’; we may suspect it to be the product of hiscommonplace book.30 That his inexhaustible stock of platitudesderives, like Touchstone’s moralizings, from such rhetorical aids ratherthan from direct observation is all the more plausible in view of the factthat voyages – inescapably associated with exploration in this period,as Rosalind’s ‘South-sea of discovery’ (III.2.197) reminds us – wereavailable as a metaphor for the acquisition of literary and scientificknowledge; witness Ben Jonson’s motto: ‘ex libris: Tanquam explorator’.All this talk of travels and voyaging, put into the mouths of characterswhose own geographical peregrinations are central to the plot, helps tosustain the aporia over whether that which is ‘observed’ or ‘discovered’in the course of such wanderings belongs primarily to the visual or theverbal order of knowledge.31

These ambiguities invite us to take a more critical look at the visualtropes embedded in rhetorical (or dialectical) theory and the imagina-tive uses to which they are put in As You Like It. Apart from topos itself,always potentially a ‘live metaphor’ for Aristotle, according to LaneCooper,32 the development of topical logic and commonplace antholo-gies in the sixteenth century produced its own vigorous crop of supple-mentary analogies. Woods, forests and gardens, in particular, becameassociated with the inventive process, being used interchangeably todesignate the field in which the stuff of discourse could be gatheredfrom a range of ‘places’.33 The elaborate treatment which these tropesoften received, along with Wilson’s equally conventional and equallyresonant hunting analogy, indicates just how easily they might berevivified, made concrete.34 In this context, Shakespeare’s interest inLodge’s narrative, with its motif of exile, sylvan setting and huntingreferences, begins to look distinctly overdetermined. His choice ofsource-text allowed him to invest its already highly developed sense ofplace with the rhetorical significations of that word, or, to put itanother way, to actualize topographical metaphor without entirely



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shedding its figurative status. Indeed, it may be argued that Arden isnot fully comprehensible except when read as a discursive space thatcan only be properly explored on a rhetorical rather than physicalplane. Significantly, the play’s critics have struggled to make sense ofArden as an actual location, owing to a lack of descriptive detail andthe blatant inconsistencies in its flora and fauna; but the problemvanishes as soon as it is identified with the pastoral common-placeitself, where oaks and palm trees, deer and lions, might happily consorttogether.35 Such a reading would also help to account for the structur-ing of the forest scenes, which, as has frequently been remarked,are organized around a series of encounters issuing in discussion anddebate. In moving from one part of the forest to another, the charac-ters discover a fresh supply of ‘matter’ as well as new partners indialogue. Just as Jaques, coming across Touchstone, finds in him a richvein of wit that spurs his own, so Duke Senior seeks out Jaques:

Show me the place.I love to cope him in these sullen fits,For then he’s full of matter.

(II.1.66)

In each case, we are encouraged to make the connection between thecharacters’ displacement through the ‘purlieus’ of the greenwood andtheir rhetorical inventiveness. Like Wilson’s huntsman who knowswhich ‘places’ will yield him game, Touchstone and his fellow courtiersknow what types of argument have their ‘assign’d and native dwelling-place’ in Arden and where to look for them.

The play’s welding together of the rhetorical and topographicalsenses of topos may also owe something to the art of memory and theemphasis this gave to visualizing places as an aid to recollecting infor-mation.36 Traditionally, this branch of rhetoric required one to imaginea series of real or fictive localities, assigning to each an image that wasused to designate a specific idea, as though ‘inscribing letters on wax’;by moving (in thought or actuality) from one place to another while‘reading’ the images they contained, it was thus possible to recall theconcepts associated with them.37 Something similar transpires inShakespeare’s forest. In II.2, one of Duke Senior’s attendants relateshow he and ‘my Lord of Amiens’ spied on Jaques as he lay

Under an oak, whose antique root peeps outUpon the brook that brawls along this wood,To the which place a poor sequest’red stag,



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That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt,Did come to languish.

(II.1.31)

He goes on to describe how Jaques succeeded in extracting an abun-dance of doleful matter from this image of creatural distress. Theemblematic details of this scene, the weeping stag and the recumbentposture adopted by his observer, have been shown to derive from thestandard iconography of melancholy.38 Not content with this singlereceived meaning, however, Jaques proceeds, in Erasmian fashion, to‘moralize [the] spectacle’ into a ‘thousand similes’ – by likening thedeer’s weeping into the ‘needless stream’ to the legacies bestowed onthose who already possess ‘too [much]’, his ostracization by the herd tothat inflicted on the ‘poor and broken bankrupt’ by ‘fat and greasy cit-izens’, and so on.39 The sight of the wounded stag standing beside thebrook functions, so to speak, as a mnemonic trigger to his invention,releasing a flood of sententious discourse. A residual oddness aboutthis moment confirms its indeterminate status; for while the presenceof spectators sets this up as one of the play’s many interpolated‘pageants’, as something to be looked at, the fact that the ‘spectacle’ ismerely reported and that its meaning depends on rhetorical manipula-tion emphasizes the primarily argumentative nature of the occasion.This sort of interpenetration of the visual and the verbal occurs every-where in Arden’s iconic landscape. The play asks us to imagine a worldwhere objects, some of them (like the trees in whose barks Orlandocarves his love poems) literally inscribed with messages, can be madeto bear an infinite variety of glosses, where the observant eye is capableof finding ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons instones, and good in every thing’ (II.1.16).40

By projecting rhetorical processes in objectified forms, the play thusactivates a number of visual and spatial tropes that were routinely usedto describe the art of eloquence. We may find it helpful to examine theuse of place here as a kind of shorthand for rhetorical (or dialectical)invention in the light of the thesis put forward by George Lakoff andMark Johnson in their book, Metaphors We Live By. According to this,our conceptual systems tend to be structured by metaphors that dictatehow we perceive, experience and relate to the world at the most basiclevel, metaphors that typically translate mental activities into concreteor sensory forms.41 The visual tropes deployed in As You Like It substan-tiate this argument on two fronts. Not only did these tropes conditionthe way that language was understood to function in classical and



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Renaissance culture, they also suggest that perception is so deeplyinformed by our linguistic habits that it is itself in some sense a productof discourse. This can certainly be said of Shakespeare’s characters, forwhom the act of seeing is seldom a purely physiological event. Viewingtends to act as a stimulus to interpretation and invention, so that theobject in view only comes into focus through a screen of verbal com-mentary. And, conversely, what the characters see is largely predeter-mined by the rhetorical positions they choose to adopt. The idea thatlanguage may embody a particular way of looking at things is alreadyimplicit in contemporary discussions of the ars disserendi. In his DeInventione Dialectica, for example, Rudolph Agricola appears to think ofthe topoi as a set of conceptual viewpoints enabling the mind’s eye torange freely over a given subject when he states that, since the places‘contain within themselves each thing and every possible argument’,by following them the speaker may ‘survey the entire nature, parts,compatibilities and incompatibilities of a thing’.42 With the help oftopical invention it was thus possible to acquire, in Joel Altman’s felici-tous phrase, ‘virtually an Argus-eyed view of any subject of discourse’.43

In much the same way, each of Jaques’s thousand similes generates adifferent perspective through which the meaning of the weeping stag –its conceptual shape, as it were – may be endlessly reconfigured. Bothtopical and analogical arguments, that is, serve as a handy device forturning an idea into more shapes than Proteus himself. The opportuni-ties for complex seeing afforded by such compositional methods areexploited to the full by Arden’s courtiers, especially the agile-mindedTouchstone and Rosalind. In addition to replenishing their store of‘matter’, their movements from place to place bring fresh ways of look-ing at things. By shifting their physical/rhetorical position, these wittyobservers ensure that every facet of the pastoral ideal will be kaleido-scopically explored.

Despite the verbal resources at their command, however, the charac-ters’ freedom to adjust their view of the world or reshape it to theirmeasure is less absolute than might appear. Their pursuit of copiousinvention, like that of the Albertian painter, is subject to constraintswhich prevent it from succumbing to its inbuilt and potentially harm-ful tendencies to dissipation or fragmentation. Take, for example, DukeSenior’s address to his followers on the benefits of country living:

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,Hath not old custom made this life more sweetThan that of painted pomp? Are not these woods



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More free from peril than the envious court?Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,The seasons’ difference, as the icy fangAnd churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,Which when it bites and blows upon my bodyEven till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,“This is no flattery: these are counsellorsThat feelingly persuade me what I am”.Sweet are the uses of adversity,Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;And this our life, exempt from public haunt,Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

(II.1.1)

As a virtuosic display of the metamorphic powers of language thismight have come straight out of De Copia. Devices recommended inthat text are summoned here in order to vary and embellish a veritableanthology of pastoral topoi.44 Thus an initial proposition (‘Hath not oldcustom made this life more sweet / Than that of painted pomp?’) is firstrephrased and then amplified by another (‘Here feel we not the penaltyof Adam’), which is supported by a prosopopeia converting the icy blastsof winter into benevolent ‘counsellors’. This is clinched with a suitablemaxim (‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’), enforced, in turn, by the sim-ile of the toad. The whole performance has an unmistakable air of self-congratulation about it; the Duke repeatedly, if obliquely, calls attentionto his skill in drawing consoling morals from adversity and transmutingphysical hardship into more palatable forms. Even his acknowledg-ment of the courtiers’ painful exposure to the ‘seasons’ difference’,through which an extra-textual reality intrudes threateningly on thetheme of pastoral contentment, is gracefully absorbed into the verbalpattern (‘churlish chiding’, ‘winter’s wind’). This feat of eloquencefinds a fitting response in Amiens, who applauds the Duke’s ability to‘translate the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet astyle’ (II.1.19, my emphasis), his choice of diction (‘translatio’ being theLatin word for metaphor) deftly confirming the rhetorical basis ofthe amelioration in their condition. But while this ducal affirmation ofthe power of a fertile wit to override factual obstacles by making of themwhatsoever it wishes goes unchallenged, it is subtly qualified: firstly, byAmiens’s tacit admission that his master is indulging in a verbal pastime



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whose exact relationship to and ability to act upon the real world are farfrom clear, and, secondly, by the speaker’s deference to ‘old custom’. Indramatic terms, the Duke and his followers (all decked out as foresters,according to the Folio direction) show their reverence for tradition byself-consciously re-enacting the myth of the ‘golden world’ associatedwith them from the very first scene (I.1.115–19), and, linguistically, bytheir continual recourse to commonplace.

Critics have sometimes objected to what they take to be thepompous banality of Duke Senior’s speech.45 But this is to misconceivefundamentally the nature and scope of the play’s commitment to con-ventional modes of thought and expression. Predictable though it maybe in one sense, the Duke’s address is not composed merely of emptyverbal flourishes, nor is it purely self-regarding. Like all rhetoricalgames, it is intended to have a specific effect on its audience, one thatin this instance serves a clear political agenda. By dint of his pastoralallusions and posturings, the Duke is implicitly positing an alternativesociety, capable of healing the fratricidal conflicts and incipient socialfragmentation that characterizes existence at the usurper’s court or thede Boys estate.46 Commonplace has a crucial role in articulating – andhelping to implement – this utopian fantasy inasmuch as it offers away of reconnecting with a past that has been systematically repudi-ated by Oliver and Duke Frederic, whose disrespect for a father’s will inthe one case, and the laws of primogeniture in the other, are seen assymptomatic of the degenerate ‘fashion of these times’. For the ban-ished Duke, it is also a means of restoring his authority; under the‘place’ usually known as pronunciata, but which he calls ‘aucthoritie’,Wilson lists as lending weight and credibility to one’s discourse, ‘quicksaiynges, proverbes … the judgementes of learned men, the commonopinion of the multitude, olde custome, auncient fashions, or anysuche like’.47 Moreover, in all the manifold forms in which it isinvoked in this play – from the dialectical topoi to those formulaicexpressions which correspond more closely to our modern debasedunderstanding of the term as mere cliché – commonplace emphasizesthe beliefs people hold in common, the views they share. Hence it is asingularly appropriate vehicle for the Duke’s vision of a reformed com-munity modelled on the values of the ‘antique world’, where, accord-ing to popular imagination, men acted on the basis of their mutualhumanity, their ‘kindness’, where divisive social hierarchies wereunknown and all things collectively enjoyed.48 It is no accident, then,that he should avail himself of such language in order to reaffirmthe bonds between himself and his ‘co-mates and brothers in exile’.



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A similar function is performed by the play’s songs; their charminglywistful restatement of pastoral topoi helps to cement the society takingshape in the forest by (as Jaques scornfully puts it) ‘call[ing] fools into acircle’ (II.5.55). As an expression of custom and communitas, this com-monplace discourse acts on one level as a cohesive force within theplay, its consensual implications working to counter any drift towardsa total relativity of values, such as may seem to be enshrined in theplay’s title or implied by its delight in rhetorical transformation andmultiple perspectives.

Of course this is not to say that the play’s exuberant diversity cansomehow be reduced to a simple rehearsal of certain literary clichés.Even such pure offspring of the Petrarchan convention as Silvius andPhebe have their unsuspected dimensions. Yet, as we are reminded byCorin’s invitation to see in their courtship a ‘pageant truly play’d /Between the pale complexion of true love / And the red glow of scornand proud disdain’ (III.4.52), the play achieves much of its effect byreworking or playing off quite a narrow range of topoi. One conse-quence of this is that the received ideas which constitute the very basisand precondition for the practice of varying, also ensure that this isexercised within traditionally prescribed limits. The play’s centrifugaland centripetal tendencies, it might thus be argued, are rooted in oneand the same set of rhetorical strategies. This is best illustrated by refer-ence to another of the play’s inset ‘pageants’, which restages a familiarpastoral encounter between age and youth.49 In II.4, Silvius’s hack-neyed complaint to Corin concerning the ‘actions most ridiculous’ towhich he has been driven by his passion is overseen by Rosalind andTouchstone, who comment on the scene following his exit. AlthoughShakespeare had already experimented in Love’s Labours’ Lost and AMidsummer Night’s Dream with incorporating into the plot a sequenceof theatrical performances watched by onstage audiences, it is in thisplay that he really begins to use the technique to highlight the specta-tors’ different viewpoints.50 So it is all the more significant that suchdiscrepancies in outlook are expressed here in the context of a primaryimaginative identification:

Rosalind Alas, poor shepherd, searching of [thy wound], I have byhard adventure found mine own.Touchstone And I mine. I remember when I was in love, I broke mysword upon a stone, and bid him take that for coming a-night toJane Smile; and I remember the kissing of her batler and the cow’sdugs that her pretty chopp’d hands had milk’d … We that are true



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lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is allnature in love mortal in folly.

(II.4.44)

In this comedy Shakespeare seems to be as intent as Alberti on creatingaffective links between the beholders (both on- and off-stage) and theevents they are witnessing, whilst allowing for a greater diversity ofresponse.51 Although undoubtedly heartfelt, Rosalind’s sympathy forthe young shepherd is tinged with irony. In Touchstone’s mouth thisbecomes outright mockery, an irreverent parody of Silvius’s complaintthat commutes its cloying sentimentality to bawdy innuendo. Still, thejoke only makes sense as a burlesque refiguring of the stock absurditiesof love. As if in wry acknowledgment of this compliance with ‘old cus-tom’, Touchstone winds up his speech with a maxim about the univer-sal folly of desire that, as his use of the first-person plural indicates,implicates him among the objects of its ridicule. Even as it is used toestablish divergent positions, then, this display of the art of varying isenclosed, literally and figuratively, within commonplace utterancesand the sense of fellow-feeling issuing from a shared experience theyembody. It is the hidden pressure exerted by this language of consen-sus that in the final scene will permit four lovers to subsume their dif-ferences of opinion, albeit temporarily, in a choric reaffirmation ofPetrarchan platitudes (V.2.83–106).

This process of containment also operates where the differences ofview are more sharply delineated and the sense of relativity theyinduce takes on a decidedly sceptical hue.52 One such moment isTouchstone’s debate with Corin on the stock pastoral quaestio of therelative merits of court and country. To the query, ‘And how like youthis shepherd’s life, Master Touchstone?’, the Fool retorts:

Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respectthat it is a shepherd’s life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, Ilike it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life.Now in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in respect itis not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life (look you) it fitsmy humour well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes muchagainst my stomach.

(III.2.12)

Touchstone does his best to overawe the illiterate shepherd with hisflamboyant demonstration of a skill that every Elizabethan schoolboy



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was expected to master: the use of the dialectical ‘places’ (of definition,property, place) to argue in utramque partem – on both sides of thequestion. In this he is merely following approved argumentative proce-dures that, as I said earlier, were deemed suitable for dealing withdoubtful subjects such as are susceptible to more than one answer.What is amusing and provocative about the speech, however, is itsforegrounding of the relativism inherent in these strategies, which ittakes to extremes by showing how (as Wilson had noted) both positiveand negative arguments could be drawn from the same topoi. Thistreatment of the ‘places’ wilfully transgresses, in spirit if not accordingto the letter, that prescribed by classical dialecticians and their human-ist successors. For if absolute truth remained out of reach, the generalassumption nevertheless was that the clarifying effects of weighing andtesting propositions against each other in debate would lead to aconsensus about which is the more probable, to a form of ‘practicalcertainty’ that might serve as a valid basis for human conduct.53 ‘Thesole object of our discussions’, wrote Cicero, ‘is by arguing on bothsides to draw out and give shape to some result that may be either trueor the nearest possible approximation to the truth’.54 Touchstone’splayful manipulation of the viewpoint embedded in the topoi mockssuch modest truth claims with its insinuation that personal whim isthe only arbiter of veracity, things being indeed as we like them.

Yet, here too, hedonistic relativism is tempered by the forms inwhich it is articulated. Besides relying on the ‘places’ with all their nor-mative force, Touchstone conducts his argument in ‘good set terms’.Like all Arden’s courtly exiles, he quarrels by the book. The rules ofdialectic he observes – or pretends to observe – were primarily intendedto enable the listener to sift truth from falsehood by exposing falla-cious modes of reasoning:

Logique, otherwise called Dialect … is an Art to trie the corne fromthe chaffe, the trueth from every falshod, by definyng the nature ofany thing, by dividyng the same, and also by knittyng together trueargumentes, and untwinyng all knottie subtleties, that are bothefalse, and wrongfully framed together.55

‘And therefore’, Wilson concludes, ‘I would wish that Logique werealwaies the square to rule our talke, & made the very touche stone totrie our reasons’.56 Wilson’s analogy supplies an important clue to oneof the play’s enduring puzzles: how Touchstone came by his seeminglyincongruous name. One way in which this cynical equivocator could



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be said to embody a common standard of truth is in his methods ofargument, which empower his sundry interlocutors – and more impor-tantly perhaps, the play’s audience or readers – to judge for themselvesthe relative merits of the opinions debated in the forest. Certainly, weare given the impression that the characters’ deliberations are not quiteas open-ended as the play’s title suggests; of their being subject to anunstated yet omnipresent criterion that weighs the relative plausibilityof each viewpoint, whether we imagine this to be lodged in the Fool,the audience or the forest itself: ‘You have said; but whether wisely orno, let the forest judge’ (III.2.121).

Not only does the Fool’s chop-logic invite detection by flaunting itsown speciousness, it also fails to get the better of Corin. WhenTouchstone proceeds to take a deliberately extreme and untenable lineof argument – that a man who has never been in court must bedamned, ‘like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side’ (a sly reference per-haps to his own lop-sided argument) – the shepherd opposes him notby unmasking his reliance on sorites (verbal ambiguity) and otherforms of sophistry, but on pragmatic grounds57:

Not a whit, Touchstone. Those that are good manners at the courtare as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country ismost mockable at the court.

(III.2.45)

Corin’s brand of relativism, unlike Touchstone’s, is rooted in practicalcommonsense and a sensitivity to context that offer, as it were, “nat-ural” analogues for the learned arts of decorum and topical inventionparaded by the courtiers. He backs this up with a recitation of his shep-herd’s creed, old as the pastoral tradition itself and as impressive in itsdignified simplicity as it is ‘most mockable’ for its lack of sophistication:

Sir, I am a true labourer; I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe noman hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, con-tent with my harm, and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewesgraze and my lambs suck.

(III.2.73)

Touchstone’s attempts to overturn this with further sophistical argu-ments appear strained by comparison, sacrificing a deeper persuasive-ness to mere ingenuity. Although, technically, it is he who wins theskirmish, Corin speaks for values that are no less integral to this play,



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values that become entwined with and help to stabilize the wittyextravagance they seem to oppose: a sense of balance and moderation,a respect for received wisdom and the claims of the community overthose of the individual.58

As You Like It is full of this sort of interplay between an emphasis onshared norms and a plurality of viewpoints articulated through a richand varied invention. The manner in which this dialectic is handled isexhibited in microcosm by Jaques’s disquisition on the ‘seven ages ofman’ in II.7, and by Rosalind’s similar set-piece about ‘time travell[ing]in divers paces with divers persons’ in III.2. In both speeches, themultifacetedness of human experience is unfolded in relation to aseries of general character types (the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier,the maid, the lawyer, the thief, etc.) which have evidently been fleshedout using the so-called ‘places of person’ (age, sex, profession, disposi-tion, etc.).59 And in both the speaker shows off his/her rhetoricalprowess by detailing the behaviour appropriate to each type, in com-pliance with the rule of decorum which, as in Albertian compositio,mediates between the pursuit of copious variety and an equally strongpremium on unity. But if these conflicting demands appear to be per-fectly reconciled here, the unstable dynamic of their relationship dic-tates that such a balance can never be fully or finally achieved. Thereare moments when the play’s formal harmony is put under severe pres-sure by its proliferating inventions, when the differences of outlookand social interest implied by this rhetorical diversity cannot be satis-factorily resolved or glossed over by an appeal to common values.Many of these occasions involve Rosalind, whose masculine disguiseallows her the freedom to experiment with multiple perspectives inways that resist integration into a single, unified position. Largelythrough the medium of her restless wit, the play tests and exposesthe limitations of commonplace language, to the point almost of invali-dating its generalizing and cohesive properties. The assumption thatthis discourse constitutes an authoritative expression of a universallyshared experience is held up to critical scrutiny, as is the nature of thesocial harmony it helps to construct. For the remainder of the chapter,I wish to focus on those factors that complicate our sense of the play asembodying an inclusive harmony, a discordia concors, by highlightingthe fictive, provisional quality of this achievement.

In II.7, Orlando, driven to desperate measures by Adam’s hunger andhis own, rushes with drawn sword upon Duke Senior and his compan-ions as they picnic peacefully under the shade of melancholy boughs.To his surprise, instead of uncouth rustics he discovers men of his own



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stamp, who ‘know some nurture’ and offer him only kindness and hos-pitality in return. ‘Speak you so gently?’, he exclaims, ‘Pardon me, Ipray you / I thought that all things had been savage here’ (II.7.106).Courteous eloquence is interpreted on both sides as a mark, indeed themark, of gentle birth and breeding. And just as Duke Senior signals hislineage with a graceful antimetabole (‘Your gentleness shall force, / Morethan your force move us to gentleness’), so Orlando, whose hostile ges-ture had threatened to put him beyond the pale of ‘smooth civility’,now reinstates himself within it by appealing in similarly patternedspeech to their hypothetical shared past:

If ever you have look’d on better days,If ever been where bells have knoll’d to church,If ever sate at any good man’s feast,If ever from your eyelids wip’d a tear,And know what ‘tis to pity and be pitied,Let gentleness my strong enforcement be.In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword.

(II.7.113)

The Duke’s repetition of this litany with minimal variation ratifies themoment of mutual recognition. This ritualistic invocation of a com-mon fund of knowledge serves, figuratively, to ‘hide’ Orlando’s swordby dispelling the threat of violence and the deeper social tensionswhich its eruption would have forced into the open. Commonplacewould appear to function here much as it did in the Duke’s earlieraddress to his ‘co-mates and brothers in exile’: as the rhetorical coun-terpart of those pastoral values of kindness, compassion and courtesycharged with repairing the ‘natural bond’ of brothers and with restoringthe harmony of a vanished ‘golden world’.

On closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that the verylanguage used to call up this image of an integrated community – predi-cated on the recognition of a common humanity or ‘kindness’ – simul-taneously works to undermine its claim to inclusiveness. The effect ofthe reiterative verbal play upon Orlando’s ‘gentleness’ and ‘civility’ is toprise these cognate terms away from their universal signification,returning them to their original social meaning as denoting the civilizedmanners befitting good birth or life led in the city and at court.60 Bymeans of this rhetorical sleight of hand, such ‘natural’ qualities are reas-signed as the exclusive property of a privileged minority with access tothe sorts of social ritual Orlando describes. The suggestion is that Duke



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Senior’s ideal community defines itself as much in opposition to theboorishness of the lower orders, exemplified by Arden’s native popula-tion, as against the moral savagery of villains like Duke Frederick. Smallwonder, then, that the persuasive force of Orlando’s ‘gentle’ speechneeds to be backed up with more direct proof of his parentage beforehe succeeds in gaining admission to the Duke’s band of ‘contented fol-lowers’. As the Duke’s concern with issues of brotherhood implies,women too are marginalized by this emphatically masculine commu-nity, which can find no room for the comparable ties, ‘dearer than thenatural bond of sisters’, between Rosalind and Celia.61 The disjunctionenacted here between the egalitarian connotations of the common-place discourse invoked by Duke Senior and Orlando and the actualpractices regulating social relations in the forest has been noted byLouis Montrose in an important essay on the play. ‘Tensions in thenuclear family and in the body politic’ appear to be ‘miraculouslyassuaged’ in Arden, he writes, but while

the courtly decorum of hierarchy and deference may be relaxedin the forest … it has not been abrogated; the Duke’s ‘brothers inexile’ remain courtiers and servants attendant upon his grace. Anatmosphere of charitable community has been created among thosewho have temporarily lost or abandoned their normal social con-text; the sources of conflict inherent in the social order are by nomeans genuinely dissolved in the forest, but rather are translatedinto a quiet and sweet style.62

Acknowledging the part that language plays in ‘translating’ these hier-archical distinctions into more ‘charitable’ expressions of the socialorder, Montrose overlooks the extent to which it is also responsible forholding them in place. Duke Senior and Orlando are not the only char-acters for whom eloquence is an implicit assertion of rank and maleprerogative. Touchstone’s ‘good wits’ are quite blatantly displayed as ameans of enforcing his courtly credentials and his ascendancy overArden’s rustic inhabitants, while Rosalind’s right to lay down the lawto Silvius and Phebe is established by her adoption of ‘a boisterous anda cruel style’, suiting with her disguise as a ‘saucy lackey’. The languageof ‘kindness’, it seems, can as easily become a medium for reinscribingsocial differences as for effacing their existence.

A more conscious interrogation of commonplace and the lessthan benevolent social arrangements it sustains takes place in Rosalind’scourtship games with Orlando. For Rosalind, these games are an



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opportunity to confront a range of stereotypical notions of femininity(and masculinity) which threaten to distort her relationship withOrlando, if not to demolish these – the tentacular grip of commonplaceon our thought and behaviour makes it, she is aware, impossible toexorcise completely – at least with the desire to show them for whatthey are. What makes this possible, of course, is her multi-layered dis-guise as Ganymede-Rosalind. It provides an ideal forum in which toact out conventional gender roles (imperious mistress, capricious wife,promiscuous shrew) without committing herself to the accepted truthsthey embody, or in any way compromising her ironic detachment.Equally, this shifting of persona allows her to multiply perspectiveson the topoi of love and marriage by shuttling back and forth betweenmasculine and feminine subject positions. Like Touchstone, sheexploits the possibility created by her role-playing of speaking on allsides of the question in order to mobilize commonplace discourseagainst itself. But there are important differences. Rosalind’s wit is lessreductive in its critique of orthodox wisdom; the effect of its enchant-ing playfulness being not so much to demonstrate the absurdity ofseeking after truth as to coax the imagination into envisioning alterna-tive, more enabling ways in which men and women might relate toeach other by releasing this from the straitjacket of customary thought.

We get our first real glimpse of the subversive qualities of this wit inIII.2, when the idea of the mock courtship is broached. Rosalind, imper-sonating Ganymede who in turn claims to be relaying the opinions ofhis ‘old religious uncle’, offers to rid Orlando of his lovesickness by thesame methods he once used to cure another ‘fancy-monger’:

He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every dayto woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth,grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantas-tical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for everypassion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys andwomen are for the most part cattle of this colour; would now likehim, now loathe him; then entertain him, then foreswearhim … that I drave my suitor from his mad humor of love to a livinghumor of madness … and this way will I take upon me to wash yourliver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart that there shall not be onespot of love in’t.

(III.2.407)

On the surface, this catalogue of women’s ‘giddy offences’, reiteratingas it does the stale invectives of traditional misogynist satire, appears to



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justify Celia’s complaint that Rosalind has ‘simply misus’d’ their sex inher ‘love-prate’ (IV.1.201). But the rhetorical extravagance of the speech,its dizzy syntax and heaping up of adjectives and clauses, acts as a cor-rective to such a literal-minded response. Far from receiving endorse-ment, it suggests, these popular beliefs about women’s behaviour arebeing ventriloquized, rehearsed in the service of a parodic mimicrywhose effect is to strip them of their obviousness, as the putativeexpression of a universal (female) nature, thereby unmasking them ascultural fictions.63 What is being mocked, in other words, is notwoman’s capriciousness, but the suspect generalizations of the satirist,in whose eyes ‘boys and women are for the most part cattle of thiscolour’. The irony becomes palpable at the end of the speech when theidea of the love-cure is undercut in turn with a neat chiasmic reversaland the comically deflating image of the sheep’s heart. In the space ofa few lines, Rosalind thus manages to subvert both romantic and anti-romantic clichés by the simple expedient of reproducing these inexaggerated, burlesque form and playing one off against the other.Elsewhere she attacks received notions of love more directly bydistancing these from the experiential world in which they are suppos-edly grounded. Men have died from time to time, and worms haveeaten them, but – she ruefully observes – not for love (IV.1.94–108).Petrarchan conceits that credit the beloved’s eyes with the power towound (IV.1.111), or assume that the true lover may be known by hissymptoms (III.2.369–84), are likewise nailed as poetic ‘lies’. But it is thecontext of imaginative feigning established by her disguise which mosteffectively exposes the fictionality of such commonplace lore. BetweenRosalind’s proverbial citations and the everyday realities they purport-edly describe, her proliferating personae – the boy actor (obliquelyrecalled in the ‘moonish youth’) playing Rosalind playing Ganymedesubstituting for his uncle and then for Rosalind – insert many intricatelayers of make-believe.

It is not only the authority of commonplace wisdom that is calledinto question by Rosalind’s games, but its efficacy as a cohesive agent.So slippery is her wit that it refuses to become hostage to any of theviewpoints between which it moves. ‘The wiser, the waywarder’, shedeclares of her sex,

Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the case-ment; shut that, and ’twill out at the keyhole; stop that, ’twill flywith the smoke out at the chimney.

(IV.1.160)



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Just as her woman’s wit cannot be confined in any one place, beingcharacterized rather by its evasion of fixed rhetorical positions and theperceptual limitations they imply, so her many roles cannot be gath-ered up into a single controlling identity or voice. Critics have tendedto see these roles as dramatizing different facets of Rosalind’s personal-ity, believed to be clearly discernible beneath the shifting disguises.64

But the constant rhetorical juggling with ideas hinders attempts tolocate them as the expression of a specific persona, not to mention the‘very, very Rosalind’, who (as we are intermittently reminded) is noth-ing more than the theatrical projection of the boy actor. The difficultyof knowing who is speaking at any one moment complicates ourresponse to the platitudes offered up, as when Rosalind castigates herunpunctual lover by comparing him to a snail:

Rosalind Nay, and you be so tardy, come no more in my sight. Ihad as lief be woo’d of a snail.Orlando Of a snail?Rosalind Ay, of a snail; for though he comes slowly, he brings hishouse on his head – a better jointure I think than you make awoman. Besides, he brings his destiny with him.Orlando What’s that?Rosalind Why horns! which such as you are fain to be beholding toyour wives for. But he comes arm’d in his fortune, and prevents theslander of his wife.

(IV.1.51)

Appearing to take a stand on the proverbial notion that cuckoldry isman’s inescapable lot, the speaker contrives, at the same time, to refutethis ‘slander’ by suggesting that horns are an attribute of nature and sonone of his wife’s getting. Tempted as we may be to assign these con-flicting views to Ganymede and the fictive Rosalind respectively, thevolatile, free-wheeling quality of the wit resists such impositions. Thespeaker’s teasing assertion that he/she and Rosalind are one andthe same person (l.65) merely underlines the impossibility of identify-ing what is spoken as a self-consistent statement emanating from astable, unified being.65

It may be objected that the imaginative freedom from conventionand its attendant constraints conferred by Rosalind’s disguise is short-lived, as she, with the other characters, is returned to her ‘proper’role at the end of the play. It is undeniably the case that this kindof open-ended, sceptical playing with ideas is suspended in the final



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act, along with the courtship games through which it has found release.The experimental pleasures of talking and seeing which have domi-nated the Arden scenes yield to a new emphasis on the more tangiblerewards of sexual possession (V.2.42–52), while differences of view arevirtually obliterated by the levelling effects of the mating instinct, asthe lovers submit, one and all, to the rhythms of the ‘spring time, theonly pretty [ring] time’. This may be seen as necessary preparation forthe play’s culminating affirmation of harmony, the marriage dancewhere ‘earthly things made even / Atone together’ under Hymen’s aus-pices. The resurgence of Rosalind’s wit in the epilogue, with its playupon the ambiguities of her sexual identity (as female character/maleactor), comes nevertheless as a powerful reminder of its continuingability to unsettle such harmony. Arguably, it is this, not Jaques’srefusal to participate in the dance, in which he remains true to hismelancholic type, that poses the most radical challenge to the finalcelebration of social concord and oneness of vision.

Exposed to the disruptive force of Rosalind’s wit, the play’s move-ment towards closure is further undermined by the foregroundingof its artificiality. This is partly a consequence of the miraculous turntaken by events in the fifth act, which aligns its dramatic resolu-tion with the ‘improbable fiction’ of fairy tales: the four marriages,two lightning conversions, and the intervention of Rosalind’s supposedand Hymen’s genuine magical powers. Less obviously, it arises fromthe concentration of ‘ifs’ in the final scenes, used more extensivelyhere than in any other Shakespearean text.66 This harping on ‘if’,as David Young remarks, distils the play’s ‘atmosphere of artificeand hypothesis’, summing up its concern with poetic ‘feigning’ and(I would add) with probable or hypothetical modes of argumentthat, to varying degrees, fall short of complete certainty.67 Inasmuchas it denotes a grammatical construction, the word also calls atten-tion to the role of language in manufacturing the complex unityfigured by the dance. With typical rhetorical self-consciousness, theplay offers its own gloss on the harmonizing function of ‘if’. Immedi-ately prior to Hymen’s entry, Touchstone expounds the rules of courtlyquarrelling for the entertainment of the marriage guests. Enumeratingthe seven ‘degrees’ of the lie, he asserts that conflict may be avoidedby stopping short of the ‘Lie Direct’, and even this may be evaded withan if:

I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but whenthe parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an If,



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as, “If you said so, then I said so”; and they shook hands and sworebrothers. Your If is the only peacemaker; much virtue in If.

(V.4.98)

Touchstone derives the play’s vision of brotherly concord from theirenic properties of ‘If’; its capacity to ‘atone’ conflicting viewpointsand the fratricidal tensions in which they are rooted is seen as stem-ming from the play’s richness in forms of discourse that are predicatedupon plausible or popularly accepted truths. Such truths, being impos-sible to verify, have to be taken on trust. Hence, as Hymen intimates,our faith in the ending ultimately depends on our willingness to assentto this kind of argument, to believe that it ‘holds true contents’: thatits version of truth is both substantive and capable of bestowing lastinghappiness. The cascade of ‘if’s’ at the play’s close seems designed tointensify any doubts we have on this score by reminding us of the frag-ile, conditional nature of the harmony they have helped to construct.What language makes, it may also unmake.

In highlighting the precariousness of the unity it celebrates, the lastact of As You Like It foreshadows future developments. The plays thatfollow this comedy chronologically in the Shakespearean canon chartthe fracturing of its harmonious vision, as the balance intermittentlyachieved there between the forces of integration and dispersal tiltsdecisively in favour of the latter. In Hamlet, and to an even greaterdegree in Troilus and Cressida, rhetorical perspective functions as adisjunctive device, calling into question the unity of the perceivingsubject and the power of language to communicate truth. While per-ceptual relativism and its philosophical corollary, scepticism, are evi-dently a possible outcome of the linguistic strategies pursued in As YouLike It, we have seen that they are kept more or less under control.In the two later plays they will be allowed free reign, culminating inTroilus’s radically self-divided vision of his beloved. And even when ameasure of unity is restored in Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest,it is in the full consciousness of its fictive status, as a product of theidealizing imagination working on behalf of certain romantic andpolitical interests. Before considering these texts in detail, though,we need to return to Albertian perspective and look at the changeswhich its governing conventions, especially the imposition of a singlemonocular viewpoint, underwent at the hands of Shakespeare’s Englishcontemporaries.



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2English Beholders andthe Art of Perspective

32

‘We shall believe we have achieved our purpose if in this difficult sub-ject, which as far as I can see has not before been treated by anyoneelse, our readers have been able to follow our meaning’ (p.37).1 It isthus, in the full consciousness of the novelty and complexity of hissubject, that Alberti introduces the perspective construction which,together with his notion of compositio, constitutes his main contribu-tion to the theorization of art. As we noted in the previous chapter,this construction was the offspring of Euclidean optics, the geometricalanalysis of vision or, more specifically, of the visual rays ‘by [whose]agency the images of things are impressed upon the senses’ (p.40).Developed from its classical origins by a succession of Arabic andScholastic writers during the Middle Ages, the science of optics hadhitherto remained entirely disconnected from artistic concerns. It wasleft to Alberti – following in the footsteps of his contemporary,Brunelleschi – to see how its lessons could be applied to the problemof ordering pictorial space. This marriage of art and science led tothe invention of the painter’s perspectiva artificialis, so called to distin-guish it from the perspectiva naturalis of optical studies: a set of rulesenabling a mathematically exact and rigorously unified depiction ofspace organized around a single vanishing point. Alberti’s formulationof ‘artificial’ or ‘linear’ perspective acquired canonical status, and itis therefore necessary to familiarize ourselves with its basic conven-tions before attempting to assess what English artists and beholdersmade of them.2

Until the early fifteenth century artists had to make do with variousempirical techniques for evoking a plausible illusion of depth andvolume. Although these methods had gradually been refined in theworkshops of Italy and northern Europe, all fell some way short of


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complete mathematical consistency. In De Pictura Alberti proposeda new, scientifically grounded conception of painting that by puttingthe representation of space on a more systematic footing helped toraise the intellectual and social status of picture-making, renderingit fit to stand alongside the other liberal arts. A painting, he writes, is‘the intersection of a visual pyramid at a given distance, with a fixedcentre and certain position of lights, represented by art with lines andcolours on a given surface’ (p.48). According to this model, the picturesurface should be construed as a transparent vertical plane through thevisual pyramid, the apex of which lies in the artist’s eye and its basein the object seen, while its sides are formed by the visual rays extend-ing in straight lines between them. By tracing the outline made bythese rays in their passage through the intersection, it was thus pos-sible to produce a correctly projected image of the object (Plate 1).As a consequence of this simple but revolutionary manoeuvre, thewhole of the depicted space was subjugated to the geometrical laws ofvision, and the picture itself was transformed into an ‘open window’through which the beholder looks out at the world of extensionbeyond.

Having established that a grasp of the ‘rudiments’ of plane geometryand optical science is a prerequisite for good painting, Alberti demon-strates how this knowledge can be put into practice. While he omitsany explanation of how the methods prescribed follow from his expo-sition of the visual pyramid, the basic steps are clear enough. Theyinvolve drawing a checkerboard floor or pavimento, seen from the frontand in profile, that will serve as the framework for a carefully con-trolled spatial diminution. At every stage, as I remarked earlier, theconstructional process is predicated on the beholder’s presence, whichsupplies the necessary mathematical coordinates for the making of thecheckerboard floor. The artist first inscribes a ‘centric’ point (latercalled the ‘vanishing point’) ‘wherever [he] wish[es]’ in a rectangletaken to represent ‘the open window through which the subject to bepainted is seen’ (p.54). This point is used to situate the horizon and asthe locus of convergence for all lines at right angles to the pictureplane (the orthagonals). It corresponds to the place where the mainaxis of sight emanating from the eye of the artist or beholder – since,as we shall see, they are closely identified in this construction – strikesthe intersection. Alberti stipulates that this point should be located‘no higher from the base line than the height of the [tallest] man tobe represented in the painting’, whose proportions provide the mainmodule for measuring its spatial relationships. ‘For in this way’,

English Beholders and the Art of Perspective 33


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he notes, ‘both the viewers and the objects in the painting will seem tobe on the same plane’ (p.54), and to share the same eye-level. If thisrule is observed, the fictional space of the picture will appear to reachout beyond its frame to encompass the beholder, so accentuating theirdependence on each other.

The location of the horizontal lines parallel to the picture plane (thetransversals) is also calculated by reference to the artist-beholder’s posi-tion at a ‘given distance’ from that plane. For where he elects to placehimself in relation to the intersection will determine the orientationand degree of spatial recession within the painting. This is done withthe aid of a second diagram showing the visual pyramid in side eleva-tion, which allows the intervals between the transversals to be cor-rectly marked off where the lines corresponding to the visual rays cutthrough the vertical intersection. When the notations obtained fromthe two drawings are combined, they result in a foreshortened pavi-mento whose regularly diminishing squares can be used to calculateprecisely the relative size, location and distance of objects as theyrecede from the eye. Whatever their content, the pictured worlds con-structed on the basis of such a grid are designed to exude a sense ofrational control and proportional harmony. Seen under the right con-ditions, and once lights and shadows have been added to enhance theillusion of relievo, they will ideally appear indistinguishable from realscenes viewed through real windows.

Aside from its scientific exactitude, the great benefit of this central-ized perspective scheme, as Alberti conceives it, lies in the order andstability it imposes on the mutable, ambiguous domain of opticalphenomena. Describing objects truthfully means attending to theconstant alterations brought about in their appearance by changesin the quantity or direction of the light they receive or their positionrelative to the beholder, as Alberti acknowledges at the start of Book I(pp.39–40, 44). The important point, though, is that this is treatedas no more than a preliminary stage in a selective process designed toscreen out all but one of the object’s manifold aspects. Similar ends areserved by another Albertian invention, the so-called velo. This was areticulated net or veil, divided up into ‘parallel square sections’ andplaced between the artist’s ‘eye and the object to be represented, sothat the visual pyramid passes through the loose weave of the veil’. Bylooking at the object through this grid from a pre-selected standpoint,the artist was able to fix its contours within the parallels before record-ing them on a drawing organized into a corresponding system ofsquares. This process was not simply intended to facilitate the precise



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transcription of appearances; it also helped to arrest or subdue theirtroublesome permutations, since one of the veil’s ‘many advantages’cited by Alberti is that ‘it always represents the same surfacesunchanged’ (p.65). A version of the velo was included among the arrayof perspective instruments illustrated in Dürer’s treatise on measure-ment (Plate 2), and much the same function was performed by thelarger, impressively elaborate machine shown on the cover of thisbook, which was recommended by Egnatio Danti in his commentaryon Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola’s Le due regole della prospettiva pratica(Rome, 1583) over fifty years later. This kind of mechanical device hadearned a permanent place in the arsenal of techniques at the artist’sdisposal in his campaign to rationalize the depiction of spatial formsand reduce their volatile, illusory effects to ordered consistency.

Like the ideal harmony of his historia, similarly conceived as theexpression of a divinely instituted order, Alberti’s law-bound, homoge-neous space possesses features that clearly mark it out as an imaginaryconstruct.3 The coherence and stability of its visual geometry wereachievable only at the cost of prohibiting all movement, whether inthe object perceived or in the perceiving subject. To pass for a convinc-ing image of three-dimensional reality, a painting had, according toAlberti’s theory, to be viewed ‘from a certain distance’ and through asingle, fixed and immobile eye. The beholder was required, in effect, toinsert himself into the same position originally occupied by the artist.Although the premises on which it was based have since been dis-proven, this precondition was reiterated by later theorists.4 Some wentso far as to advocate the use of an eye-piece placed at the correct spot,of the kind seen in the Dürer engraving. These strict viewing condi-tions gave rise to one of the many paradoxes inherent in the theoryof linear perspective. For while the artist is at liberty (within certainlimits) to select his own viewpoint, thereafter he and the beholder areobliged to adhere rigidly to the designated place. Or, to put it anotherway, if the artist has the power, through his arbitrarily chosen position,to determine the spatial configuration of the painting, conversely theresulting optical image specifies the beholder’s viewpoint. In laterchapters, this reciprocal process will be explored as an analogue for theway rhetorical discourse operates in relation to the speaker and thoseto whom it is addressed. Here I am concerned rather with its practicalconsequences. The conventions of Albertian space meant that it couldonly come into being by denying the circumstances that obtain inactual, binocular vision, where we are free to look through both eyes,to shift our gaze or move about, thereby opening up a much more fluid



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visual field capable of extension in an unlimited number of directions.Ironically, the costruzione leggitima (as this system came to be known) isfounded on a recognition of the degree to which visual appearances arecontingent upon a particular beholder, yet manages to suppress the rel-ativistic implications of that fact. It evokes the illusion of our shifting,multifaceted world of sight as never before, whilst enclosing thiswithin a single, strictly delimited viewpoint. In so doing, it sacrificesthe plurality of aspects and potential viewers implicit in the verynotion of perspective to an ideal of uniformity.

The costruzione leggitima, as its name suggests, rapidly establisheditself as the correct method for expressing the third dimension on a flator curved surface. A knowledge of its conventions became an indis-pensable tool for every self-respecting artist in Italy and, in due course,across Europe. Meanwhile, its theoretical basis – as expounded inAlberti’s method or in the longer version, reproducing the intersectionin full plan and elevation, worked out by Piero della Francesca – wascodified and disseminated via a series of treatises published in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries.5 Yet while the normative status ofthis construction was never in question, it is important to recognizethat its hegemony was not absolute. It had always coexisted with otherspatial systems, which, if they were not absolutely at odds with theorthodox method, did at least offer the artist alternative possibilities.Of these it is only possible here to touch on the two most significant,‘aerial’ perspective and the ‘tiers point’ method. ‘Aerial’ perspectivewas based on the observation that as well as diminishing in size in pro-portion to their distance from the eye, objects gradually lose theircolour and their contours become blurred.6 The ‘tiers points’ method,on the other hand, supplemented the central vanishing point of thecostruzione leggitima with two ‘distance points’, usually placed on thelateral margins of the painting, which functioned as the point of con-vergence for lines lying at 45 degrees to its surface. Apart from provid-ing a simpler route to constructing the pavimento, this systemencouraged a return to the slanting space and forms set at an obliqueangle to the picture plane that had been largely displaced by thefrontal, rectilinear compositions favoured by Albertian perspective.There is some evidence to suggest that this spatial formula proved espe-cially popular with northern artists. Dürer apparently employed ele-ments from it for his 1514 engraving of St Jerome in his Study, with itssharply angled forms and plunging orthagonals which recede to a van-ishing point eccentrically located on the right-hand margin (Plate 3).7

Although based on a workshop practice current in the Trecento, the



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‘tiers points’ method had to wait until the beginning of the sixteenthcentury to receive theoretical definition.8 Eventually Vignola wouldtake it upon himself to demonstrate its mathematical soundness andits compatibility with the orthodox construction.9

Not only was the costruzione leggitima merely one of several possi-ble systems for representing space; it was also a set of rules dependentfor its practical implementation on the individual artist’s powers ofinvention and conditioned by the specific task he had in hand.Consequently it was rare, even at first, for these conventions to bedogmatically applied; rather, they were adapted and reinterpreted tosuit the requirements of the moment, sometimes in daringly experi-mental ways.10 In the Cinquecento especially, the interpretive processwas carried so far in some cases that Albertian norms were either moreor less jettisoned or transformed beyond recognition. In Manneristpaintings, to cite a well known instance, the conventions of deep spa-tial recession and harmonic proportions are deliberately abandoned infavour of a more compressed pictorial space and gracefully attenuatedfigures. Artists such as Parmigianino and Pontormo skilfully exploitedambiguities in their handling of these aspects of painting, creatingeffects that defy translation into a rationally coherent or intelligiblevisual world. Alberti had treated the proportions of the human figure asa fixed scale by which the relative dimensions of other objects could beprecisely measured, reasoning that ‘man is the best known of all thingsto man’ (p.53). By contrast, in Parmigianino’s Madonna del Collo Luongo(1534–6) (Plate 4) the fantastically elongated proportions of theMadonna and child do not clarify the spatial relationships of whichthey are part, but, on the contrary, render them virtually illegible. Ourdifficulty in making logical sense of this picture is compounded bythe abrupt cleavage between the cramped, overpopulated foregroundand the twilight depths glimpsed to the right of this, which makes thedistance between them impossible to ascertain, the column and theman with the scroll in the background appearing implausibly small incomparison with the towering Madonna.

A more insidious challenge to the authority of Albertian perspectivearose from some of the novel applications found for it in the course ofthe century. These usages did not involve a direct violation of the rulesof the costruzione leggitima, still respected in essentials, so much as ateasing out of its potentialities. But by manipulating its conventions inextreme and self-consciously playful ways, they tended to destabilizethe very system on which such effects depended. This developmentwas bound up with the contemporary fascination with illusionism in



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all its forms, as employed in the decoration of ceilings and walls, in themaking of scenic designs and optical jeux d’esprit. It was during thisperiod that illusionistic stage scenery – of the type that Inigo Joneswould later transplant into the Stuart court masque – was first usedfor plays and intermezzi at the Italian ducal courts and more permanenttheatres such as the Teatro Olimpico at Vincenza.11 Designed in strictaccordance with the laws of perspective, such scenery often had toresort to accelerated foreshortening and other optical tricks in order tocreate the requisite impression of deep space on a shallow stage. Theearly decades of the century also saw the beginnings of the great eraof the illusionist ceiling with its soaring architectural structures seem-ingly open to the heavens in which swirling figures are suspended.Its inventors – called upon to reorient the picture plane through90 degrees – became adept at dramatically foreshortening their figuresto accommodate the low viewpoint, and at blending fictive with actualarchitectural settings so that the ceiling surface is dissolved and onecannot tell where reality leaves off and illusion begins. In producingsuch convincing effects of infinite expanse, they perfected the trompel’œil realism associated with the costruzione leggitima in ways thatAlberti could scarcely have contemplated. But the illusion evoked iseven more vulnerable than in conventional perspective paintings, foras soon as the beholder moves away from the predetermined view-point, the whole scene begins to distort alarmingly. This was also thecase with anamorphic pictures which enjoyed a considerable vogue inItaly and, more especially, the North by the end of the century.12

Typically, this species of perspectival image presents an indecipherablepattern of distended shapes if looked at from a centralized viewpoint,as Albertian conventions dictate, only assuming its true proportionswhen viewed from the margins at an angle close to the picture plane.Often dismissed as an ephemeral curiosity or divertissement, illustratingthe more bizarre aspects of perspective, it could also generate thought-provoking art. One thinks, for example, of Holbein’s Ambassadors(1533) with its famous anamorphic skull, or, in a more light-heartedregister, of the Schön engraving discussed in Chapter 5 (Plate 14).

All these exaggerated and knowingly unorthodox uses of perspectivefigure prominently in treatises on the subject published in the secondhalf of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Daniele Barbaro’sLa Pratica della perspettiva (Venice, 1569), for instance, includes one ofthe earliest discussions of the art of anamorphosis, this ‘bella e secretaparte di Perspettiva’, as he calls it.13 It also reproduces the influentialengravings of stage designs, based loosely on Vitruvius, for ‘Comical’,



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‘Tragicall’ and ‘Satiricall’ scenes – two of which show illusionistic archi-tectural settings placed on a foreshortened pavimento (Plate 5) – whichwere originally devised for Sebastiano Serlio’s treatise on architecture.Vignola similarly devotes some attention to anamorphic images as wellas offering detailed instruction on painting vaults, considered by himto be the most difficult yet admirable branch of perspective. Both thesetopics reappear in Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura,scoltura et architettura (Milan, 1584), which will be examined in thenext chapter as an important mediator of Italian aesthetic ideas viaRichard Haydocke’s anglicized version of it. Lomazzo’s technical expo-sition of these and other applied aspects of perspective are largelyconfined to Book VI of the Trattato, which Haydocke never got aroundto translating. Yet, as we shall see, his general remarks on perspectivein the earlier books reflect the proclivities of his artistic milieu insanctioning practices that effectively subvert Albertian rules and canon-ical proportion whilst outwardly conforming to them. Thus the author-ity of perspectival norms was already being questioned in the format inwhich they were transmitted to English readers and to English artists,who, for their own reasons, would find them difficult to comply with.

The multiple forms perspective might take and the different uses towhich it was put support the line taken by a number of recent analystswho argue that, for all its historical dominance, the Albertian modelwas not a seamless whole, any more than it precluded the formation ofalternative visual economies within Western culture.14 Svetlana Alpers,for example, has shown how seventeenth-century Dutch art assumes avery different mode of describing space, in which the framed prospectseen at a distance from a specified viewpoint is replaced by a panoramicaggregate of views which stand in for the (mobile) eye itself – a per-spectival treatment conceived by analogy not with the open windowbut with the camera obscura and the map.15 Differences within theorthodox system were also brought into play when it came into con-tact with cultural contexts beyond the boundaries of its native Italy.Reviewing the dissemination and adoption of linear perspective acrossnorthern Europe, Martin Kemp observes that in the case of artists likeDürer

we will not simply be witnessing a passive acceptance of Italianideas. The way in which perspective became creatively transmogri-fied as it travelled Europe is partly a consequence of the possibilitiesit offered to artists of high intellect and individuality, but alsoreflects the position of perspective as a new citizen in an adopted



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country – naturalised to a degree, but still speaking with a foreignaccent, for the first generation at least … In its new country, a cer-tain strangeness tends to persist.16

Kemp is thinking here chiefly of Germany and France, but his remarksapply with equal force to the importation of perspective into Englishvisual culture. Indeed, it may be argued that the process of creativetransformation he describes is more obviously exemplified in the caseof England, which was slower and altogether less eager to appropriateperspective than its continental neighbours and where it remained inmany respects an alien discourse well into the seventeenth century. Inthe following pages, I shall consider the English reception of this picto-rial technique, examining the ways in which its conventions weremodified in practice and its meaning differently inflected in their newadoptive context. This will lead me to speculate about the qualities itcame to embody in the minds of indigenous artists and, no less impor-tantly for our purposes, of English writers – qualities that Shakespearewas able to harness for his own imaginative ends.

Any attempt to define the place occupied by perspective in Englishvisual culture at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning ofthe seventeenth must confront certain problems. To start with, thenature and degree of its importance for English artists and beholdersare not self-evident but, on the contrary, need to be carefully estab-lished. One might reasonably ask just how relevant the concept of per-spective was to a culture in which it made such a belated appearanceand with whose native artistic traditions it was conspicuously at odds –a culture whose very participation in an Italian-style Renaissance hasbeen seen by some as open to dispute.17 Painting was still widelyregarded as a mere craft, and not a prestigious one at that.18 Moreoverthe period from 1590 to 1613, during which Shakespeare’s plays werewritten, was, from an art historical standpoint, a transitional phasethat tended, Janus-like, to look as much to the past as to the future,and hence is one that does not lend itself to easy summarization. Inspeaking of contemporaneous developments in the visual arts, weoften find ourselves obliged to proceed by means of qualifications,by statement and counterstatement. In this respect the map of theperiod handed down by Roy Strong and others, according to whichthe ignorance of continental aesthetic conventions prevailing underElizabeth I abruptly gave way to the ‘revolution in visual perception’ushered in by the Stuarts, proves unhelpfully schematic.19 As I shalltry to show, the reception of perspective, in both theoretical and



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practical contexts, was a more complex and chequered affair than thisnarrative suggests. If its intellectual rigour and powerful mimeticeffects were enthusiastically embraced in some instances, they weredisregarded or rejected in others. Indeed, acceptance and resistance canbe hard to disentangle in the case of a picture by Marcus Gheeraertsthe Younger or the attitude of an artist such as Nicholas Hilliard orHenry Peacham. And even where the desire to assimilate this new tech-nique is clearly paramount, its meaning and function are necessarilyaltered through contact with a foreign environment in ways that makeAlbertian norms, in their pure, originary form, largely inapplicable.Even once absorbed and domesticated, perspective retained its foreignaccent.

The question of relevance is posed most strongly by Elizabethan por-traiture, notoriously lacking as it is in perspective, chiaroscuro, corpo-real modelling and other illusionistic devices that had for so long beenan integral part of the continental aesthetic tradition.20 In these por-taits – which make up the bulk of artistic production in the period –figures tend to be represented as flat icons posed stiffly against a plainbackground or in a restricted space minimally defined by a few simpleprops. The emphasis falls on colour and linear patterning at theexpense of any evocation of solid, three-dimensional bodies or attemptto create a convincing architectural setting. The purposes whichshaped the making of such images were an additional factor militatingagainst illusionism, in that their primary function was to express thesubject’s social role, office, status and lineage rather than to record thequirks of an individual appearance or personality; as David Evett putsit, ‘their emblematic or iconic nature, calling up the role, the idea,more than the person, pulls the quality of the painting away fromnaturalism and hence away from naturalistic devices like perspec-tive’.21 The ambition to produce a lifelike image seems largely tohave been confined to what Alpers, speaking of Dutch painting, calls‘descriptive presence’, or the precise rendering of surfaces. In Englishportraits of the period this is ostentatiously expressed by a delightin capturing the minutest details of costume: the texture of expensivefabrics, the light glancing off pearls, jewellery and armour, the intrica-cies of ruffs, lace and embroidery. Attention to surfaces was reinforcedby the practice of superimposing on the actual picture plane heraldicdevices or various types of inscription recording the date, the sitter’sage and identity, and even, on occasion, mottos and commemorativeverses. Any impulse to read this plane as a window giving onto a worldof infinite spatial extension was thus well and truly quashed. A more



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appropriate paradigm for these portraits is, in fact, to be found in themedieval concept of painting as ‘a material surface covered with linesand colors which could be interpreted as tokens or symbols of three-dimensional objects’.22

The Queen’s official portraits are the purest embodiment of this for-mal, decorative and two-dimensional style, her favourite miniaturist,Nicholas Hilliard, its chief exponent. Their famous exchange concern-ing artistic matters, recorded some thirty years after the event inHilliard’s Arte of Limning (c.1600), has often been cited as a quintessen-tial expression of late Elizabethan tastes in affirming the shared prefer-ence of the Queen and her limner for a linear style that eschews heavyshadowing. It is worth noting, however, that the details of their con-versation reveal this preference to be something more than ignorantprejudice. The Queen, remarking on ‘the great difference of shadowingin the works … of sundry nations, and that the Italians, who had thename to be cunningest and to draw best, shadowed not’, wishes toknow the reasons for this. Hilliard explains that while some paintersprefer to work with a restricted light source in order to make ‘the workemboss well [appear in strong relief], and show very well afar off’, suchuse of ‘hard shadows’ is more suited to ‘story work’ – to an historiaor narrative painting – than it is to miniatures, which are to be ‘viewedof necessity in hand near unto the eye’.23 Theirs is clearly an informedchoice based on an awareness of stylistic alternatives as articu-lating national differences, and of what is distinctive about the Englishvisual tradition and its peculiar product, the miniature. Hilliard’s viewson perspective are, by contrast, impossible to pin down. He deploresthe ‘disproportion and false perspective’ that mars ‘much fair work’,no doubt with their botched handling by native ‘artificers’ in mind(p.85), and explicitly defers to Lomazzo – on whom he draws viaHaydocke’s translation – over the importance of understanding therules of perspective, conceived as a science of visual measurement(p.71). Yet, as will become apparent when we take a closer look at hisArte of Limning in Chapter 3, he not only transposes Lomazzo’s defini-tion into an alien and unmistakably English idiom, but refuses tobe bound by the authority of rule and rational system implicit in thatdefinition. To add to the confusion, his incidental remarks on perspec-tive reduce it to a rough-and-ready practical device for obtaining alifelike appearance:

as the position is, or the drawer placed according to art, the furthesteye from the drawer must be a little higher than the hithermost,



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because of the perspective, if the drawer sit any deal higher than theparty drawn; but if lower, then the further eye must be a little lower;if level, then to be of one height. So shall the work by well placingand true doing of the eye have great life.

(p.79)

We are transported back to a pre-Albertian world of craft-based, empiri-cal knowledge.24

As in his writings, so in his practice Hilliard’s response to the per-spective techniques he must have encountered during his two-yearsojourn in France was highly selective and non-committal.25 His por-traits are invariably oriented towards the surface, his figures flattenedout by the minimal use of shadow. In general, too, he avoids the useof any particularized spatial setting. One interesting exception is hislarge-scale miniature of the courtier and soldier, Sir Anthony Mildmay(Plate 6), represented in his tent surrounded by the paraphenalia ofthe Accession Day tilts. Perspective is used here locally and after arudimentary fashion for the foreshortening of particular objects, suchas the trunk on the far right, rather then being applied systematicallyas a means of organizing and unifying the whole picture plane. Opticallogic has in fact been made to bow to expressive considerations; whilethe figure of Mildmay, with its gracefully elongated legs familiarfrom other Hilliard portraits, is viewed straight on, the ground plane istilted towards us at an incredible angle so that the military accou-trements betokening his participation in these neochivalric games – hisgauntlet, lance and plumed helmet – and, by extension, his statusas a favoured courtier are displayed to maximum advantage. Littleattempt has been made to disguise the resulting spatial inconsistencies.Sir Antony looks out at us, engaging us in a brief moment of intimacy,but the beholder is in no sense positioned or defined by the spatialorganization of the picture.26 Indeed, as Clark Hulse has pointed out,the specific qualities of the miniature precluded any such mathemati-cal relationship by destroying the symmetry between the artist’sand the beholder’s viewpoints posited by Alberti; painted at a distanceof around six or seven feet, it was made to be viewed ‘in hand nearunto the eye’.27

This relative indifference to perspective on the part of native practi-tioners was, to some extent, offset by the availability of continentalmodels. Access to this alternative illusionistic tradition was, however,restricted in various ways. The Reformation had curtailed cultural traf-fic with Italy and inhibited any serious attention being paid to its art,



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which, of course, dealt overwhelmingly with religious subjects. Onlythe privileged few had the opportunity to become acquainted with thisart in situ, at a time, moreover, when the continental grand tour hadnot yet become an obligatory rite of passage for young aristocrats. Onthe other hand, from the 1530s, when Holbein’s services were engagedby Henry VIII, English visual culture was periodically enriched by theimmigration of foreign artists, many of them Flemish and DutchProtestants fleeing religious persecution.28 They brought with themtheir own style of substantial bourgeois naturalism, still clearly identifi-able in the work of a Hans Eworth or a Cornelius Ketel, despite thepressures they were under to accommodate this style to the prevailingEnglish taste for linear flatness and iconic formality. Works by foreignartists, both Italian and Flemish, are also known to have formed part ofthe extensive picture collections assembled by the Earl of Leicester,Lord Lumley and a handful of other noblemen who were the precur-sors of the great aristocratic collectors of the Caroline era.29 More diffi-cult to assess is how far this interest in acquiring paintings by foreignas well as indigenous artists filtered down the social scale. In his epistleto the reader, Haydocke refers to an appreciation for well executed pic-tures shown by ‘divers private Gentlemen’ as well as ‘some of ourNobility’, and a desire to procure them at any cost, ‘as may appeare, bytheir Galleries carefully furnished, with the excellent monuments ofsundry famous ancient Masters, both Italian and Germane’. But inalmost the same breath he, like Peacham later, laments the lack ofinformed patronage and the low esteem in which painting is generallyheld in England.30 One way in which examples of Italian and Flemishart could have come within the purview of a broader section of societywas through printed engravings; and, although facts are notoriouslyhard to come by in this area, Antony Wells-Cole’s recent book, show-ing how pervasive the impact of European prints was on the decorativearts, has established that the market in this kind of commodityexpanded dramatically during Elizabeth’s reign.31 The cumulative evi-dence – sketchy as it is, and indeed contradictory in places – suggeststhat by the 1590s English men and women were beginning to acquiresome knowledge of, and a taste for, works of art in what might becalled the scientifically naturalistic mode.

This increasing familiarity with illusionistic art was reflected in acorresponding growth in the number of allusions to linear perspectivein the literature of the period. Lucy Gent has documented the intellec-tual curiosity and excitement with which many of the foremostwriters of the day – including Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman and



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Drayton – responded to what were, for them and their generation, thenew-fangled devices of perspective and chiaroscuro.32 As she also notes,however, this newly awakened interest was not accompanied by orgrounded in a working definition of perspective, a fact that she putsdown to the absence in England of any extensive experience of conti-nental art and, by extension, of a specialized artistic vocabulary ade-quate to deal with such sophisticated concepts. There were exceptionsof course – men who lacked neither the education nor the appropriatediscourse to discuss the theoretical principles involved. One such wasJohn Dee, who, in his preface to Henry Billingsley’s translation ofEuclid’s Elements (1570), defines drawing (or ‘Zographie’, as he calls it)in language that may, for the first time, be said to be truly Albertian (heowned a copy of De Pictura along with other works on perspective andarchitecture). A knowledge of geometry, arithmetic, perspective andproportion is, he declares, indispensable to the practice of ‘Zographie’,

an Arte Mathematicall, which teacheth and demonstrateth, how theIntersection of all visuall Pyramides, made by any playne assigned,(the Centre, distance, and lightes beyng determined) may be, bylynes, and due propre colours, represented.33

But it was primarily as a graphic technique suited to a range of scien-tific purposes that perspective interested Dee, not as an artistic tool. Heregarded the painter, for all his marvellous skill, as merely the mechan-ical executor of the draughtsman’s theoretical knowledge (‘but the pro-pre Mechanicien, & Imitator sensible, of the Zographer’). In this, hewas carrying on an English tradition of valuing perspective for itsmathematical basis and its practical utility in matters of building, forti-fication, surveying, astronomy, ‘and topographie’, rather than for itsassociation with the fine arts.34 The existence of such a tradition mayaccount for the large number of perspective treatises to be found insurviving library inventories dating from around this time.35 It mayalso help to explain why the presence of these treatises, like Dee’s pre-cocious definition, appears to have had remarkably little impact on thedevelopment of English aesthetic discourse.

Untutored in the niceties of the intersection, the visual pyramidand light rays, the average Englishman could offer only impression-istic descriptions of perspective, emphasizing not its underlying scien-tific rationale but its powerful and wondrous effects. Poetic testimonyto the sense of astonishment aroused in the beholder by the newillusionist technology is supplied, for example, by a passage in Drayton’s



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Poly-Olbion (1612), where the river Soare is likened, somewhat improba-bly, to a maiden entering a richly furnished prince’s court where she‘amazed is to see’

Large galleries, where piece with piece doth seeme to strive,Of pictures done to life, landskip, and perspective,Thence goodly gardens sees, where antique statues standIn stone and copper, cut by many a skilfull hand,Where every thing to gaze, her more and more entices,Thinking at once shee sees a thousand paradices … 36

For a poet, this lack of technical expertize did not necessarily con-stitute a handicap – he was not, after all, being called upon to executea painting. What mattered to him, we may suppose, were the imag-inative possibilities opened up by this ‘curious’ (in the sense of beingboth ‘ingenious’ and ‘strange’) device. And exposure to its miraculouseffects was less likely to impel him to labour over the rules of perspec-tive, than, as I argue in this book, to stimulate him into pondering itsbroader artistic implications and how they might be translated intohis own rhetorical medium – whether through the sorts of ekphrastictechnique employed by Drayton or by some other means.

After the Stuart succession more determined and systematic attemptswere made to get to grips with the theoretical basis of perspective.Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Lomazzo paved the way for other publi-cations in this area, while the work of several painters and thestage sets devised by Inigo Jones for the court masque point to theemergence of a stronger, more self-conscious feeling for spatial depthand order. Much of this activity centred on Prince Henry, who, from1610 until his premature death in 1612, endeavoured to build acontinental-style court around him. One of a new breed of discerningart collectors, he dispensed artistic patronage on a broad scale andtook an active interest in things scientific.37 According to the Frencharchitect and garden designer, Salomon de Caus, who was employedby the Prince on the refurbishment of Richmond palace duringthis period, he instructed his royal patron in the art of perspective fortwo or three years – a truly remarkable development, considering thatdrawing was still viewed in some quarters as a manual skill unworthyto be included in a gentleman’s education.38 It was to Prince Henrythat De Caus dedicated La Perspective avec la Raison des Ombres et Miroirs(London, 1612), signed by him from ‘vostre maison de Richemont



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le premier jour d’Octobre, 1611’. The first text specifically devotedto this subject to be published in England, it runs through the stan-dard topoi of late Renaissance art treatises, not omitting the more‘extravagant’ uses of perspective for anamorphic images, the trompel’œil decoration of galleries and garden walls, and catoptrics (mirrorillusions), in addition to instructing the reader on how to foreshortenvarious regular forms of increasing complexity and shadow themcorrectly.39 Henry’s personal interest in artistic as well as scientificapplications of perspective can also be seen as a motivating forcebehind at least two other publications of this period. The preface to thetranslation of Serlio’s Il Primo libro d’architettura (London, 1611), com-missioned by his Serjeant-Painter, Robert Peake, and dedicated onceagain to the Prince, makes a pointed allusion to the latter’s training in‘all excellent sciences’. Five years earlier, the first English handbook ondrawing as a gentlemanly pursuit – with chapters on foreshortening,aerial perspective and ‘Landtskip’ – had been put together by HenryPeacham the Younger, who became a member of the Prince’s court(albeit in a rather peripheral capacity) and a popularizer of its aestheticideals.40 An expanded and revised version of his Art of Drawing with aPen (London, 1606) was brought out in 1612 – given impetus perhapsby Peacham’s involvement with Henry’s circle – under the title ofGraphice or The Gentlemans Exercise, in which the discussion of perspec-tive is not only amplified but noticeably more technical and betterinformed. Peacham even promises his readers ‘a discourse of perspec-tive I will shortly publish’, though it appears never to have seen thelight of day. These texts are worth pausing over for what they revealabout the changing, yet still uncertain, attitudes to perspective ema-nating from the court of this ambitious young prince.

In his dedicatory epistle to the ‘Serenissime Prince’, De Caus explainsthat what prompted him to convert his royal lessons into printedform is English ignorance on this important topic, ‘d’aultant qu’il mesemble que ceste science n’a encores esté bien demonstrée en icellela[n]gue: car ce qui en a esté fait jusques à present, n’a esté demonstrépar auculne raison’. The lack of any real grasp of the theoretical princi-ples underpinning perspective had clearly not escaped De Caus’snotice, and he feels it incumbent on him, as a foreigner versed in suchmatters, to insist that a knowledge of this mathematical science ‘esttant necessaire, qu’il est mal aise d’ordonner bien les ouvrages tantd’Architecture que de peinture, que l’on n’en aye quelque cognois-sance’. Robert Peake similarly sees himself as repairing this deficiency



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in learning and its damaging effects on English artistic practice. Hispurpose in publishing Serlio’s work is, he says,

to benefite the Publicke; and convay unto my Countrymen (espe-cially Architects and Artificers of all sorts) these Necessary, Certaine,and most ready Helps of Geometrie: The ignorance and wantwhereof, in times past (in most parts of this Kingdome) hath left usmany lame Workes, with shame of many Workemen; which, for thefuture, the Knowledge and use of these Instructions shall happilyprevent.41

Nevertheless Peake is well aware that, however strong his own conver-sion to the cause, his compatriots may not be so receptive to the mes-sage that some training in the mathematical principles of art is both‘needfull and necessary’. For he goes on to relate how he was almostprevented from publishing the first two books on geometry and per-spective by ‘sundry friends and workemen’, who tried to dissuade himfrom his plan,

The which I had surely effected, if I had been over-ruled by theirrequests and perswasions; alleadging strong reasons, that theCommon Workemen of our time little regarded or esteemed toWorke with right Simmetrie: the which is confused and erronious,in the judgement of the learned Architect.42

This discouraging attitude provides a context for the strikingly defen-sive posture adopted by Peake, as he justifies his part in the publicationof Serlio as being for the ‘common good’ and urges the ‘Artificers ofour Nation’ to let themselves ‘be perswaded that who so shall followthese rules hereafter set downe, shall not onely have his Worke wellesteemed of the common people, but also generally commended andapplauded of all workemen, and men of judgement’.43 As Peake real-izes, the ‘subtill and ingenious Arte of Perspective’ is in contentionwith the habits of English artists who, accustomed as they are to‘following after their owne minde’ and to ‘work[ing] without rule orreason’, are unlikely to submit readily to its authority.44

Analogous tensions are discernible just beneath the surface ofPeacham’s Art of Drawing. Like Peake, he deplores the ineptitude of hiscountrymen in matters of foreshortening, which ‘kind of draught iswillingly overslipt by ordinary painters for want of cunning and skill toperforme it’, and he catalogues at length the ‘notable absurdities’ into



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which this has betrayed them.45 He too feels obliged by the unfamiliar-ity of his subject to explain the basic laws of optical diminution:

as in discerning a building 10 or 12 miles off, I cannot tell whetherit bee Church, Castle, gentlemans house, or the like: So that indrawing of it I must expresse no particular signe as bell, portculleis&c, but shew it as weakly and as faintly as mine eie judgeth of it,because all those particulars are taken away by the greatnes of thedistance. I have seen a man painted comming downe a hill somemile and a halfe from mee, as I judged by the Landtskip, yet mightyou have told all the buttons of his dublet.

(p.30)

But if Peacham is convinced of the need for the discipline imposed byperspective rules, he also makes it clear that this is to be the final stageof a programme of self-training in draughtsmanship shaped by verydifferent aesthetic principles. The amateur artist is advised to start bypractising how to improve his sketch ‘according to that Idea you carriein your mind, in the generall proportion…using no rule or compasse atall but your own judgement in mending every fault lightly, and with aquick hand’ (pp.15–16).46 Only when he has learnt to draw withoutthe benefit of measurement and rules should he think of meddlingwith perspective. A knowledge of geometry turns out, in actuality, to beless essential to Peacham’s scheme for becoming proficient in this artthan ‘a prety fantastical head’, native wit and ‘co[n]tinuall practise’ (p.3).Two antithetical sets of values collide here – one founded on the author-ity of ‘rule and reason’, the other on whimsical invention and intuitivejudgement, for which, inasmuch as it prides itself on an ability to dis-pense with rules, such learning is a superfluous and unwelcome encum-berance – and each is subtly altered by its conjunction with the other.

At around the same time that these writers were proselytizing onbehalf of perspective as a form of scientific ratio guaranteeing thetruthfulness of the visual image and the intellectual (and, by implica-tion, social) respectability of the artist, it began to insinuate itself intoEnglish painting. This was largely due to the exertions of a small groupof artists, including Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Isaac Oliver andInigo Jones. Each was exposed to wider continental influences, andtheir compositions consequently display a much greater degree ofspatial control than their predecessors had been capable of. And heretoo, Prince Henry’s inspirational presence and patronage seem tohave acted as a spur to artistic developments. Oliver and Jones, both



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of whom had travelled extensively on the continent by the end ofElizabeth’s reign and were entirely at ease in their handling of Europeanstylistic conventions, entered the Prince’s service in 1610, having pre-viously been patronized by his mother, Anne of Denmark.47 Of thetwo, Oliver is the more obscure figure. A Frenchman by birth, he isbelieved to have received his early artistic training as a subject painterabroad before becoming a pupil of Hilliard’s. From the first, his stylereflected a ‘totally different aesthetic viewpoint’ from that of his tutor,and was apparently more in tune with – as it must have helped to fash-ion – changing tastes, for he had supplanted Hilliard as premier courtminiaturist by the end of the century.48 Dramatic chiaroscuro is used inall his miniatures to give definition and depth to the human face andfigure, while many of his larger compositions employ meticulously con-structed landscape or architectural settings. His portrait of the threeBrowne brothers (1598) (Plate 7), for example, reveals a much firmergrasp of perspective than Hilliard’s comparable miniature of Sir AnthonyMildmay. The spatial layout of the room with its correctly recedingwooden floor is free from incongruity, while the shadows cast by theintertwined figures help to locate precisely their relative positions. Oliverbroke even more radically with Elizabethan pictorial conventions in aseries of demonstration pieces, comprising both finished drawings andsubject miniatures, dating from the mid-1580s onwards. Presenting asynoptic synthesis of the various Mannerist styles then fashionable onthe continent, these self-consciously virtuosic works realised more fullythan anything yet produced in England the Italianate concepts ofdisegno and the historia. Their impact on popular aesthetic assumptionsis likely to have been negligible, however, if, as conjectured, they weremade for a small, sophisticated group of connoisseurs, who alone wouldhave been qualified to appreciate their pastiche of foreign art.49

Through his scenic designs Inigo Jones was able to introduce this artand its illusionistic vocabulary to a wider audience, though we shouldbear in mind that spectatorship of the masques was still restricted tocourt circles. For Jones, masques were famously ‘nothing else but pic-tures with light and motion’, and he treated them accordingly.50

Perspective scenery was already an essential feature of his first excur-sion in the genre, The Masque of Blacknesse, staged in the BanquetingHouse at Whitehall in 1605, as is clear from the account given by hiscollaborator, Ben Jonson. The astonished spectators, Jonson records,were treated to the vision of what appeared to be

a vast sea (and united with this that flowed forth) from the termina-tion, or horizon of which (being the levell of State, which was placed



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in the upper end of the hall) was drawne by the lines of Prospective,the whole worke shooting downewards from the eye; which decorummade it more conspicuous, and caught the eye a farre off with awandring beauty. To which was added an obscure and cloudy nightpiece, that made the whole set of.51

Over the next three decades, Jones would exploit his position asdesigner of the annual court masque to create a sequence of deep archi-tectural and landscape vistas with the help of assorted scenicmachines, painted stage flats and a raked stage.52 The proficiency andinventiveness he brought to the making of these ‘stage pictures’ maybe gauged from the surviving designs (see Plate 16). For the first timean English audience was being asked to look through the picture frameof the proscenium arch into an optically coherent and credible worldof make-believe. And, for the first time also in the nation’s culturalhistory, the beholder’s location was exactly defined, since the ‘lines ofProspective’ were made to converge on the eye of the monarch, whosechair of state was always placed at the optimum viewpoint. There canbe little doubt that this (for the English) extraordinary viewing experi-ence gradually altered visual expectations, ‘condition[ing] the taste ofthe new generation to look in terms of aesthetic depth’.53 Indeed, JohnPeacock has argued that the designs for these masques – which, likeOliver’s demonstration pieces, drew upon a vast array of Europeanartistic sources – were part of a sustained and programmatic attempt byJones to educate his countrymen in the ‘whole repertory of images,styles and visual conventions which had long been established on thecontinent … in what looks like a project to naturalise Renaissance art inEngland once for all’.54

But, if such was Jones’s intention, it was destined to be only partiallyfulfilled. The ‘revolution in visual perception’ inaugurated by him anda handful of other artists was, like most revolutions, a patchy businessthat encountered resistances and setbacks even among the elite socialcircles to which it was initially confined. Jones’s stage designs assumeda degree of familiarity with perspective norms and the visual languageto which they belonged that his audiences did not always possess.As Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong remind us, the effectiveness of Jones’sperspective scenery

lay less in its naturalism than in its power to project something thatwas recognised to be an illusion. For such an effect to be successful,a certain sophistication is required of the viewer’s perception as wellas of the designer’s skill: one must learn not only how to devise



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perspective scenes but also how to read them. Straight lines on apage moving upward and converging will appear to recede to avanishing point only if we have learned the rules for translatingthree-dimensional images into two dimensions, and back again …The evidence indicates that Jones had to deal with an untrainedaudience who were not, moreover, quick learners.55

That Dudley Carleton found the set for the ground-breaking Masqueof Blacknesse puzzling is understandable; it is more startling that thirtyyears later at least one spectator lacked the requisite visual knowl-edge to interpret another of Jones’s designs correctly.56 Owing perhapsto the slowness of English beholders to assimilate perspective conven-tions, Jones’s brilliant scenic effects regularly found a more appreciativeaudience among foreign visitors and ambassadors accustomed to watch-ing the intermezzi or comparable court festivals. Outside the enclosedworld of Whitehall, moreover, it continued or was rare for artists to useperspective consistently as a way of rationalizing and unifying thewhole of the pictured space. The founding Albertian metaphor of thepainting as a window onto another world is rigorously enacted only inJones’s designs, and his most ambitious perspectival illusions were notcreated until after his second trip to Italy in 1613–14. Undoubtedly therepresentation of space did become more widespread and more skilfulfrom the 1590s onwards, even among artists who had no direct contactwith the court. But, as might be expected given the idiosyncraticresponses to perspective I have been outlining, it tended or was inter-preted in a wayward or unorthodox fashion, or was adapted to andintermixed with existing traditions. This is very much in keeping withwhat happened to other Italianate or classical features introduced intoEnglish visual culture during this period.57 For, as recent work on thesubject has shown, the vernacular culture was distinguished by its fluid-ity and heterogeneity, its capacity to accommodate radically differentmethods of ordering and imaging visual reality with no outward senseof strain.58 To test how far this description of English artistic practice isapplicable to the treatment of space in the early seventeenth century,I propose to consider briefly the ways perspective, as a function of land-scape, intersects with other kinds of pictorial convention in the work oftwo artists considered to be key players in the English aesthetic revolu-tion, Robert Peake and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. I shall concludewith some reflections on what can be inferred about Shakespeare’s ownattitude to perspective and how this compares with the artistic practicesof his contemporaries.



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The turn of the century saw the emergence of a new vogue for repre-senting figures in or projected against an outdoor setting, reflected inportraits from around this time which ‘begin, fairly routinely, to showglimpses of landscapes through open doors or windows’.59 ‘Landtskip’itself was still an unfamiliar word and an unfamiliar concept for theEnglish.60 Peacham’s Art of Drawing includes one of the first detaileddiscussions of the genre. He treats it as a major branch of perspectiveand expatiates appreciatively on the subtle optical effects of which it iscapable, though its importance for him remains secondary, as ‘seldomeit is drawne by it selfe, but in respect & for the sake of some thingels’.61 Predictably, the same artists who were most innovative in theirhandling of space in general also led the way in exploring the poten-tialities of landscape. Isaac Oliver and Inigo Jones both made sophisti-cated use of it. A more interesting because altogether more liminal caseis the later work of Robert Peake, whom we have already encounteredas the sponsor of a translation of Serlio and a would-be disciple of thenew art of perspective. Although sometimes rated (rather unfairly) as adull and incompetent artist, Peake clearly made valiant efforts tokeep abreast of changing fashions in this and other fields. This is illus-trated by two formally experimental portraits he painted of PrinceHenry in a landscape setting. The earlier of these (Plate 8), dated 1603,shows the Prince and his young companion at hunt, situated on highground alongside the body of the stag they have just killed, with apleasantly wooded landscape, through which runs a river with abridge, falling away behind them. Despite the compression of theforegound, Peake has succeeded in creating a fair sense of spatial reces-sion through the use of overlapping forms, so that the foreshortenedbody of the stag, the Prince, his dog, horse and groom (each partiallyoccluding the other) appear to occupy distinct yet contiguous planes.The landscape is also competently managed in perspectival terms,the diminishing line of trees conducting the eye inwards to the vanish-ing point in the distant hills. Structurally, however, the Prince andhis companions seem to inhabit a separate world. Confined to theirnarrow strip of foreground, they are prevented from interacting withtheir surroundings, which (as Peacham implied) function merelyas a decorative adjunct to the main subject. As in so many previousEnglish paintings, that is, the figures appear to stand in front of spacerather than in it. And, notwithstanding the attempt to convey move-ment in the slight twisting of the Prince’s body as he sheatheshis sword, the overall effect remains static and two-dimensional ina manner reminiscent of an earlier tradition. The most persuasive



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explanation for the conflicting impressions of superficiality and depthevoked by this portrait has been proposed by Ellen Chirelstein. Itsoddly unrealistic venture into visual realism, she suggests, was inspiredby Inigo Jones’s use of painted flats arranged sequentially to form anillusionistic backdrop for the shallow masquing stage on which thecourtiers acted out their parts.62

Tradition and innovation, the spatially obsolete and the new, con-front each other in less conspicuous ways in the portrait of CaptainThomas Lee (1594) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (Plate 9).63

Gheeraerts’s image of this ambitious soldier of fortune – an elaborateexercise in self-fashioning on Lee’s part, intended to further his bid tobecome chief negotiator between the English crown and rebelliousIrish lords – is, optically speaking, quite refined.64 Lee stands unam-biguously in space, even though not engaging directly with his envi-ronment. Aerial perspective has been sensitively used to describe themountain range viewed in the far distance to his left, while the groveon the right, with its curved line of tree trunks and subtle gradations oflight and shade, maintains the feeling of continuity between fore-ground and background. For all its naturalistic effect, however, thelandscape is primarily symbolic in function; its details signify in waysthat are meant to contribute to the complex political and iconographicprogramme behind the portrait. The mountainous terrain refers to Lee’sservice in Ireland, while his bare legs and chest figure him as an Irishfoot soldier or Kerne. Similarly, the oak tree beneath which he sheltersis a traditional emblem of constancy, recalling here the personal mottoof his influential kinsman and protector, Sir Henry Lee (‘Fide et con-stantia’). True, the use of emblematic imagery – so fundamental to thelanguage of Tudor portraiture in general – is not inherently incompati-ble with a high standard of illusionism, as Gheeraerts’s picture demon-strates. Yet insofar as it elicits a different sort of attention, inviting thebeholder to work at decoding the meaning of the image rather thandwell on its mimetic properties, it tended to operate as a reactionaryforce within English visual culture.65 This retrogressive emphasis onverbal meaning at the expense of more purely visual qualities is com-pounded, in the portrait, by the use of inscriptions; the one to theright of the figure recording his age and the date, the other (to the left)a quotation from Livy’s History of Rome epitomizing the heroism ofGaius Mucius Scaevola, the Roman soldier upon whom Lee modelledhimself. Outmoded conventions are also brought into play by the con-cern with superficial detail – evident in the rendering of Lee’s exquis-itely embroidered shirt and lace collar, the wrought surface of gun and



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helmet – which contrasts with the volumetrically conceived figure andsturdy white legs. As with the inscriptions, the inclusion of such detailsattaches the beholder’s eye to the picture surface, disrupting the move-ment into space urged by the landscape. The different conceptions ofpainting and its relationship to the third dimension engaged here, andthe different artistic idioms through which they are articulated, aremuch more smoothly integrated than in the Peake portrait. Yet they arethere to be activated by the viewing process, a latent source of tension.The spatial dissonances in these portraits by two of the most avantgardepainters working in England at the turn of the century call attention tothe coexistence of different visual economies within the vernacularculture. Because of this, they can help us to see why it was that perspec-tive, even when enthusiastically adopted by English artists, could notremain its original self.

This imaginative pluralism, and the inability to conform fully toAlbertian conventions that went with it, has often been deplored asa sign of English conservatism, a benighted tardiness in appreciatingand assimilating the artistic achievements of the Italian Renaissance.Seen from another standpoint, however, it had certain benefits. Inparticular, it allowed native artists to approach linear perspectivewith an unusual degree of latitude, modifying or deviating from itsrules at will – not, like their Italian counterparts, out of a desire to sub-vert long established norms (with which, as we have seen, they werenot yet familiar), so much as from an apparent aversion to beingbound by any rigid theoretical system. This seems to have been thecase not just for English artists but for English writers too, who, aswe noted earlier, took a keen interest in perspective. Shakespeare wasthe most deeply responsive to this device, the quickest to see that ‘per-spective it is best painter’s art’ (Sonnet 24), and to explore its signifi-cance in the context of his own. His allusions to perspective spanvirtually his whole career, beginning with the trickery of anamorphicimages in Richard II (II.2.14–27), Henry V (V.2.20–23), Twelfth Night(V.1.216–17), and All’s Well That Ends Well (V.3.47–52), and progressingto more nuanced descriptions of the spatial diminution of objects asthey recede from the eye in landscape settings, of the type found inEdgar’s cliff-top speech in King Lear (IV.6.11–24) and in Cymbeline(I.3.14–22, III.3.10–15).66 Arguably, his involvement went much fur-ther than these local references, significant as they are in themselves.I would suggest that it fed into and helped to sharpen and definethe already deeply rooted preoccupation with questions of viewpointthat informs all his work. Consistently in his writings, perspective is



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associated with, and can function as a metaphor for, the relativityof human perception and of the cultural value-systems by which itis shaped, a relativity that is shown to be equally conducive to self-delusion and conflict.

This alerts us to the most obvious way in which Shakespearean ver-sions of perspective diverge from Albertian norms. As a dramatist, he isnecessarily concerned with multiple and conflicting points of view,rather than with the single, restrictively monocular focus of thecostruzione leggitima – even when attempting to evoke something likea community of vision, as we have seen him do in As You Like It.Hence, his tendency is to emphasize the relativistic and subjectivequalities of perspective over against its claims to scientific objectivity,reversing Alberti’s hierarchy. Another, more far-reaching way in whichShakespeare transforms the orthodox system is by not identifyingperspective exclusively with the values of rationality, rule, measure anddecorum; instead he extends its connotative range by employing it alsoas a vehicle for imaginative ways of seeing that are apt to exceed anddestabilize such laws. Thus we shall discover that, rather like the Peakeand Gheeraerts portraits examined above, two of his later plays incor-porate fundamentally different visual economies that are, as it were, incompetition for the same space. Antony and Cleopatra pits a Romansociety that professes to live strictly by rule and reason against thefantastic world of the lovers, where everything ‘o’erflows the measure’and proportions become infinitely manipulable. And likewise TheTempest dramatizes Prospero’s ambition, as an Inigo Jones-like figure, toimpose his single, authoritarian perspective on others and its undoingby Caliban, whose physical deformities are more redolent of thegrotesque, and whose distinctive mode of vision offers a very differentkind of knowledge of the isle.

The next chapter asks what factors made it possible for Shakespeareto experiment with translating the essentially visual phenomenon ofperspective into the rhetorical (and dramatic) language of his ownmedium. As we shall see, the key to this conversion process was thediscourse of ut pictura poesis. In addition to supplying a system ofready-made correspondences between the visual and verbal arts, it alsoinvested their interchanges with a complex set of associations thatwould condition and enrich discussion of perspective on both sides ofthe Alps.



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3Ut Pictura Poesis and theRhetoric of Perspective

57

Reading As You Like It through the lens of Alberti’s pioneering treatiseon painting and the interest in copious invention it shares withShakespeare’s comedy has shown us that language has the capacity tofunction as a mode of seeing, that rhetorical devices embody and pro-duce a particular viewpoint on the world. But precisely how may lan-guage be said to constitute a potential analogue or substitute for visualperspective? The answer to this problem must be sought in the com-monalities forged between the verbal and visual arts by the venerabledoctrine of ut pictura poesis. Ingeniously spun from Pliny’s anecdotesregarding famous artists of antiquity and some incidental remarks inAristotle, Horace, Quintilian and Plutarch likening poetry to painting,this discourse evolved in the sixteenth century into a formalized bodyof commonplaces to which both writers and artists might resort. Itsdeepest roots, however, lay in the rhetorical system itself. By develop-ing a critical terminology and a set of descriptive categories that werereadily applicable to all the arts, classical rhetoricians and their human-ist heirs created the conditions in which the modus operandi of poetryand painting – their subject matter, aims and techniques – could betreated as analogous, even interchangeable. The easy commercebetween verbal and visual modes of expression we encounter every-where in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is, in a veryreal sense, a product of comparative habits of mind implanted by thisdiscursive tradition.1

We have already seen how a humanist like Alberti who wanted toconstruct a theory of painting was obliged, in the absence of anysurviving classical text on the subject, to fall back on his rhetoricaltraining. The linguistic model he imposed on painting in Book II ofDe Pictura enjoyed a long and vigorous afterlife. Cinquecento Italy


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witnessed a vast outpouring of writing on the visual arts, much ofit devoted to the task of hammering out the rhetorical correspon-dences that Alberti had been content to leave implicit. In the treatisesof Gauricus (1505), Pino (1548), Dolce (1557), Armenini (1586), andLomazzo (1584 and 1590), to name but a few, the scientific and techni-cal aspects of painting that had so engrossed their predecessors wereincreasingly subsumed by the dominant humanist methodology withits broader literary and philosophical concerns. As a consequence, thetheory of perspective shed some of its purely mathematical character,becoming embedded in a complex web of rhetorically derived topoi.2 Inthe process, I argue, it became indissolubly bound up with wider issuesto do with artistic creativity and with the nature and status of represen-tation which affected the writer no less than the painter. Accordingly,the aim of this chapter is to locate perspective and the closely affiliatedconcept of proportion within their sixteenth-century discursive con-text, by examining how discussion of these matters was coloured by therhetorical disposition of the age. Assumptions about what was meantby imitation and invention, by illusion, and decorum or its licentiousobverse, formed part of the common framework within which poeticlanguage and pictorial perspective were understood to function. Theyhelped to determine the criteria by which both were defined andjudged. The chapter falls into three sections in which each of the abovementioned topoi is examined in turn in an attempt to show how theywere instrumental in shaping attitudes to perspective (or proportion)and, in so doing, helped to produce and consolidate the relationshipsthat tied pictorial to poetic practice. Each section will conclude bybriefly reviewing some of the ways Shakespeare used these topoi, inorder to demonstrate the range and diversity of associations that wereavailable to him when exploring questions of viewpoint.

As the original codifier of linear perspective, Italian art theory sup-plies an important point of departure for this discussion.3 Of moreimmediate concern to us, however, are the ways in which this particu-lar mode of conceptualising space – or, to be precise, the rhetoricallyinflected discourse associated with it – was transplanted into Englishculture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Althoughdirect access to continental art theory was, so far as we can judge,restricted to an educated elite, by the turn of the century many of itsbasic themes had found their way into the mainstream of English artis-tic thought, where they coalesced with and were modified by vernacu-lar traditions. What resulted from these encounters was, in importantrespects, quite unlike anything to be found between the covers of an



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Italian Renaissance art treatise. In fact the gradual absorption of per-spective as an aesthetic idea follows a similar pattern to its appropria-tion as a mimetic technique by native artists, whose unorthodoxhandling of this device was examined in Chapter 2. Thus it is oftenpossible to observe how artistic discourses emanating from the conti-nent were adapted, manipulated or transformed to meet the needs andpreoccupations of a different culture. Various factors, ranging fromEnglish pragmatism to English Protestantism, with its legacy of hostil-ity to any form of reverence for the visual image, played their part inthis process. Even where a reasonably accurate translation of an Italiansource existed, as in the case of Haydocke’s rendering of Lomazzo,shifts in emphasis and meaning inevitably crept in. Moreover, theapparent echoing of Italian theorists on the part of English writers candisguise fundamental differences in interpretation. At the same time, itis important to recognize that such transvaluations were liable to occurnot only between cultures but within a particular cultural setting, wherecompeting views on a host of matters relating to poetry and paintingwere in circulation at any one moment, allowing a writer to selectthose best suited to his purpose.

Along with grammar and the study of classical texts, rhetoric formedthe staple component of a humanistic educational programme that bythis time was ensconced throughout Western Europe.4 In this sense, itcan be said to have functioned as a sort of lingua franca, capable oftranscending cultural differences or at least of facilitating communica-tion across them. To minds schooled from an early age in rhetoricalmodes of thought, Italian art theory may not have seemed so whollyalien as we imagine. The idea that visual images might fulfil certainpersuasive functions, for example, was one educated Englishmen werewell equipped to appreciate. The doctrine of ut pictura poesis, alreadyfully naturalized in Tudor literature, where it had devolved into some-thing of a cliché, provided another, complementary framework towhich this foreign discourse could be assimilated. In affirming the kin-ship of poetry and painting, it must also have encouraged writers tolook for parallels between their own stylistic strategies and the newartistic ideas being propagated across the Channel. But the ‘noble arteof eloquence’ contributed more than a repertory of common terms andpatterns of thought that enabled concepts to be translated, more or lessintact, from one cultural context to another. I suggest that it alsooffered a way of talking about the visual arts – and, by extension, aboutperspective – in terms not so much of conformity to nature or rule, butrather of that which exceeds or deviates from such approved standards

Ut Pictura Poesis and the Rhetoric of Perspective 59


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of truth. This way of describing painting and its relationship to poetrysteadily gained ground in Italian academic circles, and English com-mentators, uncomfortable as they often were with attempts to legislatethe arts, seem to have found it especially congenial.

Imitation and invention

In 1598, Richard Haydocke, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, traineephysician and amateur artist, published a translation of the first fivebooks of Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura, e archittetura(Milan, 1584) under the title A Tracte containing the Artes of curiousPaintinge, Carvinge & Buildinge.5 Apart from omitting the final twobooks, Haydocke made a number of personal additions and emenda-tions to the text, usually by way of concession to doctrinal objectionsor the ‘strangenesse of the matter it selfe’.6 Despite being limited toa single edition, the impact of the Tracte on evolving attitudes tothe arts continued to be felt well into the eighteenth century.7 Its sig-nificance for our purposes is twofold. First, as the earliest translationof an Italian art treatise and indeed the first theoretical text on thesubject to be printed in England, it acted as a crucial intermediarybetween continental aesthetics and English visual culture. Second,it specifically addresses the problem of what constitutes true propor-tion (or perspective) in the context of contemporary debates concern-ing imitation and with a shrewd eye to the rhetorical implications ofthe question.

In the first book of the Tracte, devoted to proportion, Lomazzo/Haydocke briefly rehearses one stock position on mimesis:

Painting is an arte; because it imitateth naturall thinges mostprecisely, and is the Counterfeiter and (as it were) the very Ape ofNature: whose quantity, eminencie, and colours, it ever strivethto imitate, performing the same by the helpe of Geometry, Arith-meticke, Perspective, and Naturall Philosophie, with most infallibledemonstrations.8

Geometry, arithmetic and perspective are seen here as the servants ofan objective reproduction of nature, the accuracy of which is but-tressed by their ‘most infallible demonstrations’. The instruction in themathematical rules of proportion and perspective purveyed by theTracte derives its authority from this very premise. Yet, from the outset,scientific correctness is dismissed as inadequate to encompass visual



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truth, which frequently requires that such rules be abrogated. Thisleads Lomazzo/Haydocke to postulate that – like colour and light, alsosubject to a ‘double consideration’ –

Proportion is of two sortes: either Proper, expressing the exact andtrue proportion of the thing to be represented … Or else in Perspec-tive in respect of the eie, differing very much from the other.9

In exhorting the artist to follow the second type of proportion – there-after designated as the ‘visuall’ or ‘perspective’ proportion – Lomazzo/Haydocke is not simply recommending that he alter the dimensions ofhis figures in accordance with the laws of perspective, but that theseshould be further modified to take account of any resulting distortions.Such adjustments, already practised in antiquity and zealously codifiedby sixteenth-century theorists, were intended to preserve that pleasingimpression produced by suitably composed proportions called euryth-mia, after Vitruvius.10 For Lomazzo, this valuable skill was exemplifiedby the colossal statues of the Dioscuri on Monte Cavallo in Rome(plate 10), thought to be the work of the legendary Greek sculptors,Phidias and Praxiteles.11 Had these statues conformed to the ‘exact andtrue proportion[s]’, the beholder would nevertheless have judged themto be false, owing to the accelerated diminution caused by the remote-ness of the upper parts from his/her eye. To compensate for such opti-cal distortions and to appear correct when viewed from below, theywere compelled to exceed their proper dimensions. A skilful artist,Lomazzo/Haydocke concludes, will therefore make his painting orsculpture ‘answerable to the place where it is to be set, in respect of thebeholders eie’, and, taking his cue from the ancients,

if the place be high, and the sight low, he shall make the head andhigher partes of his picture bigger than the life … according to thegenerall rule which teacheth; that so much of that parte must beadded, as is lost by the distance of the place; that so the picture maycome to the eie in his due proportion.12

Even when his figures are placed nearer to the beholder and at eyelevel, so eliminating any natural foreshortening, the artist is underno obligation to observe the actual proportions but may enlarge ordiminish as necessary in order to achieve those most graceful and‘decent to the eye’ (p.184). What rapidly emerges from this discussionis that mimesis is being taken to mean much more than the literal



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transcription of appearances, since only by deviating from their modelwill the artist’s representations look convincingly like it.

To understand the full import of Lomazzo’s concept of a double pro-portion and the paradox it articulates, we have to see this as issuingout of a reappraisal of the status and function of perspective thatculminated at the end of the Cinquecento.13 From its beginnings, thistechnique was, as Lomazzo implies, inextricably bound up with theprevailing aesthetic doctrine of mimesis. By equipping the artist with aseemingly objective method for depicting objects in space, it enabledhim not only to render appearances in a more lifelike manner thanever before, but, in so doing, to reveal the divine geometry inscribedwithin them.14 Lomazzo’s assertion that it is impossible to representthis intelligible and harmonious order of nature without recourse toscience harks back to Alberti and Leonardo. According to the latter,artistic practice

must always be built on sound theory, of which perspective is thesignpost and gateway, and without perspective nothing can be donewell in the matter of painting. The painter who copies by practiceand judgement of eye, without rules, is like a mirror which imitateswithin itself all the things placed before it without any understand-ing of them.15

Mere uninformed observation or indiscriminate copying, it wasassumed, could not by itself guarantee a true imitation; for painting toreflect the visible world other than superficially it had to be groundedin a knowledge of first principles.16 By the time Lomazzo wrote hisTrattato, however, the necessity for scientific rules as a prerequisite of,and ‘gateway’ to, good practice was no longer axiomatic. And theprospect of achieving a perfect replica of nature, though never entirelyabandoned, had come to seem an insufficient goal for the artist.

These aesthetic developments were themselves indexed to shifts ofinterpretation and emphasis within the notoriously fluid theory ofmimesis. It is a critical truism that in the Renaissance, as in classicalantiquity, the idea of imitating (in the sense of replicating) naturecoexisted – often with scant regard for consistency – with the idea ofgoing beyond it.17 Copying the appearance of things was, according tothe latter view, not enough; the artist must also strive to express theperfection at which nature aims but which its material defects preventit from fully realizing. There was more than one way of going aboutthis. Alberti, who counselled the painter to ‘be attentive not only to



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the likeness of things but also and especially to beauty, for in paintingbeauty is as pleasing as it is necessary’, believed this was best attainedby studying and selecting from the finest bodies in order to build up acomposite ‘idea of beauty’ in one’s mind (p.90). Other commentatorspreferred to stress the role of the imagination or fantasia in improvingupon nature. Literary associations were ineluctably brought into playhere, since the classical text most often adduced in connection withthe imaginative function was Horace’s Ars Poetica, the opening passageof which was a crucial locus for ut pictura discourse. Likening the hybridshapes conjured up by the painter to writing where ‘the author’s idlefancies’ assume, as in a ‘sick man’s dreams’, an absurdly incongruousform, Horace concludes:

‘But,’ you will say, ‘the right to take liberties of almost any kind hasalways been enjoyed by painters and poets alike’. I know that; wepoets do claim this licence, and in our turn we concede it to others,but not to the point of associating what is wild with what is tame,of pairing snakes with birds or lambs with tigers.18

The equivocal note sounded by Horace’s grudging concession of imagi-native licence to poets and painters would lend its sanction to approba-tory as well as hostile responses to such creative abandon. Writing at theturn of the fifteenth century, Leonardo embraced the activities of thefantasia with an enthusiasm that seems barely in keeping with his scien-tific creed.19 In his early notebooks especially, the imagination is identi-fied with an inexhaustible fecundity of invention that, not content withringing the changes on familiar forms, generates others never seenbefore or presumed to exist. ‘Painting’, he affirms, includes ‘not onlythe works of nature but also an infinite number that nature never cre-ated’, and he urges the painter to give ‘visual embodiment to [his]intention and the invention which took form first in [his] imagination’(pp.46, 225). (Shakespeare was writing from within the same traditionwhen he credited ‘strong imagination’ with the power to invent ‘strangeforms’ that, in their extravagance, outdo nature and give to ‘airy noth-ing / A local habitation and a name’.)20 Nevertheless Leonardo was asunyielding as Alberti on the necessity of remaining in close touch withnature even when exceeding anything it might show. The painter’s free-dom to invent whatever he wished in the way of fictional landscapes or‘monstrous forms’ did not release him from the primary obligation toensure their consistency with natural appearances. Neither Leonardonor his predecessors saw any incompatibility in these requirements.



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In the following century, however, the alliance between imitationand idealization, science and imagination, grew increasingly strained,to a point where fissures began to appear in descriptions of mimeticpractice. The sculptor Vicenzo Danti, in his treatise on proportion of1567, specifically distinguishes between what he calls ‘ritrarre’, therepresentation of things in the flawed state in which we actuallyperceive them, from ‘imitare’, a nobler version of imitation that‘uses all the powers of the intellect’ to apprehend and recreate the‘perfect form as intended by nature’.21 Correspondingly the stock ofthe fantasia rose, particularly among Mannerist artists for whom ithad become synonymous with conspicuous artifice, liberty of inven-tion and autonomy from rules.22 Leonardo’s emphasis on its conceptu-alising powers prefigured the idealist and mystical tenor of muchlate sixteenth-century Italian art theory, epitomized by the writingsof Federico Zuccaro and Lomazzo himself. Despite real differencesin approach, these theorists were at one in locating the source of artis-tic production not in the exterior world but in an internal ideawhose ultimate origin is divine. Hence Zuccaro argues that all artsand sciences derive their creative force from a mental image (‘disegnointerno’) analogous to that idea in the divine intellect from whichthe universe was first fashioned, which is then manipulated into mate-rial form (‘disegno esterno’) with the help of the imagination andsensory perception. The capacity to conceive such an idea is grantedto man, he asserts, ‘so that with this Design [Disegno], almost imitat-ing God and vying with Nature, he could produce an infinite num-ber of artificial things resembling natural ones, and by means ofpainting and sculpture make new Paradises visible on Earth’.23 Suchclaims for the artist’s God-given right to invent new and better worldsby following the bent of his own inspiration led not only to thedevaluing of nature as an object of imitation, but to a general relax-ation – even, in some quarters, a repudiation – of the authority ofthose mathematical laws on which an earlier generation of theoristshad pinned their faith:

The [artist’s] intellect must be not only clear but also free, andhis spirit unfettered, and not thus restrained in mechanical servitudeto such rules, because this truly most noble profession wishes judg-ment and good practice to be the rule and norm of working well.24

Leonardo’s scorn for a mode of imitation based solely on ‘practice andjudgement of the eye’ is thus completely inverted.



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What effect, then, did this displacement of emphasis from imitationto invention, and the privileging of an ideal beauty held in the mindover conformity to nature or rule, have on attitudes to perspective? Inthis matter we can look for no clearer or more eloquent guide than thepreface to the third and final part of Vasari’s Le Vite de’ piu eccelentiPittori, Scultori e Architettori (1550; revised edition, Florence, 1568). Herehe famously affirms that artists belonging to the second period of the‘modern style’ (that is, the Quattrocento), unlike those of the third(beginning with Leonardo),

fell short of complete perfection, since their work lacked thatspontaneity which, although based on correct measurement, goesbeyond it without conflicting with order and stylistic purity. Thisspontaneity enables the artist to enhance his work by adding innu-merable inventive details and, as it were, a pervasive beauty to whatis merely artistically correct. Again, when it came to proportion theearly craftsmen lacked that visual judgement which, disregardingmeasurement, gives the artist’s figures, in due relation to theirdimensions, a grace that simply cannot be measured.25

Vasari is not saying that the artist can afford to ignore mathematics,for only those versed in canonical proportion and the laws of pers-pective know how to go beyond them. Rather, he is criticizing artist-technicians such as Uccello and Piero della Francesca, who, in hisopinion, had sacrificed beauty to what is merely artistically correct.Their ‘excessive study’ of scientific matters produced figures thatappear ‘offensive to the eye and harsh in style’. Nowhere was this moreevident, according to Vasari, than in their obsession with the finerpoints of perspective, which resulted in unimaginative and labouredeffects, in ‘ugly foreshortenings and perspectives as disagreeable to lookat as they were difficult to do’. Conversely, artists of the third periodhave attained perfection by violating these same rules, guided by a‘visual judgement’ which lends their contrivances a semblance of natu-ralness and ease and thereby adds an indefinable grace to the whole.26

Vasari’s rehearsal of these contradictory positions regarding the neces-sity for mathematical accuracy and truth to nature as integral features ofperspective is curiously echoed in one of the key modern debates on thesubject. I am referring to the issue, still vigorously contested, of whetherthis method of representing space amounts to an objective descriptionof certain immutable features of vision, or, as others have argued, ismerely a set of conventions that bear no necessary relationship to the



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way we actually see things.27 Had he been quizzed on this point,Alberti would surely have placed himself in the former camp. His faithin his new technique is expressed repeatedly in terms of its approxima-tion to ‘things seen’.28 Indeed, for all its scientific rationalism, Alberti’sdescription of the costruzione leggitima is deeply informed by whatNorman Bryson has called ‘the natural attitude’: the naive assumption,epitomized by Pliny’s tales of trompe l’œil realism and still ingrained inWestern art theory, that such technological inventions edge the visualarts ever closer to their ultimate goal of producing a perfect copy of thevisible world.29 Underpinning this attitude, Bryson argues, is a modelof painting as the product of an encounter between the artist’s gaze,which ‘witnesses but does not interpret’ the sensory data it receives,and a pre-existing reality which the artist must strive to record asfaithfully as possible but has no part in shaping. It would be hard tofind a more striking illustration of this particular mind-set than thewindow and mirror metaphors which Alberti and Leonardo used toexpress their pictorial ideal. The picture surface, its status as artefacteffaced, is imagined as a transparent medium through which may beglimpsed a prior and fully intelligible world. Moreover, the claim thatperspective makes possible an exact replication of this world is bol-stered by a tacit equation between vision and painting. It has beenpointed out that Alberti’s famous definition of a picture as an ‘inter-section of the visual pyramid’ glosses over the fact that it is, strictlyspeaking, an imaginary reconstruction of a plane section through thepryamid or cone of sight, not the thing itself.30 By eliding the crucialdistinction between seeing and depicting, Alberti would convince usthat perspectival images are a direct, unmediated transcription of thevisual field as it imprints itself on the observing eye. What is absentfrom this influential account of painting is not just a recognition thatall representation, like vision itself, involves a creative ordering ofsensory experience; as Bryson remarks, it also suppresses the role ofpainting as a material sign whose meaning depends on cultural codesfamiliar to the beholder.

Bryson’s poststructuralist critique of this naturalistic theory of paint-ing was, to some extent, anticipated by Erwin Panofsky’s seminal essayof 1927, ‘Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form” ’.31 Here, Panofsky setsout to demonstrate that the costruzione leggitima entails a ‘systematicabstraction’ from reality, as defined by our ‘actual subjective opticalimpression’, in that it ignores the fact that we see not with a singlefixed eye but with two in constant motion and that images areprojected onto the concave surface of the retina, rather than (as in



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painting) onto a flat surface, so that straight lines are in fact perceivedas curved.32 This analysis of the technical shortcomings of linear per-spective prepares the ground for a more radical assault on the Albertianview. For Panofsky goes on to argue that perspective should be under-stood primarily not as a method for replicating optical reality but asan imaginative reconfiguring of visual experience. It functions, hemaintains, as a signifying system that, in a manner analogous to othermodes of cultural expression, communicates a historically specific viewof the world (Weltanschauung), or, as he phrases it in terms borrowedfrom the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, as ‘one of those “symbolic forms”in which “spiritual meaning is attached to a concrete, material signand intrinsically given to this sign” ’.33 With due allowance madefor differences of intellectual outlook, it may be argued that this wayof thinking was less remote from the aesthetic culture of the Cinquecentothan we might suspect. As Panofsky noted, the discrepancies betweenthe retinal image and its pictorial representation had not goneunnoticed even by the early theorists of perspective.34 Moreover, theidea of painting diverging from ‘objective’ reality was, as we have seen,entirely acceptable to a Mannerist like Vasari, for whom artifice andabstraction from nature were highly desirable (if not necessarily intrin-sic) properties of the spatial image.35 That such images might operateas visual signs along broadly linguistic lines was also a possibilitysixteenth-century theorists were prepared to entertain, though theynaturally tended to think of this in rhetorical rather than Saussureanterms.

The various factors I have been outlining came together to shapeLomazzo’s attitude to perspective. In Books I and V of the Tracte (thelatter devoted to perspective) mathematical rules – and the rule ofmathematics – are subordinated to the judgement of the eye and thepursuit of a grace that exceeds the natural while remaining consonantwith it. Where arithmetical ratios are called upon to assist the eye inascertaining the correct dimensions, they do so in a strictly ancillarycapacity. Moreover, although Lomazzo/Haydocke stresses that it isimperative for the artist to acquire a solid grounding in the science ofproportion, this is not because he ‘ought alwaies to observe the same’,but simply

because it behooveth him first to be acquainted with this properproportion of things [questa proporzione naturale e proprie de le cose],that thereby he may be the better inabled, to draw and transferre[ritrarla e trasferirla] it afterwardes to the Perspective of the eie.36



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Lomazzo’s policy of hiving off the ‘visual’ from the ‘proper’ propor-tions confers official status on that bifurcation in mimetic theorywhich figured so prominently in contemporary discussion of the visualarts. By distancing the ‘visual’ proportions from the actual dimensionsof the object, such passages as that quoted above foreground the styl-ized and conventional nature of images formed in accordance with the‘Perspective of the eye’. Far from presenting themselves as a simpleduplication or extension of optical reality, Lomazzo’s perspectivalimages flaunt their abstraction from the natural order and the mathe-matical laws thought to underpin this. The artist’s gaze, no longerimagined as the passive recipient of a given external reality, is cast as adiscriminating agent, actively involved in the construction of an aes-thetic – and ultimately social – ideal. The images produced retain theirresemblance to nature, but this is now acknowledged to be an illusion,the product of sheer art. There is, as we have seen, little new aboutsuch views which echo, in a more ostensive vein, those expressed byVasari and other Italian theorists. What is of special interest to us, how-ever, is that Lomazzo finds in the traditional analogy between paintingand poetry – or, more precisely, rhetoric – a language for articulatingthis other interpretation of perspective theory.

Imitation had always been understood in rhetorical or literary con-texts to imply the production of an artful likeness that does not simplyseek to ape the object imitated.37 Even when delineating the visibleworld the poet was expected to go beyond a bare statement of fact byemploying tropes and figures, whose primary function was not descrip-tive, so much as the communication of certain ideas, values and atti-tudes to the listener.38 It is the persuasive qualities inherent in poeticlanguage, I suggest, that provide the template for Lomazzo’s rejectionof unadorned pictorial realism. For just as his sense of what artifice canaccomplish requires him to distinguish between two sorts of propor-tion, so eloquence was thought to depend on an awareness of the gapbetween the literal meaning and its figurative reshaping.39 And just asfigurative discourse is constituted by its deviations from the literal or‘proper’ sense, so Lomazzo’s ‘visual’ proportion takes its meaning andeffect from its transgression of the ‘proper’ dimensions of things. (Eventhe fact that ‘proper’ clearly refers here not to the actual dimensions ofan object but to the canonical proportions used to represent them inacademic art echoes the frequent confusion of ‘literal’ and ‘common’speech in discussions of elocutio). As if to underline the parallel, theartist’s practice of enhancing his figures by ‘draw[ing] and trans-ferr[ing]’ them from their ‘proper’ proportions to others that are more



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pleasingly artificial, if still ‘like to the Natural’, is described byLomazzo/Haydocke in terms that directly evoke the classical definitionof metaphor (itself a trope of resemblance) as

a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right significa-tion, to another not so naturall, but yet of some affinitie or conve-niencie with it.40

Adopting a rhetorical model of painting has certain consequences forLomazzo’s understanding of mimesis. It allows him to formulate a cen-tral paradox of mimetic art: that to capture either the outward appear-ance or the inner essence of things it is often necessary to violateobjective truth; that to be like is not to be the same.41 More impor-tantly, it could scarcely fail to induce a heightened consciousness ofthe expressive or iconic potentialities of perspective, of its capacity tosignify. For, as rhetoricians had long taught, any swerving from literal orcustomary speech – and, by extension, from the ‘proper’ proportions –might work in various ways to enrich the meaning of a verbal (or visual)statement. Of the usages commonly assigned to metaphor, to stay withthis particular trope, the two most important were embellishment andclarification. A writer introduced metaphors into his text in order toadorn his matter with pleasurable fictions – in much the same way thatobserving the ‘visual’ proportion is said by Lomazzo to lend a ‘wonder-ful grace and beauty’ to the painter’s compositions (p.184). The sametrope could also help to illuminate the significance of his matter, beingused to direct attention to the latent meanings embedded within it byexpressing these ‘with more light and better note’.42

Both these metaphorical applications have a direct bearing on a keypassage in the Tracte which reflects, memorably, on the associationsbrought to mind by the sight of graceful proportions:

Now the effectes proceeding from proportion are unspeakable: theprincipall whereof, is that majestie and beautie, which is founde inbodies, called by Vitruvius, Eurithmia. And hence it is, that whenwee beholde a well proportioned thing, wee call it beautifull; as if weeshoulde saie, indued with that exact and comely grace…But if weshall enter into a farther consideration of this beauty, it wil appearemost evidently, in things appertaining to Civile discipline [culto divino].For it is strange to consider, what effects of piety, reverence, and reli-gion, are stirred up in mens mindes, by meanes of this sutable comeli-nesse of apte proportion [da la maesta e belezza de le sacre imagini].43



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Comely and apt proportions function in Lomazzo/Haydocke’s analysisas a powerful ‘symbolic form’, whose ability to act as a vehicle forculturally constructed meanings may be turned to a range of expressiveand didactic ends.44 In deference to his Protestant readers, Haydockehas substituted ‘Civile discipline’ for Lomazzo’s ‘culto divino’ and hassuppressed the ensuing discussion of the miraculous effects wrought byrepresentations of Christ and the Virgin, in keeping with his policy ofdoctoring the Italian text wherever it ‘crosseth the doctrine of thereformed Churches’ (p.4).45 The effects of piety, reverence and religionare now stirred up in men’s minds by secular rather than sacredimages. Yet the message remains essentially unchanged. By virtue of itsiconic qualities – its distance from the literal – the ‘visual’ proportioncan work upon the beholder in a manner analogous to figurative dis-course, which seeks to persuade its listeners by variously delighting,moving and instructing them. Indeed, such is the power of eloquencevested in this idealised type of proportion that the beholder may beprevailed upon to acquiesce in the ideological values it communicatesand to act in conformity with them. What this passage invites us to seeis that perspectival images share with rhetorical figures certain signify-ing properties that enable each to project a particular view of the worldin ways that seek to enlist the recipient in that vision.

If Lomazzo implied that many of the functions ordinarily assigned topoetic language might be usurped by visual (or perspectival) images,conversely English writers were in the habit of invoking pictorial mod-els when endeavouring to account for their own creative processes.46

‘Poetry, and Picture, are Arts of a like nature; and both are busie aboutimitation’, wrote Ben Jonson, adding that ‘both invent, faine, anddevise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use, andservice of nature’.47 As the capaciousness of Jonson’s aphorism suggests,the established homology between poetry and painting came in handywhether one was arguing that the writer should adhere to nature orthat he should go beyond it. Arguably, though, it was in support ofthe latter position that such analogies were most effectively deployed.In the painter’s willingness to overstep the limits of ‘objective’ realityEnglish poets found a useful parallel that authorized their own fictiveinventions, whether they took the form of imaginative fables or displaysof stylistic ingenuity. Thus George Chapman defended his abstruse styleby appealing to a superior form of portraiture:

That, Enargia, or cleerenes of representation, requird in absolutePoems is not the perspicuous delivery of a lowe invention; but high,



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and harty invention exprest in most significant, and unaffectedphrase; it serves not a skilfull Painters turne, to draw the figure of aface onely to make knowne who it represents; but hee must lymn,give luster, shaddow, and heightening; which though ignorantswill esteeme spic’d and too curious, yet such as have the judiciallperspective, will see it hath, motion, spirit and life.48

By apposition, the poet’s dark conceits are identified with the painter’sexpressive ‘heightening’ of his likeness through the addition of ‘luster’and ‘shadow’ [relievo] and both are excused as necessary to the unfold-ing of a ‘high, and harty invention’. Chapman’s evident appreciationof these newfangled illusionist devices might lead us to suspect him ofpossessing an intimate knowledge of the sort of ‘curious painting’which was then beginning to find favour in England. However, suchcomparisons were part of a poet’s stock-in-trade and do not necessarilyimply any special exposure to continental art or art theory.

The obvious exception to this generalization is Sir Philip Sidney,whose handling of ut pictura discourse, uniquely for an English writerof the period, reflects his first-hand contact with European artists andan informed curiosity about every aspect of painting.49 One editor ofthe Apology for Poetry, noting parallels between Sidney’s famous declara-tion of the poet’s freedom to pursue the course of his inventionbeyond the restrictive bounds of nature and the claims made byZuccaro on behalf of the painter, has gone so far as to state that thetreatise is imbued with a ‘direct knowledge of advanced contemporarytheorising on the arts’ and that its poetics may therefore be labelled‘mannerist’.50 Even if this conclusion seems too reckless, we may yetconcede that there are passages in the apology which point to a morethan casual acquaintance with continental aesthetics. However, we doneed to be alert to the skilful manner in which these imported ideas –in keeping with the philosophical hybridity of Sidney’s text – havebeen fused with, and tempered by, other influences more at home inlate sixteenth-century English culture.

At a crucial moment in his defence of his ‘unelected vocation’,Sidney turns to painting as the sole art resembling poetry in its‘high flying liberty of conceit’. The difference between the historian,who is tied to the particular truth of things, and ‘right poets’, he says,is like that

betwixt the meaner sort of painters, who counterfeit only such facesas are set before them, and the more excellent, who having no law



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but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for theeye to see: as the constant though lamenting look of Lucretia, whenshe punished in herself another’s fault; wherein he painteth notLucretia whom he never saw, but painteth the outward beauty ofsuch a virtue. For these [poets] … most properly do imitate to teachand delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, hath been, orshall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into thedivine consideration of what may be and should be.51

Like Chapman, Sidney frames his poetic code in terms of a distinctionbetween the ‘meaner sort’ of painters who are content to copy whatthey see, and the ‘more excellent’, who strive to express a preconceivednotion of perfection – their ‘Idea or foreconceit’ – by means of an ideallikeness. In pursuing this higher brand of mimesis, the latter are sub-ject to no ‘law’ other than that supplied by their own ‘wit’ or ‘discre-tion’. It is this inner judgement rather than any prescriptive modelthat directs their choice of such ‘colours’ (a term that conflates thepainter’s pigments with the poet’s rhetorical ‘colours’) as will bestconvey the invisible essence of their subject: Lucretia’s inner chastityas opposed to her outward appearance. Sidney, it is clear, sharesLomazzo’s conviction that in order to represent ‘what … should be’ thepainter (like the poet) must be prepared to depart from literal truth andimposed rules, and that to do so is a mark of superiority. Equally, heshares Lomazzo’s sense of the suasive force of images, arguing that thekey to the poet’s ability to move to virtuous action lies in his ‘feigningnotable images of virtues, vices, or what else’ (p.103). By creatinga ‘lofty image’ of heroic virtue, for example, the epic poet ‘mostinflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with coun-sel how to be worthy’ (p.119). The logic of this position almost pushesSidney into arguing that the poet’s aim should be to emulate thespecial vividness of the pictoral image, whose power to ‘illuminate’and ‘figure forth’ its subject makes it a far more effective teacher thanany ‘wordish description’.52 But at the same time, anxious perhapsto counter what to Protestant minds might seem a dangerous over-emphasis on the sensuous appeal of the image, he takes steps to restorethe primacy of the word. To this end he stresses that the poet’s‘speaking picture[s]’ are, above all, a vehicle for his discursive anddidactic meaning. For the same reason, perhaps, he also spells outmuch more directly than Lomazzo the rhetorical demands that bindthe visual and verbal arts to each other. Whether it works upon thesenses or through the mind’s eye, the image must fulfil its mandate of



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‘delightful teaching’. Mannerist doctrines are thus accommodated tothe emblematic view of images, whereby they are to be valued less fortheir mimetic qualities than for the moral lessons they impart, thathad for so long held sway over English visual culture.53 By such expedi-ents, Sidney succeeds in adapting a foreign aesthetic to its new habitat,bringing it into conformity with patterns of thought that were deeplyingrained in his readers.54

Shakespeare’s pictorial conceits are recognizably a product of thesame cultural milieu. Throughout his career he returned repeatedly tothe topos of the artist as nature’s ape, whose works are so lifelike thatthey appear to be on the verge of breath, speech or movement. But hewas no less attuned to the concept of art ‘surpass[ing] the life’, and hiswriting abounds in references to hyperbolic artefacts that defy what isliterally true or physically possible, like those summoned to describethe excelling beauty of Adonis’s horse or Cleopatra on her barge.55

Existing only as a textual effect, these artefacts tend to function reflex-ively as a trope for Shakespeare’s own rhetorical virtuosity, therebyinstigating a running paragone between poet and painter.56 As com-ments on the mimetic process, his pictorial allusions are mostly unre-markable additions to the stock of Renaissance commonplaces on thistheme. Occasionally, however, they take on a new and precise signifi-cance. Such is the case in Antony and Cleopatra which, I argue inChapter 6, is structured around an opposition between the rational val-ues of ‘rule’ and ‘measure’ and the imaginative proportions that exceedthem. This antithesis – so strongly reminiscent of Lomazzo’s two sortsof proportion – attests to the fact that Shakespeare, though lackingSidney’s cultural advantages, was in touch with the aesthetic ideas fil-tering through from the continent. Other plays I shall be discussingoffer further evidence of his familiarity with these ideas, and indeeddemonstrate that his imagination was sufficiently engaged to exploretheir implications in some depth.

What they also confirm is that Shakespeare was no less consciousthan Sidney or Lomazzo of the power of spectacle to impress the eyeand influence the mind – a power he conceives, like them, in terms ofthe capacity of the visual image to function rhetorically.57 The famousparagone between poet and painter in the opening scene of Timon ofAthens serves ironically to show how little there is to choose betweenthem, since each depends on the forceful eloquence of images to per-suade his audience of some moral truth.58 Where the painter exploitsthe vivid expressivity of images to reveal the inner essence of character,the poet employs a succession of allegorical tableaux to instruct Lord



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Timon in the slipperiness of fortune. In short, his speaking picturescommunicate by means of the same iconic discourse as the ‘thousandmoral paintings’ which, the painter boasts, can ‘demonstrate these quickblows of Fortune’s /More pregnantly than words’ (I.1.90–92). The onlyreal source of contention is which mode of ‘delightful teaching’ pro-duces the more compelling effects. Whilst it would be foolhardy toequate Shakespeare’s understanding of mimesis with that voiced bythese two woefully inadequate representatives of the sister arts, heclearly subscribed to the same logic of complementarity. Hence he tendsto look upon the language of spectacle as an alternative, if ultimatelyinferior, mode of persuasion. Later chapters will examine some ways inwhich visual imagery is used in conjunction with verbal forms of expres-sion to manipulate the beholder’s viewpoint. In particular, we shall seehow Hamlet and Prospero exploit this aspect of the image as part of abroader rhetorical strategy for shaping the audience’s response to events.

Illusionism

Thus far we have considered how visual images might be said to resem-ble poetic fictions not only in their sensuously lifelike qualities, butalso in their deviations from canonical standards of truth. Mimeticdoctrine stipulated that all arts, poetry and painting included, shouldconform to nature, but this imperative was interpreted sufficientlyloosely to permit an infringement of the rules governing expressionwhere this was thought to enhance the significance and impact of thework in question. If some sixteenth-century theorists were more thanready to avail themselves of this latitude within the theory of mimesis,it nevertheless remained a potential source of anxiety. For while suchrule-bending found some sanction in what had been, as far back asHorace, the acknowledged right of poets and painters to invent formsanswerable only to their own imaginations, it also brought with it thespectre of abuse. The licence to exceed the limits of nature enjoyed byboth arts, so boldly reaffirmed by Lomazzo and Sidney, was construedby those opposed to such liberties as an invitation to illusionistic trick-ery and imaginative excess, deception and indecorum. In this and thefollowing section I shall focus on the perceived liabilities of dealing inwhat might be called high mimetic artifice, and on the various ways inwhich these dangers were negotiated by Renaissance commentators,both Italian and English.

In the opening pages of his Trattato, Lomazzo reminds the readerthat a lifelike painting, by definition, is never what it purports to be.



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It disguises its material nature by calling up figures, objects and land-scapes from a plane surface covered with lines and pigments, and thus

by meere arte, uppon a flat, where it findeth onelie length, andbreadth, it representeth to the eie the third Dimension … and somaketh the bodie to appeare uppon a flatte, where naturally it isnot.59

Perspective, it may be argued, raises these deceptive properties inherentin mimetic art to their highest power, since its peculiar feat is to trans-form a two-dimensional surface, with the help of chiaroscuro and othermodelling techniques, into an illusion of three-dimensional solidity. Inthe process it endows what does not exist with virtual substance andlife. Moreover, it shows things not as they are, according to their ‘exactand true’ dimensions, but as they appear from a given standpoint. Yet itis precisely this distortion of objective fact that makes perspectivalimages seem so truthful to the eye. For Lomazzo, as for most Italian arttheorists, the ability to manufacture a compelling illusion by making aprojecting body ‘appeare uppon a flatte where naturally it is not’ wasthe supreme achievement of art. On the other hand, these same con-juring tricks made painting vulnerable to much more hostile kinds ofassessment. And, mutatis mutandis, what went for painting also wentfor poetry, in that each was assumed to ‘feign’, in the multifarioussenses of that word, including to ‘invent’ and ‘dissemble’ (OED, 2and 6). The important point for us to note is that the paradoxical qual-ities of illusionistic art created scope for a broad spectrum of responsesto the poet’s and painter’s feigning – responses that often coexisted ascontending possibilities within cultural consciousness.60

Pictorial illusion had been aligned with poetry and sophistic rhetoricsince antiquity. In Plato’s devastating critique of mimetic art, all threewere lumped together as ‘image-making art[s]’ capable at best of cap-turing the shifting appearances of the phenomenal world, not the eter-nal ‘Ideas’ behind them, which they reflected only at a ‘third remove’.Each stood accused of defrauding its audience with a ‘shadow play ofimages’ designed to appeal to the basest, most irrational elements ofour nature rather than to the intellect, alone thought capable of acced-ing to the immutable order of knowledge. Perspective functions inPlato’s dialogues as a privileged trope and point of reference for suchfallacious art because of its commmitment to recording the way thingslook and its tendency to pander to our fallible senses instead of correct-ing these with the aid of the rational sciences of measurement. Thus,



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in Book X of The Republic, the painter’s depiction of a bed from anoblique angle is made to stand for all mimetic art in its distance fromand radical distortion of the truth.61 Yet, weak as it is in ontologicalvalue, this type of copying is still deemed preferable to that imagina-tive remaking of appearances which strives only for a pleasing effect.Plato associates the latter type of imitation (which he labels ‘phantas-tic’, as opposed to ‘eikastic’) with ‘sculptors and painters who work ona colossal scale’ – as Lomazzo would later do, albeit in a very differentspirit.62 Plato’s fundamental objection is that these artists, in theirdesire to eliminate any disagreeable effects arising from foreshortening,‘leave truth to look after itself, and give the images they make, not theproportions of the original, but those which will appear beautiful’.Within the hierarchy of mimetic forms, this sort of image is the mostmendacious and unreal in that it ‘appears to be a likeness without beingso’ and looks correct only when viewed from a certain angle. In thesame way, Plato argues, the imagery deployed by the sophist (or poet)may charm ignorant listeners, to whom it appears a plausible approxi-mation of the truth, but discloses its emptiness to those capable ofphilosophical reasoning.63

Plato’s indictment of illusionism had a profoundly detrimental effecton the development of ut pictura discourse. If our Western habit ofthinking of perspective as an epistemological tool – attested by oureveryday use of the term as a metaphor for the cognitive act itself –originated with the Platonic dialogues, it was after a negative fashion.64

For perspective figures there as an anti-intellectual device, a spawner ofphantasmagoric images that, like the sophist’s dazzling displays,threaten to mislead the mind in its search for knowledge. An unbridge-able chasm was thus opened up between intelligible reality and thehollow allure of mimetic fictions, a split which relegated the latterdefinitively to the realm of seeming as distinct from being. Althoughthe Platonic dialogues may have largely disappeared from view duringthe Middle Ages, the branding of poetry and painting as cognate formsof deceptive illusion became part of the general fabric of discussion ofthe arts.65 What made these arts so suspect was their ability to manipu-late truth, to make what is false appear veridical and disguise their owninsubstantiality with a specious array of ‘colours’.66 This configurationof ideas lingered on into the sixteenth century, resurfacing, for exam-ple, in H.C. Agrippa’s ironic attack on rhetoric as a form of

subtile Eloquence, [which] with exquisite colouringe of woordes,and with a false likelihoode of the truth doth allure the mindes of



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the simple, and leadeth them into the prison of erroure, seekinge tosubverte the sence of the truthe.67

Painting is likewise characterized by Agrippa as an art that ‘deceiveththe sighte, and in an Image diversely placed, doth caste many fourmesover the eies of the beholders’, by means of the ‘Arte Perspective’.68

Ensnarement by the duplicitously lifelike image barely figures as aposssible scenario in Alberti’s De Pictura, where the illusory aspects ofperspective are played down in the interests of its claim to scientifictruth.69 But as continental artists from the early Cinquecento throughto the Baroque period took to experimenting with various types ofillusionistic and trompe l’œil art, there was a resurgence of interestin the theoretical aspects of illusionism and a renewed appreciationof its effects. The capacity of a naturalistic painting to make ‘thatwhich in effect is not’ appear to be, by creating an impression of relievoand depth, was now more likely to draw admiring plaudits from thecognoscenti than to be condemned as a phantasm devoid of truth.70

The deceptions perpetrated by such images came to be regarded as(in Cleopatra’s phrase) an ‘excellent falsehood’, a mark of triumphantvirtuosity designed to excite the beholder’s astonished delight at theartistry involved. Thus Titian is praised by Lomazzo for making his fig-ures stand out with ‘wonderfull eminencie’ by his exaggerated use oflights and shadows in a manner that at once ‘ma[d]e knowne his arte’and ‘beguiled the eies of such, as beheld his most admirable workes’(pp.20–21). As the branch of perspective illusion specializing in theproduction of such hyperbolic effects of projection and recession,foreshortening provided a natural focus for this web of associations.In Lodovico Dolce’s dialogue on painting, for example, Aretino, theeponymous speaker and authorial mouthpiece, observes that elaborateforeshortenings constitute ‘one of the leading problems in art’ whichthe painter may exploit to show off his skill in this field, but recom-mends that they be used sparingly, ‘for the rarer they are, the greaterthe wonderment they occasion; and the more so when the painter,pressed for space, succeeds by dint of them in fitting a large figureinto a small area’, a trick that, when well executed, will ‘deceive theadmirer’s sight’.71 Such dwelling on the painter’s ‘mirabile artificio’ –admirable in its very capacity to seem what it is not – in the discoursesappertaining to perspective, foreshortening and relievo was anticipatedby Leonardo’s famous comparison of painting and sculpture.72 In hisparagone – the broad outlines of which were transmitted to Englishreaders by Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of Castiglione’s Book of



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the Courtier – the sense of wonderment excited by pictorial relief isspecifically ascribed to its transgression of the literal.73 Painting is supe-rior to sculpture, argues Leonardo, because it involves ‘greater artifice’and ‘mental deliberation’, especially in the achievement of ‘spatialdefinition’, for

the major cause of wonder that arises in painting is the appearanceof something detached from the wall or other flat surface, deceivingsubtle judgements with this effect, as it is not separated from thesurface of the wall.

By contrast, sculpture gives little ‘cause for admiration’, in that it is‘nothing other than it appears to be’, taking its proportions and itsmodelling by light and shade directly from nature rather than from thepoet’s own invention (pp.38–44). Painting, that is to say, earns ourapplause to the degree that it succeeds in overcoming the material con-ditions of its existence to create images which, though illusory, aremade convincing by art.

As we have seen, this type of violation of literal truth was conceived asobeying a rhetorical schema, and the high valuation Leonardo set uponpictorial illusion was entirely consistent with the preference shown bymany Renaissance writers for a consciously artificial and hyperbolicstyle – a style calculated precisely to astonish. The Ciceronian belief that‘the purpose and function of the poet is to speak surpassingly well forthe sake of arousing wonder’ was given wide currency by Italian trea-tises on poetics.74 So it is hardly surprising to find the appreciation ofdeceptive artifice implied by such aesthetic priorities being expressedin literature by reference to painting, or vice versa, especially giventheir long and largely negative association on the basis of this samequality. Thus Paolo Pino extols the painter’s skill in feigning as ‘propriapoesia, cioe invenzione, la qual far apparere quello che non è sia’.75

Castiglione reverses the analogy, using a pictorial trope to describe theaspirations to eloquence he politely disclaims:

I send unto you this booke, as a purtraict in peinctinge of the Court ofUrbin: not of the handiwoorke of Raphael, or Michael Angelo, but ofan unknowen peincter, and that can do no more but draw the princi-pall lines, without settingfurth the truth with beawtifull coulours, ormakinge it appeere by the art of Prospective that it is not.76

The accomplished poet or painter, Castiglione assumes, will not besatisfied with representing his matter in bare outline but will seek



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to adorn it with all the fictive devices at his command – be thiswith the ‘beawtifull coulours’ of rhetoric or with the ‘art of Prospec-tive’, which, it is syntactically implied, are interchangeable means ofconjuring up a delightful illusion.

Before attempting to assess where the English stood in relation tothis sort of argument, we might usefully pause to consider what weshould understand by the power to deceive so often imputed to illu-sionist art, whether as matter for praise or blame. The ubiquity andutter conventionality of such claims – which recall Pliny’s oft-told talesof trompe l’œil images capable of fooling human beings as well as birdsand animals – only add to our difficulty in knowing what to make ofthem. On the other hand, the self-conscious delight in artifice, andin the particular type of mental agility it demands, with which thesecommonplaces are imbued in Italian art treatises suggests that they arenot to be taken entirely at face value. For all their talk of deception,Leonardo and his successors generally assume that the beholder mustbe fully apprised of the fictive nature of what he/she is seeing in orderto experience the peculiar pleasures associated with illusionism. Indeed,it is often implied that the mimetic artefact will work its magic mosteffectively in the presence of the cognoscenti who, being acquaintedwith the problems of art, can appreciate the skill with which theyhave been resolved. These presuppositions are in broad agreement withthe findings of modern science. As perceptual psychologists havedemonstrated, the illusion generated by a naturalistic painting is rarelyso perfect as to dupe the beholder; rather, it is conditional upon his/heractive collusion in a familiar set of representational conventions.77

Even when the eye is momentarily tricked into experiencing a powerfulillusion of depth – on first encountering a painted ceiling, say – this isquickly superseded by reflection on the mechanisms used to induce theillusion.78 A similar case could be made in relation to poetry, as we shallsee, since the rhetorical theory in which it was rooted also assumedthat the pleasure and instruction to be derived from figurative languageare inseparable from the consciousness of artifice.79

Italian interest in the putative powers of illusionistic art to ‘beguile’the sight was widely echoed by English writers at the turn of the six-teenth century. As Lucy Gent has shown, ‘where we see naturalism inthe lifelikeness produced by perspective and chiaroscuro, they sawdeceptiveness’.80 Their tendency to fasten on this aspect of illusionismto the virtual exclusion of any other manifested itself in various ways.It fuelled the native fascination with anamorphic devices – a species of‘couzening picture’ that offered a witty reminder of the tricks perspec-tive might play on the unwary beholder.81 More importantly, it



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dictated the terms on which English commentators responded to andattempted to make sense of continental aesthetic ideas. Peacham’sincreased exposure to these ideas is reflected in the addition of a chap-ter on the ‘manifold deceptions of the sight by perspective’ to therevised 1612 edition of his Art of Drawing. Likewise Haydocke specifi-cally commends Lomazzo’s Trattato for the instruction it offers in ‘themysteries of this Arte of Painting, whereby the unskilfull eye is so oftencozened and deluded, taking counterfeit creatures for true and natu-rall’.82 A similarly biased and radically selective reading of Lomazzowas proposed by Nicholas Hilliard, whose Art of Limning is openlyindebted to Haydocke’s translation. Citing Lomazzo’s point thatobjects seen at a distance cannot be represented by their ‘true superfi-cies’, he adds by way of explication that

painting perspective and foreshortening of lines, with due shadow-ing, according to the rule of the eye, worketh by falsehood toexpress truth … For perspective, to define it briefly, is an art takenfrom or by the effect or judgment of the eye, for a man to expressanything in shortened lines and shadows, to deceive both theunderstanding and the eye.

(p.71)

For better or worse, it seems, perspective had become synonymouswith deceit in the English imagination.83

Outwardly, there is little to distinguish Hilliard’s discursive terminol-ogy from that employed in similar contexts by Leonardo or Lomazzo.Yet we may have reason to suspect that the overfamiliarity of this topos,its very status as a cliché, masks a crucial discontinuity in meaning.The note of apprehension so often sounded in English referencesto perspective painting, even when the primary message is encomias-tic, seems to point to a more literalist understanding of illusion thanwas the norm on the far side of the Alps, to a deeply rooted fear thatthe beholder might actually be duped into confusing the image with itsreferent. It was this anxiety, of course, that lay at the heart of the argu-ments about idolatry advanced by Protestant thinkers, who repeatedlywarned of the dangers of mistaking visual symbols for the reality theysignified.84 Margaret Aston notes that English Reformers were commit-ted to the view, expounded in the Elizabethan homily against idolatry,that ‘different art-forms represented different degrees of danger: thegreater the realism the greater the hazard of idolatry’.85 Sculpture wasconsidered more harmful than flat images, but painting, especially



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perhaps where it imitated the third dimension, was not above suspi-cion either. Over-sensitization to the ‘abuses and deceipts used byPaynters’ can thus be seen as part of the ripple-effect created by theperiodic outbreaks of iconoclasm experienced in England during thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the iconophobic reactionsthey unleashed which defined all art, secular as well as religious, aspotentially suspect.86 At the same time, it is important to bear in mindthat the Protestant doctrine on images was never fully consistent withitself, any more than the English culture it helped to shape, which hasbeen described as subject to a ‘continuous interplay, and the occasionalmajor collision, between strongly iconic and strongly iconoclasticimpulses’.87 Inevitably this made for a complex attitude towards thevisual arts, one compounded, in differing measures, of attraction anddistrust. Hilliard’s gloss might be said to encapsulate this ambivalence,moving as it does from a positive account of the paradoxical qualitiesof perspective, in which falsehood is a vehicle for expressing truth, to amore simplistic and morally ambiguous assertion of its capacity todelude ‘both the understanding and the eye’.

The official reformist line on images did not deter even committedProtestants like Sidney and Spenser, acutely conscious though theywere of the immanent dangers of idolatry, from responding apprecia-tively to the new illusionist technology.88 Nor did it make them ortheir compatriots unreceptive to or incapable of reflecting upon thepleasures of an illusion consciously entered into. As librarian to theArundel household, Franciscus Junius may have enjoyed greater accessto Italian sources than other writers in England, yet he was reiteratingideas familiar to them when he declared in his Painting of the Ancients(the English version of which appeared in 1638) that both poetryand painting

doe wind themselves by an unsensible delight of admirationso closely into our hearts, that they make us in such an astonish-ment of wonder to stare upon the Imitation of things naturall,as if we saw the true things themselves; in so much that we doenot love, though we finde our selves misled, to have this our joyinterrupted, but we do rather entertaine it with all possible careand studie.89

Junius recognizes that the wonder engendered by mimetic art dependson the readiness of beholders/readers to entertain the illusion in theknowledge that it is an illusion, to suffer themselves ‘wittingly and



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willingly to be seduced and beguiled’. For many Englishmen, however,the pleasures afforded by this kind of ‘agreeable cheat’ were distinctlytroubled.90 The whole-hearted approval of illusionism voiced by conti-nental theorists tended to be qualified in English minds by misgivingsabout the moral and epistemological risks it posed for those whoallowed themselves to be so seduced. Other factors in addition toProtestant ideology may have contributed to this stance. The Englishhad not yet fully shaken off a moralistic attitude to image-makingreaching back to the early Church Fathers, as evidenced by their prac-tice of calling portraits ‘counterfeits’, which endured well into the sev-enteenth century.91 They were also less experienced readers of mimeticart than their European counterparts, and hence more likely perhapsto give credence to its fabled powers of deception. Whatever thecauses, there was a widespread suspicion of visual images that, in somecases, cohabited uneasily with a more informed and open-mindedresponse.92 In 1608, George Hakewill, for example, implicitly attackedpainting by placing it in the same category as the ‘delusion of thesight’ worked by the ‘subtiltie of the divel, by the charmes of sorcerers…[and] by the knavery of Priests and Friers’, but went on to observe, withgreater discrimination, that ‘among al artificiall deceiving of theeie … that of painting, and limming is the most noble’, because itso bewitches the sight ‘that its then most delighted, when tis mostdeceived’.93

Similar contradictions and instabilities emerged when Elizabethanwriters endeavoured to get to grips with the nature of poetic illusion.In recent years critical attention has focused almost exclusively onthe Puritan-led propagandist assault launched upon the theatre in theclosing decades of the sixteenth century. But this needs to be seen incontext, as a local skirmish in a much wider campaign against ‘paintedeloquence’ and mimetic fictions or feigning in general.94 In each casethe defence centred on the question of what status ought to be assignedto such fictions since, as John Harrington remarked, ‘this objection oflyes is the chief, and that upon which the rest be grounded’.95 Aspoetry’s most energetic advocate, Sidney employed two main strategiesin vindication of its ‘feigned image[s]’. He maintains, as we noted ear-lier, that they make a better teacher than factual example, being free toevolve a ‘perfect picture’ of vice or virtue. More subtly, he argues thatno attempt is made to deceive by disguising the imaginary status ofthese inventions: ‘the poet never maketh any circles about your imagi-nation, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes’. Hence noteven a child would be so gullible as to confuse the poet’s fables with



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life, or be tempted ‘to give the lie to things not affirmatively butallegorically and figuratively written’ (p.124). Sidney’s central point hereis that we are culturally trained to recognize and decode metaphoricityand are thus accustomed to sifting meaning from the poetic falsehoodsthat represent it to best advantage, knowing ‘the application [to be]most divinely true, but the discourse itself feigned’ (p.115). Yet whilehe mounts a strong case for taking poetic fiction on its own terms, as amode of communication that is sui generis, he also concedes much toits adversaries. Imaginative licence, he acknowledges, may be abusedand so make poetry which should be ‘eikastike’, construed as ‘figuringforth good things’, to be ‘“phantastike”, which doth contrariwise infectthe fancy with unworthy objects’ (p.125). Sidney’s rewriting of this cru-cial Platonic distinction between more and less acceptable forms ofillusionism in ethical terms is symptomatic of a larger problem, for ifhe succeeds in redeeming poetry from Plato’s slur, it is only at the costof binding it to the inculcation of edifying truths.96

Puttenham’s attempts in his Arte of English Poesie to put a favourablegloss on the charge of lying are no less equivocal.97 Poetic discourse, hestates in well-known passage, is condemned by its transgression of lit-eral speech to a fraudulent duplicity:

As figures be the instruments of ornament in every language, so bethey also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speach, becausethey passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occu-pied of purpose to deceive the eare and also the minde, drawing itfrom plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doublenesse, wherebyour talke is the more guilefull & abusing.

(p.154)

Viewed in this light, Puttenham admits that the Athenian judges,the Areopagites, had good grounds for banning ‘figurative speaches’from their courts as ‘meere illusions to the minde, and wrestersof upright judgement’. And though he advocates greater leeway forpoetasters in this respect, as they prosecute only ‘pleasant & lovelycauses’, he would have them exercise this liberty within the constraintsimposed by decorum, which act as a break on the abuses inherent infigurative discourse. For, as he sees it, all such speeches can he said topractise a ‘kinde of dissimulation’, in that their surface meaningdoes not correspond to their real intent (p.186). Yet, at the sametime, he insists that the very doubleness which makes language ‘moreguilefull & abusing’ also makes it more graceful and ‘significative’.



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Moreover, it gives rise to the pleasures of working out ‘what it maybe that is meant, and not expressed’ (p.195), a form of intellectual grat-ification long associated with ‘dark’ conceits which withold their truesense from a superficial perusal. A skilful poet will therefore convey hismeaning ‘somwhat out of sight’, whilst ensuring that it remains acces-sible to the educated, if not to the ‘vulgar judgement’ (pp.137–8).Like Sidney’s theory of feigning images, then, Puttenham’s poetics ofdissimulation presupposes a knowing reader who, so far from beingduped by appearances, is able to grasp the truth they ingeniously con-ceal. Adopting interpretive tactics akin to those of an informed beholderstationed before a perspective painting, such a reader will take con-scious delight in tracing the translation of this hidden truth from itsoriginal ‘plainnesse and simplicitie’ into a brilliantly illusionistic,multi-dimensional form.

In defending the poet as a maker of fictions, Sidney and Puttenhamthus become entangled in the conflicting significations generated bythe paradoxical nature of illusion, as did Hilliard when seeking toexplain perspective. Wishing to deliver feigning from its old associationwith lying, these writers yet continue to oscillate between seeing it as amedium for expressing truth and as a source of sensual and even mentaldelusion. While both show a more sophisticated understanding of theworkings of fiction and of the kind of belief it elicits than many of theircontemporaries, their readiness to grant its susceptibility to moral attackis proof (if any were needed) that they were not immune to the com-mon prejudices of their culture. Feigned images are assumed to requirecontinual surveillance if they are not to slide from the richly figurativeinto the purely ‘fantastical’ or downright falsehood. There is, in short,ample evidence to suggest that the myth of perspective and its poeticequivalents polluting the mind with ‘meere illusions’ retained its holdon the English imagination even when partially displaced by other,more complex, responses. These devices shared a capacity for decou-pling seeming from being that was viewed in many quarters as con-ducive not so much to aesthetic pleasure as to serious cognitive error.

True to his habit of playing opposing views of a given topic offagainst one another, Shakespeare exploits the full range of connota-tions that had accrued around the fictive devices of poet and painter.Occasionally he solicits our appreciation (via the admiring gaze of hisfictional audience) for the deceptively lifelike qualities of the work ofart. The ‘statue’ of Hermione and the ‘piece / Of skillful painting’representing the fall of Troy in The Rape of Lucrece are pre-eminentexamples of Shakespearean artefacts applauded for their capacity to



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‘beguile’ (in both senses) the beholder with their ‘wondrous skill’.98 Yetneither is presented in an uncritical light.99 Indeed, Lucrece’s perusal ofthe ‘well painted-piece’ provides a vehicle for some of Shakespeare’smost incisive and self-searching reflections on the painter’s illusionisttechniques and their relationship to his poetic art. Among the firstimages to attract Lucrece’s eye is that of old Nestor captivating theassembled Greeks with his ‘golden words’, which establishes an implicitcorrelation between the coercive effects of his oratory and the painter’sown modes of persuasion. We are given a taste of this pictorial rhetoricin the following stanzas (ll.1408–28) where the perspectival arrange-ment of the scene, so plausible in its rendering of optical recession thatit ‘seem’d to mock the mind’, is described at length:

For much imaginary work was there,Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,That for Achilles’ image stood his spear,Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behindWas left unseen, save to the eye of mind:A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a headStood for the whole to be imagined.

(l.1422–8)

E.H. Gombrich first suggested that this account of perspectival distor-tion was modelled on the description of a picture of the fall of Thebesin Philostratus the Elder’s Imagines. If so, the allusion would strengthenthe ut pictura context of this passage by locating it within the ekphras-tic tradition of reconstituting visual artefacts by verbal means.100 Inany case, it cannot be accidental that the foreshortened image ofAchilles recalls, in the ‘imaginary work’ it both performs and exacts,the operations of synecdoche, one of the ‘dark’ tropes Puttenham com-mends for forcing the reader to look beyond appearances by makingthe part stand for the whole to be imagined.101 Either may aptly becharacterized as a type of ‘conceit deceitful’, not to be taken at facevalue. In conflating a manifest pride in the painter’s (and, by associa-tion, the poet’s) skill in cheating both eye and mind with a sense of thepotentially perilous consequences, the phrase itself asks to be read asa synecdoche that telescopes the complex understanding of illusion –in its various artistic, moral and cognitive guises – unfolded throughLucrece’s scrutiny of the ‘painting’. The more sinister resonances ofthis phrase prepare us for the heroine’s encounter with the figure ofSinon who, like the dissembling art of his maker, strives to ‘hide deceit’



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by concealing his guile under an assumed mildness (11.1501–19).Confronted by this treacherous image of a traitor (the visual prototypeof her ravisher, Tarquin), Lucrece discovers that the key to her owntragedy lies in a failure to interrogate appearances.

For even as subtile Sinon here is painted,So sober-sad, so weary, and so mild(As if with grief of travail he had fainted),To me came Tarquin armed to beguildWith outward honesty, but yet defil’dWith inward vice: as Priam him did cherish,So did I Tarquin, so my Troy did perish.

(ll.1541–47)

To complete the ut pictura analogy, this disastrous omission is repli-cated at a rhetorical level: Lucrece’s naive trust in outward forms findsits counterpart in ‘credulous old Priam’, whose willingness to believeSinon’s ‘enchanting story’ was, we are reminded, the error that sealedthe fate of Troy.

Darker undertones are, in fact, rarely absent from Shakespeare’scelebration of the virtuosity of illusionist art. Even the ‘majestic vision’of Prospero’s masque comes with a health-warning to those likeFerdinand who are over-ready to put their faith in an ‘insubstantialpageant’. At a more radical level, the arguments brought by Plato andthe moralists against mimetic fictions and their putative capacity tomislead the mind into a moral and epistemological quagmire providean imaginative point of departure for two Shakespearean plays inparticular. Troilus and Cressida and Macbeth explore the tragic conse-quences that might flow from a failure to resist the seductive appeal ofsuch fictions. In each case the propensity of the titular hero to creditequivocating speech that ‘lies like truth’, and to yield to his own‘fantastical’ visions, results in a mental dislocation from reality whichcontributes directly to his downfall. As we shall see in Chapter 5, theprocess culminates in the betrayal scene in Troilus and Cressida (V.2).Here the complete disjunction between the idealized imageof Cressida that presents itself to Troilus’s inner eye and the sordidscenario being enacted before him combines with the slow corruptionof persuasive discourse to plunge him into an abyss of self-delusionand doubt – an anamorphic hell where everything both ‘is, and is not’(cf. Macbeth, I.4.141).



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Licence and decorum

The violation of literal truth that characterized illusionistic artifice, ascultivated by both poets and painters, called for the exercise of a partic-ular sort of tact or judgement. During the period it was widely assumedthat what constitutes ‘good use of speache’ can ultimately only be‘knowen by a certaine naturall judgement, and not by art or anyemaner rule’, particularly with respect to rhetorical figures since, by def-inition, they entail the ‘abuse of Grammer rules’.102 The more figura-tive discourse diverged from ‘common utterance’, the greater the abuseinvolved and the more crucial the role such ‘naturall judgement’ wasrequired to perform. It was expected, in effect, to serve as a yardstickfor measuring these verbal transgressions and thereby bringing themunder control, for defining the limits to which they might acceptablygo in the absence of objective criteria or definite rules. In this section Ishall argue that the type of judgemental faculty thought to determineappropriate usage in the case of rhetorical ornament (elocutio) wasregarded as fundamentally akin to that brought to bear on the makingand viewing of pictures, and, by extension, on the regulation of socialconduct. Although it sometimes went under different names andassumed diverse forms, this faculty may be broadly identified with theall-pervasive principle of decorum. As the judgements proper to thevisual, linguistic and social arts were formulated along similar lines, soeach posed similar kinds of problems for those who exercised them.Alberti’s strictures on the importance of observing a decorous restraintwhen embellishing pictorial compositions were endlessly recycled insixteenth-century Italian treatises. So, too, was Horace’s warning thatpoets and painters should not overstep certain bounds with their fan-tastic inventions. The difficulty, as always, was in knowing preciselywhere those bounds lay.

What makes this issue especially significant for a study of the inter-connections between spatial representation and rhetorical modes ofthought is that it tended to be addressed in terms of the powerful yetelusive concept of ‘due proportion’. Whether the particular activityunder scrutiny were painting or architecture, poetic or social practice,it was around this key visual trope that critical discussion of decorumrevolved. The identification of decorum, the knowledge of what isfitting in a given situation, with a ‘sutable comelinesse of apt propor-tion’, formed part of the intellectual legacy handed down from classi-cal antiquity. Vitruvius had listed ‘decor’ (derived, like decorum, fromthe Latin verb ‘decet’: to be fitting) among the fundamental principles



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of architecture, along with ‘ordinatio’ (order), ‘dispositio’ (arrange-ment), ‘eurythmia’ (proportion), ‘symmetria’ (symmetry), and ‘distrib-utio’ (distribution), each of which is in some way directed towardsachieving an ‘appropriate harmony’ through ‘the suitable display ofdetails in their context’.103 ‘Decor’ was associated in particular with theability to vary one’s use of the classical orders to suit different architec-tural contexts. The priority Vitruvius gave to this skill was part of astrategy to dignify the science of building by grafting onto it a fullyestablished rhetorical and ethical theory of decorum.104 Conversely,the concept of ‘due proportion’ became a central plank in this theoryas developed in the works of Aristotle and Cicero, who saw decorum asproceeding from a harmonious congruity between style and subjectmatter, or between style and context.105 And the same criterion thatwas imposed on architectural and linguistic styles was deemed equallyapplicable to social conduct, on the premise that the ‘universal rule, inoratory as in life, is to consider propriety’.106 That human beingsshould aspire to an ideal of ordered harmony in life and in art is thegoverning assumption behind Cicero’s highly influential treatise onethics, De Officiis, where seemly behaviour is alternately defined byanalogy with poetic decorum and with visual beauty:

For just as the eye is aroused by the beauty of a body, because ofthe appropriate arrangement of the limbs, and is delighted justbecause all its parts are in graceful harmony, so this seemliness,shining out in one’s life, arouses the approval of one’s fellows,because of the order and constancy and moderation of every wordand action.107

In all one’s doings, striving for a graceful proportionality was evidentlyregarded as the key to a beautiful, orderly and civilised existence.108

In seeking to realize this aesthetic and social ideal, Renaissance writ-ers and artists saw themselves as upholding a fundamental law ofnature. It is well documented that in Christian-Platonic cosmology thewhole of creation was conceived as being composed of harmonic pro-portions, based on universally valid mathematical ratios that could bereconstructed from their microcosmic reflections in the musical scaleand in the dimensions of the human form.109 Since its mission was toexpress this same God-given harmony across a range of activities, thetheory of decorum is ultimately predicated on a belief in correspon-dency. It testifies to that habit of imagining the world as a vastsystem of analogical relationships which Foucault has identified as the



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distinguishing feature of sixteenth-century epistemology, but whichhad its roots in ancient Greek philosophy.110 Inevitably, this way ofthinking helped to consolidate the links between the disciplines, giventhat as Lomazzo/Haydocke puts it, ‘there is no arte, but is some waybeholding to Proportion’ (p.26). As ‘the first patterne of all Artificiallthinges’, it supposedly provided a metaphysical basis and sanction forall the liberal arts and sciences, including music, medicine, geometry,astronomy, architecture, painting, and of course language. By implica-tion, therefore, to observe the correct or appropriate proportions in anyof these domains was to conform one’s actions to a divinely institutedorder, just as, by the same logic, not to do so was tantamount to dis-rupting that order: ‘disordered speech’, writes John Hoskins, ‘is not somuch injury to the lips which give it forth … as to the right proportionand coherence of things in themselves, so wrongfully expressed’.111

While the desirability of achieving proportionality in one’s workwas more or less a matter of consensus that transcended cultural anddisciplinary boundaries, views on how this ideal should be imple-mented differed. In the following pages I shall consider what Italiancommentators had to say on the subject before going on to comparetheir approach with that adopted by their English counterparts. LikeVitruvius, Alberti assumed that ‘due proportion’ was attainable byadhering to fixed mathematical ratios notionally derived from a perfecthuman body.112 By contrast, Lomazzo was, as we have seen, moreinterested in figures that exceed canonical proportions and are thusnot amenable to purely rational methods of quantification. By whatalternative criterion was the fittingness or otherwise of their dimen-sions to be determined? For Lomazzo, as for many of his contempo-raries, the answer lay with the eye, which together with the intellectand ‘directed by the Perspective arte, ought to be a guide, measure, andjudge of Painting and Carving’ (p.181). As artists sought to give theircompositions a grace exceeding measurement, the judgement of theeye (giudizio dell’occhio) came to rival and even supplant mathematicsas the final arbiter of artistic correctness. ‘No better standard can beapplied than the judgment of the eye’, declared Vasari, ‘for even thougha thing be perfectly measured, if the eye is still offended it willnot cease to censure it’.113 As the principle responsible for regulatingthe irregular, the judgement of the eye was seen as having a specialaffinity with those aspects of proportion (or perspective) that weredifficult to compute exactly. For Italian theorists in the latter half ofthe Cinquecento, this chiefly meant the distortions induced in thehuman form by foreshortening and movement. Elaborate schemes for



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depicting the foreshortened figure by means of stereometric construc-tion and for measuring movement arithmetically had been proposed bythe early perspectivists. But to their successors, more conscious of thelimitations of mathematical rule, these areas presented practical difficul-ties only soluble by recourse to the experienced eye. Michaelangelo’sfamous dictum that ‘one should have compasses in one’s eyes, not inone’s hands, because the hands execute but it is the eye which judges’,is echoed in Book V of Lomazzo’s Trattato and elsewhere, as was hiscriticism of Dürer for attempting a rigidly systematic analysis of humanproportions – for which, in any event, ‘no fixed rule can be given’ –without making sufficient allowance for movement.114 One of theinterlocutors in Pino’s Dialogo della Pittura, for example, is reluctant tocomply when pressed to explain the rules of proportion, objecting thatthey are of small use to the painter who tries to ‘capture the quicknessof rapid and moving actions, where figures in some parts recede,shorten or diminish’; for this the painter is advised to rely instead onhis own ‘discrezione’ and ‘buon giudizio’.115 Dolce similarly opinedthat foreshortening is ‘something which cannot be done without greatjudgment and discretion’.116 Infinitely mutating and irregularly pro-portioned, the human figure in motion was simply not reducible toany absolute standard of measurement.

Arrived at intuitively rather than numerically, the judgements madeby the eye were explicated in terms of the framework laid down bymedieval faculty psychology.117 According to this Aristotelian dis-course, each sense is capable of discriminating between the qualitiespeculiar to that sense – between high and low, for example, in thecase of hearing; near and far, or light and dark, in the case of sight.Moreover, each sense will intuit the proper relation between these qual-ities on the basis of what it finds most pleasing, gravitating naturallytowards the mean, and rejecting anything disproportionate, whetherthrough deficiency or excess, as offensive to it. Insofar as the capacityfor sensate judgement was presumed to be innate – a product ofinstinct, not acquired rules – it was also thought, in principle at least,to be common to all. If the instinctual basis of such judgements furthereroded the authority of mathematical laws, so on another front didtheir involvement with the particular and the circumstantial. Like itsliterary equivalent, decorum, the giudizio dell’occhio was closely associ-ated with the moral virtues of prudence and discretion, being knownin common with them as a practical mode of reasoning concernedwith ascertaining what is right or appropriate in a given instance.118

With respect to the visual arts, this usually implied an ability to adapt



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the laws of proportion or perspective to take account of specific cir-cumstances, such as the subject matter of the work in question, or theplace and context in which it was to be viewed. Lomazzo’s insistenceon the need to adjust the dimensions of figures placed on high in orderto accommodate the intended viewpoint (a process supervised by theartist’s eye rather than his compass and rule) appeals directly to thisbelief that canonical norms should be modified where necessary inthe light of practical considerations. The same belief also dictated thatthe painter should not stick to a ‘single measure’ but should vary hisproportions – in ways clearly impossible to quantify – to harmonizewith the particular emotions, character, age and sex of the personrepresented.119

Owing to these properties, giudizio – in marked contrast to the math-ematical laws it modified or displaced – was deeply resistant to codifi-cation. The intuitive, sub-rational status of such judgements, combinedwith the fact that they related to and were only valid within a specificcontext, made them almost impossible to marshal into rigid precepts.Moreover, they had to do, as I have suggested, with forms of artificethat operated outside normative rule and so, by definition, did notlend themselves to systematic methods of regulation. One consequenceof this lack of theoretical fixity was that the concept of giudizio, tradi-tionally thought of as a force for restraint, inculcating adherence to anAristotelian mean, might equally be used to authorize opposing ten-dencies. Indeed, it was the flexibility of this principle that allowedMichelangelo and his Mannerist followers to bend it to their advantagewhen seeking to legitimize their violations of the rules governing per-spective and proportion. However, these libertarian propensities had tocontend with other, more powerful factors within Cinquecento culturethat worked to counteract the incipient relativism of giudizio or, at anyrate, to hold it in check. We may point, in particular, to the chasteningeffect of Counter-Reformation doctrines, which frowned on any devia-tion from the facts, any unnecessary display of imaginative licence,when representing historical or biblical scenes, or to the restrictionsimposed by the prevailing, and in its way no less inhibiting, emphasison a normative ideal in contemporary discussion of the arts.120

Evidence of this idealist bent greets us wherever we happen to lookin Italian art treatises of the period. What concerns us here is howattitudes to measurement were affected by the cultural tendenciesoutlined above, and it should be noted in this connection that thewidespread disaffection with mathematical rules did not prevent criticsfrom endorsing the tried and trusted canons of proportion. Lomazzo’s



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handling of this topic is altogether typical of such backsliding. Havingargued that the artist ‘ought not to tie himselfe to any one kind ofproportion’, since ‘there are as many varieties thereof, as there are nat-urall differences of bodies’ (pp.41, 49), he proceeds to advocate a seriesof measurements based on standard types originally formulated byDürer – ‘a man of eight heads’, ‘a woman of tenne faces’, and so forth –on the pretext that ‘Arte being the Counterfaiter of Nature, must everindevour to imitate the most absolute [i.e. perfect] things’ (p.51).121

Charged with adapting language and behaviour to fit the variablecircumstances of ‘places, times and persons’, the principle of deco-rum not only shared salient qualities with the giudizio dell’occhio, but,to some extent, a common history. As the sixteenth century wore on,it too was applied ever more prescriptively, reduced to a set of bind-ing precepts that left writers and artists no real latitude to speak of inthe treatment of their subject. The Italian treatises on poetics that werechurned out by the dozen during this period relentlessly remindedthe writer of his duty to observe the rules of propriety by suiting styleto subject matter and subject matter to genre. Above all, he wasenjoined by critics such as Scaliger and Minturno to give his charactersthe speech and behaviour specified as appropriate to each type of per-son and meticulously classified according to country, sex, age, fortune,disposition, and so on.122 Any author so foolhardy as to swerve fromthese formulaic patterns, any who dared to show ‘indications of gen-erosity … in an old man, or signs of temperance in a very low servant,or of shame in a prostitute’, could expect to be lambasted for indeco-rum and lack of verisimilitude.123 Such attitudes discouraged the freeplay of invention to the same degree that they rewarded conformity totypical modes of representation. Commentators on the visual artsechoed this doctrinaire approach to decorum.124 Dolce, who maintainsthat a sense of propriety (‘convenevolezza’) is as essential for the artistas for the writer, admonishes that one ‘should always pay attention tothe personal qualities of [one’s] subjects’ when depicting them, besidestaking into account ‘questions of nationality, dress, setting and period’;thus he finds fault with Dürer for depicting the Virgin in a Germancostume.125 Yet despite the fact that decorum was interpreted in arestrictive rather than in a permissive sense by the vast majority of itsneoclassicizing Italian expositors, it was possible to read another andmore liberatory set of meanings into the classical texts that enshrinedthis concept for later ages.126 Horace’s Ars Poetica, on whose authorityDolce, like most of his fellow critics, leans heavily, has generally beenblamed for the normative and dogmatic tendencies that overwhelmed



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the theory of decorum in the course of the sixteenth century. Ironically,however, its opening statement could be said to exemplify the veryinconsistency it attacks by conceding to poets and painters a condi-tional freedom to follow the promptings of their imagination (p.63).The ambiguity of the Horatian text is reflected in the ease with whichit accommodated itself to opposing critical positions in the perennialdebate about just how much artistic licence should be granted to prac-titioners of either art.127

The elasticity of decorum as a standard of propriety might alsobe inferred from another celebrated passage that became an importantlocus for both artists and writers because of its ut pictura analogizing.We have already seen how Quintilian likened rhetorical ornament tocorporeal movement as a source of pleasurable variety (p.5). In Book IIof the Institutio, he expands upon this conceit in the midst of a discus-sion about knowing when it is appropriate to bend the rules. ‘It isoften expedient and occasionally becoming to make some modificationin the time-honoured order’ (my emphasis), he writes, just as inpictures and statues

Dress, expression and attitude are frequently varied. The body whenheld bolt upright has but little grace … But that curve, I mightalmost call it motion, with which we are so familiar, gives an impres-sion of action and animation … Where can we find a more violentand elaborate attitude than that of the Discobolus of Myron? Yet thecritic who disapproved of the figure because it was not uprightwould merely show his utter failure to understand the sculptor’s art,in which the very novelty and difficulty of execution is what mostdeserves our praise. A similar impression of grace and charm is pro-duced by rhetorical figures … For they involve a certain departurefrom the straight line and have the merit of variation from theordinary usage.128

With a decisiveness that does much to substantiate a basic premise ofmy argument in this chapter, Quintilian identifies the wilful transgres-sion of artistic norms as the key to the resemblance between rhetoricalfigures and irregular proportions: the type of proportions exemplifiedby the elaborate torsions of Myron’s famous statue (Plate 11) and laterrevived by the Mannerists’ fondness for inventing extravagantly con-voluted postures.129 Indeed, he argues that it is precisely their deviationfrom ‘ordinary usage’, whether defined by canonical proportion or cus-tomary speech, that gives these artificial configurations their peculiar



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novelty, grace and charm. But the chief point for us to register is thattheir immoderation is being defended on the very grounds whichAlberti and his neoclassically-minded successors would subsequentlyuse to condemn such excessive movements – that is, in the name ofdecorum.

Quintilian’s willingness to sanction verbal (and visual) licence insome circumstances should not be taken to imply the removal of allconstraints. In common with every classical and Renaissance rhetori-cian, he took the view that ‘a certain proportion must be observed’even – indeed especially – where literal truth is most flagrantlyabused.130 This tenet raises more problems than it solves, however. For,as a moment’s reflection tells us, proportionality is even more difficultto gauge precisely in the case of figurative discourse than in thosepainted or sculpted figures whose dimensions are measurable only bythe eye.131 How then are its limits to be determined, and by whom?Where objective calibration is impossible, what other kinds of yard-stick can be applied? To conclude the chapter, I propose to look atsome English responses to these intractable issues by juxtaposingPuttenham’s discussion of poetic decorum with Hilliard’s observationson the role of the judgement of the eye in miniature painting. Theproblem of how to define ‘due proportion’ is a crucial consideration forboth men, who take for granted that it can only be resolved throughthe intervention of ‘naturall judgement’. While there are obvious par-allels between this view and what was being said on the Continent, weneed once again to be wary of allowing such discursive echoes to lullus into overlooking significant divergences of approach and emphasis.Compared to that enunciated by Lomazzo or Scaliger, the positionadopted by these late Elizabethan writers on questions pertainingto decorum appears robustly empirical, involving the rejection ofrule-making in favour of a more pragmatic and materialist agenda.Unhampered by the straitjacket of a narrow idealism, this approachallowed Puttenham and Hilliard to engage with those elusive andunstable aspects of decorum which, defying regulation, had beenlargely passed over by Italian commentators. Such differences, I sug-gest, can be seen as indicative of a continuing ambivalence in Englishattitudes to continental theorizing and, more particularly, a discomfortwith neoclassicism itself.

The chapters on decorum that round off Puttenham’s discussionof rhetorical ornament in The Arte of English Poesie follow logicallyfrom his acute sense of the indeterminate status of figures, of theirsusceptibility to being either condemned as ‘trespasses’ or extolled as



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‘vertues in the poetical science’. ‘The matter resteth much in the defin-ition and acceptance of this word [decorum]’, he concludes, ‘for what-soever is so, cannot justly be misliked’ (p.155). For Puttenham, theimportance of decorum as an arbiter of propriety is matched only byits elusiveness and resistance to rational formulation, the difficultybeing ‘to know what this good grace is, & wherein it consisteth, forperadventure it be easier to conceave then to expresse’ (p.261). Afterenumerating the diverse names by which it is known, he attempts tosum it up thus:

Now because this comelynesse resteth in the good conformitie ofmany things and their sundry circumstances, with respect one toanother, so as there be found a just correspondencie betweenethem … The Greekes call it Analogie or a convenient proportion. Thislovely conformitie, or proportion, or conveniencie betweene thesence and the sensible hath nature her selfe first most care-fully observed in all her owne workes, then also by kind graft itin the appetites of every creature working by intelligence to covetand desire: and in their actions to imitate & performe.

(p.262)

Like so many of his precursors, Puttenham makes ‘convenient propor-tion’ the cornerstone of his definition of decorum. Moreover, hisaccount of how this true proportion may be recognized – itself struc-tured around a visual analogy – mirrors the concept of the giudizio dell’occhio in certain key respects. Our senses naturally take delight in theobjects fitted to them, he notes, except where the latter are vitiated by‘excesses’, ‘defectes’, or some other ‘disorders’. So the ear is ‘ill affected’by a sound ‘too loude or too lowe or otherwise confuse’, the eye by abody ‘without his due measures and simmetry’. Similarly, the aptnessof ‘mentall objectes’ may be gauged by the amount of pleasure theyimpart, which ‘stand[s] no lesse in the due proportion of reason anddiscourse than any other materiall thing doth in his sensible bewtie,proportion and comelynesse’ (pp.261–2). Puttenham also treads oldground in affirming proportionality to be a basic law of nature,encoded in ‘all her owne workes’ and reflected ‘in the appetites ofevery creature’. All human beings, it is thus implied, are equallyendowed from birth with the capacity to detect ‘any foule indecencieor disproportion’ in the intellectual as in the visual domain (p.155).But this democratic position is significantly modified when Puttenhamgoes on to state that, in the event of any ‘controversie as may arise



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whether this or that action or speach be decent or indecent’, judge-ment ought to rest with those possessed of a ‘learned and experienceddiscretion, for otherwise seemes the decorum to a weake and ignorantjudgement, then it doth to one of better knowledge and experience’(p.263).132 From the context it is clear that precedence is being given toa courtly elite whose entitlement to judge rests more on superior educa-tion and social standing than on any innate powers of discernment.133

As a result of these manoeuvrings, a faculty initially presented as a formof universal instinct working in sympathy with the natural order iscovertly redefined as the prerogative of a privileged minority with thepower to impose its own interpretation of propriety on others.134

The lack of any absolute or common standard underlying decorumis further exposed by Puttenham’s emphasis on the inbuilt relativismof its deliberations. Owing to the differences in men’s judgements, hewrites, and

by reason of the sundry circumstances, that mans affaires are as itwere wrapt in, this [decencie] comes to be very much alterable andsubject to varietie, in so much as our speach asketh one maner ofdecencie, in respect of the person who speakes: another of his towhom it is spoken: another of whom we speake: another of what wespeake, and in what place and time and to what purpose. And as itis of speach, so of al other our behaviours.

(pp.263–4)

The volatility engendered by this proliferation of circumstances andsubjective variations in judgment lies at the very core of Puttenham’sunderstanding of decorum. He is forever reminding the reader that aspeech or action deemed to be ‘indecent’ in certain respects, mayappear entirely ‘decent’ when judged by another set of criteria orviewed from an different standpoint. So slippery is this concept,in fact, that it is quite capable of converting a rhetorical vice into avirtue and vice versa, as shown by its ability to make ‘a bewtifull figurefall into a deformitie, and on th’other side a vicious speach seemepleasaunt and bewtifull’ (p.261). The point was not new, of course;we have seen how alert classical writers could be to the difficulty ofmaking hard-and-fast distinctions regarding matters of propriety.135

Nevertheless, Puttenham’s insistence on the alterability of such judge-ments compounds the problem by highlighting the propensity ofdecorum to invert itself – to become its own presumed antithesisby acting as a spur to the very kinds of excess it was meant to curtail.



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Thus a principle expressly introduced into the Arte to assist the readerin the delicate task of discriminating between legitimate and ille-gitimate forms of licence ends up threatening to erase this differencealtogether.

Another important effect of Puttenham’s emphasis on the radicallycontingent nature of decorous judgements, and the degree to whichtheir authority depends upon the social status of those who wieldthem, is to foreground the role of society in defining what consti-tutes ‘due proportion’. That social context has a crucial bearing on thisissue is openly declared in the transition from matters of verbal pro-priety to ‘al other our behaviours’ at the end of the passage quotedabove – a shift replicated in the overall pattern of Puttenham’s com-mentary, which concludes with a chapter entitled ‘Of decencie inbehaviour which also belongs to the consideration of the Poet ormaker’. By continually alluding to this wider context and its determin-ing influence on decorum, Puttenham inadvertently lays bare the truestatus of this principle, revealing it to be rooted not in some transcen-dent law of harmony, but rather in a set of culturally instituted normsthat can be manipulated in the interests of different social groupings.Again, he was not alone in linking issues of proportionality with thesocio-political formation. Lomazzo had glanced at the ideologicaleffects of ‘due proportion’ in a passage already cited, where he com-ments on its usefulness as an instrument of religious / civil discipline(p.69). Similarly Puttenham’s treatment of the aesthetic and socialdomains as part of single continuum governed by the same kind ofpractical judgement was anticipated by both Cicero and Castiglione.136

What sets Puttenham apart is not his acknowledgment of the socialimplications of decorum per se, but the extent to which such a recogni-tion informs his whole treatment of the subject. Nowhere is thismore evident than in his strategy of illustrating the workings of thisprinciple with page after page of historical examples. Many of theexamples have been chosen with a view to underlining what is at stakein respecting verbal propriety by relating this to the maintenance ofcivil order and degree.137 Thus Puttenham objects to the term ‘pelfe’when used of a prince’s wealth as incommensurate with the dignityof the owner, though it may properly be applied to ‘meaner persons’(p.274). Likewise, he stresses the importance of selecting the appro-priate stylistic register by aligning the literary genres with their corre-sponding gradations in the social hierarchy (pp.152–3). Examples ofthis kind serve to impress on the reader that failure to maintain afitting proportionality in one’s speech has consequences beyond the



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aesthetic; that to violate linguistic norms is, by extension, to beguilty of transgressing accepted codes of behaviour. Both, we areexpected to note, were flagrantly abused by the French princess whomPuttenham rebukes for complaining that her lack of male genitaliadebarred her from the throne, on the grounds that such language‘became not the greatnesse of her person, and much lesse hersexe, whose chiefe vertue is shamefastnesse, which the Latines callVerecundia’ (p.267).

Puttenham’s policy of explicating decorum through a succession ofexamples – drawn from the annals of courtly diplomacy or based onpersonal observation – does not simply reflect his assumption that therhetorical and the political are interconnected. It is also the logical out-come of his belief that decorum is not reducible to a general method orrule. Given the variability of this principle, he argues, there is ‘no wayso fit to enable a man truly to estimate of [decencie] as example, bywhose veritie we may deeme the difference of things and their propor-tions, and by particular discussions come at length to sentence of itgenerally’ (p.263). Decorum, that is, can only be taught by heaping upspecific examples. Puttenham happily admits that his approach is shorton ‘doctrine’, but maintains that the pleasure it affords far outweighsany ‘rable of scholastical precepts’ (p.264). The exemplary techniquepursued in the Arte of English Poesie defers indefinitely the formulationof a universal law to which it was supposed to lead and pushes thecircumstantial logic of decorum to its limits. For by embedding hisviews on ‘convenient proportion’ in an open-ended sequence of con-crete examples, Puttenham asserts, in effect, that judgments of this sortcan never be divorced from the particular contexts in which they aremade. He is demonstrating that by their very nature they cannot bespoken of in the abstract and general.

Puttenham’s sensitivity to the relativistic nature of aesthetic judge-ments, which puts them beyond the reach of codification, is closelyparalleled in Hilliard’s Art of Limning in ways that do not seem purelycoincidental. Hilliard regards ‘good proportion’ as fundamental to theart of miniature painting, since it is in this – together with ‘complex-ion’ (flesh colouring) and ‘grace in countenance’ (affective expression) –that the whole ‘comeliness and beauty of the face resides’ (pp.75–7).But although prepared to grant the necessity for correct proportion,whose importance he admits has been too long neglected by Englishartists, he is not won over to the view that this requires mathema-tical knowledge, which was, for continental theorists, its inescapablecorollary. ‘True proportion’, he argues, can only be delivered by an



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‘admirable instinct of nature [which] judgeth generally, both in wiseand foolish, young and old, learned and simple, and knoweth bynature, without rule or reason for it, who is well-proportioned or well-favoured, etc’ (p.75).138 The depth of Hilliard’s antipathy to rules isfully revealed when he recounts how he was once cross-examined bySir Philip Sidney, on a technical point of proportion. Sidney reportedlyinquired whether it was possible when confronted with two picturesmeasuring the same ‘scantling’ or size to tell which of these is intendedto represent ‘a little or short man’ and which ‘a mighty, big and tallman’. Hilliard duly obliged by giving the kind of reasoned explanationcalculated to satisfy such a ‘great scholar’, but not, as he makes clear,without experiencing some inward resistance:

I showed him that it was easily discerned if it were cunningly drawnwith true observations, for our eye is cunning, and is learned with-out rule by long use, as little lads speak their vulgar tongue withoutgrammar rules. But I gave him rules, and sufficient reasons to noteand observe.

(p.83)

Hilliard’s reluctance stems less from the impracticability of formulatingrules and reasons than from their perceived irrelevance, their utterinadequacy to communicate the essence of ‘good judgment’ which heconceives of as a highly subjective, barely definable quality. (His insin-uation that indigenous artists share the ability to manage without ruleswith those who express themselves in their native tongue adds aninteresting nationalistic twist to ut pictura analogizing). While Hilliardmay have found a supportive precedent in Lomazzo (whose word heinvokes at every turn) for this privileging of the ‘true rule of judgment’,as exercised by the eye, over the false authority of reason, his repudia-tion of the latter is much more radical and uncompromising. In partic-ular, he rejects Dürer’s classification of proportions, embraced withwhatever reservations by Lomazzo and meticulously reproduced inHaydocke’s engravings (Plate 12), not only because in making figuresout to be as rigid and unchanging as ‘pillars’ it ignores the effects offoreshortening and movement (p.71), but because its rules are ‘hard tobe remembered, and tedious to be followed of painters, being so full ofdivisions’ (p.69). Over and above their academic pedantry, however, itis their irreconcilability with empirical observation that renders suchprecepts suspect in Hilliard’s eyes. Thus he counters Dürer’s axiom that‘commonly all faces hold one measure and true proportion’ with the



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proof of experience, which provides daily confirmation that physiog-nomic ratios vary infinitely from one individual to the next, and thatbeauty does not depend on conformity to an ideal canon. Such was thecase with Sir Christopher Hatton,

sometime Lord Chancellor of England, a man generally known andrespected of all men amongst the best favours, and held to be one ofthe goodliest personages of England: yet had he a very low forehead,not answerable to that good proportion of a third part of his face;and on the contrary part, infinite number of faces there are whichhold that proportion which Albert Durer commendeth, and yet arebut ill-favoured or unpleasant faces to behold, so God in naturehath for difference ordained it.

(p.81)

Reiterated in Francis Bacon’s essay ‘On Beauty’, published in 1612, thebasic elements of this anti-theoretical stance were still being rehearsedby Hogarth over a century later.139

If Hilliard’s pragmatic insistence on the diversity of ‘true proportion’recalls Puttenham’s approach to poetic decorum, the same may be saidof his assumption that the judgements involved always reflects a par-ticular set of social circumstances. The making of the miniature, helikes to remind us, differs from the ordinary run of studio portraitsin requiring the presence of the ‘party’ imitated and consequentlyderives its form and impact from the intricate relations (physical, affec-tive and social) which exist between the artist, sitter and intendedbeholder[s]. It is this whole complex of relationships that is regulatedby the artist’s ‘good judgment’, giving it a decisive role not just indetermining which are the correct proportions in a specific instance,but in selecting the right location, lighting, position and viewpoint.Such judgements, in turn, are shown to be responsive to and inflectedby a broad range of material factors, including the conditions in whichthe miniature is to be viewed (‘in hand near unto the eye’ and ‘in privatemanner’) and the emotional chemistry between the limner and his sub-ject, as well as the latter’s personal tastes and social status. That this lastwas the overriding consideration for Hilliard is implied by his advice tothe limner to take care when positioning his mostly noble patrons tosecure those proportions that best become or express their dignity:

In drawing after the life, sit not nearer than two yards from theparty, and sit as even of height as possibly you may; but if he be a



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very high person, let him sit a little above, because generally men beunder him, and will so judge of the picture, because they under-view him. If it be a very low person or child, use the like discretion inplacing him somewhat lower than yourself.

(p.115. My emphasis)

Pointing out that rather than denoting actual stature, ‘high’ and ‘low’may equally well refer here to gradations of rank, Clark Hulse astutelyremarks that, according to this reading, the passage treats ‘physicalrelationships … [as] expressive of the social hierarchy’, and ‘transformsobjective vision into class deference’.140 It does so, one might add, inmuch the same way that rhetorical relationships are regarded as anextension of their social equivalents in the Arte of English Poesie.Sharing Puttenham’s awareness of how deeply conditioned our aes-thetic judgments are by such worldly considerations, Hilliard alsoshares his conviction that this skill is better taught by example than bytheoretical precepts methodically expounded. The general ‘observa-tions or directions to the art of limning’ half promised at variousmoments in Hilliard’s rambling treatise are repeatedly postponed,replaced by practical advice (be diligent and temperate in your habits;take heed that dandruff or spittle does not fall on your work!) and bygossipy anecdotes about his patrons and fellow artists. The conversa-tion with Sidney on the subject of proportion, for example, forms akind of diptych with Hilliard’s reminiscences about an exchange ofviews between him and the Queen regarding the correct method ofhandling light and shade (pp.85–7) – an exchange which, he avers,‘hath greatly bettered my judgement’, in pointed contrast to hisperusal of Dürer’s wearisome rules. And, as in Puttenham’s case, theunease with generalized abstractions Hilliard voices is complementedby the embodied particularity of the anecdotal form in which his opin-ions are conveyed.

The belief that ‘true proportion’ is not reducible to rule was, as wehave seen, widely espoused by sixteenth-century Italian theorists. Bya curious paradox first noted by Panofsky, however, this revolt againstthe tyranny of mathematical laws coincided with a drive to legislateevery aspect of the arts, just as its more radical implications weretempered by the subservience of Italian aesthetics to a normativeideal.141 The profound impatience with such rule-making expressed byPuttenham and Hilliard left them, by contrast, free to explore theprotean and potentially heterodox qualities of giudizio. In the sharedpreoccupations of these writers we may perhaps detect the makings of



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a peculiarly English attitude to artistic problems – one that was lessconcerned with formulating rules than with responding to the speci-ficity and diversity of things, less with prescribing an abstract idealthan with taking note of the various material factors that may impingeon day-to-day practice. This aversion to systematizing can be locatedwithin wider currents of resistance to the imposition of neoclassicalmodels and to the growing pressures around the turn of the century fora comprehensive theorization of the arts along continental lines.142 Itis a well-known fact that English writers, prior to the late seventeenthcentury at least, showed little taste for the kind of rigid adherence topropriety, and the associated doctrines of the three unities and thepurity of the genres, which was considered mandatory in Italy orFrance.143 Even that precocious neoclassicist, Ben Jonson, was not sopunctilious an observer of the rules as he liked to think. Far from beingthe product of laxity or ignorant insularity, this failure to conform toacademic rules was often based on a considered choice which partici-pated in a process of cultural self-definition. That is to say, it oftenreflected a conscious self-distancing from continental ways. Indeed, asRichard Helgerson has shown, for Elizabethan writers (and, we mayadd, artists) the question of whether to adopt the weighty authority ofclassical or humanist models, in preference to following the suppos-edly barbarous example of native practitioners, was inextricably boundup with the articulation of a national identity.144

It is against this backdrop that Shakespeare’s alleged breaches ofdecorum need to be seen. The frequency with which he was taken totask by later generations of neoclassical critics on this account shouldnot surprise us, since his handling of the principle is quite as flexibleand undoctrinaire as that of Puttenham or Hilliard, with which ithas in fact notable affinities.145 Judgements about what is proper orimproper are treated throughout his work as being highly subjective,a ‘parcel of men’s fortunes’ and their temperaments; such lack of uni-formity becomes one more manifestation of the infinite diversity ofhuman viewpoints. In addition, the referential density of Shakespeare’sfictive worlds calls attention to the fact that these judgements arenever made in isolation from their socio-political context, reflecting asthey do the particular constraints under which each character mustspeak and act. Consequently, we shall find that an extraordinarydegree of elasticity is ascribed to the rule of decorum in the playsexamined in this book. Caesar’s understanding of the concept is theantithesis of Cleopatra’s. Hamlet’s antic words and gestures imply anidea of what constitutes decorous behaviour that is fundamentally at



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odds with the restraint he enjoins on the players in III.2. Whether ornot decorum has been violated in a given instance is thus often pre-sented as a matter for contention. Of the political implications ofbreaching this law, on the other hand, we are left in no doubt; the aes-thetic transgressions of characters like Cleopatra or Caliban, who refuseto submit to neoclassical canons of propriety, are construed as a mani-festation of their rebelliousness against imperialist rule in general.Shakespeare’s readiness to subject the ideal of ‘due proportion’ to aprocess of dramatic contestation and reinterpretation suggests thatit was no more stable a category for him than for the author of the Arteof English Poesie. But there is another, more basic sense in whichShakespeare’s use of this concept resonates with that of his contem-poraries. When he invokes decorum in the context of Caliban’s mon-strously ‘misshapen’ form, for example, or of Cleopatra’s dream ofAntony reincarnated as a colossus of superhuman dimensions, he doesso in ways that effectively revitalize the visual trope of proportionwhich underpinned this principle. Every renegotiation of its meaning,we are thus reminded, could be seen as taking place within the discur-sive framework of ut pictura analogising.

This kind of translocation of ideas from a visual to a verbal context,and vice versa, is symptomatic, I have suggested, of a culture thataccepted unquestioningly the interchangeability of the poetic and pic-torial arts. It was this fundamental premise that allowed spatial imagesto fulfil certain rhetorical functions and, conversely, permitted figura-tive discourse to assume some of the properties ordinarily ascribedto such images. My intention has also been to show how theories ofelocutio and theories of linear perspective or proportion, becameenmeshed, in the course of their intersecting histories, with a broadrepertoire of issues and topoi: artistic, moral, social and epistemological.Several of these topoi will be revisited in the readings of individualplays that follow in order to illustrate the extent to which theycontinued to inform and dictate Shakespeare’s treatment of problemsof viewpoint.



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4Hamlet and the Art ofLooking Diversely on the Self

104

On his first appearance, Hamlet marks out his singularity in relation toother members of the Danish court by distinguishing between his exte-rior, socially defined self and an authentic inner being, declaring‘I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings andthe suits of woe’ (I.2.85). This chapter will attempt to situate Hamlet’sself-assertion in the context of aesthetic developments which werethen taking place in English culture. It is generally accepted that theend of the sixteenth century was a crucial moment in the formation ofthe individual self, a moment when the subject acquired a sharpersense of its particularity and its power to shape or ‘fashion’ its ownidentity.1 Admittedly, Jacob Burckhardt’s much cited claim that duringthe Renaissance ‘man became a spiritual individual and recognisedhimself as such’, rather than as being merely a member of the collec-tive, has been contested in recent years on both historical and ideolog-ical grounds.2 Critics have warned of the dangers of anachronisticallyreading into the texts of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean perioda philosophy of selfhood that was not fully articulated or established asthe norm until the latter half of the seventeenth century.3 To confuseHamlet’s utterance with that of a wholly self-determining agent, whoseconsciousness serves as the ground of all meaning and action, of thetype postulated by bourgeois ideology would clearly be misguided. But,as Katherine Eisaman Maus notes, such counter-arguments can pro-duce their own distortions by encouraging a tendency to ‘minimize orunderestimate the significance of conceptions of psychological interi-ority for the English Renaissance’.4 Evidence of an interest in the exis-tence of a private inner consciousness is to be found across a widerange of discourses, including conduct literature, theological debate,psychology and jurisprudence. Some of the most compelling testimony


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comes, however, from poets and painters who sought to adapt theirrespective media to the representation of the self and the inner life towhich it increasingly laid claim. No longer content with describingexternal or generic marks of identity, they began to conceive of theseas the threshold of an interior existence imagined as qualitativelydifferent, if not yet as fully distinct from, social and familial roles.

The development of individual portraiture has been widely adducedas one manifestation of this incipient ‘cult of personality’.5 Art histori-ans have commented on the concern with psychological notation,with capturing the sitter’s distinctive qualities, evident in many Italianand Flemish portraits from the fifteenth century onwards. It is not bychance that these developments coincided with the perfecting of natu-ralism as the dominant mode in the visual arts; illusionist techniqueswere an important enabling factor in the evolution of a more individu-alized style of portraiture. The advent of linear perspective in particularmade possible a new objectification of the self for the purposes ofdepiction, both by opening up a conscious distance between the artistand his subject and by seeming to permit a more exact replication ofoptical reality. The problem, as we have seen, is that the mainstream ofsixteenth-century English portraiture cannot easily be assimilated tothis continental tradition. Decidedly anti-naturalistic and largely inno-cent of perspective and shadow, it tended, significantly, to be less con-cerned with projecting an inner self than with the symbolism of publicoffice and social rank. On the other hand, the fashion for the portraitminiature which took root in courtly and aristocratic circles during the1580s would appear to be symptomatic of a growing interest in theexpression of private emotion, to which the intimate format of this‘picture in little’ was ideally suited;6 Nicholas Hilliard, for example,designates the chief task of the limner as being to ‘catch those lovelygraces, witty smilings, and those stolen glances’, whereby the inner‘affections’ are outwardly manifested (p.77). And, as contact with theartistic cultures of mainland Europe increased around the turn of thecentury, more psychologically realistic styles in both small- andlarge-scale portraiture began to find favour with artists and patrons.7

The later sixteenth century is further associated with the develop-ment of such ‘private’ literary forms as the soliloquy, the sonnet andautobiography, each of which was committed, in varying degrees, to adetailed exploration of personal experience.8 Anne Ferry has shownhow poets of the period were foremost in articulating a radicallynew idea of inward existence unfolding at a distance from outwardexpression.9 Philip Sidney especially, and, in his footsteps, Shakespeare,

Hamlet and the Art of Looking Diversely on the Self 105


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sought to forge a new poetic language responsive to the complexitiesof the inner life. To this end they exploited the possibilities for sus-tained self-analysis which Petrarch had first revealed in the sonnetcycle, using the genre to probe the innermost recesses of conscious-ness, its vicissitudes, feints and contradictions. In heeding the famousinjunction of Astrophil’s Muse to ‘look in [the] heart and write’, thesetwo poets, as Ferry also notes, dramatize the difficulties involved ingiving truthful expression to what lies hidden within – a task compli-cated by the widening gulf between inner and outer, public and private.Her analysis of the impediments they had to negotiate in attemptingto reveal the inner self has been echoed in an influential essay on thatother ‘private’ artefact: the miniature. Comparing Hilliard’s miniatureswith the Elizabethan sonnet as cognate forms whose appeal lay in theirpromise of intimate self-disclosure, Patricia Fumerton argues that ineach case the private self could only be represented or viewed throughpublic forms of artifice (ornament, convention and rhetoric), the effectof which was ironically to conceal the inner truths they claimed todivulge.10

Similar problems are encountered by Hamlet, who shares the convic-tion of these sonneteers and miniature-makers that truth is lodgedwithin, their desire to make accessible the ‘privie thoughts and secretconceites of [the] mind’.11 More than any other literary creation,Shakespeare’s introspective prince has been taken to symbolize theshift towards an interiorized model of subjectivity we associate withthe inception of the modern age. The main purpose of this chapter isto re-examine his claim to possess ‘that within which passes show’ – aclaim endorsed, intentionally or not, by generations of critics whohave taken Hamlet at his word, assuming him to be endowed with aninner life comparable in every respect to their own – in the light of hisindefatigable efforts to grasp this within, the particular means wherebyhe engages in self-scrutiny. Introspection, as the word implies, entailsan inwardly directed act of “seeing” with what we, like Hamlet, refer toas the ‘mind’s eye’. As this perceptual analogy might lead us to expect,the devices which facilitate Hamlet’s participation in this activityare visual as well as verbal, in the sense that they draw upon variousmodes of self-imaging in addition to a range of rhetorical strategies.While Hamlet’s interest in the theatre provides an obvious place ofconvergence for these different media, I shall argue that his methods ofrepresenting himself to himself can be analyzed no less productively byreference to the trope of self-portraiture, as it was deployed by bothRenaissance painters and writers. Moreover, the techniques Hamlet



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uses to portray or dramatize the self – presuming as they do the basiccompatibility, even interchangeability of visual and verbal forms ofcommunication – serve to establish ut pictura poesis as one of the maindiscursive contexts within which the play’s concern with subjectivityis worked out.

Before considering the particular forms which Hamlet’s self-represen-tation takes, it is useful to remind ourselves why they are necessary inthe first place. The impossibility of beholding oneself directly, withoutexternal mediation, was a fact with which the Elizabethan theatre-going public was well acquainted and the implications of which areexplored in several Shakespearean texts.12 Because, as Brutus puts it,‘the eye sees not itself/But by reflection, by some other things’ ( JuliusCaesar, I.2.52), self-consciousness only becomes feasible where a personsees him/herself as other, becomes his/her own spectator. That isto say, it presupposes a splitting of the subject, a disjunction betweenthe perceiving self and the self perceived. In Hamlet’s case, the requi-site division of the self is chiefly effected by means of two deviceswhose operations are examined in detail below but may be brieflysummarized here. The first depends, as Brutus hints, on the use ofreflective images,

For speculation turns not to itselfTill it hath travell’d and is [mirror’d] thereWhere it may see itself.

(Troilus and Cressida, III.3.109)

Long associated with self-knowledge, the mirror becomes an indispens-able agent in Hamlet’s attempt to discover – in the double sense of‘finding out’ and of ‘disclosing what was hidden from view’ (OED, 3(a)and 8) – his own elusive essence.13 Hence he is forever manufacturingspecular images whose specific function is to enable him and others tocontemplate the ‘inmost part’ of themselves. It may well be argued, ofcourse, that the mirror does not simply discover or reveal what isalready there to be reflected; rather it actively constitutes the selfimaged in its depths. Lacan famously held the child’s contemplation ofits own reflected image to be paradigmatic of the formation of the ego,when the subject first acquires a sense of itself as a discrete and coher-ent entity.14 On a more historical plane, the play’s interest in self-reflection as a means to self-definition can be related to the rapidlyexpanding market for plate-glass mirrors in the sixteenth century.15

Several commentators have gone so far as to suggest that the emergent



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modern subject ‘received an access of confidence’ from the increasedavailability of this type of mirror, which ‘must … have contributed tothe individual’s sense of his or her own uniqueness’.16 Whether or notthis is the case – and Hamlet’s self-imaging permits an altogether lessreassuring set of inferences as we shall see – the invention of flat look-ing-glasses undoubtedly contributed to the growth of self-portraitureduring this period. By definition, this pictorial genre necessitates adoubling of the self, just as it may choose to make of the mirror a vehi-cle for the artist’s bid to apprehend and express the innermost core ofhis being. It is for this reason especially that Renaissance experimentsin self-portraiture can help to elucidate Hamlet’s fascination withspecular images.

The other main device forged by the prince for the purposes of self-reflection is that succession of roles known collectively as the ‘anticdisposition’. His assumption of a dazzling array of personae ensures theinternal distantiation, that objectification or ‘othering’ of the self,which we have seen to be a necessary condition for introspection tooccur. Acting out different facets of his public identity as grieving son,lover, moralist, melancholic, revenger, theatre critic and royal heirallows Hamlet not only to reflect obliquely on the less accessible, moreprivate and introverted qualities of the self, but to do so from a kaleido-scopic range of viewpoints. For, whatever form it takes, introspection iscondemned to indirection and, by the same logic, to an accumulationof perspectives, as the perceiving subject strives to envision what (in avery literal sense) remains concealed from view. Hamlet’s characteristi-cally involuted mode of addressing the world, his habit of pursuingindirections in order to find directions out, can thus be seen as moti-vated partly by a desire to circumvent the perceptual constraints thatthreaten to obstruct his quest for self-knowledge. Each shift of hisrhetorical stance, each role newly assumed, seems to promise a fresh, ifinevitably partial, insight into the hidden workings of his being.

Although imagined in visual or specular terms, the perspectivesdeployed by Hamlet are, in fact, primarily linguistic in origin. It istherefore worth pausing at this juncture to consider what implicationsthe issue of viewpoint, conceived of in these distinct yet complemen-tary ways, may have for the definition of selfhood. Contemporary dis-cussions of the history of vision generally take their cue from Lacan inassociating the invention of linear perspective with the institution ofthe modern (Cartesian) subject:

It is not for nothing that it was at the very period when theCartesian meditation inaugurated in all its purity the function of



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the subject that the dimension of optics that I shall distinguish hereby calling ‘geometral’ or ‘flat’ (as opposed to perspective) optics wasdeveloped.17

According to this line of reasoning, linear perspective exalts theindividual by adopting man as its central point of reference and makinghim, in Alberti’s phrase, ‘the measure of all things’ (p.53). The spectator isconfirmed in a state of omniscient self-possession through his mastery ofthe visual field, which arranges itself around his privileged viewpoint andreveals itself fully to his gaze. But the situation is a good deal more com-plicated in a case like Hamlet’s, where an individual simultaneously occu-pies the position of the viewing subject and the object viewed, theobserver and the observed. Moreover, as Lacan recognized, the spatialregime described can itself be seen as tending to undermine rather thanconsolidate the subject’s claims to sovereignty.18 For one thing, the con-ventions governing linear perspective dictate that the viewing position,once chosen, remains fixed, thereby obliging all subsequent spectators (intheory at least) to occupy the same spot. Assigned a specific positionrequiring him/her to look in a certain predetermined way at the scenedepicted, the beholder begins to take on the appearance not so much ofthe source or controlling centre of vision as of an incidental product of itsgeometrical laws. In fact, this reversal in the beholder’s status begs thequestion whether the subject should not be rethought as being, inHubert Damisch’s words, little more than ‘an effect of perspective, as it isof language’.19

As Damisch’s aphorism suggests, the linguistic domain throws upsimilar paradoxes. We have already noted how one function of therhetorical system was to enable individual speakers to enunciate ideasand attitudes – in short, to express their personal view of things –by making available a range of ‘places’ from which any topic under dis-cussion could be considered. In its persuasive applications, however,rhetoric was more concerned with determining the viewpoint ofthe other. The aim was to work upon the listener in so irresistible afashion that he/she would be compelled to identify with the opinionsexpressed and to adjust his/her behaviour accordingly, since eloquentspeeches ‘by a vertue inexplicable do drawe unto them the mindes andconsent of the herers’.20 Ideally, that is, language was conceived as hav-ing the capacity to alter a person’s entire mental outlook, how that per-son sees the world, and, by this process, bring about the transformationof his/her moral character. Here too, the idea of the subject as a self-determining, all-knowing agent is turned on its head by such a hypoth-esis; the implication being that rather than individual consciousness



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shaping speech, the self is as much a product of the way language isstructured as it is of the laws regulating vision. As we shall see, thecoercive properties inherent in language are vigorously exploited byHamlet for his own ends. His rhetorical training allows him to manipu-late the ways in which the many spies and onlookers at the Danishcourt perceive him and, more importantly, how he perceives himself.In so doing, he asserts his power to fashion his own identity as well asother selves, but in a manner that risks reducing that identity to anephemeral effect of visual / verbal modes of representation over whichhe ultimately has limited control.

This brings us up against a major irony of the play which will fre-quently be touched upon in the following pages. Whether they involvedramatic or specular self-imaging or the use of rhetorical perspective,the methods employed by Hamlet in pursuit of those truths which are‘hid … Within the centre’ (II.2.157) prove to be counterproductive. Thisis partly because the forms in which he chooses to project himself,standing in an uncertain relationship to the perceiving self, offer disap-pointingly little insight into what lies ‘within’. But it also to do withthe fact that his reflexive techniques call into question the very statusof the subject by dislodging Hamlet from his position of assumed cen-trality and control. As a more detailed examination of these techniqueswill reveal, in fact, their combined action unsettles the basic premisesfrom which his self-scrutiny proceeds: namely, his belief in a transcen-dent inner being that ‘passes show’ and in the possibility of an idealmimesis capable of representing this truthfully.

While the failure of Hamlet’s quest for self-knowledge may bevariously explained, it is evidently closely connected with the play’sproblematic investment in the visual domain. For the denizens ofClaudius’s court where sophisticated systems of surveillance are inoperation, sight is the predominant sense, offering access to the secretswhich most of its inhabitants are bent on either revealing or conceal-ing.21 It is a medium in which hypotheses concerning the nature ofreality can be put to the test and demonstrably proved or disproved.Just as Horatio is asked to keep watch for the ghost in order to ‘approve’what Marcellus and Barnardo have ‘two nights seen’, so Claudius isinvited behind the arras to ‘try’ Polonius’s theory about Hamlet’s mad-ness by spying on his nephew’s behaviour. And Hamlet, in turn, enlistsHoratio’s help in observing the King’s reaction to the play:

Give him heedful note,For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,



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And after we will both our judgments joinIn censure of his seeming.

(III.2.84)

But, as every reader of the play knows, the world of perception is alsoregarded as deeply suspect, owing to its association with opaque ordeceptive appearances.22 Significantly, this distrust of appearances isfocused through a number of references to painting that play upon con-temporary anxieties about its tendency to obscure rather than manifesttruth. Both Hamlet and Claudius appeal to what was, for English audi-ences, the stock identification of cosmetics with painting when accus-ing women of making themselves a false face to hide an unattractivereality (III.1.51–3, 144–6; V.1.186–8). Like other Shakespearean texts,moreover, the play restates only to question claims made on behalfof the ‘art of physiognomy’ (i.e. portraiture) regarding its unrivalledcapacity to express the inner character.23 Thus it implicitly invokesthe classical topos which defined the limitations of painting, often bycontrast with poetry, in terms of its constitutive inability to representthings invisible to the eye, notably the human mind or soul.24

Hamlet’s confidence that the twin portraits with which he confrontsGertrude, in III.4, do reveal with utmost clarity the mind’s construc-tion in face and figure is offset by Claudius’s inquiry if Laertes’s grieffor his father is genuine or whether, on the contrary, he resembles ‘thepainting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?’ (IV.7.108), and by hiswry observation that, deprived of our rational faculties, ‘we are pic-tures, or mere beasts’ (IV.5.86). In keeping with this equivocal attitudeto the art of portraiture and its ability to exteriorize the life of thesoul, the play leaves us unsure of the extent to which any artificialconstruction – be it that of poet or painter – can capture the inwardbeing it purports to resemble.25

In a play where the ‘hunger to know’ is dramatized as ‘the desire tosee’, the constraints which hamper perception in Denmark point to arange of cognitive problems.26 Contrary to the position of rational mas-tery, of complete and assured knowledge, with which perspective isaligned in Alberti’s treatise and some versions of Cartesian epistemol-ogy, Hamlet’s use of a shifting viewpoint in the service of introspectiongenerates only doubt. The continual adjustment of his standpointinevitably reinforces his scepticism, which, as has often been remarked,is rooted in an acute sense of the relativity of perception and a conse-quent distrust of his own judgements.27 Even as he asserts Denmarkto be a prison and man a quintessence of dust, he is troubled by thethought that they will appear otherwise to his companions and, in a



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different mood, to him. His self-perception is not exempt from theuncertainty created by the availability of alternative views; a note of per-plexity resonates through many of his statements about himself: ‘I haveof late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth’ (II.2.295); ‘I do notknow / Why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do,” / Sith I have cause, andwill, and strength, and means /To do’t’ (IV.4.43) (my emphasis). Giventhe play’s concern with the problematics of vision, it is hardly surprisingthat its major epistemological conundrums tend to be framed in ocularterms. From the various appearances of the ghost to the spectacle ofOphelia’s madness, the characters are brought face to face with a numberof enigmatic and highly unstable images that resist any attempt to assignthem a determinate identity or meaning. Just as the characters (and theplay’s audience) must struggle to make sense of these images, so Hamletwill experience comparable difficulties in his efforts to apprehend the“true” self presumed to lie behind its protean, outardly visible forms. Thefollowing reading of the play traces his mission to discover the invisiblecore of his being (II.2.158) in its dramatic unfolding.

* * *

The characteristic forms of Hamlet’s introspection are inscribed in hisfirst long speech. Gertrude’s well-meant inquiry why his father’s deathshould seem something peculiar to him provokes a virulent response:

Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not “seems.”‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, [good] mother,Nor customary suits of solemn black,Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,Together with all forms, moods, [shapes] [F.‘shewes’] of grief,That can [denote] me truly. These indeed seem,For they are actions that a man might play,But I have that within which passes show,These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(I.2.76)

Hamlet rejects what he sees as the hypocritical shows of grief indulgedin by his mother and the court as inimical to his essential beingwhich resides ‘within’, hidden and inexpressible. This antithesis betweenwhat ‘is’ (the innermost self) and what ‘seems’ (everything extraneous to



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that self) is immediately qualified, however: ‘ ’Tis not alone my inkycloak…can [denote] me truly’. Outward forms are surreptitiouslyrecuperated as partial expressions of an inner self that still exceeds ourbest endeavours to represent it. There then follows a catalogue of thecostumes, gestures and facial expressions associated with mourning: the‘customary suits of solemn black’, ‘the fruitful river in the eye’ and‘dejected haviour of the visage’. Hamlet’s lingering over these exteriormarks of grief (which depend on received visual codes common toElizabethan acting and portraiture) suggests a fascinated recognition of,and a willingness to exploit, their signifying power before this is sup-pressed with the emphatically stressed ‘seem’ in line 84, which restoresthe context of wilful deception. Hamlet’s ambivalence towards such arti-ficial modes of expression is further underlined by the pointed ostenta-tion of his own ‘inky garb’ and his punning and hyperbolic utterances.The studied theatricality of these visual and vocal gestures compoundsthe ironies clinging to his denunciation of ‘actions that a man mightplay’ by reminding us that it comes from the mouth of an actor who, byhis own definition, lacks any interiority or ‘within’. Even as the princedenies any truck with seeming, then, we are alerted to the histrionicpropensities that will crystallise in the ‘antic disposition’. As A.L. Frenchastutely remarks, there is ‘a certain unreality in his grief, a certain kindof histrionic self-regard…Whatever the “that within” may be, it is, evenin Hamlet’s own sensibility, deeply involved with the outward show’.28

The depth of that involvement, as French suggests, is intimatelyrelated to the self-regarding impulses behind the speech. For I wouldargue that the responsibility for opening up a gap between an authen-tic inner self that passes show and an outward fictive self that is allshow lies not so much with a court culture steeped in duplicity as withHamlet’s extreme self-consciousness. Without such a division of theself and the detachment this enables, the inner recesses of his beingwould remain forever inaccessible to the mind’s eye. It is only byprojecting himself in this manner that Hamlet can fulfil the condi-tions required for self-scrutiny. Thus his reflexive cast of mind pusheshim towards the very theatricality he claims to despise, underminingthe opposition between being and seeming, self and other, on whichhis speech is predicated. From the suspended syntax it appears, more-over, that his self-directed gaze is arrested and absorbed by thosesame ‘forms, moods, [shapes]’ he presents to the world, whose capacityto denote him truly is precisely what is at issue. By such means, thespeech hints at the impossibility of penetrating beyond the con-structed versions of the self to some prior essence. On examination,



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then, Hamlet’s diatribe resolves itself into two contradictory and irrec-oncilable propositions: ‘the self-knowing subject knows not seems / thesubject knows of itself nothing but seems’.

While Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ is clearly prefigured by his histri-onic performance of I.2, the birth of this creation is not announceduntil after his crucial encounter with the ghost in I.4–5. It is thereforepertinent to ask whether the ghost’s intervention may have influencedthe particular means Hamlet uses to represent himself to himself andothers. From the outset, the ghost is characterized as an enigmatic‘apparition’ of uncertain status, origin and meaning.29 Viewed throughHamlet’s rhetorical dubitatio it becomes a ‘questionable shape’ thatboth invites and evades interrogation:

Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn’d,Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell,Be thy intents wicked, or charitable,Thou com’st in such a questionable shapeThat I will speak to thee.

(I.4.40)

The instability of this image (which always threatens to ‘assume someother horrible form’) reflects the varying interpretations of the onlook-ers, impelled by the pressure of the ghost’s mystery to multiply conjec-tures. On one point those who witness the comings and goings of this‘portentous figure’ are nevertheless agreed: that it is ‘like’ the late Kingof Denmark, indeed ‘so like’ as to be virtually indistinguishable (a pointreiterated nine times in the opening scenes). It is not too fanciful per-haps to describe the ghost’s striking resemblance to the deceased kingas being essentially of a pictorial nature, given that the primary func-tion assigned to portraits both during and prior to the Renaissance wasto preserve the memory of the dead by means of a living likeness.‘Painting’, wrote Alberti, ‘possesses a truly divine power in that notonly does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but italso represents the dead to the living many centuries later … Throughpainting, the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time’(p.60).30 Horatio similarly emphasizes the commemorative value of theghost’s facial and corporeal mien when he is reminded, on seeingthem, of Old Hamlet’s bygone triumphs:

Such was the very armor he had onWhen he the ambitious Norway combated.



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So frown’d he once when in an angry parleHe smote the sledded [Polacks] on the ice.

(I.1.60)

It is significant, too, that doubts expressed about the ghost’s ontologi-cal status – about whether it is pure ‘illusion’ or ‘something more thanfantasy’, whether it embodies the devil’s handiwork or the late king’sspirit – echo debates about mimetic art that were being conducted inEngland and on the continent.31 Yet however ‘like’ Old Hamlet andwhatever its power to make absent things seem present, the ‘appari-tion’ cannot be anything other than an imperfect substitute for thedead king, an ‘image’ or copy that ‘usurps’ the place of the original.The reiterative use of the comparative adjective in connection with itsappearance keeps before us the unerasable and indeterminate distanceseparating this ‘image’ from the reality it claims to represent. For all itssuggestiveness, the ghost’s likeness to the dead monarch only intensifiesthe mystery surrounding its identity.

Alternatively, the ghost can be understood in terms of a different butrelated paradigm: that is, as an actor who ‘usurps’ the ‘majesty ofburied Denmark’ in the sense of putting on his ‘fair and warlike form’(I.1.46–9). (Apart from a visible form, the word ‘shape’ might denotean actor or theatrical disguise in this period.) Hamlet is exhorted to‘mark’ the ghost, as well as to ‘list’ its utterances, since in true thespianstyle the forms of eloquence deployed by this ‘apparition’ are framed asmuch for the eye as the ear. Thus it passes before the watch with‘solemn march’, spreads its arms, ‘address[es] / Itself to motion like as itwould speak’, and beckons Hamlet away with ‘courteous action’. Andwhen it finally consents to speak, it is to issue a series of forcefulcommands pressed home with a graphic narration of Claudius’s crime.All these strategems, it should be noted, are ruthlessly directed at awak-ening Hamlet’s compassion in the interests of persuading him torevenge – notwithstanding the ghost’s disclaimer: ‘Pity me not, butlend thy serious hearing / To what I shall unfold’ (I.5.5). The rhetoricalmeans by which this end is encompassed repay further study, bothbecause they operate across artistic boundaries, and because they willlodge themselves in Hamlet’s imagination. The ghost’s predilection foraffective figures, for example, has gone largely unnoticed, yet in thefollowing passage, ecphonesis (exclamation) and adhortatio (command)are typically used, in combination with epizeuxis (an emphatic form ofrepetition) to create an overwhelming emotional appeal:

O, horrible, O, horrible, most horrible!If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not,



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Let not the royal bed of Denmark beA couch for luxury and damned incest.

(I.5.80)

What distinguished this class of figures was their ability to communi-cate inner states of feeling in such a way as to excite a correspondingemotion in the listener’s breast; indeed, their persuasive force wasthought to be wholly conditional upon their skill in revealing the ‘sun-drie affections and passions of the minde’.32 Henry Peacham, who dis-cusses ‘figures of affection’ at some length, differentiates adhortatio from‘bare commandements’ on the basis of its greater vehemency and emo-tional charge, having ‘sundry & mightie reasons to move the mindeand understanding of man not only to a willing consent, but also to afervent desire to performe the thing adhorted’ (pp.77–8).33 Descriptivefigures were likewise deemed to prevail upon the listener by virtue oftheir power to evoke a range of feelings. There is ‘none more forcible tomove pittie’ or to ‘amplifie’ the horrific nature of events such as mur-ders, Peacham notes, than that which ‘doth as plainly portray theirimage, as if they were most lively painted out in colours’ (pp.139–40) –in short, that incorporates the sort of vivid detail used by the ghostwhen recounting the effects of poison on its ‘smooth body’. Armedwith such figures, a speaker might so ‘prevaile… in drawing the mindesof his hearers to his owne will and affection’, as to ‘quite alter theformer state of their mindes’ and ‘move them to be of his side’ (p.121).34

As part of the rhetorical art of actio, gestures were credited with asimilar expressive capacity and sway over the beholder’s will and emo-tions. ‘So bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action’, declaresThomas Heywood in his Apology for Actors, ‘that it hath power to newmold the harts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of anynoble and notable attempt’.35 Its appeal to the eye, the most impres-sionable sense, arguably gave such ‘action’ the edge over verbal induce-ment; ‘Hadst thou thy wits and didst persuade revenge, / It could notmove thus’ (IV.5.169), Laertes remarks of his sister’s crazed pantomime.In exploiting this power, the ghost draws upon a gestural tradition thatbound together play-acting, oratory and painting as cogent forms ofaffective persuasion. A well-known passage in Quintilian’s Institutiocompared the orator’s (and, by extension, the actor’s) command ofrhetorical gesture with that of painting:

Nor is it wonderful that gesture which depends on various forms ofmovement should have such power, when pictures, which are silent



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and motionless, penetrate into our innermost feelings with suchpower that at times they seem more eloquent than language itself.

(XI.3.67)

The assumption that images share with words a ‘hidden force to moveand compell our minds to severall Passions’ became a central pillar of utpictura discourse.36 On the strength of this analogy, humanist and neo-classical theorists would construct an ‘exact, yet extensive pictorialrhetoric of gesture and facial expression’, which assigned to every pas-sion its appropriate movement.37 Initiating this process, Alberti empha-sizes, once again, the causal connection between the ability of gesturesto make known the hidden movements of the soul through the exterior‘movements of the body’ and their impact upon the beholder:

A ‘historia’ will move spectators when the men painted in the pic-ture outwardly demonstrate their own feelings as clearly as possible.Nature provides … that we mourn with the mourners, laugh withthose who laugh, and grieve with the grief-stricken. Yet these feel-ings are known from movements of the body.38

The translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato, Book II of which deals with‘actions and gestures’, was instrumental in disseminating this doc-trine of empathetic identification to English readers. Not contentwith carrying the visual codification of emotion to new extremes,Lomazzo boldly asserted that the ‘comparison’ between painting andpoetry ‘alone consisteth’ in knowing how to convey ‘the inwardaffections of the minde, by an outward and bodily Demonstration’(Bk.II, pp.4–5).

It scarcely needs saying, however, that the belief that gestures, likethe orator’s emotive figures, constitute a reliable index of the soulcrumbles under critical scrutiny.39 In his treatise on the passions,Thomas Wright concedes that, while ‘for the most part’ it is possible,by a process of inference from a man’s speech and actions, to ‘viewthe passions or inclinations which … reside and lie hidden’ in his heart,the task of deciphering these exterior clues may be complicated byreticence or dissembling in the person studied. To add to the problem,all the ‘effects & externall operations’ of emotion may be repro-duced artificially, as is shown in the case of ‘stage plaiers’ whom Wrightholds up as a morally dubious example of the power to convince spec-tators of one’s authenticity by faking (‘act[ing] fainedly’) the signsof interiority.40 A similar point is made by Hamlet when he treats



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play-acting as a by-word for the display of sham emotion. His implicitadmission that there is no direct or necessary correlation between the‘externall image’ and the ‘internall minde’ it supposedly reflects isrepeatedly endorsed. The gestural language of the play’s many dumbshows, for example, proves oddly illegible to their stage audiences.41

And, as rhetoricians warned, the expressive qualities of speech wereequally open to abuse as tokens of sincere emotion and good faith – apoint underlined this time, ironically, by the ghost, when inveighingagainst Claudius’s ‘wicked wit’ which had ‘the power / So to seduce’ intowrongdoing ‘the will of [his] most seeming virtuous queen’ (I.5.42–6).42

We are thus discouraged from placing too much trust in the ghost onthe basis of its impassioned words and gestures; however effective asinstruments of persuasion, they offer no real assurance of its royal iden-tity or the morality of its intentions. Perhaps for this reason, Hamlet,though initially convinced of the spirit’s ‘honesty’ and prompt inassenting to its demands, soon relapses into doubt.

But while the ghost’s theatricality does nothing to dispel the uncer-tainty concerning its true status and motives, it is this aspect of thevisitation that seems to make the deepest impression on Hamlet, res-onating as it does with his own self-dramatizing propensities. Itis therefore no accident, I suggest, that he decides to assume an ‘anticdisposition’ directly after their first encounter, since the ghost’s ‘ques-tionable shape’ and histrionic mode of adddress act as a catalyst and amodel for that invention. What Hamlet makes of the example willemerge in the course of this discussion, but two possible sources ofinfluence can even now be pinpointed. We have seen how dramatic orpictorial self-imaging works to obscure the ghost’s real identity, whileoffering to disclose this to the view, in a game of obfuscation and reve-lation that Hamlet will mimic in his antic mode. It is also clear thatthe ghost’s theatricality is much bound up with the desire to elicit acertain reaction from its audience. In fact, our attention is explicitlyredirected away from the promised, but significantly withheld, revela-tion of personal ‘secrets’ to the impact this might have on others:

But that I am forbidTo tell the secrets of my prison-house,I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,Thy knotted and combined locks to part …

(I.5.13)



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Above all else, it is this imagined capacity to induce an empatheticresponse in the spectators, that Hamlet seeks to emulate in his revengetask. By compelling the Danish courtiers to see matters from his per-spective he will try to ‘fashion’ or ‘new mold’ their identities.

We are, of course, never told why Hamlet decides to assume an ‘anticdisposition’. According to one time-honoured theory, its purpose isto hide his true feelings and intentions from the prying eyes of thecourt spies, while at the same time allowing him to vent these incovert form.43 (If self-concealment is the aim, though, we should notethat the ‘antic disposition’ has the reverse and presumably not whollyundesired effect of setting both courtiers and critics on the trail of hisinner mystery). The complex function of this dramatic invention inrelation to the self is highlighted by an incident in III.2. Follow-ing Hamlet’s provocative behaviour during the staging of ‘The Mouse-trap’, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are renewing their efforts to wheedlefrom him ‘some confession / Of his true state’. They are duly rebukedfor attempting to pluck out ‘the heart of [his] mystery’, for daringto play upon him like a pipe. Clearly this is ironic, since it is notthey who are manipulating him, but he them, as is confirmedwhen Polonius enters and is made to participate in Hamlet’s favouritegame:

Hamlet Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of acamel?Polonius By th’ mass and ’tis, like a camel indeed.Hamlet Methinks it is like a weasel.Polonius It is back’d like a weasel.Hamlet Or like a whale.Polonius Very like a whale.

(III.2.376)

In these imaginary cloud formations we are invited to find an emblemof the shifting ‘forms, moods, [shapes]’ assumed by Hamlet as part ofhis ‘antic disposition’. As his teasing of Polonius suggests, these art-ful transformations are partly a device to control the ways in whichothers (mis)perceive him. His playing of the malcontent, for example,is nicely calculated to convince his former schoolmates that thehidden spring of his madness is disappointed ambition. Similarly, hisappearance before Ophelia with ‘doublet all unbrac’d, / No hat uponhis head, his stockins fouled / Ungart’red and down-gyved to his ankle’(II.1.75) exploits the conventional visual lexicon of love melancholy



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in order to encourage her and Polonius in their mistaken belief thatunrequited passion is the key to his mystery. From this we mightconclude that the chief function of these transformations is tostrengthen Hamlet’s advantage over the King and his stooges by atonce inviting and frustrating their attempts to elicit the ‘secrets’ ofhis being.

But the ‘antic disposition’ is much more than a political tool.Hamlet’s trick of continually donning and discarding roles seems toarise from some more compelling private need. It allows him, for awhile, to resist or defer the single role of revenger that has been thrustupon him, to entertain the illusion of freedom from external pressuresby reshaping his identity as the whim takes him. It creates a space inwhich he is able to rehearse the manifold functions – ‘the courtier’s,soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword’ – that might have been expectedto form part of his identity, were it not for the circumstances of hisfather’s death. However, this exploratory process extends beyond hispublic self, for, as I noted earlier, such socially prescribed roles areimplicated in Hamlet’s inward existence and his attempts to apprehendthis. Through their mediating power he seeks access to the hiddenreaches of his subjectivity, the cloud-like permutations of his personaereflecting a determination to bring every facet of that interior life intoview. At the same time, the ironies attendant on this process arerevealed with paradigmatic clarity in the game with Polonius. So farfrom occupying a position of omniscient control, as the sole possessorof his true self which he deliberately withholds or conceals from theintrusive gaze of others, he shares both their desire to uncover theheart of his mystery and their predicament as the detached and oftenbaffled spectator of himself. ‘Th’ observ’d of all observers’ has becomehis own observer.

The willed metamorphoses of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ may thus beunderstood as part of a systematic self-interrogation, a way of ‘look[ing]diversely upon the self’. This last phrase is taken from Montaigne,whose sustained endeavour to see and represent himself truthfullyin his Essays was elaborated through the trope of self-portraiture.44

As a writer intent on observing not only the outward man but con-sciousness itself in its devious unfolding, and sensitive to the difficultiesposed by such a project, the French essayist supplies an illuminatinganalogue for Shakespeare’s self-absorbed prince. In a brief but sug-gestive article published in 1975, Robert Ellrodt argued that theplays written by Shakespeare around the turn of the sixteenth centurybear witness to ‘the emergence in European literature of a form of



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self-consciousness which implies a simultaneous awareness of experi-ence and the experiencing self’, and that Shakespeare’s interest in thissplit form of consciousness may have been quickened by his recentreading of Montaigne.45 Unquestionably, Hamlet’s methods of self-scrutiny are closely anticipated in such passages as the following, fromMontaigne’s essay, ‘Of the inconstancie of our actions’:

The blast of accidents, doth not only remove me according to hisinclination; for besides, I remove and trouble my selfe by the insta-bility of my posture … Sometimes I give my soule one visage, andsometimes another, according unto the posture or side I lay hir in. IfI speake diversly of my selfe, it is because I look diversly upon myselfe. All contrarieties are found in hir … according as I stirre orturne my selfe; And whosoever shall heedfully survay and considerhimselfe, shall find this volubilitie and discordance to be in him-selfe, yea and in his very judgement. I have nothing to say entirely,simply, and with soliditie of my selfe, without confusion, disorder,blending; mingling; and in one word, Distinguo is the most universalpart of my logike.

(II.1.195)

The first thing to note here is that Montaigne manipulates his view ofhimself in much the same way that Hamlet manipulates Polonius’s:‘sometimes I give my soule one visage, and sometimes another accord-ing unto the posture or side I lay hir in’. The indirect and dividedstructure of self-perception dictates this proliferation of perspectives, asit does in Shakespeare’s play. In so doing, however, it puts pressure onthe conventional ideals associated with portraiture, its claim to fix thesubject in a truthful and permanent image, to which Montaigne attimes subscribed.46 For each shift of viewpoint discloses a differentpersona, generating a succession of selves whose discontinuity andcontradictoriness preclude any integration into a single, unified entity.This production of new identities undermines the hypothesis of a tran-scendent inner essence in several ways. Apart from highlighting the‘discordance’ and instability inherent in subjectivity, it postponesindefinitely the moment when the perceiving self may come into fullpossession of its own being, the moment when it may truly knowitself. Denied the possibility of assured self-knowledge, Montaignemust be content with recording the mutations of his thought, and ofthe images he presents to himself and others, none of which, he isaware, bears reliable witness to the inner man. In another famous



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reference to his self-portrait, he declares: ‘I cannot settle my object; itgoeth so unquietly and staggering, with a naturall drunkennesse. I takeit in this plight, as it is at th’instant I ammuse my selfe about it. Idescribe not the essence, but the passage … Were my minde setled, I wouldnot essaye, but resolve my selfe’ (III.2.483).

Montaigne’s analysis of his reflexive ploys also prefigures Hamletin its emphasis on linguistic agency in the act of self-observation:‘If I speake diversly of my selfe, it is because I look diversly uponmy selfe’. Language enables Montaigne to alter his ‘posture’, and withit his mental outlook, by offering the writing/perceiving subject (thetwo are effectively identified here) a series of positions from which to‘survay and consider himselfe’. Indeed, the twists and ‘turne[s]’ heperforms in endeavouring to catch a glimpse of the consciousness thatlies behind or at a distance from his outward selves specifically recallthe turning powers ascribed to figurative discourse. So obtrusive isthis rhetorical mediation that it threatens to invert Montaigne’s apho-rism; if he looks diversely upon himself, it is because he speaks diverselyof himself. Or, to put it another way, his identity is ambiguous andfragmented because his style is so: ‘I have nothing to say entirely, sim-ply, and with soliditie of my selfe, without confusion, disorder, blend-ing, mingling; and in one word Distinguo is the most universalpart of my logike’. Hamlet, who concedes that his own wit has becomeso ‘diseas’d’ as to conform no longer to any ‘frame’ of reason(III.2.308–22), might have made a similar confession. That ‘Distinguo’is also the governing principle of his logic is evident from his pre-ferred forms of locution, which tend to produce a splintering of mean-ing. This is as marked a feature of his use of large-scale dialectic in thesoliloquies, as of his fondness for figures involving some kindof doubling or equivocation, and his habit of wresting others’ wordsinto a fresh and unintended sense.47 The effects of such linguisticwaywardness on self-perception are obvious. As subjects viewed throughand constituted in language, neither Hamlet nor Montaigne can layclaim to any substance or ‘soliditie’. Part of the linguistic flux, they aregoverned by its play of differences and are thus unable to ‘resolve’ theirdisparate selves or make them cohere into a single, durable image.Instead of leading to the discovery of a stable inner essence, theirreflexive praxis draws them into a ceaseless rhetorical making andunmaking of the self.

This reading is supported by Hamlet’s management of the soliloquy.As one of the chief loci of self-reflection in Shakespearean tragedy, thesoliloquy is readily adaptable to the art of looking diversely upon the



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self. Take the soliloquy at the end of Act II. Like his earlier speechaffirming that he knows not seems, this is predicated upon a directopposition between the player’s simulated passion and Hamlet’s genuinegrief, between ‘actions that a man might play’ and the authentic actionthat Hamlet is called upon to perform:

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!Is it not monstrous that this player here,But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,Could force his soul so to his own conceitThat from her working all the visage wann’dTears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect …Yet I,A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peakLike John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,And can say nothing.

(II.2.550)

Once again, the antithesis proves unsustainable, as the distinctionsbetween the fictive and the real in which it is grounded begin to col-lapse. For Hamlet, it transpires, regards his situation in a similarlytheatrical light, as a ‘cue for passion’, identifying his own task withthe player’s48:

What would he doHad he the motive and [the cue] for passionThat I have? He would drown the stage with tears,And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,Make mad the guilty, and appall the free,Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeedThe very faculties of eyes and ears.

(II.2.560)

In Hamlet’s imagination the player’s performance coalesces with theghost’s proven ability to amaze the very faculties of eyes and ears; andtogether they stimulate his fascination with the power of play-acting tocompel a particular kind of emotional response – a reaction envisagedas precipitating in turn a moral transformation of the spectators’ indi-vidual natures. It is their combined example that leads directly toHamlet’s decision at the end of the soliloquy to stage ‘The Mousetrap’,



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thereby translating the revenge task from a problem of heroic actioninto one of dramatic persuasion.49

Meanwhile, Hamlet marvels at the theatrical fiction which, though‘nothing’ in itself, has such sway over the emotions that even theplayer is profoundly moved. It was a commonplace of classical rhetoricthat the orator (or actor) who would excite the feelings of others mustfirst experience them in himself.50 But if the player does feel genuinepity, this is evidently no more than a by-product of his performance,called into being by an affective rhetoric of speech and gesture whosespecific purpose is to manufacture an illusion of inwardness. Ironically,the same can be said of Hamlet, who is more stirred by the player’s‘dream of passion’ than by the actual wrongs he has suffered andwhose own feelings are likewise shown to depend for their existenceupon an external and highly artificial code of expression. Thus he mustresort to the vehement speech of the stock revenge hero – ‘Bloody,bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!’(l.580) – in order to kindle in himself the necessary fury and desire forbloody action. Indeed it could be argued that it is the player whoachieves the greater degree of sincerity in displaying an ability to iden-tify totally with his ‘conceit’ that Hamlet, always alienated from hisvarious roles, lacks. Fiction thus displaces the real thing not only in thesphere of action, but within subjectivity itself.

The fictionalizing of the self implicit in Hamlet’s imaginative identi-fication with the player is subtly confirmed by the introspective tech-niques employed in the soliloquy. The speech includes several shifts ofviewpoint, clearly signalled in each case by a break in the verse: ‘YetI … Why, what an ass am I! … Fie upon’t, foh! / About, my brains’. Aconsequence of Hamlet’s determination to get at the truth ‘though itwere hid indeed / Within the centre’ (II.2.158), this changing perspec-tive only serves to fragment further his already decentred identity.Comparison and antithesis supply the basic structure of the argument,but Hamlet’s rhetorical stance is more volatile than this suggests, gen-erating the contrarieties that permeate this speech at every level. Thusthe soliloquy uses its occasion (the player’s show of emotion) to informboth for and against Hamlet, oscillating between a negative and a posi-tive evaluation of play-acting, between a proclaimed self-loathing andan implicit self-exoneration. As the speech works against its own struc-tural oppositions, Hamlet’s self-definitions grow more equivocal andunsure: ‘Am I a coward? / Who calls me villain … ’Swounds, I shouldtake it: for it cannot be / But I am pigeon-liver’d’. Try as he may to sumup these disparate perceptions of who or what he is in a definitive



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image, his efforts are frustrated by the divisions that are an inescapablefeature of self-consciousness and by his consequent inability, likeMontaigne, to say anything entirely, simply and with solidity of him-self. Their shared modes of reflection simply do not permit any morerooted self-knowledge. Far from yielding any insight into an authenticinner core that might stand over against the player’s feigned version,the soliloquy offers for inspection only a series of similarly improvisedselves.

Apart from the ‘antic disposition’ and the soliloquy, the most impor-tant vehicle for Hamlet’s introspection is the mirror image.51 Self-reflection, as the term indicates, depends on the mediating power ofsuch images, and Hamlet proves highly adept at fashioning those char-acters and events with which he comes into contact into mirrors of theself: ‘by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his’ (V.2.77), hesays of Laertes who, like him, has lost a father whom he is bound toavenge. Fortinbras, Horatio, Pyrrhus, Yorick, the player (to name but afew) are similarly recruited by Hamlet’s imagination and made toreflect different facets of his being. By dint of this identificatory proce-dure all encounters become occasions for self-examination, opportuni-ties to revise his view of himself. ‘How stand I then …?’ (IV.4.56) hemuses, when confronted with Fortinbras’s heedless bravado, so unlikehis own habit of ‘thinking too precisely on th’ event’. The extent towhich these specular images are able to disclose the ‘inmost part’ ofhim is nevertheless open to question. It is not just that, as with anymirror, they are subject to a degree of distortion, or that they necessar-ily offer only a limited and ephemeral perspective on the self. Hamlet’sidentification with these figures is achieved in defiance of the fact thatthey stand in an ambiguous relationship to the perceiving subject, onefounded as much on difference as on likeness. He may declare that hewears Horatio’s image in his ‘heart’s core’, but neither Horatio nor anyother character in whom he strives to see himself is ‘his semblable’ inany unqualified sense of the word. None can be said to denote himtruly, and hence none affords easy access to what lies buried withinhim.52 As if in acknowledgment of this fact, Hamlet’s attitude to thesemirror images of his own devising is surprisingly off-hand. Having, forexample, praised Horatio fulsomely as one whose ‘blood’ and ‘judg-ment’ are, in contrast to his own, ‘so well commedled, / That they arenot a pipe for Fortune’s finger’, he abruptly dismisses the implied com-parison with ‘Something too much of this’ (III.2.62–74). His habitof disengaging himself from such analogies, of playing them offagainst each other or elaborating them until they begin to break down,



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suggests that, as aids to self-knowledge, they have for him at best aninterrogative value.

Given that the mirror is also, as I noted earlier, a prerequisite of self-portraiture, there is much to be gained from considering Hamlet’suse of mirror images alongside sixteenth-century pictorial examplesof the genre. One artist who exploited the heuristic possibilities ofself-reflection in a manner akin to Hamlet is Dürer. In his remarkableseries of self-portraits executed between 1484 and 1522, the mirrorbecomes the agent of a sustained exploration of identity, ‘as [Dürer]pursues his elusive core of selfhood through various costumes, settings,and expressions’.53 Rather than examine these in detail, however, Ihave chosen to focus instead on Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a ConvexMirror [Plate 13], executed in c.1524. My reason for selecting the laterportrait is that, in making use of a convex mirror in preference to aflat one, it more clearly demonstrates the constraints and difficultiesinherent in the process of self-representation – difficulties with whichHamlet must come to terms in endeavouring to bring before theeye his own core of selfhood. Painted on a curved wooden panelmade in the shape of a convex mirror, Parmigianino’s paintingshows the bust of the artist and the surrounding room with all thedistortions – curvature of the beams and window, exaggerated fore-shortening – proper to such a mirror. Evidently, the aim was to achievea trompe l’œil effect by duping the beholder into supposing, if onlymomentarily, that what he/she is seeing is not a painted panel butthe image of an actual person in an actual mirror. Commenting onthe portrait in the second edition of his Lives, Vasari asserts thatParmigianino ‘succeeded so felicitously’ in this intent that ‘what wasreal was no different from what was painted’.54 A closer analysis of thepicture may nevertheless lead us to conclude that this mimetic ideal isqualified in the very process of being affirmed. While the distortionsenhance the illusion, they also interrogate the assumption that objec-tive truth is achievable either in perceiving or in rendering the world ofthings. Experiencing an illusion of the real depends on being able toignore the material means by which this is accomplished. The mirrorrecommended itself to Alberti and Leonardo as a model for paintingprecisely because of its translucent qualities and the confusion ofimage with reality they encouraged. But the effect of the distortions inParmigianino’s self-portrait is rather to make us aware of the mirror asa mirror. This emphasis on the mediating function of the glass wasitself unprecedented; Sydney Freedberg notes that ‘the mechanicalagency through which a self-portrait is achieved, the mirror, had never



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before been openly confessed, nor indeed exploited as it is here, norhad it been used as the vehicle for the formal structure of a portrait’.55

This trick of making the self-portrait foreground its own medium findsa striking parallel in Hamlet’s (or Montaigne’s) reflexive awarenessof the ways in which perceptual and rhetorical structures shape hisself-imaging.

The potential relevance of Parmigianino’s self-portrait to Shakespeare’splay is not exhausted by its challenge to the belief in a perfect copy. Thechoice of a convex mirror also has implications for the way in whichthe portrait’s subject-matter, the self, is defined. The abnormal perspec-tive scheme, the sitter’s hugely magnified hand in the foreground andhis gentle gaze directed out beyond the picture frame, all contrive tomake us more than usually conscious of the beholder to whom theyare addressed. As the beholder in this case is also the artist, the effect isto exhibit very starkly the divisions inherent in subjectivity. By invok-ing the beholder’s presence in this way, the portrait also calls atten-tion to the radically contingent status of the self, whose imageis shown to take its particular configuration from the perceiving gazeas well as from the peculiar properties of the mirror itself. For ratherthan attempting to express the unchanging core of his identity,Parmigianino has elected to depict his appearance when viewed underhighly specific and ephemeral conditions. As Montaigne would say, hisself-portrait describes not the essence but the passage.

Like Parmigianino’s self-portrait, Hamlet’s modes of introspectioncast doubt on the existence of a transcendent inner being and the pos-sibility of its objective mirroring. But just as the prince clings to hisbelief in a self within that ‘passes show’, so in his advice to the playershe upholds the idea of a truthful mimesis, free from distortion. ‘Letyour own discretion be your tutor’, he tells them,

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this specialobservance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, bothat the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up tonature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and thevery age and body of the time his form and pressure.

(III.2.17)

According to Hamlet’s orthodox encomium of theatre as speculum vitae,the play they are about to stage is composed of a sequence of arrestingimages, capable of reflecting the moral substance of the age as well as



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its outward ‘form’ or ‘feature’. Dramatic fiction, he assumes, may bepressed into service as a ‘bait of falsehood’ with which to capture theelusive ‘carp of truth’, and the truth he is after here includes the secretsof the self. By holding the mirror up to Claudius, the play will seek toprovoke him into a private recognition, accompanied by a publicbetrayal or ‘unkennel[ling]’, of his ‘occulted guilt’ (III.2.75–84). It is notonly the King’s conscience that ‘The Mousetrap’ is intended to catch,however, but Hamlet’s own, in that, (like the Pyrrhus fragment he asksthe players to perform in II.2), its reflective surfaces afford furtheropportunities to ‘scan’ his situation. This secondary aim may accountfor the surprising degree of indirection and complexity in the play’streatment of its subject, which far exceeds its ostensible purpose of pre-senting as faithful an ‘image’ of the murder as possible. As Hamletjocularly remarks, the re-enactment of Claudius’s crime asks to beinterpreted ‘tropically’ rather than on a literal level (III.2.7); into thisone action is compressed a range of meanings we have barely begun tounpack. What prompts this enlargement of the play’s scope beyond itsimmediate mimetic function, I suggest, is the need to accommodatethe prince’s multiple and contradictory self-identifications. I am refer-ring not only to his startling naming of the poisoner as ‘one Lucianus,nephew to the king’, which, in superimposing the figure of the revengeron that of the king-slayer, hints at Hamlet’s profoundly ambivalent atti-tude to the deed demanded of him. The long and seemingly redundantexchange between the Player-Queen and the Player-King can also beseen as continuing the debate with himself first broached in the solilo-quies. The Player-Queen’s shrill protestations versus the Player-King’sworld-weary tolerance, her moralistic rigour versus his quiet acceptanceof mortality and the decay of human purpose, offer Hamlet alternativeways of thinking about his predicament, a means of reflecting upon thefailure of will which afflicts him no less than Gertrude.

The problem is that this element of superfluity in the play-within-the-play threatens to obscure or deflect its message: the ‘necessaryquestion’ of regicide to be considered. Moreover, the persuasive powersvested in ‘The Mousetrap’ also seem to be adversely affected, judgingby its failure to provoke the kind of moral indignation Hamlet envis-aged in his soliloquy of II.2. In keeping with the reflexive mood of theplay’s central scenes, Hamlet’s advice to the players in III.1 provides itsown commentary on the causes of this failure.56 The prince is wellaware that the success of his plan depends on the accuracy of his dra-matic mirror: its suiting of the word to the action, the image to its ref-erent. And he therefore cautions the players against all forms of



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histrionic excess, recognizing that ‘anything so o’erdone’ may detractfrom the desired transparency of signification. He knows too that anyoverstepping of the bounds of ‘nature’ is likely to cost him the supportof the ‘judicious’ observers whom he must endeavour to win over tohis cause. Such strictures concerning the dangers of excess carry anironic charge, however, when coming from a character who strugglesunsuccessfully to match the action to the word, and whose personalinability to maintain any vestige of ‘temperance’ in the whirlwind ofhis passion is confirmed by the flow of cryptic puns, obscene jokes andnonsensical rhymes he keeps up prior to and during the perfor-mance.57 Hamlet’s sense of the potentially disastrous consequences ofany falling off from the mimetic ideals and neoclassical standards ofdecorum he has laid down for the players is fully borne out in the fol-lowing scene. His inability to resolve the disparate meanings of ‘TheMousetrap’ leads to a blurring of the dramatic mirror, and in theprocess generates a surplus of viewpoints which is reflected in thedivergent reactions of the spectators – ranging from Ophelia’s blankincomprehension (‘Will ’a tell us what this show meant?’), Gertrude’squiet disclaimer (‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’) andHoratio’s evasive verdict, to the King’s angry but unclearly motivatedreaction. In lieu of the expected confession from Claudius, the playand its dumbshow succeed in eliciting only varying degrees of baffle-ment.58 Hamlet turns chorus in a desperate attempt to impose his owninterpretation of events on stage, expounding the play’s meaning atevery turn. But even this direct intervention fails to rally the audienceto his viewpoint. Indeed, the authority of his vision of things is itselfcompromised, as (in his other role as witness to the proceedings)Hamlet is forced to share in the uncertainty experienced by the otherspectators, left still unsure of the King’s culpability and his own moralbearings.

Something similar occurs in his ensuing encounter with Gertrude,which gathers up many of the themes and issues examined in thischapter. In the closet scene, Hamlet proposes to create a verbal ‘glass’in which his mother will be forced to contemplate the ‘inmost part’ ofherself (III.4.18–20) in such a light as seems guaranteed to bring abouta total reformation of her moral character. When speech alone failsto produce the desired effect, he turns for assistance to twin portraitsof her past and present husbands. It is generally accepted that ‘thecounterfeit presentment of two brothers’ was intended to denote twominiatures – versions of the ‘picture in little’ to which Hamlet alludedearlier (II.2.363) and which, as he makes clear, were circulated in the



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period as badges of political allegiance as well as tokens of personalattachment.59 Too small to be seen on stage, the miniatures are madeat once visible to the mind’s eye and morally intelligible by Hamlet’sekphrastic description:

See what a grace was seated on this brow:Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,An eye like Mars, to threaten and command,A station like the herald MercuryNew lighted on a [heaven-]kissing hill,A combination and a form indeed,Where every god did seem to set his sealTo give the world assurance of a man.This was your husband. Look you now what follows:Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear,Blasting his wholesome brother.

(III.4.55)

For Hamlet, the value of these two miniatures lies less in their senti-mental or political associations than in the degree to which they realisethe expressive ideals associated with portraiture. Their achievement, hesuggests, is to reveal the essence of Old Hamlet and Claudius, so fixingthe brothers’ true and opposed natures as Hyperion and satyr, god andbeast. We have reason to suspect, however, that this limpidity of expres-sion exists more in the eye of the beholder than in the portraits them-selves.60 After all, nobody apart from the ghost appears to share Hamlet’sview of Claudius as morally and physically repugnant, tending rather,like Gertrude, to regard him as a perfectly satisfactory substitute for hisdead brother. And it is unlikely that miniatures of the new monarch, forwhich his supporters were (according to Hamlet) willing to lay out suchlarge sums, would portray him in anything other than a flattering light.Despite its tone of authoritative exposition, then, Hamlet’s paragone ofthese images mediates what is in fact a highly personal reading of thevisual evidence, one born of his desire to reinscribe distinctions betweenthe two kings that are being threatened with erasure.61

This is underlined by Gertrude’s failure to see what Hamlet sees in theminiatures. Berated by her son for her impercipience – ‘Have you eyes?’he rants, ‘ha, have you eyes?’ (I.65–7) – she is briefly coerced into view-ing herself and her marital history through his censorious gaze:

O Hamlet, speak no more!Thou turn’st my [eyes into my very] soul,



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And there I see such black and [grained] spotsAs will [not] leave their tinct.

(III.4.88)

She is prevented from sustaining this rare moment of introspectionnot, as is sometimes claimed, by her lack of moral fibre but by herson’s increasingly wild behaviour. Once again, the clarity of Hamlet’s‘glass’ is impaired, as, with his excitement mounting, reasoned exhor-tation degenerates into the excessive and uncontrolled language ofthe ‘antic disposition’. This allows Gertrude to formulate a verydifferent view of the situation, one centred on her son’s madnessrather than her own trespass. With the entrance of the ghost, thedivergence of their perspectives is decisively re-established. UnlikeHamlet, Gertrude cannot see the ghost; what she does see and focusupon is the deranged appearance of her son: ‘Forth at your eyesyour spirits wildly peep, /And as the sleeping soldiers in th’alarm, / Yourbedded hair, like life in excrements, / Start up and stand an end’(III.4.119–22). Her description of Hamlet’s demeanour briefly buttellingly objectifies for us the vulnerability of the perceiving mindwhose views have so dominated the play.62 Of that vulnerability tocognitive error and distortion no one is more aware than Hamlet him-self, and it may be supposed that Gertrude’s refusal to corroborate hisperceptions only adds to the doubt which reverberates anxiouslythrough his harangue.63

It is often stated that Hamlet returns in Act V from the aborted jour-ney to England a changed man, that after much soul-searchinghe finally attains a more settled sense of purpose and identity.64 In sup-port of this reading one might cite his unequivocal assertion of hisroyal identity in the graveyard, ‘This is I, / Hamlet the Dane!’ (V.1.257),and the firmness with which he lays aside past and present misgivings(V.2.63–70, 215–24), declaring the readiness to be all. Equally, itis probable that recent encounters with mortality and what he seesas ‘a divinity that shapes our ends’ regardless of our will have sharp-ened his awareness that he too is ‘subject to his birth’ and that hisfreedom to refashion the self is consequently limited.65 And this, inturn, may have made him more disposed to submit to his destinedrole, acting out the part of revenger to its bleak conclusion. Yet, inother respects, he appears little different from the introspective andhistrionic prince of old.66 Musing in the graveyard on the ‘base uses’to which all humanity must return, he invokes a range of exem-plary figures – Alexander the Great, Cain, the politician, the courtier,



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the jester – whose occupations and absurd ambitions reflect, in varyingways, his own. Even coming face to face with Yorick’s skull, which mightseem to unmask the truth of human identity by presenting this in itsfinal, most universal and irreducible form, does not signal the closureof Hamlet’s self-scrutiny. For, as I have tried to show, the very condi-tions which enable this activity preclude any such resolution.

Similarly, Hamlet’s continuing use of dramatic tropes emphasizesthe extent to which his conception of situation and self remainsinveterately theatrical:

Being thus benetted round with [villainies], –Or I could make a prologue to my brains,They had begun the play.

(V.2.29)

This is confirmed by his histrionic confrontation with Laertes atOphelia’s graveside, so embarrassing to those critics who wish to seehim as a reformed character. There may be an element of burlesquein his attempt to outdo Laertes’s hyperbolic speech and gestures, asseveral critics have suggested – a venting of patrician distaste for the‘ranting’ of third-rate actors. The primary impression, though, is ofHamlet vying with Laertes more in rhetorical skill than out of love forthe dead Ophelia, impelled by the same mixture of fascination andrivalry that characterized his reaction to the performances of the ghostand the player:

What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrowConjures the wand’ring stars and makes them standLike wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,Hamlet the Dane.

(V.1.254)

The fantasy reiterated here of exercising complete control over an audi-ence through an irresistible appeal to its emotions continues to excitehis imagination long after events have shown it to be unrealizable inpractice. This ambition stays with him to the very end. His dyingthoughts revolve around the response of the assembled courtiers –described as being ‘but mutes or audience to this act’ (V.2.335) – to thetragic spectacle they have just witnessed, and his determination to



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shape that response from beyond the grave by having Horatio tell hisversion of the story. However, the misleading summary of eventswhich Horatio gives to these onlookers at the play’s close (V.2.380–86)does not inspire confidence that Hamlet’s posthumous attempts ataudience manipulation will be any more successful than before.

Like his rhetorical aspirations to ‘new mold’ the Danish court,Hamlet’s desire to apprehend that which lies ‘within’ persists undimin-ished because unsatisfied. For him no less than for the court spies andonlookers who observe him in a futile attempt to extract the secrets ofhis being, the inner self remains an ‘undiscover’d country’ beyond thereach of direct (or, for that matter, indirect) vision. That his relentlessself-examination should yield so little in the way of substantive knowl-edge is, as we have seen, partly due to the techniques deployed in pur-suit of that end. Not only are these techniques more effective inobscuring than in revealing inward experience, but the continual pro-duction of heterogeneous images of the self they set in motion callsinto question Hamlet’s presumption that there is a heart to his mys-tery. Our analysis of the various strategies he uses to reveal that enigmato himself may thus lead us to concur with Francis Barker’s view thatHamlet’s assertions of interiority are primarily gestural and that theplay’s ‘promise of essential subjectivity remains unfulfilled’.67 In Troilusand Cressida, written a year to two later, the erosion of a supposed coreof identity (articulated in mythical and stoic rather than proto-bour-geois terms) by a rhetorical process of making and unmaking the selfwill be pursued to its logical conclusion. So too will Hamlet’s experi-mentation with alternative perspectives, bringing about the dissolutionof all ‘rule in unity’ and the institution of a negative epistemologywhere any standard of value or truth is consumed by doubt.



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5Troilus and Cressida, ‘Imagin’dWorth’ and the ‘Bifold Authority’of Anamorphosis

134

Troilus and Cressida culminates in an optical illusion, a hallucinatoryapprehension of unreality. In V.2, Troilus, watched by Ulysses andThersites, watches Cressida give herself to Diomedes and experiences apsychological schism that throws him into an agony of doubt. Unableto reconcile Cressida’s actions with his personal vision of her, he triesto deny what is taking place before his very eyes:

But if I tell how these two did [co-act],Shall I not lie in publishing a truth?Sith yet there is a credence in my heart,An esperance so obstinately strong,That doth invert th’ attest of eyes and ears:As if those organs [had deceptious] functions,Created only to calumniate.

(V.2.118)

In place of the evidence of the senses, he asserts the legitimacy of theimage residing in his heart and mind:

This she? no, this is Diomed’s Cressida.If beauty have a soul, this is not she;If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimonies,If sanctimony be the gods’ delight,If there be rule in unity itself,This was not she.

(V.2.137)

But this desperate move to heal his self-divided consciousness resolvesnothing; each perception merely threatens to cancel out the other. If


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Troilus’s ideal image of the beloved inverts and so undermines ‘th’attest of eyes and ears’, conversely their sensate proof calls his roman-tic faith into question. For, by certifying that this is indeed she, it con-verts his hypotheses into a series of negative propositions: souls do notguide vows, vows are not sanctimonies, there is no rule in unity.1

Troilus is thus forced to give up the struggle to reintegrate his experi-ence and submit to ‘bifold authority’, as he continues to oscillatebetween these conflicting views, neither of which offers him assuredgrounds for belief or disbelief. For a while he succumbs to a ‘madnessof discourse / That cause sets up with and against itself’ in endeavour-ing to represent (by means of paradox, chiasmus and antithesis) aworld of contrarieties, where ‘a thing inseparate / Divides more widerthan the sky and earth’, where a union ‘tied with the bonds of heaven’may yet be ‘slipp’d, dissolv’d and loos’d’, and every truth is also neces-sarily a falsehood since ‘this is, and is not, Cressid’.2

By the time Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida (c.1601–2), theepistemological condundrum – paradoxical, tautological and self-negating – of that which ‘is, and is not’ was already firmly associated inhis work with anamorphic perspective.3 In his most extended perspec-tival allusion, which occurs in Richard II, the distortive effects of griefon perception are likened to ‘perspectives, which rightly gaz’d upon /Show nothing but confusion; ey’d awry / Distinguish form’ (II.2.14–27).Attempting to dispel the Queen’s anxieties, which ‘for things trueweeps things imaginary’, Bushy evokes the experience of viewinganamorphic pictures that look substantial enough from one viewpoint,but, seen from the correct oblique angle (‘ey’ d awry’), are revealed as‘nought but shadows / Of what it is not’. Similarly, the difficulty of dis-tinguishing the true Viola / Cesario from the false copy (her identicaltwin) reminds Orsino of ‘a natural perspective, that is and is not’(Twelfth Night, V.1.216). So although no explicit reference is made toperspective in the betrayal scene, these verbal and contextual parallelsstrongly point to Shakespeare’s having a comparable device in mind.(The fact that the scene takes the form of an inset performanceobserved by three spectators, each with his distinctive philosophicaloutlook and each located at a different point on the stage, may alsohave helped to activate a latent perspectival metaphor). Troilus’sdescription of Cressida, ‘a thing inseparate’, mysteriously ‘divid[ing]’into contrary images is particularly reminiscent of the sort of reversibleportrait to which Cleopatra compares her own double-dealing lover,when she observes that ‘though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, /The other way’s a Mars’ (II.5.116).4 There is, then, a prima-facie case

Troilus and Cressida and the Bifold Authority of Anamorphosis 135


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for supposing that this fashionable species of optical trickery also sup-plied the paradigm for Troilus’s crisis of doubt, a case that is strength-ened when some of the cultural meanings that became attached toanamorphic images are taken into consideration.5

Valued from the time of its invention as a technical curiosity, a wittydivertissement d’esprit, anamorphosis could equally be construed as pre-senting a more serious challenge to the perspectival conventions uponwhich it was founded. By forcing the beholder to abandon a monocu-lar, unambiguous vision of the world – such as Troilus has hithertoespoused – it denied him/her that sense of security, of cognitive mas-tery, which the costruzione leggitima had seemed to confer. Instead, itdemanded of the beholder a willingness to juggle alternative view-points, to weigh their competing claims against each other. Moreover,the undisguised illusoriness of anamorphic images can only haveintensified their power to unsettle. Simply by adjusting one’s viewingposition, distorted apparitions could be made to resolve themselvesinto intelligibility, or one image to metamorphose into another. Thechimerical quality of these shifting configurations expressed in its mostacute form that paradox of mimetic art which had intrigued Lomazzoand other Renaissance theorists: that to produce the appearance of opti-cal truth it may be necessary to transgress the laws of reason; thatwhatever its pretensions to scientific objectivity, representation cannotdispense with an element of fiction. Commenting on the ways inwhich anamorphosis exploits the tensions inherent in the orthodoxsystem, Jurgis Baltrusaitis notes that perspective

is a science which fixes the exact dimensions and positions ofobjects in space, but it is also an art of illusion which recreatesthem. Its history is not only the history of artistic realism but thehistory of a dream.6

Dream and reality merge as troublingly in the visual ambiguitiesof anamorphosis as they do in Troilus’s phantasmagoric vision. More-over, the effect of such ambiguity is to throw the beholder’s normalontological categories into disarray by compelling him/her to expe-rience at first hand the difficulties of disentangling the fictivefrom the real, truth from falsehood, much as Troilus is obliged tograpple with the enigma of a Cressida that both ‘is, and isnot’.

In this sense, almost any anamorphic artefact of the period wouldserve as a satisfactory analogue or model for Troilus’s perceptual



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dilemma. Hans Holbein’s exhaustively analysed painting, TheAmbassadors (1533), with its distended skull floating eerily in the fore-ground, or the anonymous portrait of Edward VI (1546) now in theNational Portrait Gallery, London, present themselves as obvious can-didates, especially as Shakespeare may well have had the opportunityof seeing them when his company performed at Whitehall where bothpictures were on display.7 However, for comparative purposes I wish toconsider a lesser known engraving entitled Aus, du alter Tor! [Plate 14]produced in the 1530s by Erhard Schön, a Nuremberg artist and disci-ple of Dürer who developed a particular line of expertise in this kind ofpicture puzzle or Vexierbild. While its claims to artistic merit can hardlybe said to rank with either of the Whitehall portraits, it seems to me tobe closer in spirit to Shakespeare’s anamorphic betrayal scene, not onlythematically but in the intellectually teasing manner in which its mul-tiple viewpoints are turned to advantage. Just as Troilus tries to sepa-rate out ‘Diomed’s Cressida’ from his own, so here the two images arejuxtaposed rather than, as was the more common practice, superim-posed. On the left, we are shown in conventional perspective a youngwoman being caressed by an old man (presumably her husband), over-looked on one side by a clown and on the other by an elegantlydressed youth to whom the woman secretly passes the old man’s purse.To the right, there appears an indecipherable blur of swirling shapes,which, when viewed obliquely from the extreme left-hand margin,recomposes itself into a naked young couple making love. The disclo-sure of their illicit embrace simultaneously unlocks the cunningly con-cealed relationship of the figures and the significance of the smallhunting scenes depicted above as an emblematic allusion to cuckoldry.It allows us to glimpse, as if through the window linking the twohalves of the engraving (an arch reference perhaps to Albertian per-spective and the unsuspected visions discoverable within it), thewoman’s infidelity which remains hidden from the old man’s gaze,though not from that of her Diomedes-like lover or the Thersites-likeclown, both of whom are present in the love scene. Quite apart fromrequiring us to revise our reading of the first scene, this doubling ofimages challenges our assumptions concerning the truth of perceptionitself. For it is possible to regard the ‘realistic’ image as pure illusion, afalse semblance of marital harmony, the manifestly illusory anamor-phic image as laying open the erotic reality. Unsubtle though itshumour may be, the Schön engraving plays with differences of view-point and discrepant levels of awareness in unexpectedly sophisti-cated ways. In the process it stimulates reflection on the problematic



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relationship between seeing and knowing, illusion and reality, asembodied in its own devious techniques.

In the majority of cases, the disruptive effects of the ‘curious perspective’(as anamorphosis was then called) were containable because short-lived. Afterexperiencing an initial bewilderment and sense of dislocation, thebeholder could expect to be compensated with a flash of insight once thecorrect viewpoint was established. To certain philosophical minds, how-ever, this kind of optical illusion might come to figure a more comprehen-sive and lasting state of uncertainty, a more fundamental disjunctionbetween reality and the ways it is perceived. Earlier we noted how Platoassociated the distortive possibilities of perspective with the unstable realmof opinion and sense impressions, those treacherous substitutes for knowl-edge of the eternal forms (pp.75–6).8 This topos was revisited by a long lineof classical and Christian writers.9 Sceptics of the Pyrrhonian School, inparticular, placed optical illusions at the centre of their campaign to dis-credit sensate knowledge and, by a sort of domino effect, all intellectualsystems.10 Their aim was to bring about a suspense of judgement concern-ing knowledge claims in general, and their means of achieving this was toput forward opposing evidence (whether arguments of equal probability orconflicting sensory data) pro and contra on any question. Among the‘tropes’ or exercises prescribed by their spokesman, Sextus Empiricus, inthe third century AD for attaining this state of undecidability was thereflection that since objects are always perceived in a specific relation tothe beholder they never present the same appearance. Hence

while we can, no doubt, state the nature which each object appearsto possess as viewed in a certain position or at a certain distance or ina certain place, what its real nature is … we are unable to declare.11

The latterday Pyrrhonist, Montaigne, similarly considered the unrelia-bility of the information supplied by our senses to be ‘the greatest foun-dation and triall of our ignorance’ (II.341).12 His ‘Apology for RaymondSebond’, cites a number of stock examples of ‘the faults and deceits’perpetrated by sight in support of its thesis that humanity is confinedto the domain of variable and insubstantial opinions and, without thehelp of divine grace, can no more have ‘communication with being’than it can ascertain the essence of things from the diversity of oursense impressions. For the Sceptic, the counterposing of opinions andsensations should lead – as it can be seen to do in Troilus’s struggle toreconcile the contradictory testimony of his senses and his heart – to adismantling of the so-called criterion. To determine which of these



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conflicting propositions is true or false we need, as Montaigne remarks,a standard of judgement, a ‘judicatorie instrument’, whose authorityis impartial and beyond question. But this criterion has to be supportedin turn by further proofs, a process which generates an infinite regressor, should appeal be made to the evidence in question, a circularform of reasoning in our vain search for an unshakeable basis forjudgement.

The practice of making optical devices that exploit the infirmity ofour senses the springboard to a radical critique of human knowledgecontinued to flourish into the seventeenth century. If Baltrusaitis isright in his conclusions, Descartes’s studies in optics and dioptrics,together with his interest in contemporary refinements of the ‘curiousperspective’, played a crucial role in the formation of his philosophy ofmetaphysical doubt, en route to establishing a new criterion in theshape of the cogito.13 Coming closer to home, we have already observedhow alive English sensibilities were to the deceitful properties of per-spective, though for reasons that may have had more to do with reli-gious and moral scruples than with metaphysics. There is evidence tosuggest that the well-documented native fascination with anamorphicimages was partly due to the vivid demonstration of the fallibility ofthe mind and senses afforded by such ‘couzening picture[s]’.14

Drummond of Hawthornden, for example, seems to be thinking ofthe double vision characteristic of anamorphosis when he invokes per-spective as a trope for the delusions endemic in our earthly existence:

All wee can set our eyes upon in these intricate mazes of Life is butAlchimie, vaine Perspective, and deceiving Shadowes, appearingfarre other wayes afarre off, than when enjoyed, and looked upon ata neare Distance.15

A similar connection is made by Samuel Daniel between the multipleviewpoints characteristic of these devices and the relativism inherentin human judgements; each individual ‘standing according to theprospective of [his] owne humour, seeme[s] to see the selfe same thingsto appeare otherwise to [him] than either they doe to other, or areindeede in them selves, being but all one in nature’.16 One did notneed to be a confirmed Sceptic like Montaigne, after all, to intuit thepotential relationship between the beholder’s readiness to be taken inby these optical tricks and his/her susceptibility to more serious formsof error. The by now routine association of perspective with falsehoodwas a quite sufficient trigger.



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Taken in this context, Shakespeare’s decision to stage Troilus’s self-conflicting vision of Cressida’s identity, his personal crise pyrrhonienne,in the form of an anamorphic puzzle has an obvious fitness. It is notdifficult to see how germane such games of ‘bifold’ perspective are tothe imaginative concerns of a play so obsessed by epistemological ques-tions, especially by the discrepancies between ‘esteem’ and ‘worth’,things as they are and what the perceiver makes of them. Troilus’s hal-lucinatory vision is symptomatic of a world where accepted standardsof truth have been usurped by the counterfeit authority of opinion, byhypothetical fictions that reflect without apology the minds that con-ceived them rather than any prior reality.17 This chapter considers whatimpact the play’s foregrounding of the relativity of perception has on itsverbal and visual modes of representation. In particular, it examines theconsequences of this decentring of vision for the play’s epideictic dis-course, conceived as a medium of evaluation. In so doing, it aims toshow how, to a degree unparalleled even in Hamlet, the absence of anyrhetorical or perceptual ‘rule in unity’ submits both subjectivity andmimesis itself to a process of fragmentation and emptying out. All thatis left for the mind to fasten upon is the flicker of ghostly images meta-morphosing one into another. For the loss of the criterion, I argue,affects not only the characters’ capacity to apprehend and make value-judgements about the nature of the world they inhabit, but our own.We may not, to be sure, share Troilus’s local difficulties in establishingwhether it is really Cressida who surrenders to Diomedes, but at a meta-critical level we are fully implicated in the problems of judgement andidentification arising from the play’s rhetorical strategies. The Prologuesets the tone here with his sly insinuation that the judgements of theplay’s ‘fair beholders’ will be quite as arbitrary, as determined by irra-tional whim, as those voiced by the characters, when he challengesus to

Like or find fault, do as your pleasures are,Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war.

(Prologue, l.30)

But then, not content with making exorbitant demands on our mentalagility, the play’s mutiple gestalts contrive to keep us off balance, in astate of radical perplexity. Anamorphic images thus turn out to be noless appropriate a metaphor for our experience of watching the play.18

* * *



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Let us begin this reading of Troilus and Cressida with another vertigi-nous moment. Barely has Ulysses finished expounding the importanceof ‘degree’ in holding the traditional structure of values in place in I.3,before he displays the obverse of this principle, introducing us withoutfurther ado into the looking-glass world of opinion. Achilles, whom‘opinion crowns / With an imperial voice’, is described wasting his dayslolling on a ‘lazy bed’ and being entertained by his sidekick, Patroclus,while

… with ridiculous and [awkward] action,Which, slanderer, he imitation calls,He [Patroclus] pageants us. Sometime, great Agamemnon,Thy topless deputation he puts on,And like a strutting player, whose conceitLies in his hamstring, and doth think it richTo hear the wooden dialogue and sound’Twixt his stretch’d footing and the scaffolage,Such to-be-pitied and o’er-wrested seemingHe acts thy greatness in; and when he speaks,’Tis like a chime a-mending, with terms [unsquar’d],Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropp’dWould seem hyperboles. At this fusty stuffThe large Achilles, on his press’d bed lolling,From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause,Cries, “Excellent! ’tis Agamemnon right!Now play me Nestor, hem, and stroke thy beard,As he being dress’d to some oration.”That’s done, as near as the extremest ends Of parallels, as like as Vulcan and his wife;Yet god Achilles still cries, “Excellent!’Tis Nestor right!…”

(I.3.149)

The ‘great’ Agamemnon and ‘venerable’ Nestor find themselves subver-sively reconfigured in the glass of Patroclus’s mimicry, translated fromthe unique, god-like figures of legend into comic caricatures. In theprocess, the notion of theatre as speculum vitae, the faithful mirror-image of life, so eloquently defended by Hamlet, undergoes a paralleltransformation. For Patroclus’s ‘pageant’ takes its place in an appar-ently endless sequence of imitations: Ulysses holds a critical mirror up



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to Patroclus’s derisive apeing of the Greek generals, who (like the ‘strut-ting player’ of his description) in turn self-consciously act out their pre-scribed roles, modelling their behaviour on one of the many literaryand dramatic recensions which, in this most knowingly intertextual ofplays, intervene between Shakespeare’s version of the Troy story and itssupposed historical origins.19 These multiplying imitations trigger aregress ad infinitum that distances the founding object of mimesis,putting it effectively out of mental reach. Behind each image weencounter only further representations, no final or fixed referent onwhich the imagination can come to rest. In this respect, Patroclus’smime – a Renais-sance equivalent, as it were, of the deconstructionist’smise en abyme, that vortex of undecidability associated with the topos ofthe mirror mirrored20 – seems exactly calculated to bring about a sus-pense or deferral of judgement.

How, in these circumstances, should we respond to Ulysses’s pressinginvitation to make an absolute distinction between the ‘o’er-wrestedseeming’ of parody and the genuine article, between ‘slander’ and‘imitation’? The problem is highlighted by the opposing reactions ofAchilles and Ulysses to the spectacle described, the former being asquick to detect a likeness between the scurrilous ‘pageant’ and its puta-tive model as the latter is to disclaim any such identity (‘That’s done,as near as the extremest ends / Of parallels, as like as Vulcan and hiswife’). On their side, the play’s critics have perhaps too readily con-cluded that we experience the same thrill of pleasurable recognition asAchilles; that the Agamemnon and Nestor whom we encounter in thisscene are captured with cruel precision in Patroclus’s fatuous hyper-bolist and decrepit orator. But should we necessarily assume this to bethe case? The variations which are an inescapable feature of the differ-ential nature of imitation might, on the contrary, lead us to expect thateach version will offer its own distinctive slant on the subject. Equallyevery actor has his particular way of handling a classic role, of express-ing what he thinks it means to be a Ulysses or an Achilles. The diffi-culty of finding our critical bearings in this matter is compounded bythe impenetrability of the speaker’s intentions. Ought we to infer thatUlysses’s indignation at such unqualified mockery of the Greek leader-ship is sincere or tongue-in-cheek? Is his irony, ostensibly reserved forthe antics of the ‘god Achilles’ and his ‘male varlet’, in fact directed atthe complacency and incompetence of his colleagues whose responsi-bility for this sorry state of affairs has been made abundantly clear inthe degree speech? Either way, Ulysses’s duplicitously ironic stancehelps to ensure the indeterminacy of response which this moment



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seems intended to provoke. Compelled to oscillate between thesecompeting possibilities, we are prevented from achieving anyresolution other than to conclude that this is and is not Agamemnon,is and is not Nestor.

It is as an exemplary coda to the degree speech that this scene of the-atrical reproduction taken to dizzying excess may best be understood.What it vividly demonstrates is the effects on representation of the dis-solution of a stable, universally agreed order of values that Ulysses hasanatomized moments before.21 Not only has the loss of ‘rule in unity’fractured the glass of imitation into countless pieces; it has unfixed allmimetic constructs, so that words and images can no longer bematched with their customary objects or signifieds (‘right and wrong …should lose their names, and so should justice too’). The hierarchicalsystem of distinctions to which Ulysses appealed as part of the preor-dained fabric of things has collapsed, making way for a promiscuousbreeding of differences that precludes any meaningful ‘determination /‘Twixt right and wrong’, truth and falsehood (‘Degree being vizarded, /Th’ unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask’). The consequent descentof representation into a ‘chaos’ of competing imitations drained of anysubstance – a sort of mimetic counterpart to the ‘envious fever / Of paleand bloodless emulation’ infecting the whole of the Greek camp –leaves no aspect of the play untouched.22 Ultimately, then, what wewitness in the reflective surfaces of Patroclus’s ‘pageant’ (as rehearsedby Ulysses) is nothing other than an object-lesson in the play’s charac-teristic strategies. We are treated to an illustration of how the heroic’matter’ of Troy and the seemingly weighty achievements of its leg-endary protagonists are emptied out in the process of being convertedinto so much grist for the characters’ rhetorical and theatrical games,becoming ‘stuff … to make paradoxes’.

Throughout the play Trojans and Greeks are continually engaged inthe kind of paradoxical (re)inscription of identity enacted in Patroclus’smimicry. Defining themselves and each other is not simply a descrip-tive act for these characters, but a means of constituting identity; itbecomes ‘a way of actually mediating and conveying their reality toanother, re-creating them as individuals’.23 For, as Ulysses explainsto Achilles in III.3, in a world where public opinion in the form of rep-utation holds sway, the self only exists as a knowable entity in relationto others:

… no man is the lord of any thing,Though in and of him there be much consisting,



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Till he communicate his parts to others;Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,Till he behold them formed in th’ applauseWhere th’ are extended.

(III.3.115)

Hamlet’s belief in the virtues of reflection as an aid to self-knowledgeis taken here to its logical extreme. According to Ulysses, only bybeholding one’s parts as they are ‘formed’ in ‘the eyes of others’ or ‘inth’ applause / Where th’ are extended’ can one legitimately claim to beor know oneself ‘for aught’. It is as important to attend to the mannerin which this idea is expressed, as to its philosophical ramifications.For, in conflating the activities of seeing, praising and valuing,Ulysses’ language points to the fusion of optical and rhetorical concernswhich lie at the heart of the play. Individual identity is described asbeing apprehended ‘by reflection’, either in ‘men’s looks’ or, by aprocess of metonymic association, in the ‘glass of … praise’ that isrepeatedly trained on the characters. The clear implication is that thelanguage of praise functions as a necessary support, even as a substi-tute for vision (cf. ‘The present eye praises the present object’(III.3.180)). In any event, the accent falls on the image which beto-kens the worth ascribed by others, whether this takes shape on thebeholder’s retina or rhetorically in his/her epideictic discourse. In thisscene, for example, Achilles is simultaneously made to feel the declinein his reputation by ‘word’ and ‘look’; that is, both by the ‘derisionmedicinable’ with which his fellow Greeks frame their greeting and bythe ‘unplausive eyes’ they turn on him, which seem to ‘find out /Some thing not worth in [him] such rich beholding / As they haveoften given’ (III.3.90). Ulysses’s claim that identity is actively createdin and through the gaze/praise of others is borne out by the charac-ters’ habit of observing and commenting on one another. In the firstscene Troilus and Pandarus interpret Cressida to each other. This situa-tion is reversed in the second where Pandarus extols Troilus’s manli-ness to Cressida as they watch the Trojan soldiers parading past.Wishing to transform Ajax into a worthy rival for Achilles, the Greeksmirror him to himself in a glass of sardonic flattery (II.3.182–256).Thersites enacts Ajax’s folly for the amusement of Achilles andPatroclus in an echo of the latter’s ‘pageant’ (III.3.270–99), while inIV.5 Ulysses ‘translate[s]’ Troilus to Agamemnon by recountingAeneas’s eulogy of the young prince. The ubiquitous presence of go-betweens in the play comes to stand for the mediating power of



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language itself, and Troilus’s self-confessed inability to manage with-out Pandarus (‘I cannot come to Cressid but by Pandar’ (I.1.95))hardly overstates the degree to which he and the other characters aredependent upon such rhetorical intercession.24

I now propose to take a closer look at this process of verbal media-tion and the peculiar qualities of the language of praise through whichit is effected, paying special attention to its implications for the play’sepistemology and treatment of identity. Alexander’s bizarre portraitof Ajax in I.2 provides an early, almost programmatic forecast ofits likely effects in both areas. Having summed up this Trojan lord forhis mistress in conventional epic terms as ‘a very man per se’ who‘stands alone’, Alexander unmakes this image through his rhetoricalelaboration:

This man, lady, hath robb’d many beasts of their particular additions:he is as valiant as the lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant;a man into whom nature hath so crowded humors that his valor iscrush’d into folly, his folly sauc’d with discretion. There is no manhath a virtue that he hath not a glimpse of, nor any man an attaintbut he carries some stain of it …he hath the joints of every thing, butevery thing so out of joint that he is a gouty Briareus, many handsand no use, or a purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight.

(I.2.19)

Initially designated as the autonomous, self-identical figure of heroiclegend, Ajax is re-presented thereafter as a monstrously inchoatehybrid that is constantly being reshaped in relation to different con-texts and different beholders.25 Each of the interlocking analogies thatmake up the portrait embodies an alternative perspective on the man.This archetypal ‘mongrel’ lord, who will be turned into a menagerie ofbestial shapes by Thersites’s scurrilous wit and manufactured into ahero by the ‘voices’ of his fellow Greeks, is appropriately shown toexist only as the nexus of ‘additions’ bestowed on and by other crea-tures. The rhetorical dismemberment of Ajax (‘he hath the joints ofevery thing, but every thing so out of joint’) – a more extreme versionof that inflicted on Cressida in the previous scene, where ‘her eyes, herhair, her cheek, her gait, her voice’ were handled piecemeal inPandarus’s discourse (I.1.54) – illustrates in little how identity is vio-lated by the very ‘applause’ through which it is constituted.26

As the play’s main epideictic device, comparison is a prime agent inthis dislocation of the self. The use of this figure may be necessary to



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establish a character’s status as a non-pareil, but its equivocal logicsimultaneously undoes that claim to uniqueness by defining the objectof praise in relation to others in ways that negate the possibility of everbeing simply a man or woman per se. With her keen ear for rhetoricalabsurdities, Cressida homes in on this problem a few lines later whenobjecting to her uncle’s overuse of comparison.

Pandarus … Troilus is the better man of the two.Cressida O Jupiter, there’s no comparison …Pandarus Well, I say Troilus is Troilus.Cressida Then you say as I say, for I am sure he is not Hector.Pandarus No, nor Hector is not Troilus in some degrees.Cressida ’Tis just to each of them; he is himself.Pandarus Himself? alas, poor Troilus, I would he were!

(I.2.61)

By reducing comparison in this fashion to its barest, most schematicform, Cressida pushes Pandarus into admitting its underlying tautolog-ical structure: Troilus is, and is not Hector; Hector is, and is not Troilus.That is to say, she unmasks this figure as the rhetorical counterpart ofanamorphosis, a complementary expression of the play’s central episte-mological riddle, which shares its ontological status as ‘to say thetruth, true and not true’ (I.2.97). Her demystification of comparisonexposes its capacity to strike at the roots not only of identity as such,but of our mental capacity to grasp it. Identifying Ajax or Troilus ashimself may be unhelpful; on the other hand, to describe him in rela-tional terms, in the context of his shifting attributes, risks turning himinto a ‘minced man’ assembled out of left-over ‘fragments’ or greasy‘scraps’ with ‘no date [i.e. centre] in the pie’ (I.2.238–4), as she obliquelywarns, and opens the door to intellectual chaos.27 Like ‘purblindArgus’, comparison frustrates our desire for enlightenment by lendingus many eyes but no sight.28

At the same time, comparison epitomizes the relativistic code of val-ues embraced by both Trojans and Greeks through its association withamplificatio, the set of rhetorical procedures whereby ‘matters [are]mightily magnified’, or conversely diminished.29 The rhythm of infla-tion and deflation governing the characters’ speeches can be seento reflect the inevitable fluctations in an ‘imagin’d worth’ that is sub-jectively conferred.30 If the play’s mock-heroic magniloquence, the‘terms unsquar’d’ of its ‘swoll’n and hot discourse’ which make ‘thingssmall as nothing … [appear] important’ (II.3.169–73), corresponds to a



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general propensity to overvalue things, the opposing impulse to debaseand diminish makes itself felt in Pandarus’s prosaic vein and Thersites’sdelight in coining vile comparisons. That these seemingly antitheticaltendencies are, in fact, interconnected is evidenced by the stylistic dis-sonances, the frequent slippages in register, that have been widelycommented upon as a feature of the play’s dialogue.31 Troilus is, noto-riously, one of the worst offenders in this kind. His opening blazon ofCressida’s charms (I.1.48–63) typically strikes several off-key notes withits self-conscious straining for effect and its reference to ‘the open ulcerof my heart’. Like all the play’s ‘ample proposition[s]’, it failsconspicuously in its ‘promis’d largeness’. The inadvertent bathos ofthis speech may partly explain the huffy response it gets fromPandarus, but his own more pedestrian style of panegyric is no lessambiguous. Superseded by Troilus’s rhapsodizing, it is made to soundalmost derogatory and earns him a lover’s rebuke for speaking less thanthe truth (I.1.64–5). Comparative figures play a crucial part in generat-ing this ambiance of linguistic slipperiness; commonly employed tomagnify an object or person by ‘ris[ing] from the less to the greater’,they were easily thrown into reverse, being capable, as Quintilianremarks, of ‘creat[ing] an effect in either direction’.32 Indeed, theirbasic modus operandi, which is to enhance the value of one thing at theexpense of another, governs much of the dramatic action – not leastUlysses’s plan to inflate Ajax into a prize-champion by ‘giv[ing] himallowance for the better man’ in order to ‘pluck down Achilles’splumes’. These double-edged tactics have also been worked into theplay’s verbal texture, especially in the early scenes where the effects ofcomparison are insistently foregrounded. Cressida, for example, teas-ingly sabotages her uncle’s plan to advertise Troilus’s attractions as alover by disparaging the latter as a ‘sneaking fellow’ and crying upHector’s and Achilles’s superior virtues, while Pandarus’s own encomiaperform so many somersaults that they begin to rival Thersites’s invec-tives in ‘comparisons with dirt’. Thus Paris is at first pronounced a ‘gal-lant man’, but, relative to the ‘admirable’ Troilus, he is ‘dirt’ and‘Helen, to change, would give an eye to boot’ (I.2.227–9). The samescandalous bias prompts Pandarus’s dismissal of ‘great’ Achilles as ‘adrayman, a porter, a very camel’ (l.249). It is this versatility in servingindifferently to praise or dispraise that makes comparison ideallyequipped to project the play’s contingent and unstable values. Itsinbuilt tendency to self-inversion functions as a precise rhetorical ana-logue for the equivocal nature of opinion, which, as Thersites com-plains, can be worn ‘on both sides, like a leather jerkin’ (III.3.264).



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The volatility of comparison as an instrument for communicatingrelative worth, a price-tag placed upon things, is underscored by thecommercial associations it gathers to itself in this play.33 Shakespearehad already explored the proverbial correlation between praising andselling in Love’s Labours’ Lost and the Sonnets, where it is similarly usedto express a wider unease about the misuse of ‘proud compare’ andexalted rhetoric in general34:

I love not less, though less the show appear;That love is merchandiz’d whose rich esteemingThe owner’s tongue doth publish every where.

(Sonnet 102)

But the critique is given greater edge here by grounding this traditionalmercantile conceit in the reversible mechanisms of comparative dis-course and by dramatizing its practical consequences. KnowingPandarus’s reputation as the patron saint of all ‘traders in the flesh’, wemay find something too uncomfortably literal in Troilus’s likening ofCressida to a ‘pearl’, which he, as ‘merchant’, hopes to procure withthe assistance of ‘this sailing Pandar / … our convoy, and our bark’(I.1.96–102). The disturbing corollary of this figure is explored furtherin a speech underlining its material power to convert Helen or whoeveris so praised into a ‘thing’ to be bartered.

Fair Diomed, you do as chapmen do,Dispraise the thing that they desire to buy:But we in silence hold this virtue well,We’ll not commend what we intend to sell.

(IV.1.76)

Troilus employs the same trope (in reverse) on parting from Cressida ina speech lamenting the abrupt fall in love’s price: ‘We two, that with somany thousand sighs / Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves /With the rude brevity and discharge of one’ (IV.4.39). Again, we arereminded that metaphor is about to be translated into fact, whenCressida is traded for Antenor – just as the proposal before the Trojancouncil is that Helen, herself described as ‘a pearl, / Whose price hathlaunch’d above a thousand ships’ (II.2.81), should be exchanged as ameans of striking off wartime debts.35 In fact, Cressida shares Helen’sfate in a more than superficial sense, inasmuch as she, like the‘ransack’d queen’, is ‘merchandiz’d’ by the fickle operation of fame,transformed by her lover’s praises into a covetable ‘prize’ that will



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awaken the cupidity of Diomedes. As commodifiable objects in whommen have invested their honour and for whom they are consequentlyprepared to pay a heavy price, both women are peculiarly vulnerable tothe commercial logic of praise. Hence their marketable value is, moreblatantly than any other, subject to sudden inflation and deflation, asthey become, by turns, a ‘theme for depravation’ or for ‘honourand renown’. As a substitute for Achilles whose worth is artificiallymaintained through epideixis, Ajax interestingly finds himself in a sim-ilar position – a parallel that confirms his exposure to the insidiousprocess of effeminisation affecting many of the male characters in theplay.36 He too is alternately praised and dispraised as part of the policywhereby he is ‘bought and sold among those of any wit, like abarbarian slave’ (II.1.46). For Ulysses and Nestor are, ‘like merchants’,quick to exploit comparison as a sales tactic; their intention is toreduce Achilles’s price in the opinion-stakes by promoting Ajax in hisstead, but ‘if not, / The lustre of the better shall exceed / By showingthe worse first’ (I.3.357–61). The importance of not losing sight of theobjective value of things when amplifying or diminishing, so as to‘avoid too great swelling without substance’, was routinely stressed inthe rhetorical handbooks.37 In clear defiance of such prescriptions,the play’s mercenary analogies announce that the only truth to begleaned from its epideictic discourse concerns the capricious laws ofthe marketplace.

That comparison is being abused here on an unprecedented scale isfurther attested by the wilfully irrational nature of the parallels and dis-tinctions in which the characters seek to root their use of this figure.38

Erasmus and other Renaissance pedagogues had advised the use offamiliar exempla as an aid to perspicuity and sound argument.39 Yet,perversely, Pandarus selects only what is most arbitrary and insignifi-cant in the lives of his famous subjects:

And her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen’s – well, go to! –there were no more comparison between the women!

(I.1.41)

Why, he is very young, and yet will he, within three pound, lift asmuch as his brother Hector … I think his smiling becomes him bet-ter than any man in all Phrygia.

(I.2.115–23)

Once again, the degree speech offers us the key to the problem.In orthodox fashion, this speech rehearses a series of graduated



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correspondences between micro- and macrocosm supposedly encodedin the actual structure of the universe and thus long assumed to under-write not only the socio-political order, but the analogical basis of rep-resentation itself. At the same time, however, the speech reflects on thebreakdown of these parallels and its potentially disabling effects oncomparison. What happens when the general is ‘not like the hive’,when he fails to conduct himself in a manner befitting the ‘gloriousplanet Sol’? Where Ulysses’s analysis breaks off, the rest of the playcould be said to take over, drawing out the linguistic consequences ofthis collapse of a once absolute order. Without a stable system ofrhetorical values – a ‘virtue fix’d’ – to which it might attach itself, thecharacters’ analogizing slides into the uncontrolled play of relativity orinto meaningless differentiation. Ironically, one effect of multiplyingdifferences is thus to make the objects of discourse appear ‘all affin’dand kin’, reducing them to an indistinguishable sameness. Charactersare presented as oddly interchangeable; Pandarus confuses Troilus withDeiphobus (I.2.227), and Helen with Cressida, (III.1.34) while Ajax mis-takes Thersistes for Agamemnon (III.3.261). That their compulsiveanalogizing merely exacerbates the problem by erasing previouslyclear-cut differences seems to be the point behind Diomedes’s elabo-rately sarcastic exercise in comparison in IV.1. After balancing Paris’sclaim to Helen against Menelaus’s for eleven lines, he concludes that‘Both merits poised, each weighs nor less nor more; / But he as he, theheavier for a whore’ (ll.55–67).

In short, the play’s suspect language of comparison contrives byevery means at its disposal to subvert the rational, elucidatory functiontraditionally assigned it. Even when used in a purely ornamentalcapacity, there still clung to comparison some of the logical force andforensic qualities it originally possessed as one of the ‘places’ of argu-ment deployed in the law courts.40 Consequently, Renaissance rhetori-cians tended to set great store by the clarifying effects of this figure,which was thought to facilitate sound judgement by laying open thetrue nature and value of things. Peacham, for example, anticipatesDiomedes’s judicial metaphor when he states that ‘this forme of speechis of mightie force and power … to persuade by reason, for the parts ofthe comparison being brought together, their likenesse or unlikenesse,their equalitie or inequalitie is as plainly discerned, as things whichare tried and judged by the ballance’ (p.158). Puttenham similarlyobserves that comparison ‘sets the lesse by the greater, or the greaterto the lesse … and by such confronting of them together, drives outthe true ods that is betwixt them, and makes it better appeare’ (p.234).



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But this rhetorical ideal is systematically violated, turned inside out inthe play. Instead of enabling us to attain a clearer, more objective senseof their identity and worth, the characters’ verbal tick of comparingonly confounds our tentative judgements.

In the absence of any touchstone that would allow us to arrive at areasonably impartial assessment of the play’s epideictic discourse andits objects, critics have sometimes tried to import such an entity intothe play. Thus Thomas McAlindon has argued that we need look nofurther for an authoritative standard against which to measure theplay’s rhetorical deviations than the rule of decorum:

In this doctrine it is assumed that speech and conduct are subject toessentially the same laws of fitness … For the Renaissance theorist, itfollows that fitting words signify an intelligent respect for the uni-versal laws of “degree, priority, and place”; they are a recognition ofthe proportion and order implanted in things by nature.41

McAlindon rightly points out that the type of grotesque amplificationand diminution in which Troilus abounds would have invited condem-nation as an example of the related forms of indecorous excess knownas bomphiologia (‘which giveth high titles to base persons, and greatpraises to small deserts’) and tapinosis (‘when the dignitie or majestie ofa high matter is much defaced by the basenesse of a word’).42 Theproblem with this argument, however, is that decorum (as he alsonotes) is predicated on the doctrine of degree, priority and place, thevery doctrine which has been so remorselessly called into question. Itpresupposes a knowledge of intrinsic worth that the play’s rhetoricaland dramatic strategies consistently deny to the characters – and, inso-far as we share their predicament, to us. To attempt to determine thefitness of mimetic forms which, having been uprooted ‘deracinate[d]’from a defunct and discredited order of signification, are no longersubject to any rational verification is clearly not a viable proposition.

For a critical gloss on this problem – the problem in effect of findinga valid criterion, as raised by the Sceptics – we may turn to Hector’srebuttal of Troilus’s infamous assertion that private opinion is a suffi-cient determinant of worth (‘What’s aught but as ’tis valued?’):

But value dwells not in particular will,It holds his estimate and dignityAs well wherein ’tis precious of itself



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As in the prizer. ’Tis mad idolatryTo make the service greater than the god,And the will dotes that is attributiveTo what infectiously itself affects,Without some image of th’ affected merit.

(II.2.53)

Siding with rhetorical dogma, Hector takes the view that ‘’tis mad idol-atry / To make the service greater than the god’ by lavishing praise onthings way in excess of their demonstrable worth. Such rhetorical wor-ship, he suggests, is sure to become a delusion and a snare whereverthe individual desire to confer value is not matched by somethinginherently ‘precious’ in the person valued; or, more precisely, unlessappeal can be made to ‘some image of th’ affected merit’ correspond-ing to (and so able to ground) the virtues ascribed to that person. Itmay help us to grasp what Hector is getting at in this notoriously diffi-cult speech if we juxtapose this with Francis Bacon’s musings on thedangers of verbal idolatry, which are similarly couched in terms of aperceptual analogy:

It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portrai-ture of this vanity; for words are but the images of matter; andexcept they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love withthem is all one as to fall in love with a picture.43

What is being stipulated in each case is that words, like images, shouldpossess an inner substance that will allow them to function as a guaran-tor or ‘objective correlative’ for the qualities attributed by the desiringimagination. Arguably, the collapse of Troilus’s romantic expectations –his passage from infatuation to disenchantment with the mental imageof Cressida he has created – stems from his failure to heed this advice.It will lend weight to Hector’s call for some more adequate token of‘affected merit’ than the shadowy images produced in the gaze of theonstage beholders or mirrored in their discourse. Whether such a signof objective worth, visual or verbal, exists in the play, however, is amoot point. Significantly, the ‘image’ in question is caught up here ina tautological pattern of assonance and alliteration, as if to suggest itsinevitable absorption by the reflexive value system it is supposed tocounteract. The worth ascribed to the prized object is reflected backupon the ‘prizer’ (‘infectiously itself affects’) in a circular motion thatmakes no reference beyond itself to any absolute norm or objective



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fact. More directly, Hector’s sudden abandonment of his argumentand his defection to the cause of ‘fame’ at the end of this scene – echoing Ulysses’s abdication of the rationalist position he formulatedin I.3 – implies that there is no effective standard of truth to set againstopinion.44

This pessimistic conclusion would seem to be confirmed by ourexperience of watching or reading the play. The dubious nature of thelinguistic strategies employed by the characters are not the only thingpreventing us from establishing a viable alternative criterion. Onemight also cite the striking disproportion between the play’s ‘matter’ orres and the volume of commentary it generates. Tellingly, the ‘argu-ment’ of Troilus and Cressida is invariably spoken of in disparagingterms, as too inconsequential, ‘too starv’d a subject’, to justify thedegree of conflict (both military and rhetorical) it provokes.45 A play inwhich interpretation so outweighs and sustains itself at the expense ofcontent poses obvious difficulties for its audience. Quite simply, thereis no substantive, unmediated reality here to which we might gainaccess. This is partly due to the play’s refusal to conform to the con-ventions of mimetic realism. Although the play’s characters anddramatic events are sometimes seen as providing a useful counterbal-ance that allows us to assess the validity of its rhetorical claims, othercritics have acknowledged the lack of characterization of the three-dimensional sort to be found here, or any action worthy of the name.46

The play typically reflects upon this deficiency and its relationship tothe excessive production of epideictic discourse. Trojans and Greeksrepeatedly warn that it is in the nature of praise, especially when self-directed, to consume itself and the very deeds that could be used tovalidate its assertions:

He that is proud eats up himself. Pride is his own glass, his owntrumpet, his own chronicle, and whatever praises itself but in thedeed, devours the deed in the praise.

(II.3.154; cf. I.3.241–4, III.3.169–74)

The characters are continually having to contend with the epistemo-logical problems stemming from this tendency for their rhetoricalactivity to overwhelm or devour anything that might conceivablyact as an external standard of truth. The difficulty they have in recog-nizing each other from description or from prior acquaintance hasoften been remarked.47 No doubt this may partly be put down to thefailure of these supposedly heroic figures to live up to their inflated



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reputations. But a more fundamental factor, I suggest, is the continualbarrage of discussion, which coercively shapes and directs the ways inwhich they perceive each other, whilst at the same time screening theperson designated from view. And if this represents a handicap for thecharacters, it is no less of a problem for the audience. Just enough dra-matic evidence filters through the verbal contamination to enable usto ascertain that things are otherwise than they are valued, not enoughto serve as an independent basis for judgement.

The sheer prescriptive weight of the play’s rhetorical commentarydoes not merely stand in the way of unbiased analysis; it also inhibitsthe development of subjectivity in the characters. Any independentsense of selfhood they seek to assert must struggle to maintain itselfagainst the textual identities imposed on them by others, both in theplay itself and, accretively, through the many prior retellings of theTroy story.48 In general, however, the characters show little inclinationto resist the pressures created by this ceaseless reinscription of thequalities by which they are known.49 On the contrary, they are onlytoo eager to identify with the images refracted back at them by theglass of praise. Diagnostically speaking, we could say that Troilus is notthe only character to be afflicted by the Pygmalion complex of fallingin love with an imaginary idol (Cressida) constructed by his owndesires; or – to invoke another mythic analogue that haunts the play –that they all, to varying degrees, suffer the fate of Narcissus in suc-cumbing to a self-destructive infatuation with their own fictitiousimages, as shown to them ‘by reflection’ in the mirror surfaces of opin-ion.50 The degree to which they are psychologically enthralled by thesereflected images is evidenced by their often comic efforts to conform tothem. Hence their tendency to self-parody:

Nestor Tell him of Nestor, one that was a manWhen Hector’s grandsire suck’d. He is old now …

(I.3.291)

Hence also their chameleon-like knack of adapting their speech andbehaviour to whatever context they find themselves in. We may be star-tled to hear Agamemnon respond in kind to the chivalrous idioms ofHector’s challenge in I.3, given that Greek concerns have hitherto takena quite different direction, but such inconsistencies are legion in theplay. ‘Languageless’ for most of the time, the foolish Ajax waxes noblyeloquent in the company of his cousin Hector. In I.1 Troilus declareshimself too much in love to do battle without the walls of Troy, only to



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reverse this decision a few lines later. And both Ulysses and Hector fore-sake the rational principles they have enunciated for motives that can-not satisfactorily be explained either in psychological or political terms.It is clear, in fact, that such conduct makes a nonsense of any reading ofthe play which is committed to the idea of fully realized subjects, capa-ble of interior reflection upon their experiences and of reacting inde-pendently to events. Ulysses, it seems, is right; the characters appear tohave no sense of themselves, indeed no existence, above and beyondthat conferred on them by the fickle authority of public expectation. Insuch conditions any attempt they make to preserve a degree of integrityor assert their autonomy from the tyranny of opinion is sure tofounder. When exposed to the scorn of the Greek leaders in III.3,Achilles tries at first to defend his sense of intrinsic worth by distin-guishing what is ‘simply man’ from ‘those honors / That are withouthim’, which he dismisses as ‘prizes of accident as oft as merit’(ll.74–92). But despite his protestation that there is a stoical self-consis-tency to his identity which the vagaries of fame cannot touch – ‘I doenjoy / At ample point all that I did possess, / Save these men’s looks’ –by the end of the scene this most narcissistic Greek of them all is forcedto admit how troubled he is by his ‘gor’d’ reputation, how impossiblehe finds it to probe the depths of his own being (l.302). As long as itcompels him to find himself in the gaze of others, Achilles’ self-infatua-tion condemns him, as Thersites gleefully remarks, to a life of ‘valiantignorance’ (l.312, cf. II.1.66).

Cressida seems to be the one exception to this rule of enforced super-ficiality insofar as she has struck many critics and play-goers as ‘a realperson, in spite of her role as a commonplace in the play’s externalisedand intellectual scheme’.51 She herself connives at this impression onher first appearance by suggesting that her caustic wit is a form of self-defence (I.2.258–64). Like Hamlet, she would have us believe that shecultivates an enigmatic persona in order to protect an authentic selfwithin that passes show. Our expectations that these intimations ofHamletian profundity will be developed are heightened when shedelivers her soliloquy at the end of I.2 – expectations that, in theevent, will be only partially fulfilled. Significantly, she begins by dis-claiming any reliance on the mediatory offices of opinion when form-ing her own view of things: ‘But more in Troilus thousandfold I see /Than in the glass of Pandar’s praise may be’. We should note, however,that this defiant assertion of independence is qualified by the hint, inher hyperbolic ‘more’ and ‘thousandfold’, that she cannot so easily



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escape the inflationary logic of praise. The rest of the soliloquy under-cuts itself in similar fashion:

Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing:Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.That she belov’d knows nought that knows not this:Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is.That she was never yet that ever knewLove got so sweet as when desire did sue.Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:Achievement is command; ungain’d, beseech;Then though my heart’s content firm love doth bear,Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.

(I.2.272)

‘Yet hold I off’ expands on her earlier show of reserve, contextualizingthis as the deliberate policy of a worldly-wise young woman who, fullycomprehending the laws governing male desire and valuation of hersex, intends to exploit these for her own advantage. By playing hard toget she will drive up her market value and thereby retain a measure ofautonomy and control over her fate in a situation of seduction whichthreatens to deprive her of either, since ‘achievement is command;ungain’d beseech’. Like Ulysses (whose analysis of the way value is pro-duced in the play-world she shrewdly prefigures), Cressida both recog-nizes and wishes to manipulate for private ends the determining force ofopinion, while at the same time seeking to distance herself from this. Itis a tricky balancing act, and one that in the long run proves untenable.The precarious sense of selfhood generated by the gap between herself asshe is prized and as she feels herself to be (‘Men prize the thing ungain’dmore than it is’) seems always to be on the verge of collapse. For suchmoments of ironic detachment are rare. Ominously, elsewhere in thesoliloquy she slips into speaking of herself in generic terms, as seenthrough the eyes of men (‘Women are angels wooing’), in ways thatpoint ahead to her ever more pronounced narcissistic tendency to deriveher sense of identity and worth exclusively from her variable status asan object of desire. Her pretensions to self-knowledge are furthermocked by her diction, with its reliance on commonplace wisdom, itsmechanical rhyme scheme (won, done; never, ever) and flat reiteration(knows, knows, knew), all bespeaking the second-hand nature of herinsights. If the soliloquy reveals a certain inwardness and independenceof spirit, then, it also suggests the impossibility of maintaining these



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qualities in a context where women, even more than men, are taught tovalue themselves as they are appraised by the beholding eye.52

Cressida will continue to act out these internal contradictions, albeitin increasingly schematic forms. Through its hesitations and retractions,the speech in the assignation scene where she opens her heart to Troilus(III.2.113–33) parades her conflicted desire to ‘hold off’ and to surrenderherself to Troilus, who, she fears, will be licensed by her unguarded‘confession’ to ‘play the tyrant’. So intense is the struggle between theseopposing impulses that she figures her psyche as radically split:

Troilus What offends you, lady?Cressida Sir, mine own company.Troilus You cannot shun yourself.Cressida Let me go and try.I have a kind of self resides with you;But an unkind self, that itself will leaveTo be another’s fool. I would be gone.

(III.2.144)

I take it that the ‘kind of self’ that would bestow itself on Troilusshould be read as being in apposition (not in opposition) to the‘unkind self’ which foolishly reveals itself by blabbing. The sponta-neous self-abandonment demanded by love is, once again, seen byCressida as an act of self-betrayal requiring her to relinquish her hard-won autonomy by consenting to become ‘another’s fool’. Whether weunderstand this last phrase as referring proleptically to her status as theobject of Troilus’s idealism or of Diomedes’s more brutal attentions – orindeed to the role of archetype of female infidelity which legendthrusts upon her – what is at stake is an act that (as she sees it) willtransform her into another’s creature, that would demean her ‘true’ selfby allowing this to be defined in alien terms. But Troilus’s warning thatshe cannot shun this destiny, try as she might, turns out to beprophetic. At the end of this scene, she abruptly drops her strugglewith her ‘unkind self’ and joins her lover in presenting herself as nomore than the proverbial figure of legend, voluntarily playing Echo tohis Narcissus. Thereafter she continues to oscillate between the desireto resist and a readiness to capitulate to, even to anticipate, her futurereputation as the stereotypical wanton.53 After initially submitting tothe generals’ kisses on her arrival in the Greek camp in IV.5, sheregains command of the situation sufficiently to fend them off,but only by means of a coquettish display of wit that courts Ulysses’s



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savagely misogynist assessment of her as one of the ‘sluttish spoils ofopportunity, / And daughters of the game’ (l.62). At the moment ofyielding to Diomed, she still shows signs of being caught between anow token resistance and acquiescence in her fate: ‘Well, well, ’tisdone, ’tis past. And yet it is not; / I will not keep my word’ (V.2.97). Butby then she has become a mere shadow of her former self, stripped ofthe rhetorical markers of inwardness as well as any degree of agencyshe once possessed, demoted to the status of devalued object.Cressida’s failure to sustain her real, if fragile, sense of selfhood in theface of popular opinion and its constitutive power over identitypoignantly defines the limits placed on subjectivity in this play.

Despite their apparently submissive compliance with the laws ofopinion, there is nevertheless a sense in which the characters do rebelagainst the constraints these laws impose. Out of a desire to escape thecorrosive, disintegrative effects of reputation on value and identity,Trojans and Greeks articulate a collective fantasy of transcendencewhose grip on their imaginations is in inverse proportion to its basis infact. Thus they hypothesize about distinguishing ‘valor’s show’ from‘valor’s worth’ in contexts that point the futility of their wishes (I.3.46,IV.5.124–32). They dream of isolating the essence of human beingsand experiences through a process of winnowing or distilling that willenable this to emerge in its true ‘purity’, ‘strain’d’ of its ‘qualifyingdross’, so that ‘what hath mass or matter, by itself / Lies rich in virtueand unmingled’ (I.3.23–30, III.2.20–2, 164–7, IV.4.2–10). Just as theGreeks like to think that the ‘protractive trials’ they have endured are ameans of discovering a stoic firmness, a ‘persistive constancy’ in men(I.3.20), so Troilus predicts that his own ‘truth’ (in its dual sense of sin-cerity and constancy) will be approved by posterity. And both sides inthe conflict are given to nostalgic day-dreaming about restoring the‘rule in unity’, recuperating a lost integrity by organizing their experi-ence around a new emotional or political centre (IV.2.101–5, V.5.44).The basic fantasy on which this tide of wishful speculation turns is theidea of establishing an absolute truth or core identity independently ofany rhetorical agency – without, that is, the need for recourse to a lan-guage of (dis)praise which distorts, depletes and finally consumes itsobject. This essentialist desire to fix meaning and identity takes, as weshall see, both verbal and visual forms.

One occasion when the longing for transcendence asserts itself withparticular force – and, in so doing, demonstrates its impossibility – isthat curious moment in III.2 where Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus,stepping out of the historical continuum of the dramatic action,



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identify themselves as the literary types of constancy, falsehood andpimping they will become in the popular imagination. By anticipatinga future state of ‘perfection’, when their reputations will have beenfixed for all eternity, this gesture appears to bring about a convergencebetween name, character and public ‘esteem’ of the sort which the playgenerally manages to frustrate. Troilus is determined to capitalize onthis fact. He sees here an opportunity to affirm his personal integrityand, by this process, to redeem a language bankrupt by excess and‘tir’d with iteration’:

True swains in love shall in the world to comeApprove their truth by Troilus. When their rhymes,Full of protest, of oath and big compare,Want similes, truth tir’d with iteration,As true as steel, as plantage to the moon,As sun to day, as turtle to her mate,As iron to adamant, as earth to th’ centre, [Yet] after all comparisons of truth(As truth’s authentic author to be cited)“As true as Troilus” shall crown up the verse,And sanctify the numbers.

(III.2.173)

As truth’s self-styled ‘author’ and originary prototype, Troilus sets him-self up as an absolute standard of veracity / fidelity in love. By provid-ing a stable referent in which future lovers can ground their empty andover-inflated rhetoric, ‘full of protest, of oath and big compare’, hispersonal truth will ‘sanctify [their] numbers’. We are thus invited tothink of Troilus as an immutable presence, located outside and beyondthe relativizing discourse of comparison. But the language in which itis couched belies this claim. ‘“As true as Troilus”’ is no less hackneyed asimile, no less tired a cliché than those other comparisons of truth hehas just cited, and its proverbial status confirms the derivative, rhetori-cal status of the identity Troilus wishes to found upon it. Other andlarger ironies haunt this desperate attempt to circumvent the nullifyingeffects of contingency. By now our suspicions should be well and trulyaroused regarding the kind of truth with which Troilus identifies him-self. For a start, this truth is itself relative in that it is defined by oppo-sition to Cressida’s falsehood. One contentious, unstable truth is thusbeing offered as proof of another in a manner that evokes the circularprocess of reasoning which Pyrrhonian Sceptics used to dissolve the



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notion of a reliable criterion. Moreover, this same truth is already asso-ciated with a range of incriminating qualities, since it is consistentlydescribed by Troilus in terms of ‘plainness’, ‘simplicity’ (i.e. sincerityand/or naivety) and immaturity: ‘but alas, / I am as true as truth’ssimplicity, / And simpler than the infancy of truth.’ (III.2.168; cf.IV.4.102–8). Troilus’s disparaging view of his own truth as a foolish weak-ness, a ‘vice’ or ‘fault’, merely serves to reinforce the subtextual messagethat it is a hopelessly inadequate measure of the play-world, being fartoo monological – arrested, as it is, in a state of ‘unpractic’d infancy’ – towithstand the testing complexities of adult experience. And such isshown to be the case. For this truth, in its regressive ‘simplicity’, provesutterly incapable of comprehending the contradictory forces (rhetorical,psychological and ideological) that lead to its betrayal as a consequenceof Cressida’s sexual surrender in V.2.

The lovers’ futile bid to ‘stick the heart’ of truth (and falsehood) isenacted on a spectacular as well as rhetorical plane. Their vows com-pleted, they solemnize their ‘bargain’ by taking Pandarus’s hands in aweird parody of a betrothal ceremony, offering themselves as the visualembodiments of their legendary qualities for our contemplation. Thisbrief interval where the plot is suspended in a moment of contempla-tive stasis can be seen as one of several such instances in the play.It corresponds to what Agamemnon, welcoming Hector to theGreek camp in a passage added to the Folio text, calls the ‘extantmoment’:

What’s past and what’s to come is strew’d with husksAnd formless ruin of oblivion;But in this extant moment, faith and troth,Strain’d purely from all hollow bias-drawing,Bids thee, with most divine integrity,From heart of very heart, great Hector, welcome.

(IV.5.166)

All things, says Agamemnon – echoing Ulysses on the devastationwrought by time (III.3.145–53) – lose their distinctive identity andshape in the ‘formless ruin of oblivion’, strewed as this is with the‘husks’ of discarded reputations; only in the ‘extant moment’ can theybe ‘see[n] truly’ for what they are. In this instant, ‘faith’ and ‘troth’ willreveal themselves in their rightful forms to the beholder’s gaze. Withits strong iconic properties, the ‘extant moment’ is imagined here aspossessing something of that capacity to communicate the essence of



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things directly to human intuition, rather than by the more circuitousroute of discursive processes, which Neoplatonists had attributed to theimage.54 Its imputed power to disclose truth in visual form is perhapsthe nearest equivalent for Hector’s ‘image of th’ affected merit’ the playhas to offer. Yet even such moments as these are not permitted toretain their ‘divine integrity’; instead they are subjected to much ‘hol-low bias-drawing’, directed ‘tortive and errant’ by the glass of praisewhich interposes its corrupting medium between eye and object.

Nowhere is this process more clearly demonstrated than in the ‘lov-ing interview’ between Greeks and Trojans which supplies the contextfor Agamemnon’s disquisition on the ‘extant moment’. The ‘embrace-ment[s]’ exchanged by these enemy warriors are evidently intended asan emblematic expression of the chivalric code, which tempers aggres-sion with courtesy.55 A stylized formality pervades the staging of thescene and accompanying dialogue between Hector and his hosts.Nestor brings the ceremony to a climax by mirroring Hector to himselfin the idiom of heroic spectacle56:

I have, thou gallant Troyan, seen thee oft,Laboring for destiny, make cruel wayThrough ranks of Greekish youth, and I have seen thee,As hot as Perseus, spur thy Phrygian steed,Despising many forfeits and subduements,When thou hast hung [thy] advanced sword i’ th’ air,Not letting it decline on the declined,That I have said to some my standers-by,“Lo Jupiter is yonder, dealing life!”

(IV.5.183)

Although this purports to be an eye-witness account, the introductionof flattering analogues and mythological comparisons calls its objectiv-ity into question. As if to emphasize this point, Achilles – who hasalready weighed Hector well and found that what looks like courtesy isin fact pride (IV.5.81) – disrupts the ritual of hospitality a second timeby brutally re-presenting it as a tawdry charade. Correctly viewed, hesays, the meeting is a deadly confrontation and Hector, Troy’s ‘baseand pillar’, no more than a walking carcase:

Now, Hector, I have fed mine eyes on thee;I have with exact view perus’d thee, Hector,And quoted joint by joint.

(IV.5.231)



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Following Ulysses’s and Diomedes’s example – both of whom seeCressida’s body as yielding up its secrets without the need for an inter-preter, though their textual/oratorical tropes suggest otherwise (IV.4.116–20, IV.5.54–63) – Achilles fallaciously identifies corporeal presencewith an unmediated and therefore unerring vision. As before, however,the concealed bias in this ‘exact view’ betrays itself through verbalexcess – through Achilles’s self-consciously iconoclastic reduction ofHector to butcher’s meat and his boasting at his rival’s expense. His‘misprising / [Of] the knight oppos’d’ is further underlined by the use ofsalesman’s talk: ‘I will the second time, / As I would buy thee, view theelimb by limb’ (l.237). In this ambiance of rhetorical obfuscation,Hector’s protest that he cannot be so easily ‘read’ (ll.239–41) carries anunusually strong charge, one that seems to be directed as much at thecomplacency of the play’s ‘fair beholders’ as at Achilles. Providing weheed the warning, we will experience this encounter not as a trans-parent icon of chivalry, but as an anamorphic-style puzzle, which inforcing us to consider it from opposing perspectives of equally ques-tionable authority, leaves us no secure vantage-point from which toassess Hector’s reputation as the epitome of chivalric honour.

Returning to the betrayal scene, we are now (I hope) better placed toappreciate its effect on Troilus as the culmination of a range of disinte-grative pressures which ‘co-act’ to produce this hallucinatory experi-ence. As with previous ‘extant moments’, we are compelled to witnessCressida’s seduction through a glass darkly, as it is drawn ‘bias andthwart’ by the commentary of the onstage beholders, each of whomreshapes it in the image of his own prejudices:

Cressida Now, my sweet guardian, hark, a word with you.Troilus Yea, so familiar?Ulysses She will sing any man at first sight.Thersites And any man can sing her, if he can take her cliff; she’snoted.

(V.2.7)

The dissolution of this scene into ideologically opposed perceptions is,so to speak, a dress-rehearsal for Troilus’s fractured vision. How are weto make sense of an experience that, for Troilus at least, evades rationalexplanation? Most simply perhaps, by locating its origins in the rela-tivistic code of values to which all the characters subscribe in practice.But Troilus’s nightmarish sense of being ensnared in a ‘madness of dis-course, / That cause sets up with and against itself’ also asks us to see



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this moment as the end-product of an unstable linguistic system whoseopenness to manipulation allows it to be turned ‘against itself’, of arhetorical practice so disconnected from any agreed definition of real-ity that it has become a source of delusion in its own right. Equally,Troilus’s reaction to what he has witnessed confirms our suspicionsthat these self-divisions are accentuated by the monocular way ofseeing he brings to the event.

For, despite being plunged into an abyss of uncertainty by the irrec-oncilable images of Cressida before him, Troilus does his best to fore-close on this crisis of perception by refusing to confront its widerepistemological implications. Thus he takes steps not only to ‘contain’his emotional turmoil (at Ulysses’s insistence), but, more importantly,to limit any disruption of his philosophical outlook and salvage hisnow ‘withered truth’ from the tide of scepticism that threatens toengulf it. Having denied the evidence of his senses in a vain attempt topreserve ‘rule in unity’ and keep the ‘simplicity’ of his truth intact, hetries to split ‘Diomed’s Cressida’ off from his own – a form of moralsurgery that is intended to safeguard the purity of womanhood and ofhis own ideals. When this too fails, he commutes his love of Cressidainto obsessive hatred of Diomedes and an equally single-minded pur-suit of revenge (l.165). These evasive measures are repeated in therhetorical sphere, as he takes refuge from his insight into the ‘madnessof discourse’ and a disenchanted awareness that language has beenemptied of all significance (‘Words, words, mere words no matter fromthe heart’ (V.3.108)) in further hyperbolic outpourings (V.2.163–76,V.10.23–9). What makes Troilus’s response so troubling, I suggest, isthat we are not allowed to dismiss it as a purely personal failure, theconsequence of youthful egotism or inexperience. Rather, this refusalto address the questions posed by the collapse of his ideals is shown tobe systemic, written into the very conditions governing his dramaticworld. For the same narcissistic self-absorption that causes Troilus toretreat from contrarieties that offer to wreak havoc on his intellectualmind-set into solipsistic affirmation also prevents the other charactersfrom engaging in self-criticism or from reassessing their values whenthey break down. This collective failure of nerve is most strikingly illus-trated by the change that overtakes Hector in the course of the play. Aone-time opponent of dogmatism who sceptically urged the wisdom of‘modest doubt’ in the Trojan council scene and proved himself to bean acute critic of his brothers’ self-delusions, Hector has by V.3 becomean inflexible exponent of honour, as deaf to rational objections as anyof his siblings. Yet to accuse either brother of failing to break out of



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their blinkered attitudes would be beside the point; the milieu theyinhabit is just as inhospitable to the pursuit of open-minded inquiry asit is to any pretensions to selfhood.

We are thus faced with a paradox. While the play’s dramaturgy andits explicit interest in epistemological questions lend themselves tosceptical analysis, it lacks any character capable of the sort of complexseeing which it (more than any other Shakespearean text perhaps)seems to demand. There is no Rosalind or Touchstone here to makeplayful capital out of the constant shifts in perspective, no Hamletwho, by his stringent interrogation of appearances, might mediate –and so help us make sense of – the play’s uncertainties. In their placewe find only varieties of myopic self-regard. The characters’ reluctanceto allow ‘matter of the world / Enter [their] thoughts, save such as dothrevolve / And ruminate [themselves]’ (II.3.186) ensures that the disillu-sionment which besets Troilus in V.2 does not pave the way – as it doesin some of the tragedies and the late Sonnets – for a more securelybased, because (ironically) more sceptical, understanding.57 ‘Hector isdead; there is no more to say’ (V.10.22) represents the sum-total of wis-dom attainable in such a world. Doubting or fearing the ‘worst’ mayenable one to see things more clearly than ‘blind reason stumblingwithout fear’ (III.2.71–3), as Cressida remarks; it may work to cleansethe ‘perjur’d eye’ of its falsehood (Sonnet 152). But this sort of cathar-tic insight is only possible where the beholder is willing to confrontthe facts ranged against his/her particular view of things and thedesires it expresses. Being determined to cling to their discredited codesof love and honour even after these have been proven by events to be(in Thersites’s pithy phrase) ‘not worth a blackberry’, neither Greeksnor Trojans are able to find any release from their delusions. And, inso-far as we have been prevented from establishing a clear epistemologicaladvantage over these characters, the understanding that is denied tothem also eludes us. Our judgement may have been more severely testedand our minds perplexed, but to no obvious end. Considering theextent to which we have been made to participate in the characters’perceptual limitations and forced to contend with the distortive effectsof their discourse, it seems grotesquely fitting that Pandarus’s epilogueshould bring the play to a close by bequeathing the audience hisdiseases. Symbolically it is all the more appropriate that the eye is oneof the organs worst affected by the pox, the ailment from whichPandarus suffers (V.3.104, V.10.48).

Within the Shakespearean canon, the main inheritor of the prob-lems thrown up by this play – problems concerning the relativity of



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perception and the subjective basis of human judgements – isAntony and Cleopatra. The protagonists of this tragedy once againbecome the focus of diametrically opposed evaluations, and commen-tary again outweighs action, placing serious obstacles in the way ofindependent analysis. But the sceptical distrust directed against theindividual will and its fondness for constructing over-inflated imagesin the earlier play is, if not completely overturned, at least counter-balanced by a more positive assessment of this kind of imaginativeactivity. And this in turn allows scope for a more sympathetic responseto rhetorical amplification, the language of ‘protest, of oath and bigcompare’, through which such activity is typically expressed. The nextchapter will show how the recreative properties assigned to the imagi-nation in Renaissance aesthetic discourse were a crucial factor inenabling the revaluation of this wayward faculty.



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6Antony and Cleopatra and theArt of Dislimning

166

In a celebrated set-piece of Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus offers tosatisfy the curiosity of his fellow Romans by narrating how Cleopatrafirst appeared to Antony on the river Cydnus (II.2.190–218). In sodoing, he makes one of the play’s characteristic appeals to the imagina-tion by asking both his immediate and off-stage audiences to visualize –to picture for themselves – something that is physically absent from thestage.1 The whole magnificent spectacle of the barge is conjured up ret-rospectively in the mind’s eye by Enobarbus’s description of it; theimaginative artistry originally deployed by the Egyptian Queen whenstaging herself as the goddess Venus or transforming her boy atten-dants into ‘smiling Cupids’ and her gentlewomen into ‘so many mer-maids’ has become overlaid with his equally hyperbolic narration of itseffects. Yet even as he recreates this scene for others through the com-bined agency of words and images, Enobarbus intimates, paradoxically,that neither can adequately mediate its significance, inasmuch as theQueen’s appearance ‘beggar’d all description’ and ‘o’erpictur[ed] thatVenus where we see / The fancy outwork nature’.2 As if to emphasizethe point, there is a gap at the centre of the tableau where Cleopatraherself should be. Her ‘own person’ is evoked only indirectly, in termsof its erotic impact on the senses of the personified elements and thespectators who crowd the ‘adjacent wharves’, and of the desires itawakens in them, especially the desire of looking. To the extent thatCleopatra is figured here at all, then, it is as a focal-point for the‘amorous’ gaze of others. The clear implication is that the essence ofher power, of her quasi-divine status, can only be fully apprehended inand by the beholder’s desiring imagination.3 The intensity of the audi-ence’s involvement with her imagined presence is foregrounded in thecomplex response of Maecenas and Agrippa to this speech. In a further


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illustration of Cleopatra’s extraordinary effect on others, the distrustusually felt by these hard-bitten Romans (Enobarbus included) for thiskind of Egyptian extravaganza gives way to undisguised admiration.Shakespeare thus uses the barge speech to foreground certain aspects ofthe imagination which, however we choose to view them, are likely tobe decisive for our reading of this play: its critical role in constructingthe lovers’ mythical identities; the exaggerated forms, visual and ver-bal, through which it typically manifests itself; the sense in which,being a mode of perception as well as creation, it must be taken to bethe common property of artist and spectator (whose collaborativeactivity is responsible for producing that ‘wonderful piece of work’,Cleopatra aboard her barge); and the mixed responses which suchactivity has always provoked.

One purpose of this chapter is to show how the manner in which theimagination is conceived as operating here and elsewhere in the play isconditioned by contemporary discourses relating to this faculty –defined as the capacity for forming vivid mental images – and its rolein artistic production. But the contribution of previous Shakespeareanexplorations of this topic to the genesis of its treatment in Antony andCleopatra also needs to be acknowledged. The romantic comedies andthe Sonnets, in particular, are concerned with the imagination as itinforms the lover’s vision of things, since ‘love looks not with the eyesbut with the mind’ (MND, I.1.234).4 A more complex stance is adoptedtowards the amatory imagination in these texts than in Troilus andCressida, where, as we have seen, Shakespeare seems disposed to recog-nize only its fictitious and potentially idolatrous qualities. The latersonnets (later, that is, according to the arrangement of the 1605Quarto) anatomize in unflinching detail the perceptual aberrationsassociated with that ‘blind fool, love’ and its lack of ‘correspondencewith true sight’, which leads the poet to maintain that black is‘beauty’s best’ contrary to the evidence of his senses and his reason.Yet, at the same time, the emotionally compelling nature of these delu-sions keeps open the possibility that sexual desire is truly capable ofworking its alchemy upon the beloved, of ‘creating every bad a perfectbest’.5 Love’s ambiguous power to transpose ‘things base and vile’ to‘form and dignity’ is also a recurrent motif of A Midsummer Night’sDream. It is love’s erring vision, intensified by the effects of Puck’smagic juice, that causes Titania to ‘madly dote’ upon an ass and muchconfusion besides. But while she and the Athenian lovers may becontent to dismiss these events as nothing more than the ‘fierce vexa-tion of a dream’, in Bottom’s mind they become the stuff of a ‘rare

Antony and Cleopatra and the Art of Dislimning 167


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vision’. Theseus’s rationalistic denunciation of the imagination is equi-vocally phrased:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,Such shaping fantasies, that apprehendMore than cool reason ever comprehends.

(V.1.4)

Moreover, the last word lies with his wife, whose conviction that thetransfigurative power of these fantasies ‘More witnesseth than fancy’simages, / And grows to something of great constancy; / But howsoever,strange and admirable’ (V.1.23–7) closely anticipates Cleopatra’s defenceof her dream of Antony in V.2. In fact, the whole debate betweenTheseus and Hippolyta over the status of ‘fancy’s images’ is reproducedon a much larger canvas in Antony and Cleopatra.

A similar history of ambivalence marks the place of the imaginationin aesthetic theory.6 To the lunatic, the lover and the poet, whomTheseus describes as being ‘of imagination all compact’, should beadded the painter, since it was in the exercise of the imagination orfantasia that he was so often likened to the poet.7 When the youngerPhilostratus asserted, around the turn of the third century AD, that‘the art of painting has a certain kinship with poetry, and that an ele-ment of imagination is common to both’, he was restating an estab-lished commonplace.8 We have already encountered perhaps the mostinfluential version of this topos in Plato’s damning association of poets(or sophists) and painters as practitioners of ‘phantastic’ imitation, bywhich he meant the art of manipulating appearances to produce apleasing but specious illusion, totally at odds with rational truth.9 Butwhile Plato’s critique lost none of its force over the intervening cen-turies, it was displaced as the dominant discourse for describing theworkings of the fantasia by the more empirical tradition of faculty psy-chology deriving from Aristotle’s De Anima. And it was in the contextof this alternative discourse that the creative role of the imaginationunderwent a process of expansion and revaluation.10 Crucial to thisdevelopment was the distinction made by proponents of theAristotelian tradition between a passive, reproductive imaginationwhich (as little more than a basic mechanism of perception) forms like-nesses of external objects from the sensory data it receives, and a moreactive and freely compositive agency. Aesthetic theory put increasingemphasis on the latter, as a constitutively human and creative power.This higher version of the fantasia operated in relative autonomy from



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the senses in that it was able to construct vivid images of things evenin their absence and was thus closely allied to both memory andprophecy, as well as being held responsible for dreams and otherspecies of delusive vision. Hence Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola(nephew of the famous Giovanni) states in his treatise on the subjectthat the imagination is ‘superior to sense in that, with no externalstimulus, it yet produces images, not only present, but also past andfuture, and even such as cannot be brought to light by nature’; more-over, it separates and combines sensory forms ‘at will’.11 Pico dellaMirandola touches here on another function that made the fantasiasuch a valuable resource for artists and writers: its ability to generateforms of a type never seen before by reconfiguring those which alreadyexist in nature, whether by varying, combining, transforming or per-fecting them. As an unlimited source of new artistic images and ideas,the fantasia was naturally considered to be an important aid to inven-tion.12 Leonardo’s tendency to conflate these two functions (see p.63)was thus echoed a century later by Puttenham, who saw it as the busi-ness of a well-ordered imagination to represent ‘unto the soule allmaner of bewtifull visions, whereby the inventive parte of the mynde is somuch holpen, as without it no man could devise any new or rare thing’.13

Its partial freedom to construct images independently of the laws ofnature made the fantasia an essential component of the creativelicence to which poets and painters traditionally laid claim. One of theboldest reaffirmations of this liberty was penned by the Florentinepainter, Cennino Cennini, at the turn of the fourteenth century.Having noted that painting requires ‘imagination and skill of hand, inorder to discover things not seen … and to fix them with the hand, pre-senting to plain sight what does not actually exist’, he asserts that

it justly deserves to be enthroned next to theory (scienza), and to becrowned with poetry. The justice lies in this: that the poet, with histheory … is free to compose and bind together, or not, as he pleases,according to his inclination (volonta). In the same way, the painter isgiven freedom to compose a figure, standing, seated, half-man, half-horse, as he pleases, according to his imagination (fantasia).14

Cennini accepts that the painter, like the poet, trades in fictions,in things that do not exist. He accepts too that individual will ordesire has greater control over their manipulation of natural formsthan do rational imperatives. But it is this same freedom of inventionwhich he sees as ennobling both arts; the fantasia here usurps the



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authority normally assigned to the painter’s or poet’s scienza. Cennini’splacing of the fantasia on a par with or even above scientific accuracymay have been out of step with what would become the orthodoxscale of values. Nevertheless, the higher imaginative functions weregenerally considered to offer a means of exceeding the limits of objec-tive reality in order to evoke what cannot be seen by the eye or encom-passed by reason alone. Again, antiquity offered precedents for thiscritical position. Philostratus (the Athenian) had mooted the idea thatthe Greek sculptors of antiquity were obliged to call upon some princi-ple other than mimesis when seeking to capture the ineffable presenceof the gods: ‘Imagination… wrought these works, a wiser and subtlerartist by far than imitation [mimesis]; for imitation can only create asits handiwork what it has seen, but imagination equally what it hasnot seen’.15 Plato too, notwithstanding his many attacks on the poet’sand painter’s phantasms (phantasmata), believed that imaginativevisions formed under the influence of sleep or disease can apprehendmore than cool reason ever comprehends, becoming a vehicle fordivinely inspired insights.16 The idea of the imagination affordingaccess to a higher reality appealed strongly to some Renaissance minds,especially of a Neoplatonic bent. Hence its visionary qualities were vig-orously defended in the literary and artistic quarrels of the Cinquecento:by Tasso, for example, who (following Dante) speculated about theexistence of an imaginazione intellettuale capable of irradiating a worldbeyond the material, in contradistinction to purely ‘phantastic’ images;and by Michelangelo, who regarded the fantasia in a similarly mysticallight, as an instrument for the discovery and expression of spiritual truths.17

Such large claims did not succeed, however, in dislodging the morehostile Platonic view of this faculty, which was kept alive by generationsof moralizing commentators. The latter saw grounds for distrust in thefreedom embraced so unreservedly by Cennini; imaginative invention,it was endlessly stated, must be subordinated to reason and kept withinthe bounds of decorum, lest it lead to the proliferation of vain, foolishor monstrous images.18 Even partisans of the fantasia echoed suchstrictures. Many of these criticisms are recycled in Francis Bacon’sAdvancement of Learning, written at the tail-end of the Aristotelian tra-dition.19 What gives Bacon’s commonplace remarks a certain interestfor our purposes is their recasting into a dialectical form which makestheir relevance to the central dynamic of Shakespeare’s tragedy strik-ingly apparent. Introduced in the context of a paragone that reflectsBacon’s empirical and rationalist agenda in being heavily weighted infavour of philosophy and history, poetry is defined as a ‘pleasure or



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play of imagination’ which, its use of metre excepted, is ‘extremelylicensed’ and

being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that whichnature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined; andso make unlawful matches and divorces of things; Pictoribus atquepoetis, &c.

Measured by the strict standards of history or philosophy, the poet’sviolation of the ‘laws of matter’ appears irrational and ‘unlawful’, andin this (the Horatian tag implies) he acts as irresponsibly as the painter.But the comparison also brings out another, more favourable aspect ofthe poetic imagination, leading Bacon to concede that its very licen-tiousness allows it to grant ‘some shadow of satisfaction to the mind ofman in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it’, by‘feign[ing] acts and events greater and more heroical’ than any thisworld can show – a power necessarily denied to those disciplines underthe sober dominion of reason. ‘And therefore’, he concludes, poetrywas ‘ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because itdoth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things tothe desires of the mind’.

It will be argued here that this ongoing cultural debate over thevalue of the fantasia provides an important forum for the conflict,indissociably political and artistic, at the heart of Antony andCleopatra.20 For the power struggle between Rome and Egypt is wagedin and through their sharply opposed representations of themselvesand each other, and the rival aesthetics that underpin these images.21

The positions adopted by the contending parties can be seen to reflecta familiar tension inherent in the theory of mimesis which has beendiscussed in Chapter 3: on the Roman side, a rationalistic empiricismsuch as forms the basis not only of history, the domain over which the‘full-fortuned Caesar’ presides, but of scientific imitation with itsemphasis on rules; and on the Egyptian side, an imaginative fecunditythat ‘o’erflows the measure’ through its unceasing production of newand ever more hyperbolic forms. Consistent with its dialectical modeof presentation, I shall argue that the play offers a ‘double take’ on thelovers’ policy of enlisting the fantasia as a potent weapon in their con-flict with Caesar. Initially in the ascendant, the denigratory Platonicview of the imagination is finally subsumed in a celebration of itsvisionary and transfigurative powers. What makes the revalorizing ofthis faculty formally possible is the interval between the deaths of



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Antony and Cleopatra. As Anne Barton has noted in connection withthis play, the device of the double catastrophe can be used to alter anaudience’s perspective on the dramatic action:

It imposes a new angle of vision, an alteration of emphasis which,while it need not conflict with the previous development of thetragedy, will certainly modify our understanding of that develop-ment from a point beyond it in time.22

Taking my cue from Barton, I endeavour to show how the play’sinquiry into the ambivalent potentialities of the imagination falls intotwo distinct sections. The first, predominantly negative, movementculminates in Antony’s despairing vision of ‘black vesper’s pageants’ inIV.14, and ends with his death; the second, more affirmative, move-ment, epitomized by Cleopatra’s dream of ‘an emperor Antony’, leadsto her triumphantly staged suicide.23 Of course, to put it so baldly risksoversimplifying a play where nothing is unambiguous, monosemic orstatic, where everything reminds us of its capacity to ‘become / Theopposite of itself’ (I.2.125). And, indeed, we shall find the situation onthe ground a good deal more complex than this overview implies; thePlatonic attitude publicly espoused by the Romans is shown to beinformed by a repressed sense of imaginative possibilities, while con-versely Cleopatra, instead of seeking to eradicate that viewpoint, incor-porates it into her defence of the fantasia as a superior mode of vision.But, however schematic, such a map of the play does highlight agenuine shift of emphasis, one crucial effect of which is to facilitateour imaginative participation in the lovers’ ultimate self-apotheosis.

* * *

Take but good note, and you shall see in himThe triple pillar of the world transform’dInto a strumpet’s fool. Behold and see.

(I.1.11)

From Philo’s opening exhortation to ‘behold and see’, we are posi-tioned to view the lovers through shifting rhetorical perspectives,which (as has become customary to note) are broadly organizedaround, and located in, the conflicting cultural value-systems of Romeand Egypt.24 The belief, whence Philo’s derision arises, that Antony hasabased himself by exchanging a heroic military past for a life spent



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ministering to a ‘gipsy’s lust’, is countered and reversed when Antony,entering with Cleopatra and her train, declares the absolute value ofhis love relative to the paltry considerations of empire:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide archOf the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space,Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alikeFeeds beast as man; the nobleness of lifeIs to do thus – when such a mutual pairAnd such a twain can do’t, in which I bind,[On] pain of punishment, the world to weetWe stand up peerless.

(I.1.33)

However, it is precisely the necessary ‘space’ to make good his asser-tions that Antony lacks in these early scenes; his lyrical vision of the‘nobleness of life’ is so hedged in and challenged by hostile forces as tohave little prospect of establishing itself as a reality. It is a romantic ges-ture, nothing more, made in a futile bid to fend off the Roman messen-gers, who would remind him of his public responsibilities as triumvir.Furthermore, its sincerity is instantly questioned by Cleopatra herself:‘Excellent falsehood! / Why did he marry Fulvia, and not love her?’(I.1.40). Cleopatra’s distrust of Antony’s proclaimed allegiance to herturns out to be quite justified. Having succumbed to ‘Romanthought[s]’ in the next scene, he dismisses his love in the discourse ofthe ‘common liar’ in Rome, as a disastrous ‘dotage’ that breeds count-less political ills (I.2.116–17, 128–30). Our worst suspicions concerningthis love, with its inflated claims to uniqueness and professed disregardfor worldly business, appear to be confirmed in II.2, when we learnthat Antony, now back in Rome, proposes to sacrifice Cleopatra for anexpedient union with Octavia in the hope of salvaging his politicalalliance with Caesar.25 But it is at this stage too that Roman values,which have acquired a kind of de facto authority, begin to be subjectedin their turn to a devastating critique. A series of opportunistic negotia-tions first between Antony and Caesar, and then between the triumvirsand Pompey, culminates in the barely contained treachery of the feastaboard Pompey’s galley in II.7. Refracted through the sardonic commen-tary of Enobarbus and the servants, the point of this dramatic moment(and the subsequent scene with Ventidius) would seem to lie in its expo-sure of the threadbare nature of Roman honour and of the gulf betweenthe triumvirs’ reputation for virtu and their actual conduct as observed



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on stage. Rome, in short, is shown to have little moral advantage overEgypt, whilst lacking the grandeur of its imaginative aspirations.

By the middle of the third act Rome and Egypt are in open conflict,and we (the play’s audience) seem to be heading for a parallel crisis ofjudgement, as we experience the pull and counter-pull of viewpointswhose legitimacy has in each case been seriously compromised.26 As inTroilus and Cressida, where the tussle between competing perspectivesprecipitated a similar crisis, our deepening critical dilemma is figuredemblematically in the form of an anamorphic puzzle. Cleopatra, con-fessing her ambivalent feelings towards the lover who has temporarilydeserted her, likens him to a reversible portrait:

Let him for ever go! – Let him not, Charmian –Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon,The other way’s a Mars.

(II.5.115)

Dramatically, the impossibility of finding any ‘midway / ‘Twixt theseextremes at all’ is suggested by the fate of those who try to mediatebetween Roman and Egyptian values. Lepidus’s attempts at peace-making land him in prison, and Octavia is either paralysed (III.2.47) orriven apart (III.6.76) by her divided allegiances. Although Antonyendeavours, colossus-like, to bestride the ocean separating Romefrom Alexandria, he is forced to abandon his struggle to reconcile theRoman and Egyptian propensities within him. Having returned to Egypt,he pledges himself, apparently wholeheartedly, to Cleopatra, and, asa token of that self-surrender, opts to fight Caesar by sea (the elementmost closely aligned with Egypt and its queen) against all the dictatesof reason. When disaster ensues, however, he reverts to the viewpoint ofhis Roman followers, seeing his conduct as an action of unsurpassedshame in which ‘Experience, manhood, honor, ne’er before /Did violateso itself’ (III.10.22). But any inference we might draw from this thatRoman judgements are vindicated by Antony’s defeat at Actium, isrendered unsafe by Enobarbus, whose history mirrors his master’s inreverse. A Roman who is far from impervious to the lure of Egypt (ashis barge speech attests), Enobarbus is finally driven to foresake Antonyin an attempt to resolve the by now unbearable conflict between hisemotional loyalties and his Roman sense of ‘honesty’. No sooner hashe defected to Caesar’s camp, however, than he regrets his decision anddies of a broken heart – dies testifying to the superiority of Antony’simmeasurable bounty relative to Caesar’s cold calculation (IV.6.29–38).



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Along with Enobarbus and the other characters who serve as barometersof our fluctuating responses, we may feel that the ‘varying tide’ of thedramatic action is steering us towards making a definite commitment toone set of values over another. Yet, at the same time, the difficultiesinvolved are made uncomfortably clear in a world where all suchchoices prove to be self-destructive or at least, self-diminishing.

In this first half of the play where Roman values retain the edge, theattitudes expressed towards the imagination and its stylistic concomi-tants, hyperbolic speech and overt theatricality, are predominantlysceptical. Our attention is drawn time and again to the gap betweenthe lovers’ rhetorical pretensions and the facts of the matter. Inter-estingly, the task of puncturing Antony’s fulsome assertions and heroicposturings is assumed not, as we might expect, by some Romanonlooker, but by Cleopatra, who seems as intent on demolishing herlover as on building him up. Not that there appears to be anythingremarkable in itself about her attacks on his high-flown vows (I.3.27–31), which echo a familiar litany of complaint directed at bombas-tic rhetoric. On reflection, though, her criticism of Antony may strikeus as far from straightforward. Often Cleopatra seems to be manipulat-ing her lover for her own inscrutable ends, provoking him into makinglyrical statements which she then ridicules. At one point she inviteshim to play a ‘scene / Of excellent dissembling’ by pretending to weepfor her rather than Fulvia:

Antony You’ll heat my blood; no more.Cleopatra You can do better yet; but this is meetly.Antony Now, by [my] sword – Cleopatra And target. – Still he mends.But this is not the best. Look, prithee, Charmian,How this Herculean Roman does becomeThe carriage of his chafe.

(I.3.80)

Ostensibly, the intention here is to poke fun at Antony for indulging inthe absurdly histrionic bluster of a miles gloriosus. But the obvious sar-casm in the phrase ‘excellent dissembling’ threatens to double back onitself when uttered by a woman whom many have seen as a supremeembodiment of the very theatricality she mocks, and should alert us tothe possibility of a contrary interpetation.27 According to this alterna-tive reading, Cleopatra urges her lover in effect to live up to his idealself, to ‘do better’, by ‘becoming’ a Hercules, the semi-divine ancestor



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whose legendary rage he emulates.28 In its ironic deviousness, herpraise of Antony’s ‘excellent dissembling’ – like her earlier ‘excellentfalsehood’ – hints at the possibility of viewing such fictions not asPlatonic falsehoods but as embodying a higher form of truth, a‘lie … in the way of honesty’ (V.2.251–3, cf. II.2.133). Although theseintimations will not bear fruit until much later in the play, they pre-pare the ground for a radical reappraisal of the sorts of imaginativefeigning in which both lovers engage.

In the second and third acts, Cleopatra’s contestatory function islargely taken over by Enobarbus. Throughout III.13 especially, he keepsup a scathing commentary on the heroic postures struck by Antonyfollowing his defeat at Actium. He sees his captain’s defiant, high-pitched rant as reflecting a disastrous ‘diminution’ in his powers ofjudgment (III.13.29–37, 194–200). In his moments of Roman lucidityor when confronted by Cleopatra’s capacity for betrayal, Antony agreeswith this diagnosis, locating the source of his tragedy in blind infatua-tion (III.13.112–15). Antony’s self-confessed blindness seems intendedto recall Cleopatra’s equally perverse behaviour in the two scenes (II.5and III.3) where she receives news of his marriage to Octavia. Then theunfortunate messenger was, quite literally, bludgeoned into rearrang-ing the facts to suit Cleopatra’s wishes, in accordance with her expresspreference for a pleasing lie over an unpalatable truth (II.5.93), makingher a legitimate target for Charmian’s mockery, as Antony now is forEnobarbus’s. All of this establishes a somewhat ominous context forthe lovers’ games of make-believe, emphasizing the degree to whichtheir imaginative play has caused them to lose touch with politicalrealities with predictably fateful consequences. Amidst so much evi-dence of wilful self-delusion, any faith we retain in the lovers seemsmere folly, as Enobarbus observes. Yet, all the while, he remains aliveto the possibility of putting another, more generous construction ontheir actions, which his own death will endorse:

The loyalty well held to fools does make Our faith mere folly; yet he that can endureTo follow with allegiance a fall’n lordDoes conquer him that did his master conquer,And earns a place i’ th’ story.

(III.13.42)

Like Cleopatra’s ‘excellent falsehood’, Enobarbus’s willingness to imag-ine a different and (by implication) more sympathetic version of the



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lovers’ ‘story’ sounds an equivocal note that points ahead to a reversalof the negative judgements he has been voicing on behalf of Rome.

As Enobarbus’s speculative musings suggest, the impression we aregiven of the lovers’ wishful fantasizing being called to account by thestrict standards of truth and judgement upheld in Rome is further com-plicated by the fact that this sort of imaginative activity infiltrates bothpolitical camps. Despite their public disapproval of ‘Egyptian’ flights offancy, the Romans are almost as given to the practice; the only real dif-ference being the surreptitious manner in which they go about it andtheir consequent emphasis on the factual or reported basis of what isin truth mostly supposition. Aside from the unashamed embellish-ments of the barge speech, there are many other moments whenRomans may be caught indulging in imaginative speculation concern-ing the lovers or the mysteries of Egyptian culture.29 The parallels aremade most explicit when we are invited to compare the hyperbolicportraits of Antony proffered by Caesar in I.4 and by Cleopatra in I.5.In each case the absence of the discursive subject (Antony) has set freethe speaker’s thoughts, allowing him/her to construct a larger-than-lifefigure after his/her own desires, one that is not held to any literalstandard of veracity.30 Caesar’s Antony is imaged as a paragon of mili-tary valour and stoic fortitude; Cleopatra’s semi-divine warrior is thepretext for an erotic daydream (‘O happy horse, to bear the weight ofAntony!’). But such distinctions matter less in the overall equationthan the technical similarities between these speeches as complemen-tary exercises in fantasia. The groundswell of imaginative activity thatbuilds up in the first three acts cuts across cultural differences, requir-ing us to reassess the rigid polarization which has characterized ourthinking about the play. And, more to the point, it calls into questionthe hegemony of Roman values by showing how an exclusively ratio-nal paradigm of reality cannot properly account for the behaviour evenof those who profess to live by its rule.

This ambivalent figuring of the imagination comes to a head inIV.14. Antony has just lost the last of his battles with Caesar, betrayed(or so he thinks) by Cleopatra, and is facing political ruin. The simulta-neous collapse of his heroic self-image and his dream of love generatethe cumulative sense of unreality so hauntingly evoked in Antony’sdescription of ‘black vesper’s pageants’:

Antony Eros, thou yet behold’st me?Eros Ay, noble lord.Antony Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,



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A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,A [tower’d] citadel, a pendant rock,A forked mountain, or blue promontryWith trees upon’t that nod unto the world,And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,They are black vesper’s pageants.Eros Ay, my lord.Antony That which is now a horse, even with a thoughtThe rack dislimns, and makes it indistinctAs water is in water.Eros It does, my lord.Antony My good knave Eros, now thy captain isEven such a body. Here I am Antony,Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.

(IV.14.1)

As Antony meditates on the shifting cloud formations, their permuta-tions coalesce in his mind’s eye with those created by a scenic machinein some staged spectacle or masque; since both are ephemeral and illu-sory in nature, both are destined to vanish, like Prospero’s ‘insubstan-tial pageant faded’, which melts ‘into thin air’, leaving ‘not a rackbehind’.31 In many ways, this moment functions as a conventionalrecognition scene (agnorisis), where the tragic hero emerges from astate of deluded ignorance into full consciousness of those factors thatwill destroy him. For what Antony, like Hamlet before him, beholds inthese discandying, metamorphosing configurations which ‘mock oureyes with air’ is nothing other than the specular image of his ownunstable identity: his vacillation between irreconcilable loyalties, theagony of his dissolution (following his figurative immersion in thewatery flux over which Cleopatra reigns) and consequent loss of being,as he struggles and fails to ‘hold this visible shape’. In Antony’s eyes,then, the clouds are a symbol of his tragic undoing. But, as so often inthe play, this image of annihilation carries enfolded within it the seedsof its own refutation.

For if Antony’s vision recalls the optical illusion experienced byTroilus while watching Cressida betray him and arises out of a similarmisplaced confidence in the romantic imagination and its power toredeem the literal, it can also be seen to stand in a more positive rela-tionship to the fantasia. In its vivid picturing of remembered forms, itis itself, after all, an impressive demonstration of the workings of thisfaculty. But there is another, more precise sense in which Antony’s



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method of projecting intelligible forms into the clouds can be read as aparadigm of the active imagination. His reference to equinine shapesthat are ‘dislimn[ed]’ ‘even with a thought’ hints at the voluntaristic orcreative activity behind these seemingly random metamorphoses, andlinks this specifically with the art of painting (‘limn’ is the usualEnglish term for ‘to paint’ in this period), which replaces (or perhapsmerges with) scenic design. Since antiquity, in fact, it had been recog-nized that images may appear in irregular natural objects and be usedby artists as an aid to creative composition.32 In the most famousRenaissance version of this topos, Leonardo recommends studying(among other things) clouds, ashes and stains as a means of stimulatingthe mind to new inventions:

I shall not refrain from including among these precepts a new aid tocontemplation, which … [is] of great utility in arousing the mind tovarious inventions. And this is, if you look at any walls soiled with avariety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns, when you haveto invent some location, you will therein be able to see a resem-blance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks,trees, plains, great valleys and hills in many combinations. Or againyou will be able to see various battles and figures darting about,strange-looking faces and costumes, and an endless number ofthings which you can distill into finely-rendered forms. And whathappens with regard to such walls and variegated stones is just aswith the sound of bells, in whose peal you may find any name orword you care to imagine.33

The ability to perceive an endless succession of images in such amor-phous phenomena, to bring them to completion or use them as a spurto the making of other ingenious figures, was to Leonardo proof of aninner inventive capacity that is comparable to divine creativity itself.Embedded in Antony’s speech there may thus be found an alternativemodel of the fantasia that offers a very different perspective on itsvision of loss, according to which the unmaking of forms is but theobverse of their making, and dissolution a necessary precondition of,and prelude to, recreation. Identities are dislimned (erased, as thoughby an artist painting over them) only to be recast into new, more per-fect or more fantastic forms, just as Cleopatra, having helped todestroy her Antony, will reinvent him as a godlike colossus.

Viewed in this context, Antony’s meditation on the cloud-shapesconstitutes a pivotal moment in our evolving attitude to the lovers. In



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highlighting the destructive quality of their imaginings, it reflects asceptical crisis that has been gathering force since the start of the play;on the other hand, it can also be seen as instigating a more auspiciousdevelopment, whereby the lovers do not simply endure, but activelyremake their fate. It is significant, for example, that Antony quicklyrecovers from this low point, and that his recovery is marked by hisecstatic vision of a posthumous reunion with Cleopatra in Elysium(IV.14.50–4). In this imagined scenario the lovers’ ignominious deathsare reconfigured as a theatrical triumph which will upstage even ‘Didoand her Aeneas’ – a transformation necessitating a radical rewriting ofVirgil’s Aeneid, Book IV of which narrates how Aeneas, having aban-doned Dido for the sake of empire, was spurned by her in the under-world.34 Not only does this kind of imaginative revisionism enable thelovers to make something positive out of their defeat. It also, I suggest,provides a way out of our critical impasse by allowing us to render untoCaesar what is Caesar’s (a major historical victory over Egypt), while atthe same time acknowledging the intervention of a superior force thattransforms the very terms of the dramatic debate. Before turning to theplay’s second phase, however, we need to examine more closely therhetorical strategies involved in the lovers’ refashioning of themselvesand their world, and how they seek to implicate the audience inthis process. Like the imagination itself, these strategies are conceivedof in perceptual terms and invite comparison with representationaltechniques employed by Renaissance artists.

* * *

In her seminal monograph on the play, Janet Adelman demonstrateshow the issues it engages turn on the opposition between forms thatobserve ‘rule’ or ‘measure’, signifying both the virtue of moderation anda standard of judgement, and forms that exceed this yardstick. By theirheroic intemperance, she argues, the lovers free themselves from the lim-itations of Roman reality and gain access to a hyperbolic realm where‘nothing stays to scale because everything overflows its boundaries’,everything is in process.35 This stylistic antithesis is announced at thevery outset. The first scene opens with Philo accusing Antony of an infat-uation (‘dotage’) which ‘o’erflows the measure’ and ‘reneges all temper’.On entering, Antony implicitly refutes these criticisms by declaring suchRoman modes of ‘reckoning’ to be utterly irrelevant to his kind of love:

Cleopatra If it be love indeed, tell me how much.Antony There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.



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Cleopatra I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.Antony Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

(I.1.14)

Here ‘measure’ is being invoked in a rather different sense, as theaction of determining or computing the spatial magnitude of some-thing – and, by association, its intrinsic value – by means of a fixed(often mathematical) unit (OED, 2a and 6). When Cleopatra teasinglythreatens to take the measure of his passion by setting a bourn how farto be beloved, Antony warns that any attempt to circumscribe what isof infinite scope will force them to look beyond the confines of thepresent world, to ‘find out new heaven, new earth’. A few lines later heexpands on this conceit, intimating that a love like theirs requires forits fulfilment a different kind of space than that imposed by Roman‘rule’ – in its double sense of imperial domination and an instrumentof measurement:

Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide archOf the rang’d empire fall! Here is my space,Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alikeFeeds beast as man …

(I.1.33)

Together, these speeches suggest that Adelman’s broad opposition of‘measure’ and ‘overflow’ can be defined more exactly as a politicallycharged conflict between competing spatial economies: one that reliesupon strictly rational methods of quantification, and another thatrepudiates such fixed standards of measurement in favour of dimensionsthat are more subjectively determined.

Appropriately, given the commitment of its citizens to living by thebuilder’s (or surveyor’s) ‘square’ and ‘rule’, Rome is metaphoricallyassociated throughout the play with a classical, Vitruvian-style archi-tecture that is shown to be as limited (and limiting) as it is impres-sive.36 The play’s Romans share a belief in the ‘wide arch of the rang’dempire’ as the enduring framework that holds their power in place.But, despite its apparently unyielding solidity, this imperial edificeproves quite unstable, liable to disintegrate under its own internalstrains or when exposed to the more fluid properties of the world ofEgypt and the imagination.37 By contrast, the architectural structuresmost closely identified with Egyptian culture, the Pyramids, are notonly built to withstand the ebb and flow of the Nile but exist in



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harmony with it (‘they take the flow o’ th’ Nile / By certain scales i’ th’pyramid’ (II.7.17). Ultimately, the stability of Rome’s wide archdepends upon the individuals who prop it up. Knowing this to be thecase, Caesar brokers Antony’s union with his sister as a means of con-solidating their alliance and preventing their kingdoms and theirhearts from ‘fly[ing] off’ (II.2.150–2). But the marriage has the oppositeeffect, as he predicted it would:

Most noble Antony,Let not the piece of virtue which is setBetwixt us, as the cement of our loveTo keep it builded, be the ram to batterThe fortress of it …

(III.2.27)

As one of the ‘triple pillar[s] of the world’, Antony further weakens thestructures of empire by failing to keep his promise to abide henceforthby the Roman measure (‘I have not kept my square, but that to come/Shall all be done by th’ rule’ (II.3.6)) and returning to his extravagantEgyptian life-style. His actions reduce this pillar to a ‘noble ruin’ inRoman eyes, so devastated by Cleopatra’s ‘magic’ as to be past recon-structing (III.10.18). For the lovers, however, the fault lies rather withRome itself, which cannot accommodate their aspirations within its rigidarchitectonic framework and must therefore be wished away (‘Let Romein Tiber melt’). If the wide arch of the Roman empire is dismissed as toonarrow to contain the lovers, who from the first show their back abovethe element they live in, the same may be said of the ‘three-nook’dworld’ in which that empire appears to be firmly rooted.38 The lovers’habit of belittling the ‘dungy earth’ or ‘this dull world…No better thana sty’ when mocking Caesar’s dominion over it is echoed by many otherstatements in the play emphasizing the physical limitations of theknown world. Pompey’s fellow Romans fear his ambition ‘the sides o’ th’world may danger’ (I.2.192), while Menas promises to make him lord of‘what e’er the ocean pales, or sky inclips’ (II.7.68). Caesar affirms hisreadiness to search ‘from edge to edge /A’ th’ world’ for the ‘hoop’ thatwould bind him to Antony (II.2.122), and he later laments (insincerelyperhaps) that the two of them ‘could not stall together / In the wholeworld’ (V.1.39). Cumulatively, these allusions to the drably prosaic andrestrictively finite nature of the ‘little O, th’ earth’ support the emotionallogic behind the lovers’ desire to ‘find out’ – that is, rhetorically speak-ing, invent – a ‘new heaven, new earth’ not subject to such limitations.



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Rather than the collapse of Rome’s wide arch, however, it is the dis-solution of the ‘crown o’ th’ earth’, Antony himself, that finally makesthis possible. For it is only through death, or the imminent prospect ofdeath, that the lovers can begin to construct an alternative fictivespace, able to mould itself to the vast contours of their desires. Deathreleases them from the confines of a humdrum world, but also of theirown bodies, which have been figured – playfully at first, but withincreasing seriousness – as under pressure from the swelling emotionsof these lovers whose ‘huge spirit’ (we are told) cannot remain pentwithin so small and frail a ‘case’ (I.1.6–8, I.3.16, IV.14.39–41, IV.15.94).It allows them to burst through the fixed, quantifiable limits of theirown corporeal forms, so that, freed from rational constraints, their truemythical dimensions can at last be realized. Roman ‘rule’ has no juris-diction, no authority over this brave new world of the lovers’ poeticmaking or the ‘strange forms’ that inhabit it. The fluctuating size andshape of these forms are accountable solely to the non-rational laws ofthe imagination, to the speaker’s internal, emotionally laden percep-tion of things. All pretence of objectivity is discarded in the visionaryrhetoric of the closing scenes, as the lovers balance the pigmy figuresof the old world – where, the ‘odds’ having vanished with Antony,‘Young boys and girls / Are level now with men … And there is nothingleft remarkable / Beneath the visiting moon’ (IV.15.65) – against thegrandeur of their own reconstituted forms. Each reshaping of theiridentity dissolves to be replaced by others. Yet they only seem to growthe more by reaping, culminating in Cleopatra’s vision of her Antonyas a colossus, whose ‘legs bestrid the ocean’ and whose ‘rear’darm / Crested the world’ (V.2.76–92), a vision that, in a very concretesense, is ‘past the size of dreaming’.

The ‘new heaven, new earth’ envisioned by the lovers prior to theirdeaths bears an instructive resemblance to the dream-landscape ofFrancesco Colonna’s architectural romance, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili(c.1467), which was partially translated into English in 1592 as TheStrife of Love in a Dream.39 Vitruvian values have been transmutedin both instances into something much more rich and strange. The tit-ular lover of Colonna’s text encounters a number of highly fantasticarchitectural structures in the course of his dream-vision, causing himto marvel over and over again at the ‘hugenesse of the worke, theexcessive sumptuousnesse, the straunge invention, the rare perfor-mance, and exquisite diligence of the woorkeman’ (p.7v.), which (herepeatedly states) surpass his powers of description. Among theseidiosyncratic structures is a pyramid resting on a ‘massie frame’ and



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surmounted by an obelisk inscribed with hieroglyphics. As he inspectsthe base of this monument, the lover discovers further ingeniousdevices, including a mural depicting giants engaged in combat, a‘prodigious’ winged horse in bronze, a huge elephant made of blackstone, and the statue of a ‘wonderfull large Colosse’, which by a ‘divineinvention’ is made to emit a strange sound through its mouth(pp.10r.–18r.). In spite of the misleading flow of references to ‘symme-trie’ and ‘dew proportion’ in the Hypernotomachia, this edifice and itscontents display a characteristic disregard for ‘measure’, an excessspecifically linked by Colonna with Egyptian culture; indeed at onepoint they are said to ‘excee[d] the imagined conceit of Dinocrates pro-posed to Alexander the great, aboute a worke to be performed upon thehill Athos’. The work in question relates to a story handed down fromantiquity regarding a plan dreamed up by the architect Dinocrates tocarve Mount Athos into a gigantic statue carrying a city in one handand a bowl, for collecting all the streams from the mountain, in theother.40 Aside from its striking affinity with Cleopatra’s titanic Antonyof V.2, the relevance of this legendary project lies in the frequency withwhich it was invoked in Renaissance aesthetic discourse as a symbol ofimaginative daring. For it is the power and fecundity of invention thatis being celebrated here as in Shakespeare’s play, an invention that isset in motion by the lover’s state of longing and expressed in visualforms far removed from the rational, orderly and measured ideal ofclassicism. Moreover, the visions experienced by Colonna’s lover, likeCleopatra’s imaging of the dead Antony, are suffused with a sense ofwonder, together with an overpowering nostalgia for the heroicachievements of a ‘perfect golden age’, now recoverable only in dreams.

The markedly spatial quality of the hyperbolic discourse whichShakespeare’s play shares with Colonna’s text is indicative, I believe, ofthe resourcefulness with which the play’s meaning has been con-structed out of existing linguistic/visual relationships. I am referring,in particular, to that generally (if tacitly) accepted parallel discussedearlier, between visual forms that exceed canonical proportion and afigurative language defined by its deviations from the norms of every-day speech (pp. 68–9, 93).41 We have seen how crucial rhetorical strate-gies of magnification and diminution are to the lovers’ fabrication ofan imaginary space very different from that associated with Rome. Butthe final scenes merely bring to a climax a technique in operationthroughout the play, where exaggeration and its obverse, consciousbelittlement, are one of the chief means used to bring out differences ofperception.42 If Cleopatra emphasizes Antony’s more-than-human



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stature, the Romans regard him as having dwindled into a ‘strumpet’sfool’, in that, by failing to observe due measure, he ‘comes too short ofthat great property / Which still should go with Antony’ (I.1.50).Cleopatra herself is a ‘lass unparallel’d’ in the eyes of her admirers, a‘ribraudred nag of Egypt’ and worse to her many detractors. The dis-crepancy between Lepidus’s public eminence and his failure to cut afigure in the ‘huge sphere’ into which he is thrust is unscored by hisfigurative reduction from a cosmic body to vacant eye-sockets which‘pitifully disaster the cheeks’ (II.7.14–16). Likewise, Cleopatra publiclyproclaims Caesar ‘sole sir o’ th’ world’, only to deride him behind hisback as ‘Fortune’s knave’ and an ‘ass / Unpolicied’ (V.1.120, 307). Suchviolent modulations in size and scale call attention to the question ofproportionality which Aristotle first identified as a basic principle ofmetaphorical discourse, and which was central to classical andRenaissance definitions of hyperbole, conceived as a method ofamplification.43 Hyperbole was thus typically glossed as ‘a manner ofspeech exaggerating the truth whether for the sake of magnifying orminifying something’.44 For Peacham, it is the ability to translate amental idea of value – of the relative greatness or smallness of things –into visualizable form which is the most salient thing about thistrope:

Hyperbole … is a sentence or saying surmounting the truth onely forthe cause of increasing or diminishing, not with purpose to deceiveby speaking untruly, but with desire to amplifie the greatnesseor smallnesse of things by the exceeding similitude … by this figurethe Orator either lifteth up high or casteth downe low, eitherstretcheth things to the uttermost length, or presseth them to theleast quantitie.45

Peacham is well aware that, from a rationalistic perspective, its willing-ness to take liberties with the actual, objective dimensions of thingslays this kind of ‘exceeding similitude’ open to the charge of ‘speakinguntruly’. But he tries to pre-empt this charge by suggesting that suchlicence may be warranted as a means of registering the perceivedimportance of things, which fidelity to the facts would only obscure.

This spatialized definition of hyperbole, and its activation by theplay’s distinctive modes of amplificatio, seem positively to solicit us tomake connections with contemporary artistic practice. A suggestiveanalogue presents itself in the figures of exaggerated or distendeddimensions that crop up everywhere in Italian Mannerist art.46 Like the



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lovers’ transgression of the Roman measure, the disruption of theprevailing realist aesthetic by artists such as Parmigianino, Pontormoand Rosso Fiorentino involved a conscious rejection of mathematicalrule and rational authority in general. (The situation, as we haveseen, was more complicated in England where, although ‘Mannerist’idioms such as elongated figures and irrational space were employed,they did not assume the same knowledge of or resistance to the rules).Non-canonical proportions are accompanied in the compositions ofthese artists by an equally unorthodox management of space. Wherepreviously rational consistency had been the goal, a painting likeParmigianino’s Madonna del Collo Luongo [Plate 4] revealed the power-ful imaginative effects to be gained from extreme discontinuities inscale (p.37). Often this meant abandoning or radically modifying thearchitectural framework which had been used to give cohesion and leg-ibility to the treatment of space long before Alberti showed how itmight be done in De Pictura. Thus Mannerist artists, in a departurefrom the well-balanced composition of earlier Renaissance works,tended to compress their figures into areas too narrow or too lacking inperspectival depth to accommodate them. Many of the figures inMichelangelo’s Sistine ceiling occupy such a drastically reduced space;the massive, exaggeratedly foreshortened limbs of the prophets andsibyls, in particular, appear to spill over the architectural niches inwhich they are ensconced [Plate 15]. As with Shakespeare’s lovers, theeffect of confining these figures within an overly constrictive frame is toemphasize their monumental stature, to produce an impression ofheroic energies striving for enlargement in a world beyond the present.47

Excessive forms of this sort, that consciously flouted literal truth orreceived norms, were moreover deployed by artists and writers for sim-ilar ends, having an established range of applications, some of whichare highly germane to this play. In particular, the recognized effects ofsuch hyperbolic modes of expression go some way towards explainingthe extraordinary affective power which the lovers wield over audi-ences both on and off stage.48 For rhetorical amplification, and the‘grand style’ of which it was a staple ingredient, were closely associatedwith the ability to evoke wonder and command the emotions.49 Thesense of astonishment or meraviglia which figures so prominently insixteenth-century accounts of the heroically proportioned figures ofthe Sistine ceiling can thus be seen as following a prescribed pattern ofresponse.50 Another important source of emotive power identified byclassical writers was the rhetorical quality of enargia. And since itentailed the conjuring up of mental images, ‘whereby things absent are



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presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that theyseem actually to be before our very eyes’, this quality depended directlyupon the workings of the fantasia.51 Vivid imagery is specifically cou-pled with magniloquent expression in Longinus’s essay on the ‘sublime’or grand style, as a device for stimulating wonder and the emotionsin general.52 Describing the impact of this discourse, Longinus statesthat

sublimity consists in a certain excellence and distinction in expres-sion…For the effect of elevated language is, not to persuade the hear-ers, but to entrance them; and at all times, and in every way, whattransports us with wonder is more telling than what merely persuadesor gratifies us. The extent to which we can be persuaded is usuallyunder our own control, but these sublime passages exert an irresistibleforce and mastery, and get the upper hand with every hearer.53

The distinction Longinus makes between two different styles produc-ing different types of conviction has an obvious bearing on the playand can help us appreciate why its elevated register finally prevails. Forwhile Rome may succeed in persuading us of the lovers’ folly on ratio-nal grounds, reason itself is superseded by a hyperbolic discourse thatsecures our belief by transporting us with wonder and exerting an irre-sistible hold over our feelings. The proven ability of Antony andCleopatra to seduce others into identifying with the lovers’ viewpointagainst their considered judgement can thus be put down to a formida-ble combination of pathos and imaginative force, which circumventsany logical objections brought against it by appealing directly to theemotions or the mind’s eye.

How we view such displays of imaginative excess will ultimatelydepend, though, on our understanding of decorum, that aesthetic cri-terion in which all the complex issues of judgement raised by the playare distilled. In an earlier chapter, I noted how the question of deco-rum tended to be framed in terms of another: does it observe a properproportion?54 As the use of a fluctuating scale in Antony and Cleopatrasuggests, this question admitted of more than one answer. In fact, theconcept of decorum was a very broad one indeed, being by definition ahighly elastic principle, as useful for condoning as for condemninglicence. In it both the upholders and the abusers of moderation mightfind a powerful sanction. A similar dialectic is rehearsed in the play, withthe Romans and the lovers occupying respectively, as it were the strictand permissive poles in the debate. Dramatizing the relativistic nature of



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this principle allows Shakespeare not only to highlight the opposing cul-tural ideals of Rome and Egypt, but, more crucially, to expose the deeperpolitical issues at stake in their disagreement over matters of style.

For the Romans, decorum signifies simply ‘measure’: a moderationachieved through strict adherence to the norm. That temperance istheir main rhetorical criterion is confirmed early on by a dispute aboutwhat kind of speech best befits Antony, in which the plain-speakingEnobarbus (not for the first or last time) defends Egyptian excess:

Lepidus Good Enobarbus, ’tis a worthy deed,And shall become you well, to entreat your captainTo soft and gentle speech.Enobarbus I shall entreat himTo answer like himself. If Caesar move him,Let Antony look over Caesar’s headAnd speak as loud as Mars.

(II.2.1)

But, like the concept of decorum itself, the issue of conformity to mea-sure goes much wider than language, embracing every aspect of socialbehaviour. Caesar (the embodiment of Roman decorum) dislikesAntony’s ‘lascivious wassails’, whether these take place in Alexandria oron Pompey’s barge, not only because they are excessive and unseemly,out of keeping with the ‘graver business’ of empire, but because theyare inextricably bound up with the transgression of other norms. Thusin his diatribe against his ‘great competitor’ in I.4, Caesar explicitlyrelates Antony’s intemperance to the confusion of social and genderroles in Egypt; to the fact that Antony is happy to ‘sit / And keep theturn of tippling with a slave’, to behave in ways that are ‘not moremanlike / Than Cleopatra’, or she in ways ‘more womanly than he’.Similarly, what perturbs Antony’s soldiers most about his managementof affairs at Actium is his decision to let Cleopatra take part in the bat-tle ‘as a man’, thereby allowing private ‘affections’ to compromise hiscaptainship, and gender roles to be reversed in a manner that risksmaking ‘women’s men’ of them all (III.7.1–70). Such behaviour, it isimportant to grasp, is not merely in bad taste as far as Antony’s criticsare concerned; it violates behavioural standards or codes that areassumed to form the very basis of civilized life, as Caesar makes clear:

… Let’s grant it is notAmiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolomy,



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To give a kingdom for a mirth, to sitAnd keep the turn of tippling with a slave,To reel the streets at noon, and stand the buffetWith knaves that smells of sweat: say this becomes him(As his composure must be rare indeedWhom these things cannot blemish), yet must AntonyNo way excuse his foils, when we do bearSo great weight in his lightness.

(I.4.16)

The dangers Caesar spies in Antony’s overflowing of the measure are,at root, political. What he chiefly objects to in the latter’s conduct is afailure to maintain an exclusively masculine identity, to keep privatepleasure cordoned off from public duty, and preserve that dignity andself-discipline which distinguish the ruler from the ruled – a failurethat threatens to undo the socially instituted boundaries upon whichRome’s imperial authority is predicated.

Yet even Caesar is willing to entertain, albeit ironically, the hypothe-sis that conduct utterly unacceptable in others might ‘become’ Antonyhimself.55 There is indeed something about the lovers that seemsto exact this kind of paradoxical assessment. According to Lepidus,Antony’s faults can never be ‘enow to darken all his goodness’, for inhim they ‘seem as the spots [i.e. stars] of heaven, / More fiery by night’sblackness’ (I.4.10–15). Enobarbus likewise testifies to Cleopatra’s magi-cal ability to make ‘vilest things / Become themselves in her’ (II.2. 237).These tributes echo and so corroborate those offered by the loversthemselves. First, Antony voices his admiration for the theatrical versa-tility of his ‘wrangling queen! / Whom every thing becomes – to chide,to laugh, / To weep’ (I.1.548). Then Cleopatra returns the complimentby converting Alexas’s typically Roman praise of the mean (‘Like to thetime o’ th’ year between the extremes / Of hot and cold, he [Antony]was nor sad nor merry’) into an equally characteristic celebration ofthe extremes:

O heavenly mingle! Be’st thou sad or merry,The violence of either thee becomes,So does it no man’s else.

(I.5.59)

Clearly, such praise implies a notion of ‘due proportion’ that is totallyinimical to Roman ‘measure’. The decorum it invokes is ‘a decorumtolerant of excess’ and capable of accommodating an apparently



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limitless overreaching of thought and expression, the overflowing ofall established boundaries.56 Adopting Peacham’s line of defence, thelovers seek to legitimize their excesses by asserting – sometimes inexplicitly spatial terms – that the magnitude of their status or situationdemands a corresponding expansiveness of speech and action. ThusCleopatra refuses to be consoled for Antony’s death because ‘our size ofsorrow, / Proportion’d to our cause, must be as great / As that whichmakes it’ (IV.15.4; my emphasis). Importantly, this view is again con-firmed by others, especially towards the end of the play when thelovers do incontestibly appear to have found in defeat and death a suf-ficient ‘cause’ for their grandiose rhetoric. So Dolabella is moved toacknowledge the decorousness of Cleopatra’s vision of Antony: ‘Yourloss is as yourself, great; and you bear it / As answering to the weight’(V.2.101; my emphasis, cf. V.2.320). Earlier I remarked how Antony’sexceeding of the ‘measure’ in itself undermines the cultural normsenshrined in this concept and their use as an instrument of empire.Instead of letting matters rest there, however, the lovers challengehead-on the criterion which sanctions the imposition of these normson conquered peoples. By treating ‘due proportion’ as an infinitelyvariable quantity, they show the authority of the Roman ‘measure’, asa supposedly objective or universal standard, to be based on nothingmore than a politically convenient fiction.

But there is a further way in which the lovers’ idea of decorum func-tions as a mode of resistance to Rome’s cultural and political hege-mony. Several critics have noted the semantic play on ‘becomes’, sooften used in connection with the lovers; a verb that combines theidea of fittingness, of that which graces the subject, with the ontologi-cal sense of becoming. The implication is that the lovers’ mysteriousknack of making their flaws ‘become’ them amounts to more than ascandalous affront to accepted notions of propriety; it attests to theirpossession of an art which manages to transmute even the ‘vildestthings’ into an image of perfection, of what should be. It is a token orpledge of their capacity to transform themselves into (‘become’) theirown ideal images. Behind this pun on becoming, then, lies an assertionthat Antony and Cleopatra can effect a genuine transfiguration of theiridentity in ways that will put them beyond the jurisdiction of Roman‘rule’. It is with the legitimation of this imaginative power as some-thing of ‘great constancy’ – as distinct from the merely illusory or fan-tastical – that the second phase of the play is concerned.

* * *



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At a critical moment in her and the deceased Antony’s fortunes, itoccurs to Cleopatra that power and freedom reside with her ratherthan with all-conquering Caesar:

My desolation does begin to makeA better life. ’Tis paltry to be Caesar;Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,A minister of her will; and it is greatTo do that thing that ends all other deeds,Which shackles accidents and bolts up change …

(V.2.1)

What enables Cleopatra to forge ‘a better life’ out of her desolation isnot so much her resolve to outwit Caesar by committing suicide, as heraccess to imaginative arts which are unavailable to ‘Fortune’s knave’,by definition subservient to and constrained by the measurable facts ofhistory. All along, Cleopatra has been tacitly identified with the fanta-sia, owing to her delight in lying and duplicity as well as her ‘infinitevariety’ and gift for making defect perfection. But only now does thevacuum created by Antony’s death and the collapse of their worldlypowers allow her to make full use of this resource. Her mission is to sal-vage her lover’s reputation – and, since they are mutually constituted,her own – by reconstructing him in the image of her ‘immortal long-ings’ as a transcendent model of perfection.

Admittedly, the manner of Antony’s death puts a severe strain onCleopatra’s mythologizing ambitions, and not just because of his noto-riously botched suicide. Unlike the Egyptian queen, he has difficulty insustaining the imaginative energies which made his vision of a posthu-mous reunion with her so compelling. In fact, some of the dyingAntony’s speeches are decidely backward-looking and negative in tone(e.g. IV.15.51–9). Incapable in death, as in life, of reconciling his voca-tions as lover and soldier, he continues to veer between them. Hencehe tends to come across as the victim of his own internal contradic-tions, rather than the hero in charge of his destiny he would have ussee in him (IV.15.14). Worse still, his death in the monument is stagedin ways that accentuate the gap between the unheroic reality beingenacted before us and the idealizing rhetoric with which it is invested,thereby giving fresh impetus to the ironic perspective which doggedthe couple in the first half of the play.57 But everything that is defec-tive in Antony’s end will be redeemed by Cleopatra, who echoes – and,in so doing, perfects – many of his gestures and pronouncements.58



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She will even remake his death with her suicide, performed (as hisaspired to be) after the ‘high Roman fashion’, but transposed onto anew imaginative plane.

Cleopatra’s policy of refashioning Antony as a figure not subject torational criteria or human limitations culminates, of course, in herdream-vision of V.2. By now it will be clear that the excessive,unbounded forms in which she resurrects him constitute in their ownright a virtual manifesto for the creative powers of the fantasia. No lessimportant, however, is her defence of these powers which forms a dis-cursive coda to the dream. What makes this defence so persuasive isCleopatra’s tactic of engaging dialogically with the opposing voice ofscepticism, both in her readiness to confront head-on any doubts we(as well as the Romans) may have about her methods, and in her skil-ful use of these doubts as a means of articulating her own vision. Afterrecounting her dream, and as if partly unsure of its worth, she invitesDolabella to deliver the dismissive judgement she has anticipated (‘Youlaugh when boys or women tell their dreams; / Is’t not your trick?’):

Cleopatra Think you there was or might be such a manAs this I dreamt of?Dolabella Gentle madam, no.Cleopatra You lie up to the hearing of the gods!But if there be, nor ever were one such,It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuffTo vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’ imagine An Antony were nature’s piece ’gainst fancy,Condemning shadows quite.

(V.2.923)

Cleopatra’s initial show of diffidence (seen, for example, in the modu-lation of her question from the indicative to the more tentative condi-tional) is revealed in hindsight to be part of a cunning manoeuvre thatturns Dolabella’s negative response to her own advantage by using thisas a springboard to still bolder and more far-reaching claims. ForCleopatra incorporates Dolabella’s rational scepticism into her hyper-bolic vision only in order to emphasize the greater scope of the latter.And she does this by making a crucial distinction between his view ofthe fantasia and hers. Implicitly, she concedes that the ‘strange forms’she has called up might be regarded as products of ‘fancy’ inthe perjorative sense: the ‘fancy’ as defined by Plato and denigrated byShakespeare’s Romans as a mere idle dream or shadow-play. But this



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merely goes to show how far her envisioning of Antony as the ‘demi-Atlas of this earth’ (being ‘past the size of dreaming’) surpasses thisdebased version of the fantasia. Indeed, inasmuch as it is the imagina-tion which enables her to conceive and find ways to express (whetherby word or image) such a paradigm of human perfection, it must,she declares, be valued as ‘nature’s piece ‘gainst fancy, / Condemningshadows quite’.

One reason why Cleopatra’s defence of her dream possesses suchenormous resonance is because it intervenes directly in the widerdebate over the status of the fantasia outlined at the beginning of thischapter. Close parallels have been noted, in particular, between PhilipSidney’s advocacy of the poet’s right to exercise imaginative licence, inhis Apology for Poetry, and Cleopatra’s views on this subject.59 At therisk of exhausting the comparison, it is useful to bear Sidney’s argu-ment in mind when attempting to unpack the Egyptian Queen’s morecompressed apologia. In a famous passage, he asserts that poetry,uniquely among the arts, is not bound to observe empirical truth, but‘lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effectinto another nature, in making things either better than Naturebringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature’(p.100). And, pursuing a line of defence that would be partiallyendorsed by Bacon for all his empiricist allegiances (p.171), he furthermaintains that it is precisely this freedom which sets the poet abovehis rivals, the philosopher and the historian, since it allows him to cre-ate a ‘perfect pattern’ or model of what ‘should be’, unlike the histo-rian, who is ‘captived to the truth of a foolish world’ (p.111). At thesame time Sidney takes steps to forestall criticism, being no less awarethan Cleopatra how vulnerable such boldness of invention is to attackon both moral and rational grounds. Thus he seeks to distance‘eikastike’ fiction – which ‘figur[es] forth good things’ – from idle or‘phantastike’ conceits. However improbable, the poet’s inventions can-not be dismissed as mere fancy or ‘castles in the air’, he argues, ‘for anyunderstanding knoweth that the skill of the artificer standeth in theIdea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself’ (p.101).According to Sidney’s Neoplatonizing train of thought here, poeticimages of a ‘golden’ world may claim to be ‘nature’s piece / ‘gainstfancy’, inasmuch as they enable us to glimpse an idea of that ‘rightheavenly nature’ once enjoyed by mankind in its prelapsariancondition. In much the same fashion, Cleopatra’s ‘new heaven, newearth’ is offered to us as the visionary recreation of a state of perfec-tion lost through the fall not of our first parents but of Antony – a



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vision that can only be adumbrated through forms which ‘outworknature’.

But, for Sidney, the ultimate test that distinguishes legitimate inven-tion from vain fancy – the ‘eikastike’ from the purely ‘phantastike’ – isits efficacy in compelling the listener to acknowledge the truths itembodies, and, beyond that, to order his/her actions in accordancewith these truths. Cleopatra would appear to have just this aim in mindwhen manipulating Dolabella. And her scheme succeeds. In beingmoved first to identify with Cleopatra’s feelings (V.2.102–5) and then(by betraying his master’s plans) to act in ways that enable her to realizeher ‘immortal longings’ in death, and so convert ‘fancy’ into reality,Dolabella effectively confirms the ideational sources of her vision inspite of his sceptical reservations. The part played by this Roman soldierin Cleopatra’s dream, as audience and interlocutor, can be taken as acomment not only on the complexity of our own responses (caughtbetween acquiescence and mistrust), but on the degree to which suchimaginative visions depend for their fulfilment on our active collabora-tion. This idea was not a new one for Shakespeare. Several of his earlierplays explore the hypothesis that the poet’s ‘shaping fantasies’ must besupplemented by the audience. When Theseus suggests that the ‘palpa-ble-gross play’ staged by Bottom and the other Athenian mechanicalsmay be ‘amend[ed]’ by the imagination, Hippolyta retorts that ‘it mustbe your imagination then, and not theirs’ (V.1.211–14). And in theepilogue to this comedy Puck extends a similar invitation to the theatreaudience. That the process of making defect perfection requires awillingness on the spectators’ part to cooperate with such fictions isemphasized again in Henry V, where the Chorus repeatedly calls fortheir assistance in realizing ‘the brightest heaven of invention’. Only bymobilizing their ‘imaginary forces’, he implies, will it be possible tobridge the chasm between the literal action taking place on stage andthe heroic ideal it is intended to evoke.

As the power struggle between Egypt and Rome centres increasinglyon issues of representation, securing the audience’s creative participa-tion in this way becomes an urgent necessity. From the middle of ActIII onwards, the military conflict between Caesar and the lovers devel-ops alongside, and is finally overshadowed by, a contest in publicimage-making, with each side fighting for control over how their ‘story’is staged, told or communicated.60 Undisputed victor in the militaryarena, Caesar nevertheless loses this propaganda war, inasmuch as hisschemes to co-opt others for a public staging of his ‘princely’ attributes –his power, his love and benevolence – are all thwarted. In III.6, Octavia



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arrives in Rome unannounced and so prevents the ‘ostentation’ of herbrother’s love, just after the latter has learned how Antony andCleopatra displayed themselves to spectacular effect in the market-placein Alexandria where they were ‘publicly enthron’d’. More crucially, hisplans to lead the lovers in triumph go awry. Caesar’s obsession withparading them in Rome reflects an awareness that their presence in hisvictory parade as ‘signs of conquest’ would testify eternally to his moraland military superiority (V.1.62–6). On their side, the lovers, no lessaware of what is at stake politically and united in their refusal to bescripted into the degraded roles prepared for them in this ‘imperiousshow’, are determined to retain control over how they are perceived (asmuch by posterity as by their contemporaries) by staging their deathsin the manner of their own choosing. Although Antony cannot quitepull this off, Cleopatra arguably does so for them both in her sublimedeath-scene. But if there is a very real sense in which the lovers tri-umph over Caesar, it is not simply by upstaging him, but as a conse-quence of their superior ability to enlist others in the production oftheir mythical images.61 For they succeed in winning over some of themost sceptical members of their audience: Enobarbus, Dolabella, evenCaesar himself. In the last two acts, successive spectators are drawninto validating the lovers’ self-fashionings, both by their affectiveresponses and by their actions, which in several cases (Enobarbus, Eros,Iras and Charmian) involve willing their own deaths.

We are given a demonstration of the lovers’ methods of involvingthe beholder in their imaginative reconfiguring of events whenCleopatra calls on her waiting woman, Iras, to picture with her the fatethat awaits them in Rome:

Cleopatra Now, Iras, what think’st thou?Thou, an Egyptian puppet, shall be shownIn Rome as well as I. Mechanic slavesWith greasy aprons, rules, and hammers shallUplift us to the view. In their thick breaths,Rank of gross diet, shall we be enclouded.And forc’d to drink their vapor.Iras The gods forbid!Cleopatra Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictorsWill catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymersBallad ’s out a’ tune. The quick comediansExtemporally will stage us, and presentOur Alexandrian revels: Antony



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Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall seeSome squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatnessI’ th’ posture of a whore.

(V.2.208)

Adopting a strategy already tried out by Antony upon Eros (IV.14.62–80), Cleopatra subtly repositions Iras not as a mere bystander ordetached observer, but as a committed participant, by implicating herdirectly in the working out of her mistress’s fate.62 Moreover, by evok-ing the degraded forms in which she and Antony would be representedin the triumph or at the hands of the Roman comedians and balladiers –forms which, she maintains, travesty their true ‘greatness’ – she ensuresIras’s willing cooperation in producing the alternative fiction she isabout to stage. And Iras will indeed play her part by helping Cleopatrato show herself like a queen and then dying, apparently of a brokenheart; just as Charmian plays hers by perfecting the regal tableau of herdead mistress: ‘Your crown’s [awry], / I’ll mend it, and then play’ (V.2.318,my emphasis). By actively assisting the realization of this other versionof the lovers’ ‘story’, Iras and Charmian secure their place within it.More importantly, I would argue, they also show us the way. Unlikethe daring reflexivity of Cleopatra’s reference to being ‘boy[ed]’ in theposture of a whore, which reminds us provocatively of the boy-actordelivering these lines on the Jacobean stage, the ways in which we (asspectators) are implicated in this moment of critical self-reflection haveattracted little comment. Yet, in Iras, Charmian and Dolabella, the playholds out exemplars of audience response that could hardly be moredifferent from those associated with the ‘shouting varlotry / Of censur-ing Rome’ (V.2.56). Instead of deriding the lovers’ fictions according tothe sort of ‘rules’ that ‘mechanic slaves’ swear by, the ideal spectatorpostulated by this model will collude with these images by recognizingtheir philosophical and affective power. It is perhaps this invitation toparticipate in the fabrication of a mythical ‘golden’ world, by project-ing our personal visions and desires into the imaginary space createdpartly for that purpose, which proves hardest to resist.

With the assistance of our ‘imaginary forces’, Cleopatra meets thechallenge implicit in the Roman representation of events by stagingherself on a higher plane, not as whore but as ‘Royal Egypt’, Antony’swife and Isis, goddess of the moon and procreative nature with theasp-baby at her breast.63 To create this eikastic fiction, she fittinglyemploys both visual spectacle (robes, a crown, the bed) and that othermedium of her imaginary becomings, figurative language. Her speech



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transmutes the death-bed into a marriage-bed, the asp into a phallus orsuckling infant, departure into a reunion, and death into sleep or sexualconsummation. In a final inventive coup, she uses the moment of tran-sition from life to death to bring about the most startling and paradoxi-cal metamorphosis of them all, as she turns herself from a ‘breather’ intoa figure of marble constancy, and so confers upon the fluid, unstableproducts of her fantasia the permanency of art. But the very inertness ofthis tableau of death may also seem to mark the limits of our imagina-tive involvement with the lovers, especially once Caesar has enteredwith his retinue and begun a clinical inspection of the corpses. For it isas nothing other or more than corpses that Cleopatra and her womenare now made to appear. The cold light of Roman reason and common-sense floods back into the monument, threatening to disrupt the spellwhich Antony’s ‘enchanting queen’ has cast over us. It is especially sig-nificant, therefore, that Caesar should subscribe, if only momentarily, tothe fiction of transcendence – and the idea of a self-transcending fiction– she has created. Contemplating the spectacle of the dead Queen, hefeels impelled not only to accord the lovers’ version of the ‘story’ parityof status with his own (V.2.358–63), but to acknowledge Cleopatra’spower to redefine reality in accordance with her imaginative aspirations:

O, noble weakness!If they had swallow’d poison, ’twould appearBy external swelling; but she looks like sleep,As she would catch another AntonyIn her strong toil of grace.

(V.2.344)

Aesthetic issues are no less closely intertwined with political ambitionin The Tempest, examined in the concluding chapter. If Caesar’s powerstruggle with the lovers is waged chiefly through the attempts on bothsides to manipulate how their ‘story’ is viewed by audiences on and offstage, Prospero’s absolutist rule similarly involves imposing his ownvision of things on others. Resistance to this process in the later play isarticulated, once again, in terms of the opposition between a dominantneoclassical aesthetic – identified here with the court masque – andalternative modes of representation marginalized by its privileging ofmeasure, proportion and rule. And each of these visual economies isshown to embody a different way of seeing the world.



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7The Tempest and theArt of Masque

198

It is often observed that The Tempest, uniquely among Shakespeare’splays with the exception of the early Comedy of Errors, adheres inalmost textbook fashion to the unities of time, place and action. Thisatypical submission to neoclassical rules of literary construction maybe linked with Prospero’s controlling presence and his sponsorship ofthe values of disciplined rationality. But neoclassicizing influenceshave left their imprint on the play in other ways too.1 Of these by farthe most significant is the play’s involvement with the Jacobean courtmasque, which, under the aegis of the two great exponents of earlyEnglish classicism, Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson, sought to emulate thesplendours of antique theatre described by Vitruvius.2 Versions ofpageantry and masque feature in several of Shakespeare’s earlier works,but his debt to such forms goes much deeper here, permeating everyaspect of the play’s structure and conception.3 Again, Prospero clearlyhas a hand in establishing the primacy of this relationship; the masqueis the main medium through which he seeks to achieve his aims. Thisis not to say that the play’s connection with the masque is exhaustedby its use as an instrument of Prospero’s politico-ethical designs. For, aswill become apparent, the whole of the play is drawn into a critical dia-logue with this courtly genre and with the rhetorical arguments, visualand verbal, it deploys.

To understand how The Tempest interacts with the masque, it is nec-essary to remind ourselves of the conventions which governed suchentertainments.4 By the time the play was written in 1610–11, themasque had already embarked on the most illustrious phase of itsdevelopment at the hands of Jonson and Jones. Their notoriouslystormy yet productive partnership endured from 1605 to 1631 and wasresponsible for introducing the genre to new standards of literary


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seriousness as well as the marvels of the Italianate illusionist stage.What remained unchanged was the essentially eulogistic function ofthe masque. A highly elaborate form of seasonal entertainment com-bining poetry with music, dance and visual spectacle, it paid ritualhomage to the monarch and his courtiers, whom it imaged as the pro-tagonists of an exalted fable, creating mythical roles for its aristocraticperformers. As Stuart rule edged ever closer to absolutism, such fictionswere increasingly designed to reinforce the doctrine of the divine rightof kings by providing a show-case for the ideal virtues, the godlikepowers of royalty. To James I, allegorized in the person of some classi-cal god or heroic quality, was attributed the power to ‘salve the rudedefects’ of ‘mere nature’ by transmuting blackness into beauty, to ban-ish ignorance and folly and teach the ‘rites of true society’, to regulatethe seasons and renew the golden age, and, most crucially, the capacityto restore a fallen world to ordered harmony. Although not fully elabo-rated until later in James’s reign, these motifs are clearly announced inOberon, presented at Whitehall on 1 January 1611, a few months beforeThe Tempest was first staged there:

He is the matter of virtue, and placed high.His meditations to his height are even,And all their issue is akin to heaven.He is a god o’er kings, yet stoops he thenNearest a man when he doth govern men …’Tis he that stays the time from turning old,And keeps the age up in a head of gold;That in his own true circle still doth run,And holds his course as certain as the sun.He makes it ever day and ever springWhere he doth shine, and quickens everythingLike a new nature; so that true to callHim by his title is to say, he’s all.5

From 1609, the omnipotence of royal virtue was dramatized throughits vanquishing of the unregenerate forces embodied in the so-calledanti-masque. Conceived as a ‘foil or false masque’ preceding the mainshow, this device opened up a space for the antics of various disruptiveagencies representing everything antithetical and opposed to the val-ues enunciated in the masque proper. Often this confrontation wasarticulated visually; a range of comically grotesque beings – witches,satyrs, she-monsters, dwarves and pigmies, figures disguised as animals

The Tempest and the Art of Masque 199


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and phantasms – were brought on stage to create a ‘spectacle ofstrangeness’, the significance of which lay in its deliberate inversion ofthe masque’s rationalist aesthetic of order and symmetry.6 However,such figures were never allowed to undermine the idealised worldof the masque in any serious degree, or to challenge its dominance.After being granted a brief licence to indulge their unruly energies, theanti-masquers were either routed or sufficently tempered, tamed oreducated by contact with the masque world to enable their assimila-tion to its loftier vision. Either way, the threat presented by the anti-masque functioned, by its swift eradication, to confirm the supremacyof the political regime celebrated in the masque, whilst illuminatingthe moral virtues in which that supremacy was supposedly grounded.

The communication of this royalist ideology largely depended onhow it was staged. Those powers which the verse or songs declared tobe at the ruler’s disposal – powers to bring order out of disorder, to har-ness the forces of nature in the service of a benevolent and civilizingregime – were demonstrated for all to see in the transformations, dis-coveries and apotheoses wrought by Inigo Jones’s stage machinery. InThe Masque of Queens (1609), to take one early example, a coven ofwitches emerged from an ‘ugly hell’ to the accompaniment of a ‘kindof hollow and infernal music’, before casting their spells and perform-ing a grotesque dance, ‘full of preposterous change and gesticulation’.This was interrupted when

on the sudden was heard a sound of loud music, as if many instru-ments had made one blast; with which not only the hags them-selves but the hell into which they ran quite vanished, and thewhole face of the scene altered, scarce suffering the memory of sucha thing. But in the place of it appeared a glorious and magnificentbuilding figuring the House of Fame, in the top of which were dis-covered the twelve masquers sitting upon a throne triumphalerected in form of a pyramid and circled with all store of light.7

Similar mechanically contrived miracles were performed in masqueafter masque: wild landscapes metamorphosed into princely palaces,street scenes gave way to pastoral bowers, and clouds parted to revealthe presiding deities. In such displays of optical wizardry, it has beenargued, the audience would have beheld an affirmation of the controlwhich mankind (or, more precisely, an aristocratic elite) was ableto wield over nature by means of scientific knowledge exercisedin alliance with virtue. By alluding to the otherworldly harmonyrecreated here on earth under Stuart rule, the neoclassical proportions



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of Jones’s Palladian stage architecture, in conjunction with the geome-try of his perspective sets, helped to drive home the message. So, inanother medium, did the orderly ‘measures’ of the dance and its musi-cal accompaniment. The primary aim of this visual and auditoryrhetoric was to induce a sense of wonder in the spectators, a ‘state ofconsciousness that bordered on the visionary’ and that would makethem unusually receptive to the quasi-theological mysteries of kingshipunfolded in the masque.8 Imaginative participation led in turn to amore tangible form of involvement. For the courtiers who beheld theirperfected image in the mirror of Jonson’s poetry or Jones’s spectacleeventually became part of this world when, in the closing revels, themasquers descended from the stage and selected dancing partners fromamong them. In symbolic terms, that final opening out of the masqueto include the audience represented the power of the royal ideals toabsorb and transfigure reality. As Stephen Orgel remarks, ‘what thenoble spectator watched he ultimately became’.9

This brings us to what was undoubtedly the most important elementin the visual statement of the masque: the use of linear or single-pointperspective. As we noted earlier, perspective scenery, of the typeemployed on a routine basis for the intermezzi at the Italian ducalcourts, was first introduced to the English stage by Jones in The Masqueof Blackness (1605) (p.50). Over the next three decades, as his technicalexpertise and audacity grew, he would create a remarkable series oflandscape and architectural vistas where, framed within the prosce-nium arch, turning machines and sliding shutters, painted backdropsand scenes in relievo, interacted to produce a coherently organized andconvincing stage picture [Plate 16]. The fact that such scenery was usedexclusively at court or when the monarch was present, and that inJones’s theatre all the sight lines were, by the law of optics, made toconverge on the chair of state, is seen by Stephen Orgel and Roy Strongas possessing a clear political significance:

Through the use of perspective, the monarch, always the ethicalcentre of court productions, became in a physical and emblematicway the centre as well. Jones’s theatre transformed its audience intoa living and visual emblem of the aristocratic hierarchy: the closerone sat to the King, the ‘better’ one’s place was, and only the King’sseat was perfect. It is no accident that perspective stages flourishedat court and only at court, and that their appearance there coin-cided with the reappearance in England of the Divine Right of Kingsas a serious political philosophy.10



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This centralized perspectival arrangement was congenial to the Stuartmonarchs, Orgel and Strong suggest, because it allowed them not onlyto emphasize their place at the apex of the social pyramid, but, by fix-ing the viewing position of other spectators, to determine how theroyal image was perceived. As such, it provided a potent symbol oftheir autocratic rule. The connection that Orgel and Strong makebetween the King’s monopoly over viewpoint and the growing concen-tration of power in his hands is certainly persuasive. But should wetherefore conclude that privileging the royal perspective meant sup-pressing every other outlook, that both ‘politically andoptically the masque allows the spectator only one point of view’?11

When the history of the masque is taken into consideration, this con-trol over viewpoint begins to look less secure, the vision presented lesshomogeneous than has sometimes been assumed. For a start, the belief(assuming that monarch and designer did indeed believe it) that thebeholder’s point of view is amenable to this kind of strict regulationwas demonstrably a fantasy with no bearing on political reality; by thetime Civil War broke out in 1642, even some of those who had partici-pated in the court masques were having doubts about royal policy.12

Moreover, any degree of fixity Jones’s perspective sets imposed wasoffset by other features of the genre. In particular, the emphasis whichthe masque placed on movement, metamorphosis, and the shifts ofconsciousness they entail seems positively to imply and make provi-sion for alternative visions. So too does the antithetical structure inwhich its conflict between good and evil was typically embodied, astructure whose dialectical possibilities were realized in the finest ofJonson’s and Jones’s productions. (In this regard, it is important to dis-tinguish between the relative openness of the Jacobean masque, whichcould incorporate coded criticism of the monarchy through the anti-masque, and its Caroline successors, where the use of single-point per-spective was often compounded by a monological poetic vision).13

Shakespeare’s use of anti-masque motifs in The Tempest seems to indi-cate a sensitivity to the pluralistic, polycentric tendencies within themasque. And we shall find that his handling of these elements accen-tuates precisely their resistance to the authoritarian impulses associatedwith the form.

This is not the only sense in which the masque might be said to becomposed of contradictions. Jonson’s well-known preface to Hymenaei(1606) remains our best guide to the inbuilt tensions of the genre:

It is a noble and just advantage that the things subjected tounderstanding have of those which are objected to sense that the



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one sort are but momentary and merely taking, the other impress-ing and lasting. Else the glory of all these solemnities had perishedlike a blaze and gone out in the beholders’ eyes. So short-lived arethe bodies of all things in comparison of their souls … This it is hathmade the most royal princes and greatest persons, who are com-monly the personators of these actions, not only studious of richesand magnificence in the outward celebration or show, which rightlybecomes them, but curious after the most high and hearty inven-tions to furnish the inward parts … which, though their voice betaught to sound to present occasions, their sense or doth or shouldalways lay hold on more removed mysteries.14

Jonson acknowledges the occasional, and hence primarily political,nature of the masque; sounding to present occasions tended to meanin practice either commemorating a special event at court or offeringan allegorical justification of the royal policies of the day. But while hedoes not minimize the obligation to engage with purely topical mat-ters, he sees this importantly as only one aspect of the genre, which‘doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries’. It was infact Jonson who was chiefly responsible for giving the Stuart masque astrong moralistic slant; the classical erudition and esoteric symbolismhe lavished on his productions were part of a didactic programmeintended to persuade the courtly spectators to fulfil the ideal roles cre-ated for them. In making both the inculcation of eternal truths and thetask of glamorizing the ephemeral life of the court the legitimate busi-ness of the masque, the preface re-enacts, in miniature, that confluenceof Platonic and Machiavellian impulses which has been identified as abasic feature of the genre.15 These remits are not necessarily as incom-patible as they appear on the face of it, and Jonson’s personal skill inlinking the mystical with the topical has long been recognized.16

Nevertheless, there is undeniably scope for tension here, and in thehands of a less assured artist than Jonson, the Platonic-didactic andMachiavellian-pragmatic tendencies informing the masque mighteasily come into conflict with one another. In its attempt to prescribethe proper relationship between the literary and visual inputs into themasque, Jonson’s preface highlights another area of potentialdifficulty.17 The poet’s conceits, it argues, should possess ‘a noble andjust advantage’ over the designer’s spectacular confections, for withoutthese ‘high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts’, thevisual glories of the occasion would lack true substance or durability.Years later, when it was clear that he had lost the argument andthe partnership with Jones was over, Jonson presented his rival’s



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ascendancy as proof that the ‘outward celebration or show’ had tri-umphed at the expense of any deeper philosophical import, comment-ing bitterly that ‘Painting and Carpentry’ were now ‘the Soule ofMasque’.18 As Jonson saw it, then, the masque was always likely to suc-cumb to a disjunction or imbalance between the aesthetic pleasuresoffered by opulent spectacle and the serious meanings it was intendedto convey. These latent contradictions or incipient points of fracturewithin the masque are insistently foregrounded by Shakespeare’splay in the course of its dialogue with the genre.

Because The Tempest makes such extensive reference to the forms andconventions of the masque, it is often assumed – wrongly, I believe –that it must share the ideological agenda behind these ostentatious cel-ebrations of monarchical power.19 (This premise tends to go hand inhand with the equally questionable assumption that the play necessar-ily endorses Prospero’s views as the one and only source of authority.)The fact that it received two recorded performances at Whitehall, on 1November 1611 and again in the winter of 1612–13 as part of a pro-gramme of festivities marking the marriage of James I’s daughter,Princess Elizabeth, to the Elector Palatine, has been cited as confirma-tion of the play’s aristocratic affiliations. As the play’s modern editorshave cautioned, however, these performances are no proofthat it was originally written or subsequently revised for the court. Byfar the more likely scenario is that it was destined from the outset tobe played at the King’s Men’s regular ‘public’ venues, the Globe andthe rather more upmarket indoor theatre at Blackfriars, a commis-sioned royal performance being an incidental bonus.20 If, as seemsprobable, the play was not in fact tailored exclusively for a court audi-ence, and its composition owed as much, perhaps more, toShakespeare’s long-standing involvement with the public theatre, thisgenesis may help to account for the critical detachment which charac-terizes its relationship to the masque. For what we are presented withcannot in any sense be described as a simple homage to a fashionablearistocratic genre, or a submissive imitation of one.21 Rather, the lan-guage of masque becomes the vehicle for a double-pronged inquiryinto the motives of the play’s arch-illusionist Prospero and the limits ofhis power on the one hand, and the integrity (both structural andmoral) of the court masque itself on the other. The following readingof The Tempest seeks to substantiate this claim by showing howProspero’s experimental attempts to recreate on his ‘bare island’ themasque’s (putative) control over perception founder, owing to a combi-nation of external and internal factors.



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In his introduction to the Oxford edition, Stephen Orgel makes theobvious yet frequently overlooked point that the masque formsdeployed in The Tempest are part not of a court entertainment but of a‘dramatic allusion to one’. Hence the mechanics of the masque andother apparitions in the play are those of the public theatre rather thanthe Banqueting House with its changeable scenery.22 Moreover, these‘quotations’ from the masque have been interpolated into a larger dra-matic whole, where the meanings and intentions originally associatedwith them may be qualified, transformed or resisted. This processinvites us to reflect on the implications of relocating the masquewithin a context that is in many ways profoundly alien to its conven-tions and ideology.23 How might the masque be altered by being per-formed in a public theatre like the Globe with its apron stage, which,reflecting the socially eclectic composition of its audiences, is notstructurally designed to give precedence to any one perspective? Howcan it be accommodated within a dramatic form whose characteristicmultivocality or heteroglossic nature makes it equally resistant to theimposition of a single controlling point of view? Given this estrange-ment of the masque from its normal setting, it is surely predictablethat Prospero’s autocratic vision of things will be contested as a resultof being exposed to alternative viewpoints. His confrontation withCaliban brings this conflict of outlooks to a crisis. Not only does the‘savage and deformed slave’ embody a mode of seeing that is literallyworlds away from Prospero’s own, but, as I try to show, his monstrousappearance identifies him with a visual economy that – in a mannerreminiscent of Antony and Cleopatra’s transgression of the Roman‘measure’ – is defined by its repudiation of neoclassical rules and aes-thetic ideals. Even as its feasibility is challenged from without,Prospero’s ‘project’ is destabilized from within by internal contradic-tions similar in kind to those tensions which threatened to crack openthe masque, as well as by his own doubts regarding the legitimacy ofhis aesthetic strategies. The cumulative effect of these various disinte-grative pressures, I shall argue, is to bring about a radical decentring ofthe masque form.

* * *

As has often been remarked, the eponymous tempest of the openingscene is evoked with a degree of verisimilitude unparalleled in theShakespearean canon. The sounds of the raging elements and splittingship, the mariner’s nautical jargon and wet garments, all contribute to



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the intensity of the reality-effect. Even the hint of social insubordina-tion in the Boatswain’s robust dismissal of the courtiers, which mirrorsthe elemental chaos on a human level, adds to the realistic ambianceby appearing to locate the action in the solidly mimetic world of his-tory or tragedy rather than the realms of courtly fantasy. Consequently,we experience a shock of dislocation – not unlike that which InigoJones’s scenic metamorphoses must have produced in Whitehall audi-ences – on discovering, in the next scene, that the lifelike horrors ofthe wreck are in fact a consummate illusion, a ‘direful spectacle’manipulated by Prospero’s ‘so potent art’:

If by your art, my dearest father, you have Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.

(I.2.1)

With one stroke, Miranda establishes the centrality of this relationshipwith the court masque to the construction of the play’s meaning. Apartfrom the power to conjure up visions, Prospero’s art is intimated topossess the same capacity to incite and allay conflict, to command nat-ural forces and harmonize discordant elements in the micro- andmacrocosm, that these ‘Spectacles of State’ imputed to the Stuart mon-archs on a regular basis. The parallels so meticulously constructed inthe storm scene between disorder in the elemental, social and psychicspheres also appear to support the theory, fundamental to the rhetoricof the masque, that the ruler’s dominion extends over each of theseworlds. As it turns out, this myth is affirmed only to be questionedthereafter, as we become more aware of the problems confrontingProspero in his efforts to resolve conflict and salve the rude defects ofnature. For while his ability to command the elements is never indoubt, the same cannot be said of his hold over human psychology.(The kind of long-range irony operating here is epitomized by the ques-tion with which the Boatswain taunts the courtiers: ‘Hence! What caresthese roarers for the name of king?’ (I.1.16); though its mocking scepti-cism seems to be disposed of by the revelation that these ‘roarers’ atleast are firmly under Prospero’s control, the query it raises about thelimits of royal authority will reverberate through the play.)24 However,such complications lie largely in the future. What is emphasized inthese early scenes is Prospero’s affinity with the idealized ruler imag-ined by Jacobean court entertainments, as though the play were anx-ious to launch its dialogue with the masque by foregrounding thepremises they share. Hence the powers of the one-time Duke of Milan,



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like those on display in the masque, are presented as a function of hisextraordinary wisdom (‘for the liberal arts / Without a parallel’) and vir-tuous self-discipline.25 They occupy the same indefinite terrain, some-where between the traditional thaumaturgical virtues of kingship andthe conquests of modern Baconian science. And, most importantly,they are realized in and through the arts of spectacle, finding their chiefmode of expression in wonder-inducing displays of optical magic.

From the outset too, Prospero endeavours in true masquing fashionto impose his personal vision upon the island’s other inhabitants byregulating their visual and auditory experience. Intent on shaping theirresponse to events he himself has contrived, he appoints the times oftheir sleeping and waking, commands the touches of sweet harmonywhich sound about their ears, and determines what they see. He it iswho manufactures the conditions in which the lovers first burst uponone another’s sight as the revelation of a ‘thing divine’ in I.2, produc-ing a ‘discovery’ scene to rival one of Jones’s. Ariel’s song, with itsoblique foretelling of a miraculous ‘sea-change / Into something richand strange’ (l.401), lures Ferdinand to the spot where Miranda isdirected to gaze upon him: ‘The fringed curtains of thine eye advance, /And say what thou seest yond’ (l.409). Later, in a burlesque echo ofthis scene, the grosser senses of Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano areworked upon by Ariel, acting as his master’s agent:

Then I beat my tabor,At which like unback’d colts they prick’d their ears,Advanc’d their eyelids, lifted up their nosesAs they smelt music; so I charm’d their earsThat calf-like they my lowing follow’d …

(IV.1.175)

Attempts to dictate how things are perceived may seem innocuousenough compared to other aspects of Prospero’s art (such as the use ofhis magical powers to disempower, immobilize or imprison his ene-mies), yet ideologically they reveal the same process of coercion, thesame compulsion to bend others to his sovereign will. Almost all theisland’s occupants are forced to participate in a series of visions, andthese are arranged into a play-masque of which Prospero is the authorand stage director, royal subject and ideal spectator, combining in one,so to speak, the roles of Jonson, Jones, and James I. His unrelentingsurveillance of the action, either in person or through Ariel, evokes themonarch’s commanding view of the masquing stage and the absolute



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sway this metaphorically exhibits and confers, most obviously whenhe watches Ariel’s performance as the Harpy from ‘on the top’. In otherrespects too, his theatrical shows ask to be seen as a dramatic extensionor analogue of the court masque. The devices on which they depend –symbolic spectacle, oracular poetry, rich costume, music both harmo-nious and discordant – belong to the same basic vocabulary employedin the masque.

Moreover, the aims for which these devices are mobilized pointedlyrecall those proclaimed by the court masque: to ‘new create’ a sinfulhumanity, resolve past strife and institute a ‘brave new world’ of socialand metaphysical harmony. Or rather, one of its aims. For while theutopian elements in Prospero’s vision have tended to receive more crit-ical attention, political imperatives play no less important a part inshaping this. The exiled Duke turns his play-masque into a spectacularvehicle for reasserting his power and legitimacy, compromised by hisbanishment from Milan, and, more insidiously, by Antonio’s doubtsconcerning his fitness for ‘temporal royalties’. He also exploits his artin pursuit of his dynastic ambitions, using this as a means of securingthe restoration of his dukedom and engineering the marriage betweenMiranda and Ferdinand, thereby creating an alliance with Napleswhich consolidates and extends his power-base.26 In view of this, wemay be tempted to dismiss the ethical ideals set out in his betrothalmasque as a diversionary tactic, a convenient sublimation of the work-ings of realpolitik. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that thesemotives do not genuinely coexist in Prospero’s attitude to his art,much as they did in Jonson’s. Indeed, in ministering at one and thesame time to the lofty principles embodied in ‘removed mysteries’ andto the political exigencies of ‘present occasions’, Prospero apparentlyachieves that perfect fusion of art and power envisaged in the prefaceto Hymenaei. Such has not always been the case, however. In thelengthy protasis of I.2, he recounts how his neglect of ‘worldly ends’and the day-to-day responsibilities of government for the refined plea-sures of ‘bettering … [his] mind’ once estranged him from his state andcost him his dukedom. For while he let himself become over-immersedin studying the liberal arts, his brother was practising the material artsof the Machiavel – whose recreative properties parody and outdo hisown – to much greater effect. Antonio,

Being once perfected how to grant suits,How to deny them, who t’advance, and whoTo trash for overtopping, new created



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The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang’d ’em,Or else new form’d ’em; having both the keyOf officer and office, set all hearts i’ th’ stateTo what tune pleas’d his ear …

(I.2.79)

Prospero’s expository style, with its tortured syntax and obsessive itera-tion, suggests how deeply this experience affected him. A desire toreintegrate the two arts (the meliorative and the political) which, in aformer life, he allowed to become disjoined with such disastrous conse-quences appears to be the driving principle behind his play-masque.And the firm grip he maintains – with one significant lapse – on thedramatic action, together with his wariness towards any display ofartistic ‘vanity’, signals a determination to avoid past mistakes.

Even so, the equilibrium Prospero manages to impose on the differ-ent objectives pursued by his art is under continual strain. Above all, itremains at risk from the propensity of the idealizing imagination tofeed off itself, becoming a self-involved mode of aesthetic contempla-tion divorced from political realities. Such indeed was to be the fate ofthe Caroline masque; just as his ‘library/Was dukedom large enough’ forthe former Duke of Milan, so, it has been argued, Charles I found in theWhitehall stage his ‘truest kingdom’, where the problems besetting hisreign could be magically banished or transmuted into more acceptablePlatonic forms.27 It is peculiarly apt, then, that the dangers of artisticsolipsism should be borne in on Prospero afresh during the performanceof his own masque in IV.1, when he momentarily forgets the need foraction confronting him in Caliban’s conspiracy, for the pleasures of see-ing his ideals realized in the pure, uncompromised harmonies of poetry,music and dance. In less obvious ways, the play continues to remindhim (and us) of the risks involved in neglecting political engagement,with its inbuilt frustrations, for the easier satisfactions of art. Prospero’sbetrothal masque is anticipated, in theme and spirit, by Gonzalo’sfantasy of a pastoral utopia ‘t’excel the golden age’ in II.1:

Gonzalo I’ th’ commonwealth I would, by contrariesExecute all things; for no kind of trafficWould I admit; no name of magistrate;Letters should not be known; riches, povertyAnd use of service, none; contract, succession,Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;



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No occupation; all men idle, all;And women too, but innocent and pure;No sovereignty –Sebastian Yet he would be king on’t.Antonio The latter end of his commonwealth forgetsThe beginning.

(II.1.141)

Gonzalo’s inability to grasp the difference between fiction and lifeblinds him to the glaring inconsistencies in his idyllic daydream – hiswish to lord it over a colonial settlement (‘plantation’) supposedly freefrom social hierarchies – and so exposes him to the ridicule ofSebastian and Antonio. To equate Prospero with Gonzalo would bewrong, of course; the one is not half so politically naive as the other. IfProspero’s imaginary commonwealth echoes the Neapolitan’s in somerespects, it also offers a riposte to the muddled idealism of the latter.Instead of trusting nature to manage itself and pour out its ‘foison’‘without sweat or endeavor’, his vision is predicated on the exercise of‘sovereignty’ (through his surrogate, Juno), hard work (specifically,agricultural labour) and self-discipline. It is precisely this sort of tough-mindedness which prevents him from falling into the same traps asGonzalo. But, for all Prospero’s vigilance and worldly acumen, HarryBerger is surely right to suggest that he has more than a touch ofGonzalo’s weakness for escapist fantasy, as well as sharing Ariel’s ten-dency to artistic self-indulgence, that ‘gratuitous delight in putting ona good show’ which makes theatrical display an end in itself.28 Perhapsthe greatest of the temptations he must learn to resist is the prospect ofreducing his enemies to a state of helpless puppetry in which they willbe compelled to respond to the dictates of the magician’s (or dramatur-gist’s) will. Such absolute control is not possible in the ‘real’ world,even under the most despotic regime. Prospero’s own past has taughthim that much, and when in his enigmatic epilogue he asks the audi-ence to release him, we may speculate that the ‘bands’ from which hebegs to be set free include the pleasures of artistic omnipotence, which,having made others his captives, now threaten to ensnare him. Thevery fact that he feels it necessary to give up his art before resuming hisduties as governor of Milan implies that there can be no easy accom-modation between them.

This is witnessed by his play-masque, which becomes the locus of anirresolvable struggle to reconcile his idealistic intentions with a morehard-headed pragmatism. To appreciate this, we need to take a closer



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look at its structure. Each group of characters on the island is putthrough a different sequence of visual and auditory illusions. Afterbeing made to endure the ‘direful spectacle of the wrack’ and Ariel’sterrifying fire-display, Ferdinand is brought safely ashore where heencounters the wondrous vision that is Miranda. Barely has he hadtime to savour the strong enchantment of this meeting, before it isrudely dispelled by Prospero, who subjects the prince to hard labourand, having satisfied himself that his future son-in-law has sufficientlyatoned for his ‘faults’ (IV.1.1–2), treats him and Miranda to thebetrothal masque. Alonso and his companions are similarly presentedwith an inviting banquet which is abruptly snatched away by Arielwho, in his nightmarish guise as Harpy, reads them a lecture on theirpast crimes. On the guilty courtiers is then inflicted a period of mentaltorment that ends when they are pardoned by Prospero and recom-pensed with a ‘discovery scene’, the sight of Ferdinand and Mirandaplaying at chess. Even Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano are put throughan abbreviated version of the same sequence; first lured by Ariel’s tabor-playing on a painful treck around they island, they are tempted with adisplay of ‘glistering apparel’ before being put to flight by Prospero’scanine spirits. It is not difficult to discern an overarching pattern here:a fear-inducing spectacle is followed in each case by a more enticingapparition, which emblematically offers to satisfy the beholder’s deep-est and most morally suspect desires, only to disappoint them byrevealing itself as an ‘enchanted trifle’ sent to ‘abuse’ the eyes andmind.29 Succumbing to this delusion results in a period of hardship,which is eventually offset – in the case of Alonso and the lovers – bythe granting of a ‘rare vision’. This scheme of purgatorial suffering lead-ing, in principle at least, to spiritual insight and rehabilitation fits withthe redemptive paradigm identified by Northrop Frye and others in theplay.30 It concurs too with the masque’s emphasis on moral transforma-tion, a motif frequently enacted by the shift from an illusory show offalse pleasures to a more substantive and lasting ‘vision of delight’.31

Yet in tracing such a clear redemptive design in Prospero’s play-masque, we are constructing a version of it that is altogether simplerand tidier than the one The Tempest gives us. In so doing, we riskimputing to this ‘god o’ th’ island’ a greater degree of prescience andcertitude than he in fact shows, as well as smoothing over inconsisten-cies in his ‘project’. It is worth reminding ourselves that at no pointdoes he specify what end he has in view when ordering Ariel and hisfellow spirits to stage their shows for the shipwrecked courtiers.Moreover, the courtiers themselves experience these illusions not as



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part of a carefully crafted sequence, but as discrete and unrelatedmoments for which the past supplies no prologue. We are thus con-fronted with the possibility that, so far from having a coherent, fullyworked out plan, Prospero is basically feeling his way as he goes along.This hypothesis gains substance if we pause to examine one of the keymoments in the play-masque. In III.3, Ariel, having caused the banquetto vanish, passes judgement on the ‘three men of sin’ (Alonso, Antonioand Sebastian), expounding their torment as the action of outragedheavenly ‘pow’rs’, whose retribution can only be forestalled by meansof ‘heart’s sorrow, / And a clear life ensuing’ (l.81). As usual, Ariel isfollowing his master’s script to the letter here (l.85), and the desireit bespeaks to bring about moral reform through suffering seemsunequivocal. Ethical concerns are, however, conspicuously absent fromProspero’s reaction to the show. First, he congratulates Ariel and his‘meaner ministers’ on their bravura performance with undisguisedrelish: ‘Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou / Perform’d, my Ariel;a grace it had, devouring’ (l.83). Then he proceeds to trumpet theefficacy of his ‘high charms’ in reducing his enemies to a state ofdistracted helplessness, declaring ‘they now are in my pow’r’ (l.92). Inshort, what we seem to be witnessing here is the didactic imperativejostling for precedence with, on the one hand, a simple aestheticappreciation of Ariel’s ‘quaint’ devices, and, on the other, the desire forpolitical mastery, expressed as the urge to subjugate others to his ownvolition. This ambiguous stance is reflected in many of Prospero’s state-ments concerning his art; we encounter it again, for example, in hishabit of disparaging as a mere ‘trick’ or ‘vanity’ devices whose moralefficacy he elsewhere takes for granted.

The absence of a single, coherent strategy which such contradictionsreflect emerges most sharply at the beginning of Act V. Despite theconfident tone with which Prospero announces the imminent end ofhis labours, he seems curiously irresolute, looking for assistance incompleting his script to Ariel, who reminds him of what has beenachieved and outlines a possible denouement. Under his servant’sdelicate coaching, he arrives at a decision:

Ariel Your charm so strongly works ’emThat if you now beheld them, your affectionsWould become tender.Prospero Dost thou think so, spirit?Ariel Mine would, sir, were I human.Prospero And mine shall …



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Though with their high wrongs I am strook to th’ quick,Yet, with my nobler reason, ’gainst my furyDo I take part. The rarer action isIn virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent,The sole drift of my purpose doth extendNot a frown further.

(V.1.17)

In announcing its outcome, Prospero retrospectively confirms thestruggle between ‘virtue’ (the desire to redeem) and ‘vengeance’ (thedesire to punish) that we have seen enacted not as a process of innerdebate recorded in soliloquy, but in the discontinuities of the play-masque itself. Assuming (wrongly, as it transpires) that both the mainaims of his art – to bring the guilty courtiers to his mercy and a state ofpenitence – have been accomplished, he vows henceforth to do with-out his ‘high charms’. As the dramatic postscript to this momentreveals, though, neither the proposed renunciation of his magic norhis opting for virtue over vengeance are sufficient to heal the self-divisions within his mind and ‘project’, which, if anything, grow moreacute in the final scene. The point I wish to make here is that, over andabove their function as an index of Prospero’s psychological confusion,these divisions can be read as a comment on the structural tensionsinherent in a genre (the court masque) composed of a volatile amal-gam of aesthetic, didactic and political elements.

In addition to being subjected to these internal centrifugal pressures,Prospero’s ‘project’ is further unsettled by its involvement with otherways of seeing. For it is not solely his ‘present fancies’ that are enactedin the play-masque; the imaginative lives of the island’s other inhabi-tants also become caught up in its symbolic structure. From very earlyon, these competing points of view are locked in a complex interactionand struggle for domination. The process is initiated in I.2 byProspero’s narration of events prior to the dramatic action, which issupplemented and, to varying degrees, contested by the alternative ver-sions of the past produced by Miranda, Ariel and Caliban, all of whomsee different things in the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’ (l.50).32

Prospero’s preferred tactic for dealing with these memories is to inte-grate them into his own history wherever possible, while at the sametime emphasizing their deficiencies and hence their subordinate rela-tionship to his authoritative metanarrative. As little more than ablurred fragment, Miranda’s childhood recollections are easily absorbedinto the story her father has to tell. Ariel and Caliban, being much less



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biddable, present a greater problem. Reminded by Ariel of his promiseto release the ‘dainty’ spirit, Prospero retaliates by accusing the latter ofbeing partial and selective in his account of the past, especially wherehis dealings with Sycorax are concerned (‘I must / Once in a monthrecount what thou hast been, / Which thou forget’st’ (l.261)). Caliban’stale of usurpation and harsh treatment at Prospero’s hands is simplydismissed, as the kind of outrageous fabrication a ‘most lying slave’might be expected to concoct (ll.344–8). Yet although this initialencounter with his two servants demonstrates Prospero’s power to foisthis version of history on others, it should be noted that their dissent-ing voices are not suppressed, and their rival versions retracted underthreat of violence before they have been fully registered. This willing-ness to give space, if not necessarily a clear endorsement, to alterna-tive, unauthorized constructions of the past is consistent with theplay’s practice of foregrounding the relativity of perception.33 Formuch of the action, Ariel is present to his master’s sight, but ‘invisible /To every eyeball else’ (I.2.302). To the optimistic Gonzalo the islandlooks marvellously lush and life-sustaining, whereas to Antonio’s andSebastian’s cynical eyes the same landscape appears utterly barren andinhospitable (II.1.35–59). The moral callousness of this same ‘brace oflords’ also renders them insensible to the ‘solemn music’ that lullstheir companions asleep; conversely, the more high-minded amongthis group of castaways apparently do not hear the judgement pro-nounced by Ariel on the guilty courtiers, and so forth. Insofar as eachof these perceptions is, in some obvious way, partial, occlusive orskewed by the beholder’s temperament or self-interest, they may seem,like the supposedly faulty memories of Ariel and Caliban, to confirmthe superior truth vested in Prospero’s representation of past and pre-sent realities. The cumulative effect, however, of introducing this kindof narrative diversity – especially in the context of a broader patternof perceptual differences – is to call into question the centrality ofProspero’s vision and thus the degree of hegemonic control it is able toexert.

The force of this challenge becomes apparent when we consider thepractical consequences that flow from such differences of view. In sev-eral cases they nurture forms of rebellion more serious than any nor-mally tolerated by the masque. One instance where we are invited tomake a causal connection of this type, between imaginative and politi-cal dissent, is in the context of the fantasies of riches and empower-ment which form a ‘prologue’ to Antonio’s dramatically conceived‘plot’ to kill Alonso, and Caliban’s parallel conspiracy against Prospero.



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Like the vision of a crown dropping on Sebastian’s head conjuredup by Antonio’s ‘strong imagination’ in II.1, Caliban’s dream of heav-enly riches ready to drop upon him is described in terms that directlyevoke a masquing apotheosis, and both parodically subvert theutopian vision staged in Prospero’s masque, where ‘honour, riches,[and] marriage blessing’ are showered upon the betrothed couple byCeres and Juno:

Sometimes a thousand twangling instrumentsWill hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,That, if I had wak’d after long sleep,Will make me sleep again, and then, in dreaming,The clouds methought would open, and show richesReady to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d,I cried to dream again.

(III.2.132)

Prospero’s relationship to the plots against his own and Alonso’s life isprofoundly ambiguous. Not only are they instigated under his moni-toring gaze and with his tacit permission, but he continues, throughAriel, to intervene in their development before finally aborting them.So extensive is his involvement in these plots in fact, that it is hard toescape the conclusion that they are an integral part of his ‘project’,that they have been written into his own play-masque, to which theystand in broadly the same relationship as the anti-masque. The logicbehind this strategy is presumably none other than the logic of thegenre it invokes: Prospero, we may infer, has calculated that the treach-erous schemes hatched by Caliban and Antonio will serve as a usefulfoil for the harmonious order affirmed in the betrothal masque (ofwhich they are a debased or demonic reflection), just as their eventualoverthrow will secure his moral and political supremacy as the island’s‘god of power’. In any case, Prospero’s handling of these various con-spiracies would seem to validate a thesis which has been stronglyargued in recent years by new historicist critics, who situate the play inthe context of early English colonialism.34 According to this reading,the various disruptive energies at work on the island are activated byProspero for his own ends, as a means of legitimizing his oppressiverule, and are therefore inevitably recuperated by the dominant order.However eloquently or forcefully expressed, Caliban’s protests, like hisplot, are robbed of any real subversive charge, since no dissent can existfor which allowance has not already been made. Moreover, it is usually



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suggested that the play itself (being heavily invested in the colonialistenterprise) colludes with the process of containment put in place byProspero. But it can be argued, on the contrary, that the play deliber-ately distances itself from this scenario by locating it precisely as thedefining fantasy of the masque, a fiction only proper to this genre andone that has no validity beyond its confines. For, in marked contrast tothe ease with which he subdued the elements unleashed on his ordersin the storm scene, Prospero finds that he cannot fully master the oppo-sitional forces inscribed in these plots, having once set them in motion.

Beyond a certain point, the deviant imaginations of the island’sinhabitants resist Prospero’s attempts to incorporate them into hisoverarching ‘project’, refusing to be confined to a supporting role inhis play-masque. It is Caliban, of course, who most clearly personifiesthis refusal. The friction between him and his master constitutes thedramatic nub of the play, and the betrothal masque is, appropriately,the place where this hostility is brought to a head. The masque itselfrepresents the purest expression of Prospero’s utopian ideals, the high-water mark of his faith in the power of a sublime illusion to redeemhumanity and institute a beneficent new moral and social order. Asbefits the occasion, its ‘majestic vision’ projects a multi-levelled con-cord like that celebrated in Jonson’s marriage masque, Hymenaei.35 Theharmonious union of the elements – figured by Iris’s ‘heavenly bow’,which connects Juno’s ‘airy’ sphere with Ceres’s ‘proud earth’ – is repli-cated in the human institution of marriage, and, by implication, in theimpending political union of Milan and Naples. The ‘graceful dance’ ofnymphs and reapers, with its balancing of water against earth and coldagainst heat, functions as the visual summation of this argument, atthe same time as it brings to symbolic fruition the cycle of cultivatednature. This, the masque’s second theme, takes us straight from land-scape of ‘spungy April’ to the ‘foison plenty’ of high summer; there isno winter here: ‘Spring come to you at the farthest, / In the very end ofharvest!’ (IV.1.114).36 As in the Jacobean court masques, this ideal ofharmonious order, fertility and plenitude, triumphs through the ritualexpulsion of opposing forces. Ferdinand’s pledge not to indulge inpremarital sex is all that is needed to dispel the ‘wanton charm’ ofVenus and Cupid, whose plot against the lovers threatens a repetitionof the rape of Proserpine – an event that was traditionally construed asan analogue of the Fall because it brought death and wintery sterilityinto the world. However, this victory is ironically undone whenProspero’s edenic vision – from which all destructive agencies havebeen effortlessly exorcized – collapses at the mere thought of Caliban’s



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conspiracy. The Folio stage direction states that the dance of nymphsand reapers is broken off when ‘Prospero starts suddenly, and speaks;after which, to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavilyvanish’. As Ernest Gilman rightly notes, the cacophany which marksCaliban’s psychic eruption into the masque identifies this moment withthe commencement of the anti-masque.37 But the differences are justas significant. No anti-masquer on the Whitehall stage was ever permit-ted to generate the degree of anxiety Caliban arouses in Prospero.Shakespeare is at pains to underline this deviation from masquing con-ventions, forcing us to notice the intensity of Prospero’s reactionthrough the comments of Ferdinand and Miranda who are startled byhis outburst of ‘anger, so distemper’d’ (ll.143–5). Critics too have beenpuzzled by the excessive nature of his agitation, pointing out that hehas already taken to steps to thwart the conspiracy, which is, in anycase, too inept in the execution to do much damage. But the absenceof any obvious dramatic justification should perhaps be taken as a cueto look elsewhere for the real source of his disquiet.

Caliban’s capacity to perturb derives chiefly, I suggest, from hismonstrous appearance and what this stands for. ‘Disproportion’d’,‘misshapen’, and unclassifiable in its bewildering heterogeneity(Trinculo, for one, has trouble making out who or what this ‘moon-calf’ is, ‘being but half a fish and half a monster’ (III.2.29), epitomizingthe play’s preoccupation with the ‘strange’ and outlandish (V.1.290),his physical form aligns him with the aesthetic tradition of thegrotesque – and so, by extension, with the comically deformed crea-tures of the anti-masque.38 The fullest definition of this artistic style inthe period is that supplied by Vasari in his Vite:

The grotesque is a free and very humorous style of painting pro-duced by the ancients for the decoration of vacant spaces in someplaces where only things positioned high up are suitable. For thispurpose they fashioned monsters deformed by a freak of nature orby the whim and fancy of the workmen, who in these grotesque pic-tures make things without respect for any rule, attaching to thefinest thread a weight that it cannot support, to a horse legs ofleaves, to a man the legs of a crane, and similar follies and nonsensewithout end. And he whose imagination worked in the strangestmanner was held to be the most able.39

What to make of this kind of grotesque imagery was very much a con-tested issue in the sixteenth century. The rediscovery in the 1480s of



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Nero’s villa, the Domus Aurea, with its decorative mural designs basedon the sort of whimsical, composite creations described by Vasari, initi-ated a vogue for ornamentation alla grottesca that spread from Italythroughout northern Europe. Despite its claim to antique origins, how-ever, the grotesque was widely perceived as transgressing classicalcanons of order, proportionality, decorum and verisimilitude. In awidely cited passage, Vitruvius had specifically condemned the deca-dent tastes of his age, which relished fantastic wall-painting regardlessof the fact that it contravened the laws of nature and mimesis bydepicting things which ‘neither are, nor can be, nor have been’.40 Hisinfluence and that of Horace, whose strictures regarding the dream-like, hybridized products of the poetic and pictorial imagination I dis-cussed earlier (p.63), lies behind the frequent attacks made on theinjudicious use of such ‘fantasmi vani e loro irragionevoli imagi-nazioni’ by Italian critics, especially those most deeply affected by thechastened spirit of the Counter-Reformation.41 As Nicole Dacos hasshown, the key issue at stake in this debate centred on the competingvalues of classical proscription and an imaginative licence that, asVasari said, was subject to no rule (‘senza alcuna regola’), since thegrotesque was deemed to be a pure product of the fantasia, that is, ofimaginative invention at its most wayward, capricious and unfettered.It is conceivable that Caliban’s appearance had additional resonancesfor the play’s original audiences; the grotesque, by now an embeddedand thoroughly domesticated part of English vernacular culture whereit mingled with gothic idioms, may have seemed to exemplify nativeresistance to the incursions of the Italianate aesthetic championed byInigo Jones.42 In any event, they are unlikely to have missed the crucialpoint that the visible characteristics assigned to Caliban amount to adirect rebuttal of the neoclassical ideals underpinning Prospero’smasque – ideals on which his entire moral authority depends.43

Given the controversial status of the grotesque in contemporaryartistic discourse, it is perhaps not surprising that Caliban’s mon-strously misshapen form is open to more than one reading.44 A strongNeoplatonic bias (combined with other cultural prejudices) leadsProspero to interpret his servant’s outward monstrosity as a sign ofinner spiritual deformity. Just as he reads Sycorax’s warped body asproof of her malicious nature (I.2.257), so he sees her son’s moraldegeneracy as inscribed in the flesh: ‘And as with age his body ugliergrows, / So his mind cankers’ (IV.1.191).45 At the same time, the exces-sive, irregular and aesthetically indecorous qualities of the grotesquebody become linked with a violation of decency and rule in their



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broader social senses. For Prospero, they connote Caliban’s refusal ofcivilized norms of behaviour, as evidenced by his complaint that thelatter is ‘as disproportion’d in his manners / As in his shape’ (V.1.291).(A similar collocation underlies the, probably non-authorial, designa-tion of Caliban as ‘a savage and deformed slave’ in the Folio list ofcharacters.) We have already seen in previous chapters how the idealof ‘due proportion’ was invested by Renaissance writers with a rangeof powerful ideological associations. Those of most immediate rele-vance to the present context can be traced back to a fable in Vitruvius’sDe Architectura. Book II narrates how the transition made by humanbeings from a peripatetic existence as hunter-gatherers to the establish-ment of settled, law-abiding agrarian communities coincided with theirdiscovery of the art of building and their first hesitant steps towardsmastering ‘the assured method of symmetry’.46 A parallel mythconcerning the origins of the art of persuasive discourse, which simi-larly marks man out from the beast, was elaborated around the sametime by Horace in his Ars Poetica, subsequently becoming one of themost overworked topoi in Renaissance discussions of rhetoric.47 ThusCaliban’s egregious ‘shape’, like his rejection of the colonizer’s giftof language (I.2.363–5), proclaims his exclusion from the civilized,highly regulated society founded upon the agricultural cycle whichis evoked in the betrothal masque. It is received, in short, as confirma-tion of his irredeemable bestiality along with all those other qualitiesthat make him, in his master’s eyes, ‘A devil, a born devil, on whosenature / Nurture can never stick’ (IV.1.188). Other members of theshipwrecked party take a less moralistic view of Caliban’s physicalgrotesqueness, one that reveals a seamier side of the colonialist project.For them, it is an invitation to commercial exploitation, a ludicrous,exotic freak of nature to be displayed before a public hungry for suchcuriosities back home (II.2.27–33, 67–78, V.1.263–6).48 Rather thanobliging us to accept either of these derogatory constructions ofCaliban’s appearance, however, the play allows us to see this as noth-ing more than the mark of his radical otherness, that which sets himapart from the European castaways as the representative of a type ofbeing / seeing wholly foreign to the cultural values enunciated byProspero in particular. Nowhere is this alterity of being more eloquentlyexpressed than in Caliban’s descriptions of ‘all the qualities o’ th’ isle’;the vision of the island disclosed in these speeches (cf. I.2.336–9,III.2.135–43) differs from that associated with the court masque inbeing rooted not in an abstract ideal but in the intimate knowledge ofmaterial objects, in an enumeration of heterogeneous particulars rather



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than the urge to weld these into an ordered whole. On this distinctlyunclassical way of seeing, the play bestows its most hauntingly lyricalverse and, with this, a certain legitimacy:

I prithee let me bring thee where crabs grow;And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,Show thee a jay’s nest, and instruct thee howTo snare the nimble marmazet. I’ll bring theeTo clust’ring filberts, and sometimes I’ll get theeYoung scamels from the rock.

(II.2.167)

Arguably, the dissolution of the masque impels Prospero into a reluc-tant recognition that this alien mode of perceiving the world possessesa vigorous life of its own which prohibits it from being simply ban-ished, assimilated or contained, and with which he must thereforereach some kind of accommodation.49

Prospero’s failure to convert Caliban to the values of the bravenew world imagined in the masque reflects ironically not only on hispersonal impotence in this regard, but on the inflated claims madeon behalf of the genre, inasmuch as it was supposedly empoweredto recreate actuality in its ideal image. That is to say, it raises the ques-tion of the beholder’s part in validating these spectacular productions.As I noted earlier, the court masque depended on the audience’scollusion to an unusual degree; on its ability to decipher the arcanemeanings which formed the ‘soul’ of such productions, and on thesense of wonder that made possible its inclusion in the mysteriesrevealed. ‘A writer should always trust somewhat to the capacity of thespectactor,’ wrote Jonson, ‘especially at these spectacles, where men,besides inquiring eyes, are understood to bring quick ears’.50 But hisconfidence in the audience’s powers of critical discernment was, asalways, mixed with a strong dose of insecurity and distrust. What doc-umentary evidence we have relating to the reception of the Whitehallentertainments suggests that there was some basis for these misgivings.For while some spectators appear to have been more interested (asJonson feared) in the brilliance of the visual mechanics than in pon-dering the deeper meaning of his poetic conceits, both attracted theirfair share of boredom and incomprehension.51 Prospero’s nervousinsistence that his instructions for the staging of his play-masque be‘performed to point’ (I.2.193, III.3.83–6, IV.1.49), together with hisrepeated demands that others bestow on both him and it the right



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quality of attention (I.2.36–8, 87, 106, 453, IV.1.59), similarly seems toreflect an awareness of just how vital the beholder’s participation isto the success of these shows, and a commensurate anxiety that thisfunction will not be properly discharged. And his fears also prove to bewell-founded. The responses elicited by his play-masque do not con-form to the programmatic ideals laid down by theorists of the genre. Inparticular, the belief which Prospero shares with Jonson in the effec-tiveness of theatrical spectacle as a vehicle for philosophical indoctri-nation and moral persuasion, capable of speaking to the mind as wellas the senses, is made to appear wildly over-optimistic.52 None of thosewho witness Ariel’s vanishing banquet seems willing or able to decodethe moral allegory secreted within its visual imagery. Nor, despiteProspero’s (and Gonzalo’s) assertions to the contrary (III.3.104–6,V.1.28, 77), are there unequivocal grounds for supposing that his play-masque has succeeded in pricking the conscience as well as pinchingthe body, in inducing remorse as opposed to merely befuddling thesenses. Of the shipwrecked courtiers, Alonso is the only one to expressregret for his past crimes, yet it is unclear how far this is a consequenceof what he has seen on the island, rather than the feelings of repressedguilt and suicidal despair he has manifested all along.53 In questionhere is not just the efficacy of the masque as a rhetorical form, but thevery possibility of persuasion. Like Hamlet before him, Prospero dis-covers that although theatrical devices can be used successfully tomanipulate the beholder’s viewpoint, it does not follow that they canrefashion or ‘new create’ the beholder’s inner self.

Then there is the matter of the play’s ironic anatomization of won-der, the cardinal emotion of the masque.54 Like Antony and Cleopatra,Prospero sets great store by the irresistible power of wonder as a devicefor winning over an audience, though he relies upon feats of opticalmagic, not the sublime or ‘grand’ style, to achieve this. In this, he isattuned to the spirit of an age that had elevated the marvellous into anessential component of drama, especially tragedy. Capitalizing on theauthority of Aristotle’s recently rediscovered Poetics which designatedwonder together with pleasure as the chief end of poetry, literary criticsof the Italian Cinquecento maintained that this most sought-after effectcould be produced by a variety of means, including elevated language,unexpected happenings and other plot contrivances as well as (cru-cially) visual spectacle.55 In a parallel development noted earlier (p.77),illusionistic works of art were valued in direct proportion to their abil-ity to evoke astonishment (meraviglia) in the beholder.56 So it was moreor less inevitable that the masque, with its amazingly lifelike scenery,



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would come to be associated with this emotion. A product of thingsstrange, extraordinary and ‘almost beyond credit’, wonder is typicallyaroused by that which exceeds normal experience, that which eludesour familiar ontological systems or categories. Yet while it outstripsrational comprehension and offends our sense of probability, themarvellous, paradoxically, exacts a certain kind of belief. Analys-ing the role of wonder in the masque, Orgel and Strong define thisNeoplatonically, as arising from a heightened state of consciousnesscapable of apprehending the essential form of perfection.57 But a moreappropriate paradigm, I suggest, lay at hand in the religious miracle,which was, after all, one of the chief instruments for generating beliefaccording to Christian doctrine. In support of this reading, it should benoted that the marvellous apparitions and events which figure soprominently in Shakespeare’s late plays are as a rule infused with reli-gious affectivity, with a vivid intuition of supernatural forces at work;thus Paulina, preparing to reanimate Hermione’s statue and ‘strike allthat look upon with marvel’, tells the expectant beholders, ‘It isrequir’d / You do awake your faith’ (Winter’s Tale, V.3.94; my emphasis).In the Jacobean court masques the sense of wonder normally reservedfor the inscrutable operations of divinity was transferred to themonarch or his agents. This appropriation of religious discourse and itsaccompanying aura of mystery for secular ends is foregrounded in oneof Jonson’s later masques, where the figure of ‘Fant’sy’, together withher companion ‘Wonder’, identifies James I as the ‘god’ ‘whose pres-ence maketh this perpetual spring’, having previously declared withunconscious irony, ‘How better than they are are all things made / Bywonder!’.58 The process of debasement implicit in this awakening of asense of the miraculous, as a means of dignifying the often sordid prac-ticalities of rule by investing them with false mystery, is relentlesslylaid bare in The Tempest.

Like the Stuart monarchs deified by the masque, Prospero con-sciously exploits the mystificatory effects of wonder as part of whatPaul Brown has called the ‘euphemization’ of power-politics in theplay. Thus he nurtures the confusions of the shipwrecked courtierswho mistake his actions for those of providence or some god by keep-ing them in ignorance of true causes right up to and beyond thedenouement (V.1.245–51). The pious Gonzalo needs little persuadingthat it is ‘you gods … that have chalk’d forth the way / Which broughtus hither’ (V.1.201), and several of the castaways share his convictionthat ‘this is no mortal business’ (I.2.407). By contrast, we (the play’saudience) are kept uncomfortably aware, as we are not in the other late



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plays where the supernatural is less ambiguously present, that the deityin question is merely human and the motives governing his orchestra-tion of events on the island far from godlike. A rather different abuseof wonder is enacted by Antonio and Sebastian. On seeing the magicalbanquet served in by ‘strange shapes’, they are moved to declare theirnew-found belief in this and all such improbable curiosities:

Sebastian A living drollery. Now I will believeThat there are unicorns; that in ArabiaThere is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenixAt this hour reigning there.Antonio I’ll believe both;And what does else want credit, come to me,And I’ll be sworn ’tis true. Travellers ne’er did lie,Though fools at home condemn ’em.

(III.3.21)

Whatever else it may involve, the faith of two such cynical materialistsis unlikely to extend to any inkling of higher truths. Here it simplyseems to indicate a recognition of incontrovertible facts. Where won-der is not literalized, it is absurdly misplaced, becoming implicated (asin the discourses associated with the New World) with credulity, super-stition and idolatry. The gullibility displayed by Miranda (whose namespecifically identifies her with this emotion) exceeds what might beexpected even given her lack of experience. She persists in her beliefthat Ferdinand is an immortal ‘spirit’, for example, despite being cor-rected on this point (I.2.410–20). Her enraptured contemplation of theguilty courtiers is still more disturbing:

O wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new worldThat has such people in’t!

(V.1.181)

Prospero’s wry aside, ‘’tis new to thee’, compounds our unease by hint-ing at the disenchantment that inevitably lies in wait for this naivemarveller. Moreover, the phrasing of Miranda’s speech clearly invites usto make the connection with Caliban’s ludicrously incongruous adora-tion of the ‘brave god’ Stephano and his ‘celestial liquor’. His dealingswith his idol will quickly disabuse Caliban of his awe, as he discovers



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himself to have been a ‘most ridiculous monster, to make a wonder ofa poor drunkard!’ (II.2.165, cf. V.1.296–8). Yet his belated conversion to‘grace’ in the final scene is almost as suspect, in that, like Miranda’secstatic response, it appears to be provoked more by the impressiveappearance of the well-dressed courtiers (and perhaps fear of punish-ment, in his case) than by any genuine access of spiritual insight. Thuswhile certain characters (Antonio, Sebastian, and Caliban) are excludedfrom the apotheosis of Prospero’s play-masque by their insensibility toits visionary didacticism, those who participate in it through theircapacity for wonder (Gonzalo, Alonso, Ferdinand, Miranda) do so inwhat has been revealed to be a state of false consciousness.

Among the spectators estranged from the miraculous enchantmentsand revelations of the final scene we must number Prospero himself. Atevery stage, his confidence in the transformative powers of his art hasbeen shot through with an awareness of its inherent risks and limita-tions. But it is in the ‘revels’ speech, issuing directly out of the crisisprecipitated by the collapse of the betrothal masque, that this darkerview thrusts itself to the fore. When Ferdinand voices the romanticlonging to remain forever a dweller in the ‘paradise’ conjured up Ceresand Juno, he is firmly recalled to reality by his future father-in-law,who reminds him that what he covets is nothing more than ‘thin air’.This is followed by the illusionist’s categoric dismissal of his own‘majestic vision’ as an ‘insubstantial pageant’ which leaves no perma-nent trace, ‘not a rack behind’ (IV.1.146–58). Observations on theemptiness of such courtly shows and their purely transitory effect werenothing new; frequent repetition, not least by the masque writersthemselves, had sapped their critical force.59 That Prospero shouldturn these clichés against what is unquestionably the most seriousartistic statement of his ideals is nevertheless unsettling. (It sur-prises us in much the same way as Cleopatra’s claim that her ‘fancy’simages’ possess the weight and substance of ‘nature’s piece’, which itexactly reverses.) The comprehensive disillusionment with the masqueexpressed here is presumably a major factor behind Prospero’s decisionto renounce what he disparagingly refers to as his ‘rough magic’. Yetdespite his loss of faith in the masque’s educative powers, in its capac-ity to bring about a genuine ‘sea-change’ in the beholder, he continuesto exploit this artistic form for his own ends. The promised renuncia-tion of his magical powers, like the promised release of Ariel, is repeat-edly deferred in the final scene, while he persists in bringing forthfresh wonders and prolonging the courtiers’ astonishment, as thoughreluctant to forego the advantage which their helpless stupefaction



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gives him over them. In clinging to his masquing strategems anddevices, Prospero perpetuates the tensions we have seen to inhabitthem. The jarring mixture of magnanimity and naked compulsiondirected at political ends in his pardoning of Antonio (V.1.130–4) isthe starkest illustration of this. Familiar contradictions of this kindbecome overlaid with, and exacerbated by, new self-divisions, asProspero strives uneasily to maintain his double role as chief contriverand detached critic of the masque, master of ceremonies in whosemoral and aesthetic viability he no longer believes. These tensionsreach their height with the ‘discovery’ of Ferdinand and Miranda‘wrangl[ing]’ over a game of chess – a moment which, as David Lindleynotes, plays on the dissolution of the masque, by re-enacting that sym-bolic climax when performers mingled with members of the audienceand illusion became reality.60

Significantly, it is left to others – notably those two ingenuous opti-mists, Miranda (l.181–4) and Gonzalo (l.200–13) – to proclaim thecoming into being of Prospero’s brave new world, while its makerwatches and comments sceptically from the sidelines. If in this lastscene, we seem, as Howard Felperin remarks, to be ‘at the furthestremove possible from the spells, magic, spectacle and wonder of anaive romance consciousness’, it is largely because we are invited towitness proceedings through Prospero’s detached and disaffected gaze.61

With the play-masque over and its immediate political aims, if notmuch else, accomplished, he does at last relinquish his ‘charms’, stand-ing before us a fallible and infirm old man reliant on our ‘indulgence’to rescue him from ‘despair’. His self-confessed helplessness hints at theimaginary nature of the magical powers displayed in the court masque,which are shown to be co-terminous with the theatrical fictions thataffirmed their existence. But perhaps the most subversive touch isreserved to last. By appealing to the audience for forgiveness, Prosperounexpectedly shifts control over the dramatic perspective, and theabsolute power (to paralyse, confine, pardon, and so on) it connotes,away from himself and onto the individual spectators. The political sig-nificance of this gesture can surely not have escaped the play’s plebeianaudiences at the Globe, as the ruler’s self-assigned prerogative to mouldthe views of his people, undermined and dispersed by the precedingaction, is finally undone.



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Notes

226

Preface

1 See Lessing, Laokoön, trans. Sir Robert Phillimore (London, 1905), andWellek, ‘The Parallelism between Literature and the Arts’, English InstituteAnnual 41 (1942) 29–63. For a more recent and more nuanced assessment ofthe possible future directions of interarts criticism, see Paul and SvetlanaAlpers, ‘Ut Pictura Noesis? Criticism in Literary Studies and Art History’, NewLiterary History 3.3 (1972) 437–58.

2 See, for example, Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Trans-formations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (New York, 1956); and ArnoldHauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, 2vols (New York, 1965).

3 Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, pp.7, 12.4 The latter phrase is taken from Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism

(Brighton, 1987). Likewise, it has been argued that the visual arts embodyculturally specific modes of perceiving the world. See, especially, John Berger,Ways of Seeing (London, 1972).

1 Alberti, As You Like It, andthe Process of Invention

1 Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson and ed. Martin Kemp(London, 1991) p.88. All future page references in the text are to this edition.

2 Thereafter the term ‘invention’ was widely adopted into discussion of thevisual arts. See, for example, Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators:Humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition(Oxford, 1971) p.101, Vasari-Milanesi, I, 169–74, and Mark Roskill trans. anded., Dolce’s “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York,1968) p.117.

3 For an overview of the development of ut pictura discourse and the contesta-tion of its authority by Burke and Lessing in the mid-eighteenth century, seeJean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and EnglishPoetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958).

4 See further Chapter 3, and cf. Harry Berger’s suggestive comments in ‘TheRenaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World’, in Second Worldand Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley, Los Angelesand London, 1988) pp.17–25. Berger’s argument anticipates mine to theextent that he sees Alberti’s perspective scheme and the ‘green world’ ofShakespearean comedy as parallel instances of a Renaissance predispositionto construct hypothetical worlds, fictive heterocosms, in which tensions areideally resolved.

5 See Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, p.129.


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06 See, for example, Clark Hulse, The Rule in Art: Literature and Painting in theRenaissance (Chicago and London, 1990) p.61. On the rhetorical genealogyof Alberti’s theory of composition, see also Creighton E. Gilbert, ‘AntiqueFrameworks for Renaissance Art Theory: Alberti and Pino’, Marsyas 3(1943–5) 87–106, D.E. Wright, ‘Alberti’s De Pictura: Its Literary Structure andPurpose’, JWCI 47 (1984) 52–71, and Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric(Oxford, 1988) pp.342–53.

07 Giotto and the Orators, p.131.08 See the opening passage of Horace’s Ars Poetica in T.S. Dorsch ed., Classical

Literary Criticism (London, 1965) p.79. The implications of this locus classi-cus for poetry and painting are examined further in Chapter 3.

09 Cf. Cicero, De Oratore, III.54.206. On the importance attached to varying byRenaissance artists in theory and practice, see Michael Baxandall, Paintingand Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1972) pp.133–5, and DavidSummers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, 1981) chap.5.

10 IX.1.11, cf. II.13.8–12. Earlier, Quintilian appeared to extend this visualanalogy to the whole field of rhetorical expression, defining ‘figura’ asapplicable to ‘any form in which thought is expressed, just as it is to bodieswhich, whatever their composition, must have some shape’ (IX.1.10).

11 For a fuller discussion of this aspect of ut pictura discourse, see Chapter 4.12 Censuring unrestrained copia was itself a rhetorical commonplace. Advising

the trainee orator to acquire a ‘copious supply of words and matter’,Quintilian had been careful to differentiate this from an indiscriminateheaping up of synonyms (10.1.5–14). The warning was echoed even bythose like Erasmus (see below) who were fervent advocates of verbal abun-dance. But the most forthright attack came from Francis Bacon, who com-plained that the ‘affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech’cultivated by the humanists ‘grew speedily to an excess; for men began tohunt more after words than matter; more after … the varying and illustra-tion of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter,worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth ofjudgment’ (Arthur Johnston ed., ‘The Advancement of Learning’ and ‘NewAtlantis’ (Oxford, 1974) p.24).

13 See, for example, C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959; repr.Princeton, 1972) chap.9; Anne Barton, ‘As You Like it and Twelfth Night:Shakespeare’s Sense of an Ending’, in M. Bradbury and D.J. Palmer eds,Shakespeare’s Comedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14 (London, 1972)pp.160–80; and Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (Londonand New York, 1980) chap.10.

14 Harold Jenkins, ‘As You Like It ’, SS 8 (1955) 50. Jenkins’s classic account ofthis technique has often been recapitulated.

15 See T.W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latin & Lesse Greeke (Urbana,1944) I, 77–9, II, 179–81. The impact of Erasmus’s compositional methodol-ogy on humanistic programmes of instruction across northern Europe isreassessed in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to theHumanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-CenturyEurope (London, 1986).

16 The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (Hemel Hempstead,1992) p.46. On the literary influence of De Copia, see also Emrys Jones, The

Notes 227


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Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1977) pp.9–13, and Marion Trousdale,Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (London, 1982) chap.3.

17 While Love’s Labours’ Lost may seem a more suitable candidate for the kindof linguistic analysis I am proposing here, it is less overtly interested in thevisual possibilities of ‘painted rhetoric’. Nevertheless, its self-consciousparading of standard compositional techniques is relevant to my argumentinsofar as it suggests that these comedies were pitched at a rhetorically alertaudience, many of whom would have been familiar with these same tech-niques from their schooldays.

18 Craig R. Thompson, Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and EducationalWritings 2, XXIV (Toronto, 1978) trans. Betty I. Knott, Copia: Foundationsof the Abundant Style, p.302. Compare the use of visual metaphor inQuintilian, Institutio, IX.1.41.

19 Ibid, p.295.20 See Agnes Latham’s gloss on this passage in the Arden edition (1975) p.50.

Her reading is supported by the Oxford edition (1994) p.145.21 On commonplace, see Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin

Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953) pp.79–105, Walter J.Ong, ‘Commonplace Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger and Shakespeare’,in R.R. Bolgar ed., Classical Influences on European Culture, 1500–1700(Cambridge, 1976) pp.91–126, and Lynette Hunter ed., Toward a Definitionof Topos: Approaches to Anagogical Reasoning (London, 1992).

22 De Copia, p.638. On the importance of the commonplace book method inhumanist culture as an aid to composition and imitation, see R.R. Bolgar,The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954) pp.270–5. Likeso many of Erasmus’s pedagogic works (including the Adagia and theParabolae sive similia), De Copia can itself be seen as a glorified common-place book.

23 On the play’s handling of these themes, see John Shaw, ‘Fortune and Naturein As You Like It ’, SQ 6 (1955) 45–50, and Rawdon Wilson, ‘The Way toArden: Attitudes to Time in As You Like It ’, SQ 26 (1975) 16–24.

24 Aristotle, Topica, I.1. Cf. his Rhetoric, I.1 (‘Rhetoric is the counterpart ofdialectic, for both have to do with such things as fall, in a way, within therealm of common knowledge, things that do not belong to any one science’).

25 J.R. McNally, ‘Rudolph Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica Libri Tres: ATranslation of Selected Chapters’, Speech Monographs, 34, 4 (November,1967) 396. This form of reasoning gained prominence in the sixteenth cen-tury as a result of the displacement of Scholastic logic by a reformulatedhumanist dialectic centred on the ‘places’ and concerned with forms ofargument that are ‘compelling but not amenable to analysis within tradi-tional formal logic’. It became enshrined in school and university curricula,which encouraged both spoken and written forms of disputation. See LisaJardine, ‘Humanistic Logic’, in Charles B. Schmitt et al. eds., The CambridgeHistory of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988) pp.173–98, and PeterMack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoricand Dialectic (Leiden, 1993). On the English context, see W.S. Howell, Logicand Rhetoric in England 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1956), and Lisa Jardine, ‘ThePlace of Dialectical Teaching in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge’, Studies in theRenaissance 21 (1974) 31–62.

228 Notes


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26 The Rule of Reason, conteinyng the Arte of Logique (1551; revised ed., London,1553), p.37r.

27 See Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (1958; repr.Cambridge, Mass., 1958) p.100. Terence Cave has shown how Agricola’semphasis on the topoi as a source of verbal abundance prefigures Erasmus’sapproach in De Copia, by allowing subject matter to proliferate way beyond‘the rigorous pathways of dialectic’ (The Cornucopian Text: Problems ofWriting in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979) pp.13–19).

28 In fact, Erasmus treats the ‘places’ only cursorily, referring the reader tostandard expositions by Aristotle, Boethius, Cicero and Quintilian. Book IIof De Copia gives far greater weight to analogical arguments (i.e. induction),including historical and fictional examples, similes and fables.

29 Rule of Reason, p.60v.30 This inference is supported by the moment in III.2 where Orlando and

Jacques accuse each other of deriving their wit from stale aphorisms‘conn’d’ out of rings or painted cloths.

31 Cf. I.3.130–1, III.2.308–11, V.4.191–2.32 See the introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (London and

New York, 1932) p.xxiv.33 See Ong, Ramus, pp.118–19, and Sister Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance

Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York, 1962) pp.113–14. Ong notes howthe Greek and Latin terms for wood (�� and silva), with their connotationsof an abundance of raw material that must be given form or suitablyarranged, conditioned the Renaissance understanding of topos and werereflected in the titles of commonplace books, most famously Jonson’s Timber,or discoveries upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily readings.

34 For the hunting analogy, see Cicero De Oratore, 2.34.146–7, and QuintilianInstitutio, 5.10.20–2.

35 The usual solution is to see the forest as a fusion of Shakespeare’s nativeWarwickshire and the traditional landscape of pastoral: see, for example,E.C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition (St Albans, Herts, 1949)p.90. Recently, there has been a (misconceived, I believe) trend towards ahistorical literalization of Arden, which has been situated in the context ofcontemporary usage of the forest for pasturing (A. Stuart Daley, ‘Where arethe Woods in As You Like It?’ SQ 34 (1983) 172–80), and the enclosure ofwoodlands (Richard Wilson, ‘ “Like the Old Robin Hood”: As You Like It andthe Enclosure Riots’, SQ 43 (1992) 1–19).

36 See Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1969), and Mary Carruthers,The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge,1990). The various rhetorical meanings of topos are, if not exactly inter-changeable, closely related, since each functions as a prop to invention byenabling conceptual material to be stored and retrieved.

37 Cicero, De Oratore, 2.87.360. Cf. Ad Herennium 3.16.30. The substitution ofimages reviewed with the mind’s eye for the reading of texts is madeexplicit by Thomas Wilson: ‘The placing of these Images, is like untowordes written … The utterance and using of them, is like unto reading’(G.H. Mair ed., Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, 1560 (Oxford, 1909) p.214).

38 On conventional melancholic postures, see Roy Strong, ‘The ElizabethanMalady: Melancholy in Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture’, Apollo 79

Notes 229


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(1964) 264–9; on the sobbing deer, see Michael Bath, ‘Weeping Stags andMelancholy Lovers: the Iconography of As You Like It, II.1’, Emblematica 1(1986) 13–52.

39 Cf. Erasmus’s virtuosic demonstration in Book II of De Copia of the tech-niques whereby ‘thousands of similes’ can be drawn from the topos of sail-ing and enlisted as illustrative proof on behalf of different and evencontradictory arguments (pp.641–2).

40 Shakespeare is invoking here the topos of ‘the book of nature’, itself closelyassociated with the finding of ready-made arguments (See Curtius, EuropeanLiterature, pp.319–26).

41 See Metaphors we Live By (Chicago and London, 1980), esp. chaps.6 and 12.42 ‘De Inventione Dialectica’, I.2, p.398. First published in 1515, this was one of

the most influential manuals disseminating the new humanist dialectic andwent through numerous editions in the first half of the sixteenth century.

43 The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of ElizabethanDrama (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1978) p.53. Cf. Trousdale, p.49.

44 On the play’s complex relationship to the pastoral tradition, see DavidYoung, The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays (New Havenand London, 1972) chap.2, Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton,1974) pp. 243–65, and Judy Z. Kronenfeld, ‘Social Rank and the PastoralIdeals of As You Like It’, SQ 29 (1978) 333–48.

45 See, for example, Michael Taylor, ‘As You Like It ’: the Penalty of Adam’,Critical Quarterly 15 (1973) 76. More charitably, the Oxford editor notes thatthe Duke is ‘gracefully stating platitudes, discoursing on a theme’ (p.125).

46 Camille Wells Slights also sees the rebuilding of a fractured society throughthe creation of a new order based on the conservative values of religion,hospitality and compassion as the priority for Arden’s exiled community(Shakespeare’s Comic Commonwealths (Toronto, 1993), chap.10).

47 Rule of Reason, p.49r. Cf. Quintilian, Institutio 5.11.36–41.48 See Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral (London, 1971), especially chap.2.49 Cf. the February eclogue in Spenser’s Shepherds’ Calendar.50 In the earlier comedies, onstage audiences, if they comment at all, tend to

emphasize their collective plight (as when the members of Navarre’sAcademy ‘o’ereye’ each other’s betrayal of their vows of celibacy) orrespond as an undifferentiated group (as in their reaction to Holofernes’spageant). One notable exception is the debate between Theseus andHippolyta triggered by the farcical performance of Pyramus and Thisbe.

51 It is remarkable how often audiences in this play express an imaginativeidentification with what they see, even where this includes an element ofcritical dissent (e.g. I.2.210–15, II.7.136–39, III.4.57). The epilogue, too,directly implicates the audience in the gender roles and sexual desiresexplored in the play.

52 On the sense of relativism induced by the play’s multiple perspectives, seeYoung, Heart’s Forest, pp.50–8, and Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedyof Love (London, 1974) pp.197–8.

53 Humanists like Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola revived the Ciceronianlink between dialectic and Academic scepticism, with its pragmatic empha-sis on reasoning from and towards probabilities. See Jerrold E. Siegel,Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism (Princeton, NJ, 1968)

230 Notes


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pp.8–18. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence and Scepticism in the Renaissance(Ithaca and London, 1985) chap.1, and Lisa Jardine, ‘Lorenzo Valla:Academic Skepticism and the New Humanist Dialectic’ in M. Burneat ed.,The Sceptical Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1983) pp.253–86.

54 H. Rackham ed., Academica (London, 1913), II.7–8.55 Rule of Reason, p.2v. The emphasis here on the testing and analytical dissec-

tion, as opposed to the getting, of arguments reflects the Aristotelian divisionof dialectic into Iudicium (or Dispositio) and Inventio. Cf. Ralph Lever’s remarkthat the art of reasoning – which he differentiates into the ‘decerning parte’and the ‘finding parte’ – ‘serveth to manye singular purposes. For she dothnot onely teach an order to reason wittily of doubtfull matters, and to speakforceably of them…But she also yeldeth to them, that are cunning andexperte in hir, a generall understanding to judge of all matters whatsoever,and to discerne what is saide or done according to reason, and what is not.’(From the Preface to The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft …(London,1573) Scolar Press Facsimile 323 (Menston, England, 1972)).

56 Ibid, p.60v.57 See Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (London, 1968) p.206.

For an in-depth analysis of Touchstone’s sophisms, see Sister MiriamJoseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York, 1947) p.197.

58 Cf. Rosalind’s castigation of all forms of extremism (IV.1.5–7, IV.3.22) andthe affected idiosyncrasies which lead Jaques to proclaim his uniqueness(IV.1.10–20) or prevent Phebe from submitting to her common destiny(III.5.35–63). There is, of course, a generic basis to this privileging of thecommunity over the individual in comic convention.

59 Cicero lists eleven ‘places’ of person: name, nature (e.g. sex, race, country,age), manner of life (e.g. education, profession), fortune, disposition, pas-sions, interests, purposes, achievements, accidents and past sayings. LikeJaques, Wilson reorganizes the ‘places’ around the sequential ages of man(Arte of Rhetorique, pp.12–14). But it is important to note that while the char-acters’ affinity with stock types such as ‘Monsieur Melancholy’ and ‘SignorLove’ is repeatedly signalled in the play, their roles, for the most part self-consciously adopted, are not reducible to the stereotypes of Jaques’s speech.The impact of the ‘places’ on dramatic characterisation in the period is dis-cussed by Madeleine Doran in Endeavours of Art (Madison, 1954) chap.2.

60 Cf. Spenser’s play on the word ‘courtesy’ and its derivation from ‘court’ inthe opening stanza of Book VI of The Faerie Queene. In a detailed analysis oftheir usage in the play, Madeleine Doran notes that the original socialmeaning of ‘civility’ and its cognates was never wholly supplanted by theirfigurative (i.e. ethical) senses (‘ “Yet am I inland bred”, SQ 15’ (1964)99–114). Taking this point further, Mary Thomas Crane argues that the play‘reveal[s] the implication of language in the reproduction of the ideologiesof class’ through its insistent use of such ambiguous or ‘shifting statusterms’, which legitimise the exclusion of the lower classes from the possibil-ity of social mobility on grounds of their innate moral inferiority(‘Linguistic Change, Theatrical Practice, and Ideologies of Status in As YouLike It’, ELR 17 (1997) 361–92).

61 Several critics have commented on the importance of this ‘idealized malealliance’, and its sidelining of the romantic plot; see esp. Peter Erickson,

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Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama (Berkeley, Los Angeles andLondon, 1985), chap.1. By contrast, William Kerrigan argues that femalefriendship takes precedence over male rivalry (‘Female Friends and FraternalEnemies in As You Like It’, in Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz eds,Desire in the Renaissance Psychoanalysis and Literature (Princeton, 1994)pp.184–203).

62 ‘ “The Place of a Brother” in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form’,SQ 32 (1981), repr. in Ivo Kamps ed., Materialist Shakespeare: A History(London and New York, 1995) pp.52–3. Montrose argues that the functionof Duke Senior’s masculine community is to reconcile the social tensionscreated by the laws of primogeniture with the ideal of ‘spiritual fraternity’.Throughout the play, in fact, issues of kinship / brotherhood are closelyenmeshed with the question of status, from Orlando’s complaint thatOliver ‘bars [him] the place of a brother’ by denying him the education dueto a gentleman (I.1.17) to Duke Senior’s final promise that his ‘brothers inexile’ will share in his restored fortune ‘according to the measure of theirstates’ (V.4.167–70).

63 Jean Howard comments perceptively on the ‘playful masquerade’ in whichRosalind ‘acts out the parts scripted for women by her culture’, revealingtheir limitations in the process (‘Cross-dressing, the Theatre, and GenderStruggle in Early Modern England’, SQ 39 (1988) 434–5).

64 See, for example, Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, p.233, and Nancy K.Hayles, ‘Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night ’, SS 32 (1979) 65.

65 Catherine Belsey argues that the sexual ambiguities generated by the trans-vestite disguise of Shakespeare’s comic heroines are used to explore the pos-sibility of ‘speak[ing] from a position that is not that of a full, unifiedgendered subject’, and so undoing an oppressive system of sexual differ-ences (‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in theComedies’, in John Drakakis ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London, 1985)p.180). See also Phyllis Rackin on androgyny as a metaphor for social/gen-der transgression (‘Androgyny, Mimesis and the Marriage of the BoyHeroine on the English Renaissance Stage’, in Elaine Showalter ed., Speakingof Gender (London, 1989) pp.113–33).

66 See Maura Slattery Kuhn, ‘Much Virtue in If’, SQ 28 (1977) 40–50.67 ‘The Heart’s Forest ’, p.46. In his Dialecticae disputationes, Valla identifies a

sliding scale of probability in ratiocination, based on premises that may beverum, verisimile, possibile or impossibile (Jardine, ‘Lorenzo Valla’, p.269).Dialectical arguments, hypothetical modes of reasoning and poetic fictionsare similarly treated as graduated parts of a single spectrum in As You Like It.

2 English Beholders and the Art of Perspective

01 Alberti makes great play of the originality of his approach. However, it isgenerally agreed that the principles of linear perspective were first demon-strated by Brunelleschi c.1413 with two panels depicting the FlorentineBaptistry and the Palazzo de’ Signori (though the precise technique used isstill a matter for conjecture), while the credit of putting these into artisti-cally usable form belongs to Alberti. Artists like Masaccio and Donatello

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were using perspective more or less correctly prior to the completion of DePictura in 1435 (it was not printed until 1540).

02 The secondary literature on perspective is voluminous. My discussion ofthis artistic device is chiefly indebted to the following studies: ErwinPanofsky, ‘Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form”’ (Berlin, 1927), trans.Christopher S. Wood (New York, 1991); John White, The Birth and Rebirth ofPictorial Space (1957; revised ed., London, 1967); Jean Gadol, Leon BattistaAlberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago and London, 1969);Samuel Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (NewYork, 1975); and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in WesternArt from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London, 1990).

03 For further discussion of this point, see Chapter 3.04 The belief that a perspective painting will appear false unless viewed from a

specified viewpoint has been challenged by perceptual psychologists, whohave shown that the resulting distortions are minimised by the ‘robustness’of perspective. See Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective andRenaissance Art (Cambridge, 1986) chap.4.

05 Piero’s De Prospectiva pingendi, written c.1474, was not printed until 1899.For an authoritative account of the theoretical development of linear per-spective, see Kemp’s Science of Art.

06 The scientific development of this technique owed most to Leonardo, whoconducted a detailed study of its effects in both his painting and his writ-ings. See the entry on non-linear perspective, in Jane Turner ed., The GroveDictionary of Art (London, 1996), XXIV, 491–4.

07 Dürer’s ‘nahere Weg’ (‘shorter way’) of foreshortening objects explainedin his Underweyssung der Messung (1525) appears to combine elementsof the ‘tiers points’ method with the principles of the costruzione leggitima,which he had probably mastered as a result of travelling to Bologna in 1506to receive instruction in the ‘secret’ art of perspective (see Erwin Panofsky,The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943; revised edn, London, 1945) I,247–53).

08 The ‘tiers point’ method was first codified by the French ecclesiastic, JeanPelerin (‘Viator’) in his De artificiali perspectiva (Toul, 1505). On the ‘bi-focal’method from which the ‘tier points’ system derives and its survival inGauricus’s De Sculptura, published a year before Viator’s handbook, seeRobert Klein, ‘Pomponius Gauricus on Perspective’, in Form and Meaning:Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans. Madeline Jay and LeonWieseltier (New York, 1970) pp.102–28.

09 See Timothy A. Kitao, ‘Prejudice in Perspective: A Study of Vignola’sPerspective Treatise’, Art Bulletin 44 (1962) 173–94.

10 The non-prescriptive nature of Alberti’s rules has been stressed by historiansof perspective (see, for example, Edgerton, Renaissance Rediscovery of LinearPerspective, p.50, Kubovy, Psychology of Perspective, p.121, and Kemp, Scienceof Art, pp.23–4).

11 See Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Bury StEdmunds, Suffolk, 1984) pp.32–5.

12 The standard work on anamorphosis is Jurgis Baltrusaitis’s Anamorphoses oumagie artificielle des effets merveilleux (Paris, 1969), trans. W.J. Strachan asAnamorphic Art (Cambridge, 1977). For a valuable study of its impact on

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English writers, see Gilman’s Curious Perspective (New Haven and London,1978). The epistemological implications of anamorphic devices are exam-ined more fully in Chapter 5.

13 La Prattica della perspettiva, p.159.14 Martin Jay, for example, argues that ‘the scopic regime of modernity may

best be understood as a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously inte-grated complex of visual theories and practices’, one comprised of different‘visual subcultures’ (‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Hal Foster ed., Visionand Visuality (Seattle, 1988) p.4).

15 See The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983)chaps.2 and 4. Alpers also suggests that this spatial mode correlates with a‘special northern tradition of perspective construction’ – Viator’s ‘tierpoints’ method – where the viewpoint is located on the actual picture planeinstead of in front of it (pp.53–8).

16 Science of Art, p.53. Cf. Panofsky’s assertion that ‘the Renaissance wouldinterpret the meaning of perspective entirely differently from the Baroque,and Italy entirely differently from the North’ (Perspective as Symbolic Form,pp.68–9). For Panofsky (though not for Kemp) such cultural variationsunderline the conventional status of perspective.

17 See, for example, Alice Friedman, ‘Did England Have a Renaissance?Classical and Anticlassical Themes in Elizabethan Culture’, in Susan J.Barnes and Walter S. Melion eds, Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identityin the Visual Arts, Studies in the History of Art 27 (1989) 95–111.

18 See, for example, Eric Mercer, English Art 1553–1625 (Oxford, 1962)pp.152–4.

19 See especially Strong’s The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture(London, 1969).

20 See Strong, English Icon; John Buxton, Elizabethan Taste (London, 1963)chap.3; and David Piper, ‘Tudor and Early Stuart Painting’, in Piper ed., TheGenius of British Painting (London, 1975) pp.62–110.

21 Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens, Ga. and London,1990) p.30. Cf. Mercer, English Art 1553–1625, pp.157, 171.

22 Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, I, 247. Cited by Lucy Gent in Albion’s Classicism:The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (New Haven and London, 1995), p.383.

23 R.K.R. Thornton and T.G.S. Cain eds, A Treatise Concerning the Arte ofLimning (Ashington, Northumberland, 1981) pp.85–7. All future page refer-ences in the text are to this edition.

24 Given the pride in his craftsmanship, befitting a member of the Goldsmiths’Company, which mingles with Hilliard’s pretensions to a gentility based onartistic talent in his Arte of Limning (l.3) it is unsurprising that the nearestequivalent to this passage is to be found in Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro del-l’arte (c.1396), a manual codifying Trecento workshop practices. According toCennini, ‘the moldings which you make at the top of the building shouldslant downward from the edge next to the roof; the molding in the middleof the building … must be quite level and even; the molding at the base ofthe building must slant upward’ (trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr., as TheCraftsman’s Handbook (1933, repr. New York, 1960) p.57).

25 Hilliard was in France from 1576–8/9. Although allusions to Valois court artare discernible in his later work, the visit failed to bring about any

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appreciable change in his style (see Roy Strong, The English RenaissanceMiniature (London, 1983) p.81).

26 This sense of personal contact can be seen as a constitutive feature of theminiature, which was usually intended as a love token. In the Arte ofLimning, Hilliard stresses the special intimacy surrounding the making ofthe miniature and even asserts that the limner can only properly fulfil histask if he experiences something of the desire his image is meant to excitein the beholder. In short, he is more concerned with the affective aspects ofthe interaction between image and beholder than with the spatial, in con-trast to Alberti who emphasises both.

27 Rule of Art, p.131.28 By contrast, the only significant Italian in-put was the brief visit of Federico

Zuccaro to England in 1575.29 But even these collectors appreciated paintings more as symbols of political

or familial status, than for their aesthetic value (Buxton, Elizabethan Taste,pp.96–106). This situation only began to change in the early Jacobeanperiod (see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford,1965) pp.710–22). For a survey of picture-owning habits among the gentryand mercantile classes, see Susan Foister, ‘Paintings and other works of artin sixteenth-century English inventories’, Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981)273–82.

30 A Tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge, Carvinge & Buildinge (Oxford,1598), The English Experience Facsimile 171 (Amsterdam and New York,1969), Prefatory epistle to the ‘Ingenuous Reader’ [v] v. All future page refer-ences in the text are to this edition.

31 Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence ofContinental Prints, 1558–1625 (New Haven and London, 1997) p.14.

32 Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Artsin the English Renaissance (Leamington Spa, 1981) pp.22–7.

33 The Elements of Geometrie of the most auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara.Faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe toung, by H. Billingsley … Witha very fruitfull Praeface made by M.I. Dee… (London, 1570) d.ii, v.

34 Leonard Digges’s popular manual on mensuration and quantity surveying,Pantometria (1591), for example, argues that a knowledge of longimetra – thescience of calculating distances on the basis of angles and sight lines – isuseful for all men, but ‘for a Gentleman especially that professeth the war-res, aswell for discoveries made by Sea, as Fortification, placing of Campes,and conducting of Armies on the lande, how necessaree it is to bee ableexactly to describe the true Plattes, Symetrie and proportion of Fortes,Campes, Townes … Coasts and Harboroughes, I thinke there are none sounskilfull, but will confesse these Geometricall mensurations most requi-site’ (‘Preface to the Reader’). In fact geometry and optics were fundamentalto many of the advances made in the practical sciences by English‘mechaniciens’ during this period (see Christopher Hill, Intellectual Originsof the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford, 1997) chap.1).

35 See the useful survey of books on art, perspective and architecture in EnglishRenaissance libraries printed as an appendix to Gent’s Picture and Poetry.

36 Poly-Olbion, Song 26, ll.87–92, in John Buxton ed., Poems of Michael Drayton(London, 1953), II, 674.

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236 Notes

37 See Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance(London, 1986) pp.86–137, 184–219, and R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Cultureand the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia,1987) esp. pp.149–54. According to Smuts, a growing aesthetic appreciationwent hand in hand with an informed curiosity about practical mechanicsand experimental science in Stuart court circles. His findings are confirmedby Timothy Wilks, who notes that in Prince Henry’s entourage these inter-ests were often combined with a respect for Italian culture (‘The CourtCulture of Prince Henry and his Circle’, unpublished DPhil dissertation,Oxford University, 1987).

38 Although drawing was generally deemed to be more respectable than paint-ing because of its practical utility, and several Tudor educationalists (includ-ing Elyot and Mulcaster) had recommended that it be taught, their viewswent largely unheeded. This situation only began to be rectified with thepublication of Henry Peacham’s Art of Drawing (see below).

39 On De Caus’s contribution to the development of anamorphic perspectiveand catoptrics, see Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, chap.3. For his theory ofshadow projection, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘The Perspectiveof Shadows: The History of the theory of Shadow Projection’, in The Masteryof Nature: Aspects of Art, Science and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton,1993) pp.49–78.

40 See F.J. Levy, ‘Henry Peacham and the Art of Drawing’, JWCI (1974) 174–90.41 The first Booke of Architecture, made by Sebastian Serly … Translated out of

Italian into Dutch, and out of Dutch into English (London, 1611), Dedicatoryepistle.

42 Ibid, epistle ‘To the Lovers of Architecture’.43 In his epistle to the reader, Haydocke similarly acknowledges the ‘difficulty

and strangenesse of the matter it selfe’, and justifies his labours as being forthe ‘common good’ through ‘the increase of the knowledge of the Arte’,the lamentable state of which in his native land is responsible for ‘mostlame, disproportioned and unseemelie Counterfeites [i.e. portraits]’ (Tracte,[iv] v.–[v] v.).

44 Quoted from the opening paragraphs to Books I and II.45 The Art of Drawing with the Pen, and limming in water colours … (London,

1606) p.28. All future page references in the text are to this edition unlessotherwise specified.

46 This and other such references to drawing according to an ‘Idea’ in themind have sometimes been taken to carry the full conceptual andNeoplatonizing force of the Italian word disegno, but probably only refer tothe English practice of doing without a ‘pattern’ or live model (cp. Arte ofLimning, p.79). On English difficulties with this concept, see MichaelBaxandall, ‘English disegno’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack eds, Englandand the Continental Renaissance (Woodbridge, 1990) pp.203–14.

47 Although little is known for sure about Oliver’s early movements, he is con-jectured to have been working in France in the 1570s before journeyingnorth via Flanders to England c.1587. He was certainly in Venice in 1596,and possibly made another visit to Italy later. Inigo Jones is believed to havetravelled around France, Italy and Germany in the period 1598–1603. Helater accompanied Lord and Lady Arundel on their continental tour of1613–14. For biographical details, see Strong, English Renaissance Miniature;


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Mary Edmond, Hilliard and Oliver: The Lives and Works of Two GreatMiniaturists (London, 1983); and John Harris et al., eds, The King’s Arcadia:Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court (London, 1983).

48 Strong, English Renaissance Miniature, p.143.49 See Jill Finsten, Isaac Oliver: Art at the Courts of Elizabeth I and James I (New

York and London, 1981) pp.140–1.50 The phrase is used in Jones’s masque Tempe Restored (1632), produced in

collaboration with Aurelian Townshend.51 The Works of Ben Jonson, eds C.H. Herford and P.E. Simpson (Oxford, 1947)

VII, 171–2.52 The sources of Jones’s stagecraft are unclear. Harris et al. conclude that

‘although [he] may at some stage have had access abroad to a “pictureframe stage” of the type evolved for the intermezzi of 1589 … his stagemechanics were largely self-invented’ (King’s Arcadia, pp.83–4). What proba-bly mattered most to Jones was the link with Vitruvius, whose cryptic refer-ences to the use of perspective and scenic machines on the antique stage(V.6.8–9; X, Preface) lent this a classical sanction, emphasised by Barbaro,Serlio and other Italian theorists who called perspective ‘scenographia’ afterVitruvius.

53 Strong, English Icon, p.55.54 The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: the European Context (Cambridge, 1995)

pp.13–14. Peacock argues that it was Jones, rather than Oliver, who inductedthe English public into the conventions of linear perspective (p.44).

55 Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (Berkeley, Los Angeles andLondon, 1973) I, 11.

56 Ibid, I, 12.57 This reinterpretive process is especially conspicuous in architectural contexts

where classical or Italianate motifs were freely combined with vernacularidioms. See, for example, Friedman, ‘Did England Have a Renaissance?’, andTimothy Mowl, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style (London, 1993) chaps.4 and 6.

58 See Gent ed., Albion’s Classicism, especially the essays by Christy Anderson,Ellen Chirelstein and Lucy Gent.

59 Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts, p.183 (cf. Mercer, English Art 1553–1625,pp.179–80). Evett views this burgeoning interest in the naturalistic descrip-tion of landscape among both writers and artists as evidence of ‘a change inthe visual consciousness of spatial relationships taking place in Englandaround the turn of the seventeenth [sic] century’.

60 The first known reference to ‘landskip’ occurs in Angel Day’s EnglishSecretarie (1586). Other early English examples are found in Haydocke’stranslation of Lomazzo; Jonson’s description of the set for The Masque ofBlacknesse (initially concealed by a curtain depicting ‘a Landtschap consist-ing of small woods, and here and there a void filled with huntings’); andDrayton’s Barrons Wars (1603) and Poly-Olbion (1612). For further refer-ences, see Henry V.S. and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste in Landscape inthe Seventeenth Century (Michigan, 1955) chaps.1–4.

61 Art of Drawing, p.28. This caveat is significantly modified in the 1612 edi-tion, entitled Graphice or The Gentleman’s Exercise, where ‘if’ is substitutedfor ‘seldome’ (p.40). Peacham’s increased appreciation of landscape for itsown sake, is also reflected in the addition of chapters on ‘the fairest andmost beautifull Landtskips in the world’ and ‘the Graces of Landtskip’. In

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c.1650, Edward Norgate refers to the treatment of landscape as a distinctgenre as ‘an Invencon of these later times’ (Miniatura or The Art of Limninged., Martin Hardie (Oxford, 1919) p.45).

62 See ‘Lady Elizabeth Pope: The Heraldic Body’, in Lucy Gent and NigelLlewellyn eds, Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culturec.1540–1660 (London, 1990) pp.51–6. Landscapes often formed part of thescenic designs for the Stuart court masques.

63 Of Flemish origins, Gheeraerts the Younger grew up in London where hisfather Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, also a painter, had settled c.1568. In the1590s he experimented with landscape settings in a number of composi-tions, including a portrait of the Earl of Essex in front of a burning Cadiz(1596).

64 On the complex political context of the portrait and Lee’s self-imaging, seethe helpful entry in the exhibition catalogue, Dynasties: Painting in Tudorand Jacobean England 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (London, 1995) p.176.

65 See Gent, Picture and Poetry, pp.29–30. This habit of treating the visualimage as a receptacle for discursive meanings did, however, predispose theEnglish to appreciate the rhetorical aspects of the new art theory emanatingfrom Italy (see Chapter 3).

66 It will be clear that I disagree with Roland Mushat Frye, who maintains(wrongly) that Shakespeare’s references to perspective all date from thepost-Elizabethan era, in support of his thesis that the latter should be classi-fied as a ‘great artistic conservative’, whose vision parallels that of lateTudor artists who ‘either disregarded unified perspective, or treated it mini-mally and with pervasive inconsistency’ (‘Ways of Seeing in ShakespeareanDrama and Elizabethan Painting’, SQ 31 (1980) 323–42).

3 Ut Pictura Poesis and the Rhetoric of Perspective

01 This discursive tradition has been extensively discussed. See especiallyHagstrum, The Sister Arts; Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis; Baxandall, Giotto and theOrators; Gerard Le Coat, The Rhetoric of the Arts (Berne and Frankfurt, 1975);Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, chap.7; and Hulse, Rule in Art.

02 On the rhetoricization of perspective, see Klein, ‘Pomponius Gauricus onPerspective’, and Robert Klein and Henri Zerner eds, Italian Art 1500–1600:Sources and Documents (1966, repr. Evanston, Illinois, 1989) pp.xii–xiii.

03 Although both Vitruvius’s De Architectura and the chapter on painting inPliny’s Natural History made tantalizing references to perspective, no exposi-tion of it as a coherent representational system survived from antiquity.

04 On the installation of this humanistic curriculum, see esp. Baldwin, SmallLatine and Lesse Greeke; Bolgar, Classical Heritage, chaps.7 and 8; and Graftonand Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities.

05 For biographical details, see Karl Joseph Höltgen, ‘Richard Haydocke:Translator, Engraver and Physician’, The Library, fifth series, 33 (1978) 15–32.

06 The main additions made by Haydocke include the epistle to the reader,marginal glosses on Lomazzo’s text, ‘A Briefe Censure of the Booke ofColours’ at the end of Book III, followed by an indictment of cosmetics (stillcommonly regarded in England as a form of painting) for jeopardizing

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women’s morality and health, and 13 engravings by his own hand, basedmostly on Dürer or Serlio.

07 See Frederick Hard, ‘Richard Haydocke and Alexander Browne: Two half-forgotten writers on the art of painting’ PMLA 55 (1940) 727–41, andAlistair Moffat, ‘Lomazzo’s Treatises in England in the Late Sixteenth andEarly Seventeenth Centuries’ (unpublished MPhil dissertation, University ofLondon, 1975). The latter points out that hitherto English manuals forpainters had been almost entirely technical, consisting of recipes for coloursand practical precepts, so confirming the received view of painting as alowly handicraft.

08 Tracte, p.14. For the Italian text, see Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Gian PaoloLomazzo: Scritte sulle arti (Florence, 1974) II, 26.

09 Ibid, pp.21–2. For Italian text, see Scritti, II, 34.10 De Architectura, III.3.11–13, III.5.9, VI.2.1–5. Prior to Lomazzo these optical

adjustments had been discussed by, among others, Dürer (1525), Serlio(1545) and Barbaro (1559). See Thomas Frangenberg, ‘Optical correction insixteenth-century theory and practice’, Renaissance Studies, 7, 1 (March,1993) 207–28.

11 See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure ofClassical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven and London, 1981) pp.136–41.

12 Tracte, p.22. For the Italian text, see Scritti, II, 35.13 As I mentioned in Chapter 2, this revaluation took place concurrently in

artistic practice and theory.14 See Antony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1660 (1940; repr. Oxford,

1987), chaps.1 and 2, and Martin Kemp’s introduction to De Pictura.15 Martin Kemp ed., Leonardo on Painting (New Haven and London, 1989)

p.52. All future page references in the text are to this edition.16 Cf. Alberti’s insistence on the need to ‘explain the art of painting from the

basic principles of nature’ (On Painting, p.37).17 See Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, pp.9–16, and Erwin Panofksy, Idea: A Concept in Art

Theory, trans. Joseph J.S. Peake (Columbia, 1968) p.48.18 T.S. Dorsch, Classical Literary Criticism (London, 1965) p. 79.19 Leonardo’s notebooks date from 1489 to 1518. Their seminal contribution to

defining the role of the fantasia in artistic production is discussed by MartinKemp in ‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia”: the Quattrocento Vocabulary ofCreation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts’, Viator 8 (1977) 347–98.

20 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.1.16, and Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.98. Theimpact of this theorising of the artistic imagination on Shakespeare’s under-standing of perceptual and creative processes is examined further in Chapter 6.

21 From Primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni… (Florence, 1567) XVI,trans. Klein and Zerner in Italian Art 1500–1600, pp.182–4. For the Italiantext, see Paola Barocchi ed. Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, Fra Manierismo eControriforma (Bari, 1960) I, 264–7. Interestingly, Danti anticipates Sidney’sdiscussion of poetic / pictorial mimesis in the Apology (see below) by assimi-lating the two types of imitation to the Aristotelian distinction between his-tory and poetry, and associating ‘imitare’, things ‘as they should be seen’,with portraiture.

22 David Summers associates this premium on fantastic invention withMichelangelo and his followers, who, he argues, situated themselves within

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a ‘sophistic’ tradition that identified painting with poetry in point oflicence, in contrast to the Ciceronian tradition endorsed by Alberti, whichsubjected invention to reason and moderation (Michelangelo and theLanguage of Art (Princeton, 1981) chaps.7 and 14).

23 L’idea de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Turin, 1607) I.7, trans. Panofsky, Idea,p.88. On Zuccaro’s aesthetic theories, see also David Summers, The Judgmentof Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge, 1987)pp.283–308.

24 Zuccaro, L’Idea, II.6, trans. Panofsky, Idea, p.78.25 Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull (1965; repr. London, 1987) I, 250. For

the Italian text, see Vasari–Milanesi, IV, 9.26 As Antony Blunt pointed out long ago, the implication that producing a

semblance of naturalness and ease is the supreme accomplishment of artderives from Castiglione’s courtly ethic of sprezzatura (Artistic Theorypp.97–8). What he neglected to mention (but Castiglione does not) is thatthis principle in turn is based on a rhetorical commonplace (see, for exam-ple, Cicero, De Oratore, II.1.4–5 and Quintilian, Institutio, VIII, Pr.). An idealof artful simplicity was regularly prescribed for both painting and poetry(see Roskill, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’ p.157).

27 Those who have taken the former view include E.H. Gombrich, ‘The“What” and “How”: Perspective Representation and the PhenomenalWorld’, in Richard Rudner and Israel Scheffler eds, Logic and Art: Essays inHonour of Nelson Goodman (Indianapolis, 1972) 129–49. Among those who,following Panofsky’s lead (see below), have argued for the conventionalityof perspective are Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1968);Edgerton, Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, pp.153–65; and MaxWartofsky, ‘Visual Scenarios: The Role of Representation in VisualPerception’, in Margaret Hagen ed., The Perception of Pictures (London andNew York, 1980) II, 131–52. I am inclined to agree with Clark Hulse that‘accurate or not, perspective is in any event a construction of the humanmind and not something given by nature’ (Rule of Art, p.53).

28 Cf. Leonardo’s assertion that ‘that painting is most praiseworthy that hasthe most similarity to the thing reproduced’ (cited by Panofsky, Idea, p.47).

29 Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983; repr. London, 1991) esp.chap.1.

30 Hulse, Rule of Art, p.59. For an alternative view, see Alpers, Art of Describing,p.42.

31 This is not to confuse Bryson’s brand of cultural semiotics with Panofskianiconology, which has been criticised from a post-structuralist standpoint forinattention to the materiality of the sign and an over emphasis on the fixityof its meaning. For my purposes, however, both offer useful ways of think-ing about perspectival images as a rhetorical form, capable of expressingculturally specific meanings.

32 Perspective as symbolic form, pp.28–33.33 Ibid, p.41. On the indebtedness of this essay to Cassirer’s neo-Kantian phi-

losophy of symbolic forms, see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and theFoundations of Art History (Ithaca and London, 1984) chap.5.

34 These discrepancies were studied in particular by Leonardo, who experi-mented with ways of bringing the perspectival image into closer alignmentwith its optical counterpart (see Kemp, Science of Art, pp.44–52).

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35 On the cultivation of these qualities by Mannerist artists, see JohnShearman, Mannerism (London, 1967), and S.J. Freedberg, ‘Observations onthe Painting of the Maniera’, Art Bulletin 47 (1965) 187–97. For a usefulcritical survey of competing definitions of Mannerism, see John M.Steadman, Redefining a Period Style (Pittsburgh, 1990) chap.5.

36 Tracte, pp.25–6. Haydocke’s version adheres particularly closely to theItalian text at this point (see Scritti, II, 38–9).

37 I am concerned here with mimesis not imitatio, i.e. with the imitation ofnature rather than other texts. However, it should be noted that many ofthe questions raised by sixteenth-century debates over what form of imitatioshould be practised were also of concern to artists and are not irrelevant tothe issues discussed in this chapter. In particular, the dissatisfaction of somesixteenth-century painters with mere fidelity to nature parallels the rejec-tion by Erasmus and others of the slavish, rule-bound adherence to one’sliterary model advocated by the Ciceronians in favour of a more indepen-dent recreation of it. (See Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation andDiscovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London, 1982) chap.5).

38 See Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago andLondon, 1947) Part I.

39 Cf. John Hoskins’s observation that ‘metaphor is pleasant because itenricheth our knowledge with two things at once, with the truth and withsimilitude’ (Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton,1935) p.8).

40 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds Gladys Doidge Willcockand Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936) p.178. All future page references in thetext are to this edition. Puttenham’s phrasing is remarkably close to thatused in the Tracte, but cf. Ad Herennium, IV.34.45, and Quintilian, Institutio,VIII.6.4–6.

41 Lomazzo calls attention to this paradox in his paragone of painting andsculpture. Likeness, he argues, does not reside in ‘quantity’ (i.e. proportion),which may be common to many human beings, but rather in the ‘particu-larizing qualities’ (produced by colour in painting) that distinguish themfrom one another. Hence sculpture, though it reproduces exactly thedimensions of its object, lags behind painting in ‘precise imitation of thelife’: ‘For the carvers intent is onely to give the selfsame quantity to his fig-ure, which his naturall patterne hath, so that his speciall purpose is to makethe figure equall to the life, which cannot therefore be saied to be perfectlylike thereunto’, whereas the painter with his pigments gives ‘the true simil-itude and proper resemblance to his counterfeits’ (p.18).

42 Hoskins, Directions, p.8.43 Tracte, pp.25–6. Cf. Scritti, II, 38–9.44 Apart from drawing on Panofsky’s analysis of perspective as a ‘symbolic

form’, my reading of this passage has been assisted by Barthes’s structuralanalysis of the image. In his essay ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’, RolandBarthes distinguishes between the ‘literal’ or denotative meaning of theimage (i.e. its representation of visual objects) and its culturally assigned‘symbolic’ or connotative meaning (Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath(Glasgow, 1977) pp.32–51). In stressing the power of the image to stir upfeelings of piety/civic virtue, Lomazzo privileges the symbolic over its literalmeaning.

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45 Karl Höltgen notes that this sanctioning of images for ‘civill use’ is in keep-ing with mainstream Protestant opinion. See ‘The English Reformation andSome Jacobean Writers on Art’ in Ulrich Broich et al., eds, Functions ofLiterature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on his Sixtieth Birthday (Tübingen,1984) p.143.

46 The same was true of many sixteenth–century Italian critics. (See, for exam-ple, Girolamo Fracastorius, Naugerius, sive de Poetica Dialogus, trans. RuthKelso, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 9, 3 (1924)pp.59–60, and, for a more critical attitude to poetic-pictorial comparisons,Andrew Bongiorno ed., Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry (Binghamton, NewYork, 1984) pp.9, 46–8). The difference is that in England, lacking a fullyfledged art theory, ut pictura analogizing tended to flow one way – frompoetry to painting.

47 Herford and Simpson eds, Works, VIII, 609.48 Prefatory epistle to Ovid’s Banquet of Sence (London, 1595).49 On Sidney’s interest in the visual arts, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Sidney

and Titian’, in English Renaissance Studies: Presented to Dame Helen Gardner inHonour of her Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, 1980) pp.1–11, and Norman K.Farmer Jr., Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (Austin, Texas,1984) chap.1.

50 Geoffrey Shepherd ed., An Apology for Poetry (Manchester, 1973) p.66. Thistheory has been dismissed by D.H. Craig on the grounds that the Apologypredates the publication of Lomazzo’s and Zuccaro’s treatises and divergesfrom them in philosophical emphasis (‘A Hybrid Growth: Sidney’s Theoryof Poetry in An Apology for Poetry’, in Arthur F. Kinney ed., Essential Articlesfor the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (Hamden, Connecticut, 1986) pp.113–34).But Mannerist theories were in general circulation by the end of theCinquecento, and the possibility that Sidney knew and was influenced bythem does not depend on showing a specific debt to these texts.

51 Shepherd ed., Apology, p.102. All future page references in the text are tothis edition.

52 As S.K. Heninger Jr. notes, the quasi-pictorial vividness Sidney praises hadlong been enjoined on the writer through his use of the rhetorical qualityof enargia (‘Speaking Pictures: Sidney’s Rapprochement between Poetry andPainting’, in Gary Waller and Michael Moore eds, Sir Philip Sidney and theInterpretation of Renaissance Culture (London, 1984) pp.13–14). Nevertheless,Sidney works his pictorial analogies unusually hard, seeming at times to for-get that poetry is itself a ‘wordish description’.

53 It has been persuasively argued that the iconic language of the emblem orimpresa, combining words and images, provided the main link between lit-erature and the visual arts in England. See especially Michael Leslie, ‘TheDialogue between Bodies and Souls: Pictures and Poesy in the EnglishRenaissance’, Word and Image 1 (1985) 16–30.

54 How emblems related to Protestant ideology and aesthetics is a vexed ques-tion (see Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books andRenaissance Culture (London and New York, 1994) pp. 200–1). However, itmay legitimately be surmised that one reason why English cultureembraced a theory of images which emphasized their semantic content wasthat it neutralized the ever-present dangers of idolatry.

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55 For the former commonplace see, for example, The Rape of Lucrece,ll.1373–86; the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, ll.47–58; The Merchantof Venice, III.2.114–29; and The Winter’s Tale, V.3.60–70. For the latter see,for example, Venus and Adonis, ll.289–94, and Antony and Cleopatra, II.2.204.Cf. Cymbeline, II.4.80–85. Shakespeare’s elaboration of these twin topoi, andthe sceptical inflection sometimes given to them in the process, are dis-cussed by Leo Salinger in ‘Shakespeare and the Italian Concept of “Art”’ inhis Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans (Cambridge, 1986).

56 Cf. William Heckscher’s comment that ‘wherever we observe Shakespeareobserving the figurative arts, it is as if he wanted us to become witnesses toa paragone between poesis and pictura from which poesis would emerge asthe predictable winner’ (‘Shakespeare in his Relationship to the Visual Arts:A Study in Paradox’, RORD 13–14 (1970–1) 8).

57 This power is perhaps more theoretical than actual, for David Bevingtonhas shown how systematically Shakespeare exposes the limitations of spec-tacle, using the dramatic context to undercut its putative powers of expres-sion and persuasion (Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture(Cambridge, Mass., 1984) pp.17–22). My analysis of the use of visualimagery in Hamlet and The Tempest supports his conclusions.

58 On the possible indebtedness of this scene to Italian art theory, see AntonyBlunt, ‘An Echo of the “Paragone” in Shakespeare’, JWCI 2 (1938–9) 260–2.

59 Tracte, p.15. For the Italian text, see Scritti, II, 27.60 On the paradoxes of pictorial illusion see Summers, Michelangelo, chap.2.61 The Republic, 597b–598c. Plato goes on to recommend measuring, counting

and weighing as a prophylactic against sensory illusions, as, for example,when the apparent size of an object varies according to its distance fromthe eye or a stick looks bent in the water (602c–e). Earlier, in Book VIII, heargued that a philosopher’s training should include the mathematical sci-ences because they direct the mind away from appearances towards intelli-gible reality and a knowledge of the eternal forms.

62 The Sophist, 234–7. See John Warrington, trans. Parmenides, Theaitetos,Sophist, Statesman, (London, 1961) pp.178–81.

63 See ibid, and cf. Plato’s Gorgias, 454–63. On Plato’s quarrel with theSophists, see Vickers, In Defence, chap.2.

64 Plato is curiously omitted from Claudio Guillen’s otherwise excellent surveyof the development of perspective as a cognitive trope (‘On the Conceptand Metaphor of Perspective, in Stephen G. Nichols Jnr. and Richard B.Vowles, eds, Comparatists at Work (Waltham, Mass. and London, 1968)pp.28–90). Modern usages of this trope, by contrast with Plato’s, tend to bepositive; we talk about ‘seeing things in perspective’ (i.e. in their propercontext, as they really are) and assert the merits of our own ‘point of view’.

65 See, for example, Isidore of Seville’s assertion that painting ‘is a feignedimage, not truth … when they [pictures] strive to make things more real,they bring forth falsehood’ (Etymologiae, 19.16, cited in Summers,Michelangelo, p.48).

66 A key component of ut pictura discourse, the term ‘colours’ acquired conno-tations of deceitfulness and empty superficiality that only served to rein-force the mimetic arts’ shared reputation for mendacity. See Wesley Trimpi,‘The Meaning of Horace’s Ut Pictura Poesis’, JWCI 36 (1973) 1–34.

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67 Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of the Artes and Sciences, trans. James Sanford(London, 1569) p.19v.

68 Ibid, p.35r.69 This omission may also be explained by the fact that Alberti, like Leonardo,

positioned himself with an Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition that (in contrastto the Platonic) valued the senses, especially sight, as a reliable source ofknowledge of the material world – hence his adoption of a radiant, wingedeye as his impresa.

70 Cf. Giovan Battista Armenini on relievo: ‘Thus, with reason, the flat surfaceis altered admirably and there is made to appear that which in effect is not[‘quello che in effetto non e’]’. (De’ veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna, 1587)I.5, trans. Edward J. Olszewski as On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting(New York, 1977) p.116).

71 Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, pp.148–9. Cf. Vasari-Milanesi, I, 177–8.72 Such admiration was not universal, of course, even in Italy where, in the

wake of the Counter-Reformation, Plato’s arguments were revived alongwith Horace’s strictures in an attempt to chasten pictorial licence, if notprescribe it completely.

73 Cf. Virginia Cox ed., The Book of the Courtier (London, 1994) pp.88–9.Hilliard and Peacham both gestured towards the paragone, but the closestparallel is found – predictably given his long residency in Italy and intimateknowledge of its art – in Sir Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture(London, 1624). ‘An excellent Piece of Painting’, he writes, ‘is to myjudgement the more admirable Object, because it comes neere an ArtificiallMiracle; to make diverse distinct Eminences appeare upon a Flat, by forceof Shadowes, and yet the Shadowes themselves, not to appeare: which I con-ceive to be the uttermost value and vertue of a Painter’ (p.83).

74 From Pontano’s Actius Dialogus (1518–19), cited in an appendix to RuthKelso’s translation of Fracastorius’s Naugerius, pp.82–3. Cf. Minturno’s affir-mation that ‘no one can be called a poet who does not excel in the power ofarousing wonder’ (cited in J.V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: the EmotionalEffect of Shakespearean Tragedy [1951; repr. Chicago, 1969], p.82). For furtherreferences to the poetic inducement of meraviglia, see Chapter 7, note 54.

75 Barocchi, Trattati, I, 115. ‘Painting is true poetry, that is, invention, whichcauses what does not exist to appear …’ (my translation).

76 Book of the Courtier, p.14.77 See, for example, E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of

Pictorial Representation (1960; 5th edn, Oxford, 1977) Part 3, and Kubovy,Psychology of Perspective, chap.5. Cf. Martin Kemp, ‘Illusion, Allusionand Collusion: Perspective and Meaning in the Historical Context’, inA. Harrison ed., Philosophy and the Visual Arts (Dordrecht, 1987) pp.255–68.

78 Cf. Norman Bryson’s discussion of the complex interplay between differentlevels of the real and the simulated in which Roman illusionistic decorationengages the beholder, in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays in Still LifePainting (London, 1990) chap.1.

79 See Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians, chap.5.80 Picture and Poetry, p.60.81 George Chapman, All Fools, I.1.47 (cited in Gilman, Curious Perspective,

p.36). For further references to anamorphosis, see Chapter 5, note 4.

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82 Epistle to the reader (Tracte, iii v).83 Cf. Jonson on the use of perspective in painting: ‘From the Opticks it drew

reasons; by which it considered, how things plac’d at a distance, and a farreoff, should appeare lesse: how above, or beneath the head, should deceivethe eye &c.’ (Herford and Simpson eds, Works, VIII, 611).

84 See James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley, Los Angeles andLondon, 1985) chap.2.

85 England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988) I, 405.86 These ‘abuses’ are mentioned alongside ‘the scandall of Images and Idols’ in

George Buc’s ‘The Third Universitie of England’, appended to John Stow’sAnnales, or Generall Chronicle of England (London, 1615) p.986. Distinctionsbetween abused and unabused, religious and commemorative images, inthe Tudor laws regulating their usage often broke down in practice. SeeJohn Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England,1535–1660 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1973), and Aston, England’sIconoclasts, esp. chap.6.

87 Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down WentDagon (Chicago, 1986) p.3. On inconsistencies in the Protestant attitude toimages, see Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religiousand Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1988)chap.4, and Margaret Aston, ‘Gods, Saints, and Reformers: Portraiture andProtestant England’, in Gent ed., Albion’s Classicism, pp.181–220.

88 Their ability to appreciate illusionistic art even while conscious of the risksto body and soul latent in its seductive appeal is attested by such examplesas the ekphrastic descriptions of Kalander’s picture gallery in chap.3 ofSidney’s New Arcadia, and of the ‘goodly workmanship’ of the Bowre ofBlisse (II.12.42–62) or the tapestries adorning Busirane’s castle (III.11.28–46)in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

89 The Painting of the Ancients in three bookes (London, 1638) p.54. For furtherexamples emphasizing the conscious and pleasurable aspects of illusion, seeGent, Picture and Poetry, pp.44–6, 60–61. Gent interprets these as evidence of arevolution at the turn of the century in attitudes to pictorial and poetic fiction,whose truth was discovered to reside paradoxically in its mode of feigning.

90 The phrase is taken from John Evelyn’s Diary, ed. W. Bray (Washington andLondon, 1901) I, 53. Cited by Guillen, ‘On the Concept and Metaphor ofPerspective’, p.33.

91 ’Counterfeit’ is Shakespeare’s standard term for portraiture, and evenHaydocke uses it consistently to translate Lomazzo’s ‘ritraere’ (to portray ordepict) and ‘rittrato’ (portrait).

92 As late as c.1650, Norgate felt it necessary to defend painting as a ‘harmelesand honest Recreation’, ‘which by Ignorance and Bestie chi Parlano, isundeservedly traduced, as idolatrous, impious or impertinent’ (Miniatura,pp.44, 88).

93 The Vanitie of the eie (Oxford, 1608) pp.53, 88–9.94 The connection is noted by Jonas Barish in The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice

(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1981) p.93. On the largely Puritan dri-ven invective against florid eloquence, see Richard F. Jones, ‘The MoralSense of Simplicity’, in Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley, WashingtonUniversity Studies, 14 (St Louis, 1942) pp.265–87.

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095 ‘A Brief Apology for Poetry’, in Smith ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, 201.096 The same holds good, by analogy, for the visual arts; Sidney stipulates that

the painter’s inventive powers should be worthily employed in ‘someexcellent perspective’ or ‘some fine picture … containing in it somenotable example, as Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac’, not in ‘wantonshows of better hidden matters’ (p.125).

097 Daniel Javitch argues that Puttenham’s ‘confident endorsement of decep-tive verbal devices’ is unparalleled in English rhetorical manuals of his day,which remain uneasy about their deceitful properties, and that it was sanc-tioned by a ‘courtly code of dissimulation’, based on an ironic awarenessof the discrepancy between surface meanings and the truths they hide(Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, 1978) chap.2).However, he fails to allow for Puttenham’s concessions to a more reac-tionary view of poetic artifice.

098 The former turns out, of course, to be a living woman, not a statue, whilethe latter is generally assumed to refer to a tapestry rather than a paintingon canvas or panel, though I have followed Shakespeare in designating itas such. For a discussion of the various prototypes proposed for Lucrece’s‘piece’ and of the paragone around which its meaning is constructed, seeClark Hulse, ‘ “A Piece of Skilful Painting” in Shakespeare’s Lucrece”’, SS 31(1978) 13–22.

099 Thus the spectre of idolatry and black magic which hangs over the statuescene in The Winter’s Tale has to be exorcized by assurances from Perditaand Paulina (V.2.41–3, 88–91, 110–11).

100 Art and Illusion, p. 177. David Rosand argues that Shakespeare may alsohave intended an allusion to another famous ekphrastic passage: Pliny’saccount of Timanthes’s depiction of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, whichleaves the beholder to imagine Menelaus’s grief by covering his head witha mantle (‘ “Troyes Painted Woes”: Shakespeare and the PictorialImagination’, Hebrew University Studies 8, 1 (Spring, 1980) 90).

101 The parallel with synecdoche has been noted by several commentators.Cf. Puttenham’s description of how this figure ‘encombers the minde witha certaine imagination what it may be that is meant, and not expressed’(p.195). Peacham describes foreshortening in similarly suggestive terms:‘the whole is concluded into one part, which onely appeareth to the sight:as if I should paint a ship upo[n] the sea, yet there should appeare untoyou but her fore part, the rest imagined hid … ’ (Art of Drawing, pp.27–8).

102 Book of the Courtier, p.68.103 De Architectura, I.2.104 See John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the

Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Princeton, 1988) pp.36–40.105 See, for example, Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, III.2.3–4, 9–10, and Cicero, De

Oratore, III.50.195–6.106 Cicero, Orator, XXI, 71.107 Cicero: On Duties, trans. and eds, M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge,

1991) I.98, p.39.108 Cf. Alberti’s definition of beauty as ‘a form of sympathy and consonance

of parts within a body, according to a definite number, outline and posi-tion, as dictated by concinnitas [symmetry], the absolute and fundamental

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rule of nature’ (On the Art of Building, trans. J. Rykwert et al. (Cambridge,Mass., 1988) p.303.

109 On the metaphysical significance attributed to harmonic proportion in thearts, see Rudolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanismthird edn (London, 1962) especially chap.4, and Leonard Barkan, Nature’sWork of Art: The Human Body as the Image of the World (New Haven andLondon, 1975) chap.3.

110 See Les Mots and les choses (Paris, 1966), trans. as The Order of Things: AnArchaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; repr. London and New York,1989), chaps.2 and 3.

111 Directions for Speech and Style, p.2.112 Italian Renaissance artists generally employed one of two ‘classical’ canons

of proportion: the ‘Vitruvian’ of ten face-lengths and the ‘pseudo-Varronic’of nine face-lengths. Uniquely, Alberti devised and set out in De Statua hisown canon based on the module of the ‘Exempeda’ (foot-length) andarrived at by averaging the measurements of ‘a number of bodies consid-ered by the skilful to be the most beautiful’. See Erwin Panofsky’s seminalessay, ‘The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection ofthe History of Styles’ (1921), in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; repr.London, 1993) pp.82–138.

113 See Vasari-Milanesi, I, 151; trans. L.S. Maclehose, Vasari on Technique(London, 1907) p.146.

114 Vasari, Lives of the Artists, I, 419. For the Italian text, see Vasari-Milanesi,VII, 270. Cf. Haydocke, Tracte, p.198. For Michelangelo’s critique of Dürer’shandling of proportion, see Ascanio Condivi’s The Life of Michelangelo, ed.,Hellmut Wohl and trans., Alice Sedgwick Wohl (Oxford, 1976) pp.99.

115 ‘Lo faro, ancor che di rado ci occorre far figure tanto semplici, ritte einscepide, che si possino integramente misurare, perche ciascun maestro sidebbe acuir nella prontezza degli atti moventi e pronti, dove le figure inpiu parti fuggano, scurzano o diminuiscano …’ (Barocchi, Trattati, I, 103;my translation).

116 Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, p.147. Cf. Armenini’s statement that in matters of fore-shortening ‘it is more necessary to rely on the light of reason than onrules’, since ‘laws cannot grant good judgment’ (On the True Precepts, II.4,p.162; for the Italian text, see Marina Gorreri ed., De Veri Precetti DellaPittura (Turin, 1988) p.111).

117 On the giudizio dell’occhio, see Robert Klein, ‘Judgment and Taste inCinquecento Art Theory’, in Form and Meaning, pp.161–9, and Summers,Michelangelo, chaps.8 and 10. For a fuller account of the philosophical tra-ditions underpinning this concept, see Summers, Judgement of Sense.

118 That prudence and decorum were thought to entail similar modes of prac-tical wisdom or judgment is established by Victoria Kahn in Rhetoric,Prudence, and Skepticism, chap.2.

119 Originally advanced by Leonardo (Leonardo on Painting, pp. 119–20), thisidea was elaborated by later theorists, including Lomazzo (Tracte, p.41).

120 On the aesthetic doctrines of the Counter–Reformers, see Blunt, ArtisticTheory, chap.8.

121 Thus criticism of canonical proportions is frequently the preface to a sub-missive rehearsal of the same. Cf. Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, pp.137–9, and Pino,

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Dialogo della Pittura, in Barocchi ed., Trattati, 1, 103–6. A more radical cri-tique of mathematical proportion as applied to painting and sculpture wasdeveloped by Danti in his Primo libro (see Klein and Zerner eds, Italian Art1500–1600, pp.100–5).

122 See J.E. Spingarn, Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (1899; repr. New York,1949) pp.85–9, and Bernard Weinberg’s monumental study, A History ofLiterary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961) 2 vols.

123 Alessandro Piccolomini, Annotationi nel libro della Poetica d’Aristotile (1575)p.23. Cited by Weinberg, ibid, I, 550.

124 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, pp.34–41.125 Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, pp.119–27. 126 John Shearman notes the ‘surprising licence’ accorded to rhetorical

embellishment by classical writers, even when reiterating Aristotle’s warn-ings against excess in this area: ‘What matters is that it was as easy to jus-tify these “excesses”, in the visual or literary arts, on the basis of ancientprecept, as it was to condemn them’ (Mannerism, p.42).

127 For a libertarian reading of Horace, see Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte, p.2, andMichelangelo’s gloss on this text as reported by Francisco de Holanda inhis Four Dialogues on Painting, trans. Aubrey Bell (London, 1928) pp.60–2.For a hardline restatement of the opposing interpretation, cf. G.A. Gilio,Due dialoghi … degli errori ed abusi de’ pittori (Camerino, 1564) in Barocchi,Trattati, II, 16–19, and Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre eprofane (Bologna, 1582) in ibid, II, 401, 442–4.

128 Institutio, II.13.8–11. The importance of this passage for Renaissance arttheorists has been widely noted. See, for example, Baxandall, Giotto and theOrators, pp.18–19.

129 On this vogue and its rhetorical antecedents, see Shearman, Mannerism,pp.81–91, and David Summers, ‘Maniera and Movement: the FiguraSerpentinata’, Art Quarterly 35 (1972) 269–301.

130 Institutio, VIII.6.73. Quintilian is discussing hyperbole.131 The point is best made by comparison with poetic rhythm and metre (or

‘proportion poetical’, as Puttenham terms it) which, being regarded as aspecies of musical harmony, could be calculated numerically.

132 A similar slippage occurs in Cinquecento discussions of giudizio. In Dolce’sAretino, for example, the question is posed ‘whether a man who is not apainter himself is qualified to judge painting’. Aretino initially argues thatall men can recognize beauty and ugliness – and the (dis)proportionalityon which these qualities depend – by virtue of their familiarity with thehuman form. But he later narrows his definition to exclude the ‘masses’,restricting the right to judge to those in whom common visual experiencehas been refined by a knowledge of literature and painting (pp.101–5).

133 An inbred mastery of decorum was considered to be a defining mark ofcourtly superiority. See Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness, pp. 51–3, and FrankWhigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan CourtesyTheory (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984) p.52.

134 Commenting on the process whereby discretion is elided here with theopinion of a courtly elite, Derek Attridge shrewdly notes that ‘the “natural-ness” of decorum is at a distant remove from universal human nature orinstincts; it is an ideological product … whereby a historically specific class

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attitude is promoted and perceived as “natural”’ (Peculiar Language: Literatureas Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London, 1988) p.34.

135 See, for example, Quintilian, Institutio, VIII.3.58, and Cicero, Orator, XX, 70.136 Book II of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier is largely given over to a socio-

logical analysis of giudizio – previously discussed in relation to artistic mat-ters – as the governing principle by which the courtier should regulate hisconduct.

137 Patricia Parker has shown that it was common practice for rhetoricalhandbooks of the period to associate the regulation of figurative discoursewith questions of social ordering and control in ways that are clearly ideo-logically motivated (see Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property(London, 1987) chap.6). Few do so quite as blatantly as Puttenham,however.

138 As in the Arte of English Poesie, the egalitarian implications of this appeal tonatural instinct are strongly qualified, in this case by Hilliard’s repeatedassertion that ‘none should meddle with limning but gentlemen alone’(p.63), though the ‘true gentility’ he has in mind is conferred more by‘natural aptness’ or divinely bestowed talent than by social pedigree.

139 Bacon rejects Dürer’s ‘geometrical proportions’, asserting that ‘there is noexcellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’, abeauty that is achievable ‘by a kind of felicity … and not by rule’ (TheEssays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth, 1985) 189–90). The parallel wasfirst noted by John Pope-Hennessy in ‘Nicholas Hilliard and Mannerist ArtTheory’, JWCI 6 (1943) 89–100. Cf. Hogarth’s critique of the neoclassicaldoctrine of mathematical proportion as ‘foreign’ to artistic purpose and hiscorresponding emphasis on the eye, in The Analysis of Beauty ed., JosephBurke (Oxford, 1955) pp.89–94.

140 Rule of Art, p.132. The ambiguity was previously noted by Arthur F. Kinneyand Linda Bradley Salamon in their edition of Hilliard’s Art of Limning(Boston, 1983) p.81.

141 Idea, p.79.142 These anti-theoretical tendencies continued to counteract the increasingly

rigorous systematization of the arts well into the eighteenth century. SeeLaurence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England(Princeton, 1970) Part II.

143 Thomas Kranidas’s comment is especially germane: ‘English criticism fol-lows the Italians … but there is in Renaissance English poetry, includ-ing Jonson and Milton, no slavish adherence to the dramatic unities, gen-res, or character decorum of Italian criticism. For the Elizabethans, theterm decorum has something of the protean quality of the term wit.The best critics, like Puttenham, are aware of the instability of the term’(The Fierce Equation: A Study of Milton’s Decorum (The Hague, 1965) p.38).

144 See Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago andLondon, 1992) chap.1. Helgerson’s argument focuses on the debate aboutwhether English verse should, or could, be made to conform to quantita-tive metres. Significantly, one of the leading interventions in that debatewhich champions native rhyme against classical metrics, Samuel Daniel’sA Defence of Rhyme (1603), repeatedly invokes the authority of ‘discretion’along with that of ‘Custome that is before all Law, Nature that is above all

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Arte’, and inveighs against ‘the tryannicall Rules of idle Rhetorique’ (Smithed., Elizabethan Essays, II, 356–84).

145 For an overview of neoclassical opinion on this topic, see Brian Vickers ed.,Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston, 1974) II, 1–12.

4 Hamlet and the Art of LookingDiversely on the Self

001 See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More toShakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980). Greenblatt’s initial premise thatRenaissance males possessed the power and freedom to shape their ownidentities is strongly qualified in the course of his argument (see especiallypp. 255–7).

002 The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore and ed.Irene Gordon (New York, 1960) p.121. Challenges to Burckhardt’s thesishave tended to emphasize the degree to which identity continued to bederived from the social formation. See, for example, L.A. Montrose, ‘TheElizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Patricia Parker and DavidQuint eds, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore and London, 1986)pp.303–40, and the essays by Stephen Greenblatt and Nathalie ZemonDavies in Thomas C. Heller et al. eds, Reconstructing Individualism:Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, 1986).

003 See, for example, Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays onSubjection (London, 1984), and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy:Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London, 1985) pp.33–51. Bothsee the emergence of the modern subject, first given philosophical defini-tion by Descartes and Locke, as a consequence of the rise to power of thebourgeoisie after 1650, though they concede that it is foreshadowed in lit-erature from the turn of the century onwards.

004 ‘Proof and Consequences: Inwardness and its Exposure in the EnglishRenaissance’, Representations 34 (1991) repr. in Kamps ed., MaterialistShakespeare, p.158. Andrew Mousley similarly argues that one consequenceof equating notions of interiority exclusively with a bourgeois ideology ofthe self has been ‘to obscure the possibility of differently conceptualizing,and differently reading the history of, individualism’ (‘Hamlet and thePolitics of Individualism’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manningeds, New Essays on Hamlet (New York, 1994) p.67).

005 The phrase is taken from John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in theRenaissance (London and New York, 1963). See also Lorne Campbell,Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait Painting in the Fourteenth, Fifteenthand Sixteenth Centuries (New Haven and London, 1990) pp.9–39.

006 See Strong, English Renaissance Miniature; Edmond, Hilliard and Oliver; andRoy Strong and V.J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait MiniatureRediscovered 1520–1620 (London, 1983).

007 As seen, for example, in Isaac Oliver’s style of limning or some of the large-scale portraits produced by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger from the 1590sonwards.

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08 See J.W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London, 1956) pp.71, 103, andPaul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969)pp.11–17. On the evolution of the soliloquy from the primarily expositoryto the fully interiorized mode of expression it became in Shakespeare’s latertragedies, see Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. CharityStokes (London and New York, 1987) pp.1–12.

09 See The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne(Chicago and London, 1983).

10 ‘ “Secret” Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’, Representations 15(1986), repr. in Stephen Greenblatt ed., Representing the English Renaissance(London, 1985) pp.93–133. Other impediments to self-revelation have beenidentified by Eisaman Maus, who notes that ‘the ritual[s] of discovery’ oper-ative in the English theatre and law courts were forced to rely on unsatisfac-tory modes of inference in attempting to achieve ‘the technicallyimpossible feat of rendering publicly available a truth conceived ofas … inward, secret, and invisible to mortal sight’ (p.170).

11 The phrase is taken from Henry Peacham the Elder, The Garden of Eloquence,second edn, (London, 1593), ed. William G. Crane (Gainesville, Florida,1954) A.B.iii r. All future page references in the text are to this edition.

12 See, for example, Richard II, IV.1.264–98; Julius Caesar, I.2.51–70; Troilus andCressida, III.3.95–123.

13 The topos of the mirror as an agent of self-knowledge derives from Socratesand was ubiquitously invoked in the Renaissance. See Herbert Grabes, TheMutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and EnglishRenaissance, trans. G. Collier (Cambridge, 1982) p.137. On its importanceas an accessory to the introspection of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, see DavidJ. Palmer, ‘The Self-Awareness of the Tragic Hero’, in Malcolm Bradbury andDavid Palmer eds, Shakespearian Tragedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 20(London, 1984) pp.129–57.

14 See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I asRevealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Ecrits: A Selection (London, 1977)pp.1–7. For a recent reading of Hamlet in the light of Lacan’s theory of themirror stage and of the gaze, see Philip Armstrong, ‘Watching Hamletwatching: Lacan, Shakespeare and the mirror/stage’, in Terence Hawkes ed.,Alternative Shakespeares II (London, 1996) pp.216–37. Armstrong stresses thefact that theatre is figured in the play as a mirror that does not simplyreflect life in a passive sense, but has the power to mould the spectators’consciousness and behaviour.

15 Although glass mirrors were being manufactured as early as the fourteenthcentury, it was not until the beginning of the sixteenth century that thetechnology for the production of large, flat looking glasses was developedin Venice. These gradually superseded the convex mirror, which neverth -less continued to feature in northern European painting. See BenjaminGoldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville, 1985) chap.8.

16 Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, ‘Icons of Divinity: Portraits of ElizabethI’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn eds, Renaissance Bodies: The HumanFigure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London, 1990) p.31. A similar argu-ment has been advanced by the historian Georges Gusdorf in ‘Conditions etlimites de l’autobiographie’ (cited by Delaney, British Autobiography, p.12).

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17 Jaques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; repr. London, 1991) p.85.

18 This other, more subversive, face of the costruzione leggitima is explored inLacan’s proposition that its laws can become a means of decentring thesubject through their connection with the gaze. Put simply, this occurswhen the spectator’s gaze is directed back upon itself from another pointin the field of the ‘Other’, so that the viewing subject, no longer thesole focus for the lines of perspective, is demoted to being the objector spectacle of an alien look. In painting, the vanishing point functionsas this alternative locus towards which the visual field converges and thusas a symbol of the subject’s ‘annihilation’ (Four Fundamental Concepts,pp.79–89). For a lucid explication of this difficult topic, see Norman Bryson,‘The Gaze in the Expanded Field’, in Foster ed., Vision and Visuality,pp.87–108.

19 The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, Mass., andLondon, 1994) p.126.

20 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Gouvenor, ed. Henry Croft (London,1883) I, 117.

21 On the play’s complex ‘patterns of concealment and exposure’, see MarkThornton Burnett, ‘The “heart of my mystery”: Hamlet and Secrets’, inBurnett and Manning eds, New Essays on Hamlet, pp.21–46.

22 The classic study of this theme is Maynard Mack, ‘The World of Hamlet’,Yale Review 41 (1952) 502–23.

23 Compare the ways in which expressed admiration for the painter’s ability to‘cipher’ an individual’s inner qualities in The Rape of Lucrece (ll.1394–1400,1443–56) and Timon of Athens (I.1.30–38) is later subjected to ironic qualifi-cation. His betrayal by the Thane of Cawdor similarly forces Duncan toconclude, though without direct reference to painting, that ‘there’s no art /To find the mind’s construction in the face’ (Macbeth, I.4.11).

24 John Shearman discusses this topos and how it inflected the paragonebetween poet and painter in Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the ItalianRenaissance (Princeton, 1992) chap.3. Cf. the final couplet of Sonnet 24 (‘Yeteyes this cunning want to grace their art, / They draw but what they see,know not the heart.’), and John Lyly’s Campaspe (1584) III.4.73–80 andIII.5.50–5 (‘Now must I paint things unpossible for mine art but agreeablewith my affections: deep and hollow sighs, sad and melancholy thoughts,wounds and slaughters of conceits … ’).

25 Clark Hulse similarly argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets explore ‘the impos-sibility and the necessity of knowing and of showing the mind’s construc-tion’ through the interlocking metaphors of painting, mirroring, acting andreproduction (‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Art of the Face’, John DonneJournal 5 (1986) 3–26).

26 Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context(Chicago and London, 1996) p.244. Parker’s analysis of how this play, likeOthello, obsessively exploits the language of spying out, discovering oropening to view ‘privie secretes’ in relation to a range of contemporary con-texts is highly germane to this discussion.

27 Hence his tendency to qualify such statements with the rider that the worldseems so to him (e.g. I.2.133, II.2.249–51, 308). On Hamlet’s capacity for

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holding multiple and contradictory views at any one moment, and thescepticism it sustains, see Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare’s Mature Tragedies(Princeton, 1973) p.38, and Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’sTragedies (Princeton, 1973) pp.91–136.

28 Shakespeare and the Critics (Cambridge, 1972) p.45.29 The ghost has been widely regarded as the play’s pre-eminent symbol of

hermeneutic indeterminacy. See, for example, Harry Levin, The Question ofHamlet (Oxford, 1950, repr. 1978), and Cedric Watts, Hamlet, Harvester NewCritical Introductions to Shakespeare (New York and London, 1988) pp.32–7.

30 Allusions to the commemorative function of portraiture are ubiquitous inthe period. For a useful discussion of the subject see David Rosand, ‘ThePortrait, the Courtier and Death’, in Robert W. Hanning and David Rosandeds, Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven andLondon, 1983) pp.91–129.

31 For a fuller discussion of attitudes to illusionism, see Chapter 3.32 On the expressive function of these figures and their use as an instrument

of movere, see Vickers, In Defence, chap.6.33 Cf. Peacham’s emphasis in his ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ on the self-revelatory

function of eloquence, which enables man ‘both to powre forth the inwardpassions of his heart, and also as a heavenly planet to show foorth, (by theshining beames of speech) the privie thoughts and secret conceites of hismind’.

34 Peacham is in fact discussing figures of ‘amplification’ here, not of ‘affec-tion’, but, since the two are treated together under ‘figures of thought’, hisarguments are equally applicable to both.

35 An Apology for Actors (London, 1612) p.B4r.36 Junius, Painting of the Ancients, p.55.37 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, p.28. See also Lecoat, Rhetoric of the Arts, chap.1.38 Alberti, On Painting, p.76. Cf. Leonardo on Painting, p.144.39 For a critique of ‘physiognomic interpretation’ – the belief that the face and

bodily gestures can be read as an index of the mind – as it continues to beenshrined in art-historical practice, showing how this is problematised bythe elements of self-dramatization in Renaissance portraiture, see Harry J.Berger, ‘Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze in Early Modern Portraiture’,Representations 46 (1994) 87–120.

40 The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana,Chicago and London, 1971) pp.105, 179.

41 Hamlet’s reported visit to Ophelia in II.1, the dumb-show preceding theperformance of ‘The Mousetrap’ in III.2, and the spectacle of Ophelia’smadness in IV.5, all rely on the mute rhetoric of gesture and each contrivesto baffle the spectator[s], despite their efforts to make its meaning ‘fit …their own thoughts’ (IV.5.7–13).

42 This is part of a larger anxiety about the openness of eloquence to abuse,arising from the absence of any necessary correlation between rhetoricaleffectiveness and moral probity. (See G.K. Hunter, ‘Rhetoric andRenaissance Drama’, in Peter Mack ed., Renaissance Rhetoric (London andNew York, 1994) pp.109–111.)

43 See, for example, Levin, Question of Hamlet, pp.112–13, and Peter Mercer,‘Hamlet’ and the Acting of Revenge (London, 1987) pp.171–2.

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44 All future page references to the Essays in the text are taken from JohnFlorio’s English translation in Michel de Montaigne: The Essays, 1603, ScolarPress Facsimile (Menston, 1969). In addition to the references cited below,Montaigne employs the trope of self-portraiture in I, 26; II, 17; and III, 13.For a useful discussion of Montaigne’s handling of this topos see R.A. Sayce,The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration (London, 1972) chap.4. LikeHamlet, Montaigne also links introspection with self-dramatisation (see,e.g., I, 19 and II, 6).

45 ‘Self-consciousness in Montaigne and Shakespeare’, SS 28 (1975) 42. Ellrodtalso provides a helpful summary of the voluminous critical speculationwhich has pondered the extent of Shakespeare’s indebtedness toMontaigne. Although Florio’s translation was not published until 1603, it islikely to have circulated in manuscript before then. Modern editors gener-ally accept that Hamlet draws on the Essays and is close to them in spirit.

46 Cf. his declaration: ‘I write not my jests [gests] but my selfe and my essence’(II, 6, p.220).

47 For example, Hamlet makes extensive use of paranomasia (a play on wordssimilar in sound but different in sense), antimetabole (a phrase repeated ininverse order) and hendiadys (a yoking together of two adjectives by a con-junction). On his fondness for puns and wordplay, see M.M. MahoodShakespeare’s Wordplay (London, 1957) chap.5, and Terence Hawkes,Shakespeare’s Talking Animals (London, 1973) chap.8, and on his use of hen-diadys George T. Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet ’, PMLA 96 (1981) 168–93.

48 The proliferating ironies generated by this identification with the player areperceptively analysed by Graham Holderness, Hamlet, Open Guides toLiterature (Milton Keynes, 1987) pp.67–9, and Maurice Charney, Hamlet’sFictions (New York and London, 1988) pp.66–8.

49 Several critics have commented on this dramatization/rhetoricization of therevenge task. See, for example, Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence:Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London, 1976)pp.129–43, and Mousley, ‘Hamlet and the Politics of Individualism’, p.73.

50 See, for example, Cicero De Oratore, 2.45.189–94, and Quintilian Institutio,6.2.26–30. We have here another instance of rhetorical doctrine beingfoisted on painting regardless of whether or not it was appropriate (see, forexample, Dolce’s ‘Aretino’, pp.156–7).

51 On Hamlet’s self-mirroring, see Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art(Princeton, 1974) pp.219–24, and Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age inShakespeare (London and New York, 1981) pp.198–205.

52 Hamlet himself hints at the impossibility of anybody serving as a satisfac-tory image or copy of the perceiving self when remarking of Laertes that‘his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage [i.e.shadow], nothing more’ (V.2.118). Cf. Richard II’s admission that mirrorimages (like ‘external [manners] of laments’) are ‘merely shadows’ in respectof the ‘substance’ that lies within, incapable of revealing ‘the unseengrief / That swells with silence in the tortur’d soul’ (IV.1. 292–9).

53 Delaney, British Autobiography, p.13. For a fuller discussion of Dürer’s self-portraits, see Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, I, 24–5, 41–3, 241.

54 Lives of the Artists, II, 188. Since, according to Vasari, the self-portrait wasmade to impress potential patrons in Rome, which Parmigianino was

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shortly to visit, we may assume that the choice of a convex mirror was moti-vated, in the first instance, by the desire to advertise his technical virtuosity.

55 Parmigianino: His Works in Painting (Cambridge, Mass., 1950) p.105.56 On the play’s holding of the mirror up to itself as well as spectators on and

off stage, see Anne Righter [Barton], Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play(London, 1962) pp.158–64, and James L. Calderwood, To Be and Not to Be:Negation and Metadrama in ‘Hamlet’ (New York, 1983).

57 The tensions between the neoclassical principles of mimesis and decorumadvocated by Hamlet and the non-referential mode of his ‘antic disposition’have been analysed by Robert Weimann, who associates the latter with theclowning, punning and impertinency of the ‘mad’, nonsensical Vice figure(‘Mimesis in Hamlet ’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds,Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York and London, 1985)pp.275–91).

58 Although we learn from Claudius’s soliloquy in III.3 that the play has suc-ceeded in catching his conscience, this is not apparent to the court since hedoes not unkennel his guilt in either verbal or visual form. Many criticshave wrongly assumed with Hamlet that he does, but for the contrary view,see Snyder, Comic Matrix, p.100, and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’sScepticism (Brighton, 1987) pp.115–16.

59 The critical controversy about the kind of picture referred to in this scene isusefully summarised in an appendix to Harold Jenkins’s Arden edition ofthe play (1982) pp.516–19.

60 There is an interesting parallel here with the scene in The Two NobleKinsmen (IV.2) where Emilia’s description of the miniatures of her twolovers as studies in contrast is undone by her subsequent cross-valuation ofthese portraits, which suggests that the eye is under the sway of thebeholder’s changing emotions. This could be taken as evidence ofShakespeare’s authorship of this scene, which is still in dispute.

61 The erosion of these distinctions and Hamlet’s psychological investment inmaintaining them are lucidly analysed by Janet Adelman in SuffocatingMothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’(New York and London, 1992) chap.2.

62 Although Hamlet is conscious of his fallibility as an observer, the fact thatwe view dramatic events almost wholly through his eyes confers a spuriousauthority on his vision of things. Gertrude’s very different perspectivetherefore comes as something of a shock, especially as she has hithertoexisted for us mainly as the object of Hamlet’s warped perceptions. For acomparable moment with Ophelia, see III.1.150–61.

63 In this connection, we should note that the questions which punctuatehis tirade (e.g., III.4.65–81, 188–91) can be taken as more than purelyrhetorical.

64 See, for example, Mack, ‘The World of Hamlet ’, pp.520–1; Kenneth Muir,Shakespeare’s Tragic Sequence (Liverpool, 1979) p.88; and Jenkins’s introduc-tion to the Arden edition, pp.157–9.

65 Hamlet has of course always been dogged by such awareness, as evidencedby the many references to his sense of entrapment in ‘too too sallied flesh’,in the ‘prison’ that is Denmark, etc. Until now, however, the perception ofhimself as a ‘limed soul’ has been offset by the leisurely expansiveness with

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which he engages in self-scrutiny. On the conflict between Hamlet’s desirefor freedom and acceptance of restriction, see Mark Rose, ‘Hamlet and theShape of Revenge’, in David Young ed., Shakespeare’s Middle Tragedies(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993) pp.7–17. Thomas Greene locates such tensionswithin the context of Renaissance philosophies of selfhood in ‘TheFlexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature’, in Peter Demetz et al. eds,The Discipline of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History(New Haven and London, 1968) pp.241–64.

66 Citing the absence of soliloquies, Nicholas Grene argues that ‘what makesus feel that Hamlet is different in Act V is that we are cut off from the senseof his inner life’ (Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, second edn (London, 1996)p.58). But Hamlet’s musings in the graveyard are still clearly self-directed.

67 Tremulous Private Body, p.38. Cf. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare(Oxford, 1986) pp.70–5. Both critics explain the gestural nature of Hamlet’sreferences to an inner essence in terms of his status as a transitional figure,whose historically premature claims to bourgeois selfhood are unrealizablewithin the limits of the text.

5 Troilus and Cressida, ‘Imagin’d Worth’ and the‘Bifold Authority’ of Anamorphosis

01 Cf. A.P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns (London and New York, 1961) p.135.02 Troilus’s perceptual crisis is mirrored in reverse by Cressida (V.2.107–12). If

‘the error of [her] eye directs [her] mind’, his vision is distorted by an intel-lectual idealism that scorns mere facts.

03 For a full analysis of this conundrum and its historical applications, seeRosalie Colie, Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox(Princeton, 1966) esp. pp.3–40.

04 Cf. the references to anamorphic portraits in Chapman, Ovids Banquet ofSence, stanzas 2–6, and All Fools, I.1.47; Michael Drayton, Mortimeriadosl.2330; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, III.4.87–97; and George Herbert, ‘Sinne(II) l.10. For further literary allusions to the genre, see Allan Shickman,‘ “Turning Pictures” in Shakespeare’s England’, Art Bulletin LIX (1977)67–70.

05 For a recent discussion of the play’s anamorphic qualities, see FrançoisLaroque, ‘Perspective in Troilus and Cressida’, in John M. Mucciolo ed.,Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions: Essays in Honour ofW.R. Elton (Aldershot, 1996) pp.224–42.

06 Anamorphic Art, p.4.07 The Ambassadors has been subjected to detailed theoretical analysis, most

notably by Jacques Lacan (Four Fundamental Concepts, pp.85–9) and byStephen Greenblatt (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp.17–26).

08 See further Chapter 3.09 See David Summers, The Judgment of Sense, chap.2.10 For a useful overview of the revival of classical scepticism in the Renaissance,

especially its contribution to the controversy between Reformers andCounter-Reformers regarding the proper criterion of religious knowledge,see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979). See also Victoria Kahn’s brilliant

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analysis of Montaigne’s sceptical rhetorical practice and its deconstructionof the humanist belief in a consensual standard of judgement grounded innatural law (Rhetoric, Prudence and Scepticism, chap.5).

11 Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R.G. Bury (Buffalo, NY, 1990) p.52.12 Montaigne reserves until last his attack on the authority of the senses on

the grounds that they are the ultimate basis of all human philosophy andtherefore ‘those Sects which combate mans science, do principally combatethe same by the uncertainty and feeblenes of our sences: For, since by theirmeane and intermission al knowledge comes unto us, if they chaunce tomisse in the report they make unto us … wee have nothing else to holde by’(II.12, 343). Many of these arguments were reiterated by Sir Walter Raleighin his tract, The Sceptic.

13 Anamorphic Art, pp.66–9. Compare the movement in Descartes’s Meditations(1641), from a rigorously sceptical demolition of the foundations ofhuman knowledge, beginning with sensory impressions, to the discoveryof new grounds for certainty in a rational self-consciousness underwrittenby God.

14 Cf. Ben Jonson, ‘In Authorem’. See also Gilman, Curious Perspective, chap.6,on the widespread use of the perspective glass (i.e. the telescope or othertype of refracting lens) as a trope for the infirmity of human (as opposed todivine) understanding in early seventeenth-century devotional verse.

15 ‘A Cypresse Grove’, in Robert Macdonald, ed., William Drummond ofHawthornden: Poems and Prose (Edinburgh and London, 1976) p.155. Citedby Guillen, ‘On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective’, p.42.

16 ‘A Defence of Rhyme’, in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Essays II, p.376. In somerespects Daniel’s sceptical inflection of the perspective metaphor was antici-pated by Nicholas Cusanus, who invoked an actual pictorial exemplumat the beginning of De visione Dei in order to illustrate the fallibility of areligious faith grounded in the finite human intellect. Just as Rogier vander Weyden’s self-portrait produces in every beholder the illusion that it islooking directly at him, wherever he may be located in relation to thepainting, so every individual believer constructs the ineffable, transcendentgodhead in his own image: ‘For as everything appears red to the physicaleye when it looks through a red glass, so the spiritual eye, in its limitedness,sees you ... according to the nature of its own limitation. Man is capableonly of human judgment.’ (cited by Ernst Cassirer in The Individualand the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford,1963) pp. 31–2.

17 See Winifred Nowottny, ‘ “Opinion” and “Value” in Troilus and Cressida’, EC4 (1954) 282–96, and Tinsley Helton, ‘Paradox and Hypothesis in Troilusand Cressida’, Sh.Studs 10 (1977) 115–31. The play’s preoccupation withthe relativity of value-judgements is helpfully located in its historico-intellectual context by W.R. Elton, ‘Shakespeare’s Ulysses and the Problemof Value’, Sh.Studs 2 (1966) 95–111.

18 From this it will be clear that I find the received reading of the play as pri-marily an exercise in satirical debunking unsatisfactory. To see the play asinvolving little more than the deflation of chivalric and amatory codes is toassume that Thersites’s reductive view of its action as all ‘wars and lechery’must be taken as authoritative, even though this view is subjected tothe same stringent critique as any other in the play – not least by Thersites

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himself who twice denies its legitimacy (V.4.28, V.7.16–18). Above all, it isto underestimate the power of the play’s rhetorical and dramatic techniquesto perplex and disturb us by their indeterminacy – precisely that indetermi-nacy which the play shares with anamorphic images.

19 For an analysis of the ways in which the play ‘persistently calls attention toits intertextuality, its anachronicity, its dependence upon a prodigious liter-ary and rhetorical legacy’, see Elizabeth Freund, ‘ “Ariachne’s broken woof”:the rhetoric of citation in Troilus and Cressida’, in Parker and Hartman eds,Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, pp.19–37.

20 Lucien Dällenbach, for example, sees reflexivity as a constitutive feature ofthe mise an abyme experience: the literary work duplicates itself either inone or a series of internal (and sometimes paradoxical) mirrors, thereby‘open[ing] up dizzying perspectives’. (See The Mirror in the Text, trans.Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes (Cambridge, 1989, chaps 3 and 4)).

21 Cf. Gayle Greene’s assertion that the play traces the ‘linguistic implica-tions of loss of belief in a transcendent order – the problems of definitionand description which follow when sanctions of value have been under-mined and the correspondence of language to reality can no longer beassumed’ (‘Language and Value in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida’, SEL 21(1981) 274). My own reading of the play is indebted to Greene’s cogentargument.

22 René Girard has argued that both the erotic and military plots exemplify‘mimetic desire’, the law whereby desire is generated by the presence ofcompeting desires focussed on the same object (‘The Politics of Desire inTroilus and Cressida’, in Parker and Hartman eds, Shakespeare and theQuestion of Theory, pp.188–209). This idea can be extended to the play’streatment of imitation, for, as Renaissance theorists emphasized, the prac-tice of imitatio is similarly driven by ‘mimetic rivalry’: the wish to emulate,and in the process outdo, another’s representation of a particular themeor subject.

23 Terry Eagleton, Shakespeare and Society (London, 1967) p.14.24 On the metaphorical functions of the go-between in this play see Richard

D. Fly, Shakespeare’s Mediated World (Amherst, Mass., 1976) chap.2.25 Zvi Jagendorf argues that the levelling force of satire in the play ‘works

against the heroic idea of identity as unique, specific and autonomous’ (‘AllAgainst One in Troilus and Cressida’, English 31 (1982) 199–210). So too, Isuggest, does the relativizing force of comparison.

26 While the female characters especially are subjected to rhetorical fragmen-tation, in keeping with the blazon tradition (see Nancy J. Vickers, ‘DianaDescribed: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme, Critical Inquiry 8 (1981)265–79) – the reifying itemization of a woman’s physical charms – theirmale counterparts are by no means exempt from such treatment (cf.I.2.251–5, II.1.47–9, IV.1.70–3, IV.5.54–7, 124–32, 231–8).

27 The association of the play’s fractured identities with the culinary imageryof ‘o’er-eaten’ ‘scraps’, ‘orts’ and ‘fragment[s’] (e.g. V.1.8, V.2.156–60) makesthe loss of heroic integrity seem morally repellent.

28 Several critics have noted this emphasis on the obfuscatory and tautologicalqualities of comparison. See, for example, Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art,pp.336–7, and Greene, ‘Language and Value’, 281–3.

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29 Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, p.91. For Wilson, amplification ‘consisteth mostin augmenting, and diminishing of any matter’ (Arte of Rhetorique, p.120).

30 This process of rhetorical inflation and deflation is discussed by, amongothers, Patricia Thomson, ‘Rant and Cant in Troilus and Cressida’, Essays andStudies, 22 (1969) 33–56; T. McAlindon, ‘Language, Style and Meaning inTroilus and Cressida’, PMLA, 84 (1969) 29–43; and Parker, Shakespeare fromthe Margins, pp.220–8.

31 See, for example, Michael Long, The Unnatural Scene (London, 1976)pp.106–13, and Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism, chap.4.

32 Institutio, VIII.4.9–29.33 Discussing this commercial imagery, C.C. Barfoot shows how the play

exploits the semantic links between ‘praise’, ‘prize’ and ‘price’ in its dia-logue and plot (‘Troilus and Cressida: “Praise us as we are tasted”’, SQ , 39(1988) 45–57).

34 Cf. Love’s Labour’s Lost, II.1.13–16, IV.3.235–7, and Sonnet 21. OnShakespeare’s distrust of ‘proud’ or ‘false compare’, see John Kerrigan’sintroduction to the Penguin edition of the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint(London, 1986) pp.22–33.

35 In one sense Helen has already been exchanged since she was seized by theTrojans in retaliation for the Greeks’ detainment of Priam’s sister, Hesione(II.2.76–9). Helen’s and Cressida’s common function as objects of exchangewithin a masculine economy of desire is discussed by Carol Cook in‘Unbodied Figures of Desire’, Theatre Journal, 38 (1986) 34–52. The classictreatment of this subject is Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes onthe “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Rayna R. Reiter ed., Toward anAnthropology of Women (New York, 1975) pp.157–210.

36 On this process of effeminization, see especially Gary Spear, ‘Shakespeare’s“Manly” Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida’, SQ 44(1993) 409–22.

37 Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, p.22.38 The nearest Shakespearean equivalent is Richard II, which explores the lin-

guistic implications of a major epistemic shift in similar terms. Thus ittraces the erosion of the metaphysical basis of analogical discourse, whichbecomes fragmented and subjectivized as a consequence.

39 See Collected Works of Erasmus, XXIV, 625.40 For the use of comparatio in forensic debate, see Cicero, De Inventione,

I.30.49 and Topica 18.68–71, and Quintilian, Institutio, V.10.86–93.41 ‘Language, Style and Meaning’, p.30.42 Definitions of these vices are taken from Garden of Eloquence, p.168. Cf.

Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, pp.259–60.43 Advancement of Learning, p.26.44 In his reflections on fame in III.3, Ulysses shifts to an implicitly sceptical

position; he does not deny that intrinsic values exist, only the possi-bility that they may be known, given the contingent, ephemeral and super-ficial qualities of opinion-making the ‘whole world’ over (ll.169–84).Agamemnon’s attempts to distinguish between ‘esteem’ and ‘worth’ whereAchilles is concerned (II.3.116–34) are likewise undercut by his admissionthat, in dancing attendance on the ‘great Myrmidon’, the Greeks ‘under-write’ his assumed superiority.

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45 See, for example, Prologue, 5–10, I.1.90–3, II.1.8, II.3.95–101.46 On the play’s two-dimensional quality, see John Bayley, The Uses of Division:

Unity and Disharmony in Literature (London, 1976) pp.186–204, and on theabsence of plot, Barbara Everett, ‘The Inaction of Troilus and Cressida’, EC 32(1982) 119–39.

47 See, for example, I.2.1, 218, I.3.223–32, III.1.30–6, IV.5.75. Even when char-acters are successfully identified, it is often by a laborious process of inferencefrom known physical attributes (see, e.g., II.2.98, IV.5.13–16, 160–2).

48 Harry Berger notes how ‘the oppressive pressure of spectators, the clash ofperspectives and interpretations to which the characters are subject’ places‘limitations on inwardness’, in ‘Troilus and Cressida: The Observer asBasilisk’, Comparative Drama 2 (1968) repr. in Second World, p.143.

49 According to Linda Charnes, the play dramatizes the struggle of its protago-nists ‘to produce subjective self-representations that can in fact only be real-ized at the expense of their notorious identities. Subjectivity … is posited asthe disruptive effect of simultaneous resistance, and subjection, to thedetermining force of famous names’ (‘ “So Unsecret to Ourselves”:Notorious Identity and the Material Subject’ in Shakespeare’s Troilus andCressida, SQ 40 (1989) p.418). But, with the partial exception of Cressida(see below), submission to this process of cultural inscription is much morein evidence than resistance. Rosalie Colie is nearer the mark when she com-ments on the characters’ voluntary self-reduction to the status of stereo-types, Shakespeare’s Living Art, pp.325–6, 338.

50 The narcissism associated with the topos of self-reflection is touched onthroughout (e.g., II.3.151–7, III.3.102–11, 308). The play, I would argue,explores the interface between these twin Ovidian myths of Pygmalion andNarcissus, their common interest in the idolatrous potentialities of theimagination and the beholder’s desire, fuelled by self-consuming pride, toembrace the ‘shadow that he sees’ as though it were a ‘lively boddie’(Arthur Golding, The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entituled Metamorphosis …(London, 1587) p.37v.). Like the Trojan cult of Helen, Troilus’s adoration ofCressida is profoundly narcissistic, since any qualities bestowed on herredound to his own fame (cf. II.2.199–202).

51 Bayley, Uses of Division, p.205. This fact reflects perhaps a debt to Chaucer’sTroilus and Criseyde, since his portrait of the titular heroine is the most com-plex and psychologically realistic in the poem.

52 With the advent of feminist criticism, the degree of selfhood achieved byCressida has become a focus for lively debate. Janet Adelman argues thatshe is initially presented as a ‘fully articulated subject’, although laterdemoted to the status of ‘opaque object’ by a dramatic logic which necessi-tates her assimilation to Troilus’s fantasies (Suffocating Mothers, pp.45–63).Others see her as the pure product of her world, who has internalisedits belief that identity and worth are conferred by opinion and thus whose‘fate is the working out of a character who lacks integrity or autonomy’(Gayle Greene, ‘Shakespeare’s Cressida: “A Kind of Self”’, in Carolyn RuthSwift Lenz et al. eds, The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare(Urbana, 1980) p.136. Cf. Carolyn Asp, ‘In Defence of Cressida’, Studiesin Philology 74 (1977) 406–17, and Claire M. Tylee, ‘The Text of Cressida andEvery Ticklish Reader: Troilus and Cressida, the Greek Camp Scene’,

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SS 41 (1988) 63–76). My own view is that Cressida’s subjectivity (suchas it is) is generated by the interplay between these possibilities;she is ‘paradoxically … both self-centred and insufficiently autonomous’(Marianne Novy, Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (ChapelHill, 1984) p.121).

53 Cressida’s premature embracing of her reputation as a whore is remarkedupon by Ulysses (IV.5.54–63). There is an intriguing parallel here with herfather, who abandoned Troy and ‘incurr’d a traitor’s name’ before it wasstrictly necessary.

54 The classic discussion of this subject is E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Icones Symbolicae:The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought’, JWCI, 11 (1948) 163–92.

55 Cf. I.3.230–6, IV.1.8–34, IV.5.205–6.56 On Shakespeare’s manipulation of the iconographic conventions associated

with the Troy story, see Jill Levenson, ‘Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida andthe Monumental Tradition in Tapestries and Literature’, Renaissance Drama7 (1976) 43–84.

57 Arnold Stein argues that one reason why the play falls short of tragic expe-rience is the ‘singleness of attitude and passivity’ displayed by its characters(‘Troilus and Cressida: The Disjunctive Imagination’, ELH 36 (1969)145–67).

6 Antony and Cleopatra and the Art of Dislimning

01 The use of pictorial tropes to describe imaginative activity is nothing new;it can be traced back to Plato, who argued that the senses paint images onthe soul (Philebus, 39B), and was commonplace in the Renaissance.

02 Cleopatra’s ‘o’erpicturing’ of Venus has prompted critical speculation thatthis passage refers specifically to Apelles’s famous painting of VenusAnadyomene, mentioned by Pliny. But irrespective of whether Shakespearehad a particular artistic prototype in mind, the suggestion that Cleopatradisplayed herself according to iconographic conventions employed bypainters (based on a hint in the play’s chief source, Thomas North’s 1579translation of Plutarch’s ‘Life of Marcus Antonius’, cited in John Wilders,ed., Arden 3 edition (1995) p.139) is important for my argument, insofar asit confirms that we are expected to locate this scene in the context of utpictura discourse.

03 Cf. Jonathan Gil Harris’s subtle analysis of the play’s articulation of a narcis-sistic model of desire that invites the beholder to project his/her own long-ings into its textual/ theatrical lacunae. Noting that Cleopatra’s seductivepower is predicated upon her ‘paradoxical absence’ from Enobarbus’sspeech, he likens the latter to a ‘rococo mirror, its extraordinarily ornateand copious frame enclosing a subtly camouflaged glass in whichEnobarbus’s Roman listeners glimpse whatever they want to see’.(“Narcissus in thy face”: Roman Desire and the Difference it Fakes in Antonyand Cleopatra’, SQ 45 (1994) 418).

04 Cf. Orsino’s remark, ‘So full of shapes is fancy / That it alone is high fantas-tical’ (Twelfth Night, I.1.14). David Young usefully situates Shakespeare’streatment of the imagination in relation to the contradictory views of this

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faculty circulating in the period, in Something of Great Constancy: The Art of‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (New Haven and London, 1966) pp.115–41.

05 Sonnet 114. Cf. sonnets 113, 137, 141, 148, 150, 152. 06 The following discussion assumes that the discourses pertaining to the fan-

tasia were common currency in Italy and England, though differences ofemphasis might occur. There is some evidence that Italian writers had fewerscruples about the use of the imagination as an artistic tool; their Englishcounterparts, as William Rossky has shown, had to negotiate the over-whelmingly negative account of this faculty in popular psychology(‘Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic’, Studies inthe Renaissance 5 (1958) 49–73).

07 Although classical and Scholastic writers sometimes distinguished betweenthe imaginatio as a passive, reproductive agent and the freely creative phan-tasia, by the sixteenth century these terms were often used interchangeably(see Murray W. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and MedievalThought (Urbana, 1927) pp.179, 278). However, it is important not to con-fuse either with our modern usage of the word ‘fantasy’; while the fantasia(I have adopted the Italian spelling; cf. the English ‘phantasie’ or ‘fancy’)similarly connotes the power of desire to reshape quotidian realities, this isa voluntaristic not an unconscious process.

08 Prooemium, Arthur Fairbanks trans., Philostratus ‘Imagines’; Callistratus,‘Descriptions’ (London and New York, 1931) p.285.

09 The Sophist, 236a–b. For further discussion of Plato’s critique of illusionism,see Chapter 3.

10 On the developing role of the fantasia in Renaissance art theory, see Kemp,‘From “Mimesis” to “Fantasia” ’; Summers, Michelangelo, chaps 7 and 14;and Sharon Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention and Fantasia (London,1993) pp.29–37.

11 Harry Caplan trans., Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola: On the Imagination(1501), Cornell Studies in English XVI (New Haven, 1930) p.31.

12 See Murray W. Bundy, ‘ “Invention” and “Imagination” in the Renaissance’,Journal of English and Germanic Philology 29 (1930) 535–45.

13 Arte of English Poesie, p.19.14 The Craftsman’s Handbook, pp.1–2.15 The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, trans. F.C. Conybeare (London and New

York, 1912) VI.19. 16 Timaeus, 71–2.17 See the extract from Tasso’s Discorsi del poema eroico (1594) in Allan

H. Gilbert ed., Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (New York, 1940) p.477.For a useful survey of the critical debate over the role of the imagination inliterary production and the eicastic-phantastic distinction, see BaxterHathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca,NY, 1962).

18 See, for example, Robert Burton’s distrustful appraisal of the ‘phantasie’: ‘InMelancholy men this faculty is most Powerfull and strong, and often hurts,producing many monstrous and prodigious things … In Poets and PaintersImagination forcibly workes, as appeares by their severall fictions, Antickes,Images … In men it is subject and governed by Reason, or at least should be;but in Brutes it hath no superior, & is Ratio Brutorum, all the reason they

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have’ (Thomas Faulkner et al. eds, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford,1989) I, 152, cf. 251).

19 Advancement, pp.80–1, 116.20 The growing impact of post-structuralist theory on literary criticism has

resulted in a sharpened recognition of the degree to which questions of rep-resentation are imbricated with power relations in the play. For examples ofthis approach, see John Drakakis ed., Antony and Cleopatra, New Casebookseries (London, 1994), especially the pieces by Barbara Vincent, AniaLoomba, and Jyotsyna Singh.

21 Phyllis Rackin likewise reads the play in terms of a debate between therationalist aesthetic of the Romans and the play’s neoclassically mindedcritics, and the claims of the idealizing imagination, exemplified byCleopatra’s showmanship (‘Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra, the Decorum ofNature, and the Golden World of Poetry’, PMLA 87 (1972), repr. in Drakakised., Antony and Cleopatra, pp.78–100). But whereas Rackin’s brilliant essay istheatrical in focus, I am interested in the broader implications of thisdebate for our view of the fantasia as a creative resource, since many of theplay’s shows are staged only in the mind’s eye.

22 ‘ “Nature’s piece ’gainst fancy”: The Divided Catastrophe in Antony andCleopatra’, Inaugural lecture, University of London (London, 1973) p.4.

23 Cleopatra’s dream is similarly seen as the ‘central counterstatement’ toAntony’s vision of the dissolving clouds in Arnold Stein, ‘The Image ofAntony: Lyric and Tragic Imagination’, Kenyon Review 21 (1959) 586–606,and cf. Sidney Homan’s discussion of the play’s ambivalence towards theimagination (‘Divided Response and the Imagination in Antony andCleopatra’, PQ 49 (1970) 460–8).

24 The precise values identified with Rome and Egypt vary from critic to critic,but the former is generally seen as standing for military prowess,public duty, the ‘strong necessity of time’, reason and self-restraint, the lat-ter for sensuous pleasure, idleness, a sense of timelessness, imagination andexcess.

25 As Jonathan Dollimore notes, ‘the language of desire, far from transcend-ing the power relations which structure this society, is wholly in-formedby them’ (Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama ofShakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton, 1984) p.207). Ironically, ofnothing is this more true than the lovers’ claims to transcendance, which(I argue below) become a mode of political resistance.

26 Most of the play’s critics comment on its dialectical structure. See especiallyJohn Danby, ‘Antony and Cleopatra: A Shakespearean Adjustment’ in hisPoets on Fortune’s Hill (London, 1952), and Ernest Schanzer, The ProblemPlays of Shakespeare: A Study of ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Measure for Measure’, ‘Antonyand Cleopatra’ (London, 1963).

27 For recent discussions of Cleopatra’s theatricality, particularly the way thisis constituted as a threat to the Roman ideal of a stable masculine identity,see Jyotsyna Singh, ‘Renaissance Anti-theatricality, Anti-feminism andShakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’, Renaissance Drama 20 (1989) repr. inDrakakis ed., Antony and Cleopatra, pp.308–29, and Laura Levine, Men inWomen’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminisation 1579–1642(Cambridge, 1994) chap.3.

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28 On Antony’s Herculean qualities, see Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Heroin Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare, and Dryden (London, 1962) pp.113–21,and Richard Hillman, ‘Antony, Hercules, and Cleopatra: “the bidding of thegods” and “the subtlest maze of them all”’, SQ 38 (1987) 442–51.

29 Cf. I.4.1–10, 16–21; II.1.19–27; II.6.62–70; II.7.24–51; III.6.1–19.30 The reiterated idea that the perceived value or identity of a person alters

when he/she is absent, that he/she only becomes an object of desire whenirrecoverably lost (see, e.g., I.2.122–7; I.4.41–4), should perhaps be seen asarising not so much from a preoccupation with the state of nostalgic belat-edness (cf. Michael Neill’s introduction to the Oxford edition (1994)pp.94–8), as from the play’s investment in the fantasia, which achieves itsfullest scope only in the absence of the thing it works on.

31 A useful list of analogues for the topos of the metamorphosing clouds andpageantry trope is supplied by Marvin Spevack’s New Variorum edition ofAntony and Cleopatra (1990) pp.273–4.

32 See H.W. Janson, ‘The “Image Made by Chance” in Renaissance Thought’,in Millard Meiss ed., De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honour of ErwinPanofsky (New York, 1961) I, 254–66. While perceiving images in naturalobjects was regarded as a sign of imaginative creativity, it was not theartist’s prerogative alone but something shared with the beholder in gen-eral. This crucial point is made in Philostratus’s Apollonius of Tyana, II.22.Discussing the animal shapes seen in cloud formations, Apollonius observesthat ‘the mimetic art is twofold, and we may regard the one kind as anemployment of the hands and mind in producing imitations, and declarethat this is painting, whereas the other kind consists in making likenesseswith the mind alone’.

33 Leonardo on Painting, p.222. Cf. Vasari’s use of the same topos in his life ofPiero di Cosimo (Lives of the Artists, II, 107).

34 See Barbara J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic toShakespearean Tragicomedy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984) p.187.

35 The Common Liar: An Essay on ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ (New Haven andLondon, 1973) pp.121–31, 139–49. Like much recent criticism of the play,this chapter is deeply indebted to Adelman’s study.

36 By this I mean a style of architecture that embodies rational preceptsthrough its observance of mathematical proportion and symmetry, in keep-ing with the ideals set out in Vitruvius’s De Architectura. David Bevington’sNew Cambridge edition (1990) includes some illuminating annotation ofthe play’s architectural imagery.

37 Analysing the play’s imagistic patterns, Susan Synder notes how the solidfixity of Rome is destabilised by the seemingly undirected flux identifiedwith Egypt (‘Patterns of Motion in Antony and Cleopatra’, SS 33 (1980)113–22).

38 Terra firma is figuratively identified not only with the empire and its con-quering land armies (III.7.41–8, 61–6), but with the Roman ideal of a ‘firm’,unified and self-contained identity (I.5.43, III.11.1). But if it cannot guaran-tee the permanence or stability of the first, neither does it provide a flexibleenough basis for selfhood.

39 The translator was almost certainly Robert Dallington (for bibliographicaldetails, see Karl Joseph Höltgen, ‘Sir Robert Dallington (1561–1637): Author,

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Traveler, and Pioneer of Taste’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 47 (1984)147–77). All page references cited in the text are from Stephen Orgel ed.,Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Love in a Dream (New York and London,1976).

40 See De Architectura, II, Preface (1–4). Like Cleopatra’s vision of Antony, thisaudacious project seems consciously to emulate the fabled wonders ofantiquity (e.g. the Colossus of Rhodes) and is conceived as a fitting tributeto a world-conqueror.

41 The play’s hyperbolic discourse has been extensively discussed: see, forexample, Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function ofImagery in the Drama (Cambridge, Mass., 1961) pp.79–141; MadeleineDoran, ‘ “High events as these”: the language of hyperbole in Antony andCleopatra’, Queen’s Quarterly 72 (1965) 26–51; Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art,chap.4; Adelman, Common Liar, pp.110–21; and the introductions to therecent New Cambridge, Oxford and Arden 3 editions. Yet curiously littleattention has been given to the spatial/optical qualities of this discourse.

42 Shakespeare had exploited rhetorical amplificatio for this purpose in the firstact of Julius Caesar, where it is used to emphasise the opposing valuations ofCaesar, and again, more intensively, in Troilus and Cressida (see Chapter 5).

43 Apart from emphasizing the general obligation to observe ‘due proportion’in figurative discourse, Aristotle identifies a specific type of ‘proportionalmetaphor’, consisting of four terms which stand in the same relation toeach other and are therefore inter-substitutable (The Art of Poetry, 21.4; cf.Rhetoric, III.4.3–4).

44 Ad Herennium, IV.33.45 Garden of Eloquence, pp.31–3. Cf. Richard Sherry’s definition of amplifica-

tion as a process of ‘increasing and diminyshing, [which] serveth for thyspurpose, that the thyng shulde seme as great as it is in dede, lesser orgreater then it seemeth to manye’ (A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London,1550) e.iii v.).

46 In his essay, ‘Jacobean Tragedy and the Mannerist Style’ SS 26 (1973) 49–67,Cyrus Hoy comments illuminatingly on the Mannerist qualities of this play,though he is mainly concerned with its juxtaposition of different ordersof reality.

47 Cf. Walter Friedlander’s observation that ‘the gigantic figures of theprophets and sibyls of the Sistine ceiling live and act … [in a spacethat is] fearfully narrowed, almost canceled, and their powerful expansive-ness points towards liberation only in a transcendental and divinespace’ (Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York,1965) p.15).

48 Admittedly, this affective power is subjected to the same sceptical interroga-tion as every other aspect of the lovers’ behaviour (e.g., III.2.53–9, IV.2.24),but those most suspicious of this power (Enobarbus, Caesar) are neverthe-less moved against their will to apparently genuine displays of emotion.The lovers also know how to mobilize imaginative energies in others, har-nessing these for their own political ends. By contrast, the Roman attitudeto persuasion is strictly utilitarian (e.g., III.12.26–31, V.1.61–6).

49 On the ‘grand style’, see Cicero, Orator, V.20, XXVIII.97, and Quintilian,Institutio, XII.10.58–65.

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50 See Vasari, Lives, I, 360, and Condivi, Life of Michelangelo, p.39. Significantly,Michelangelo’s work was seen in his own day as belonging to the ‘grandstyle’ (Summers, Michelangelo, p.19).

51 Quintilian, Institutio, VI.2.29.52 See Dorsch ed., Classical Literary Criticism, pp.121–6.53 Ibid, p.100.54 See Chapter 3, p.87. Several critics have commented on the conflicting

views of decorum informing the play (see esp. Rackin, ‘Shakespeare’s BoyCleopatra’; Adleman Common Liar, pp.141–5, and T. McAlindon, Shakespeareand Decorum (London, 1973) pp.167–213), but the spatialised treatment ofthe problem has again gone virtually unnoticed.

55 In endowing Antony with this paradoxical quality, Shakespeare is buildingon a remark in Plutarch’s text, which states: ‘Furthermore, things thatseeme intollerable in other men, as to boast commonly, to jeast with one orother, to drinke like a good fellow with every body … it is incredible whatwonderful love it wanne him [i.e. Marcus Antonius] amongest them’ (NewVariorum edition, p.399).

56 Adelman, Common Liar, p.141.57 As Michael Neill notes, this scene ‘lurches in performance between high

poetry and the grossest physical awkwardness, as Cleopatra and her womenstruggle to haul up Antony’s mutilated body into the monument’ (Oxfordedition, p.77).

58 Schanzer lists instances where Cleopatra’s words, sentiments and actionsecho Antony’s and notes their increase towards the end of the play, butattributes them to an affinity of outlook between the lovers rather than aconscious policy of remaking (Problem Plays, pp.133–8).

59 See, for example, Rackin, ‘Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra’, pp.85–9, and RenéWeis, ‘Antony and Cleopatra: The Challenge of Fiction’, English (1983) 1–14.

60 Cf. Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing, pp.69–70.61 Barbara Vincent notes that the lovers’ apotheosis ‘depends on how success-

fully they engage the desires of the beholders’ (‘Antony and Cleopatra andthe Rise of Comedy’, ELR 12 (1982), repr. in Drakakis ed., Antony andCleopatra, p.241).

62 Enobarbus undergoes a similar repositioning in IV.9, when he exchanges hisrole of detached observer for that of protagonist, at the mercy of his ownemotions and watched by others. Ironically, he fulfils his earlier predictionthat remaining loyal to the lovers would entail such a change of status: ‘hethat can endure / To follow with allegiance a fall’n lord … earns a place i’ th’story’ (III.13.43).

63 On Cleopatra’s self-imaging as Isis, see Michael Lloyd, ‘Cleopatra as Isis’,SS 12 (1959) 89–94, Bono, Literary Transvaluation, pp.197–213, andT. McAlindon, Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge, 1991) pp.229–32.

7 The Tempest and the Art of Masque

11 For example, it also employs the four-part structure of Roman NewComedy. See Daniel C. Broughton, ‘Jonsonian Structure in The Tempest’, SQ21 (1970) 3–10.

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02 See Peacock, Stage Designs of Inigo Jones, p.11.03 Notable examples include Love’s Labours’ Lost, As You Like It, Timon of

Athens, Macbeth, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. Only The Tempest, how-ever, attempts to reproduce anything like a full-scale court masque.

04 Those studies of the genre I have found most useful include Stephen Orgel,The Jonsonian Masque (1965, repr. Oxford, 1990) and The Illusion of Power(Berkeley, Calif., 1975); Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones; Graham Parry, TheGolden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester,1982); David Lindley ed., The Court Masque (Manchester, 1984); and Strong,Art and Power.

05 Stephen Orgel ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven andLondon, 1969) p.169.

06 Anne Lake Prescott has shown how grotesque imagery was used by Jonsonand Jones as an old-fashioned, irrational yet not unproductive counterpartto the neoclassical style underpinning the ordered harmonies of the masque(‘The Stuart Masque and Pantagruel’s Dreams’, ELH 51 (1984) 407–30).

07 Orgel ed., The Complete Masques, p.134.08 Parry, Golden Age Restor’d, p.43.09 Illusion of Power, p.39.10 Inigo Jones, I, 7. The point is restated more fully by Strong, who notes the

irony whereby perspective, initially associated with the humanist civic val-ues of the Italian city-states, was appropriated as an instrumentum regni bythe absolutist rulers of sixteenth-century Europe (Art and Power, pp. 32–5).

11 Gilman, Curious Perspective, p.64.12 Notable performers in the Whitehall masques who later aligned themselves

with the Parliamentarians include the Countess of Arundel, Sir John Digby,the Earl of Essex, and Lord Rich. (See the index of performers in DavidLindley ed., Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments 1605–1640(Oxford, 1995).

13 On this point I am indebted to discussion with Dr. Lesley Mickel, whosemonograph on the Jonsonian anti-masque is forthcoming from Scolar Press.

14 Orgel ed., The Complete Masques, p.75.15 Orgel, The Illusion of Power, p.40.16 See, for example, Leah Marcus, ‘ “Present Occasions” and the Shaping of

Ben Jonson’s Masques’, ELH 45 (1978), 201–25, and Sara Pearl, ‘Sounding toPresent Occasion: Jonson’s Masques of 1620–5’, in Lindley ed., The CourtMasque, 60–77.

17 For the definitive account of Jonson’s dispute with Jones over this issue, seeD.J. Gordon, ‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrelbetween Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’, JWCI 12 (1949) 152–78, repr. inStephen Orgel ed., The Renaissance Imagination (Berkeley, Los Angeles andLondon, 1975) pp.77–101.

18 From ‘An Expostulacion with Inigo Jones’, in Herford and Simpson eds,Works, VIII, 404. The whole poem sums up Jonson’s jaundiced attitude tothe new orthodoxy which identified the ‘Eloquence of Masques’ with its‘Mighty Showes’ and ‘the mere perspective of an Inch board’.

19 See, for example., Glynne Wickham, ‘Masque and Anti-masque in TheTempest’, Essays and Studies 28 (1975) 1–14, and Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeareand the Courtly Aesthetic (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1981).

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20 Dryden referred to The Tempest as a Blackfriars play in the preface to his1674 adaptation of it. While we have no firm evidence that it was also per-formed at the Globe, this would fit with the usual practice of the King’sMen, who from 1608 alternated seasonally between these two playinghouses. For a review of the question, see Appendix E in Frank Kermode’sArden edition.

21 That the play performs a critical revision of the masque has been argued,with different emphases, by several critics. See especially Ernest B. Gilman,‘ “All eyes”: Prospero’s Inverted Masque’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980)214–30; David Lindley, ‘Music, Masque and Meaning in The Tempest’, inLindley ed., The Court Masque, pp.47–59; and David Norbrook, ‘ “What caresthese roarers for the name of king?”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest’, inGordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope eds, The Politics of Tragicomedy:Shakespeare and After (London and New York, 1992) pp.36–8. The play’s rela-tionship to the masque is also discussed in Robert Grudin, ‘Prospero’s Masqueand the Structure of The Tempest’, South Atlantic Quarterly 71 (1972) 401–9,and John Gillies, ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque’, ELH 53 (1986) 673–707.

22 See his introduction to the Oxford edition of the play (1987) pp.2, 43–4. 23 This question has begun to be addressed in recent criticism. Graham

Holderness, for example, argues that the different venues where the playwas staged would have determined which meanings were activated inShakespeare’s text. While the play’s discursive links with the court masqueallowed it to be received at Whitehall as a conservative celebration of theroyal prerogative benevolently exercised by an ideal ruler, he believes thatGlobe audiences would have been inclined to identify with the viewpointof socially marginalized characters, especially the Boatswain’s plebeian com-monsense and Caliban’s defiance of authority (Graham Holderness et al.,Shakespeare: Out of Court: Dramatisations of Court Society (London, 1990)chap.9). David Norbrook, in an essay that tries to retrieve the ‘republicansubtext’ embedded in the play’s utopian allusions, likewise warns againstoversimplified authoritarian readings, noting that the play’s audience‘would have contained people who were far from taking an absolutistdynastic perspective for granted’ and that the text ‘does permit a certaindetachment from the courtly viewpoint’ (‘ “What cares these roarers” ’).

24 The Boatswain’s question derives its resonance partly from the fact that‘roarers’ ‘connoted misrule and rebellion, roaring boys or girls’ (Norbrook,‘ “What cares these roarers” ’, p.21). The socio-political discontent of anAntonio or a Caliban proves more difficult to allay than the waves.

25 Prospero’s account of his ‘secret studies’ in I.2 is broadly consistent withFrank Kermode’s portrayal of him as a Neoplatonic Mage, whose artinvolves achieving mastery over the natural world and his own passions by‘the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge’ (introduction to the Ardenedition (1954, repr. 1988) xli, xlvii–viii) – a view endorsed in essentials byC.J. Sisson, Frances Yates and Karol Berger. But this idealized image ofProspero’s art is rapidly subverted, as we witness his furious outbursts atAriel, Caliban and Ferdinand, and are invited to note the parallels betweenSycorax’s brand of sorcery and his own. For a fuller discussion of theseironies, see Margareta de Grazia, ‘The Tempest: Gratuitous Movement orAction without Kibes and Pinches’, Sh.Studs. 14 (1981) 254–6.

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26 Royal or aristocratic nuptials were, of course, among the prime occasions ofthe masque. On the dynastic concerns informing Prospero’s art, see DavidBergeron, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence, Kansas,1985) pp.178–203.

27 Orgel, Illusion of Power, p.79.28 ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Sh.Studs. 5 (1969),

repr. in Harold Bloom ed., William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, ModernCritical Interpretations (New York, 1988) p.13.

29 Just as the removal of the banquet by the rapacious Harpy allegorizes thevery desires (devouring greed) which it frustrates, so the ‘trumpery’ used tocatch Caliban and his ‘confederates’ reflects their longing for the trappingsof rule. The vision of Miranda presented to Ferdinand similarly plays on hisself-confessed susceptibility to women (III.1.39–46), though his sexualdesires are not permanently thwarted. On the symbolic significance of thebanquet, see Jacqueline Latham, ‘The Magic Banquet in The Tempest’,Sh.Studs. 12 (1979) 215–27.

30 See, for example, Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York, 1965) pp.156–9,and Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972) pp.270–3,278. Felperin subsequently revised his view (see note 61 below).Presumably, Caliban and his ‘confederates’ are denied a final vision notonly on moral grounds, but because their socially low or ‘pariah’ statusmakes them unfit candidates for redemption.

31 This is the title of a Jonson/Jones masque performed at Christmas 1617.32 It should be noted that, like the imagination with which it was closely asso-

ciated, memory was conceived of as an image-making faculty and mode ofperception.

33 See Anne Barton’s introduction to the New Penguin edition of the play(London, 1968) pp.35–6. Holderness also notes that ‘the processes of story-telling, the means by which representations of the past are constructed, aremade so obtrusively explicit that the relativities of memory and interpreta-tion become insistently foregrounded’ (Shakespeare: Out of Court, p.175).

34 See, for example, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and reapersheavily vanish: the discursive contexts of The Tempest’, in Drakakis ed.,Alternative Shakespeares, pp.191–205, and Paul Brown, ‘ “This thing of dark-ness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, inJonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield eds, Political Shakespeare: New essaysin cultural materialism (Manchester, 1985) pp. 48–71. While not denyingthat the play stages (albeit unconsciously) the contradictions and anxietiesattendant on the colonialist project, these critics argue that such difficultiesare suppressed in the interests of ideological closure. A greater degree ofambivalence about that project is allowed for in Stephen Greenblatt’s‘Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: TheCirculation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988) pp.129–63.

35 The resonances between Prospero’s masque and Hymenaei are multiple.Jonson’s masque, performed at court in 1606 to mark the wedding betweenthe Earl of Essex and Lady Frances Howard, celebrates under the mysticaltrope of union both a marriage alliance between the opposing Protestantand Catholic factions, and the prospective political union of England andScotland (See D.J. Gordon, Hymenaei: Jonson’s Masque of Union’, in Orgel

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ed., Renaissance Imagination, pp.157–84). According to John Orrell,Prospero’s masque also imitates Jonson’s masque in employing a structuremodelled on the Pythagorean system of harmonic proportions (‘TheMusical Canon of Proportion in Jonson’s Hymenaei’, English Language Notes15 (1977–8) 178).

36 For a fuller analysis of these themes, see especially Grudin, ‘Prospero’sMasque’, and Gillies, ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque’.

37 ‘ “All eyes” ’, 215–16’. As Gilman argues, much of the significance of thismoment lies in its reversal of the normal sequence in which masque followsanti-masque and what this says about Prospero’s inability to dispose of thethreat associated with Caliban.

38 For relevant discussion of the grotesque, see Nicole Dacos, La Decouverte dela Domus Aurea et la Formation des Grotesques à la Renaissance (London andLeiden, 1969); David Summers, ‘Michelangelo and Architecture’, Art Bulletin52 (1972) 146–57; Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (NewYork, 1981) pp.19–28; and Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature, pp.161–4.

39 From the theoretical introduction to painting in Vasari’s Vite, chap.13(Vasari-Milanesi, I, 193). The translation is mine. Cf. Armenini, De’ veriprecetti III.12, trans. Olszewski, p.262.

40 De Architectura, VII.5.1–7.41 Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, II.37, in

Barocchi, Trattati, II, 425, cf. pp.446ff. and Gilio, Degli Errori de’ pittori,pp.15ff. in the same volume.

42 On the place of the grotesque in English visual culture, see Evett, Literatureand the Visual Arts, chap.5.

43 My focus on the art historical meanings of the term has meant excludingother possible contexts for the grotesque, in particular the culture of popu-lar Renaissance festivals analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his seminal studyof Rabelais. Nevertheless it should be noted that Caliban also shares certainfeatures with the grotesque body of the Rabelaisian/Bahktinian imagina-tion: its multiple, hybrid, excessive and disproportioned shape (whichBakhtin contrasts with the enclosed, monumental figures of classical art),and its gross physicality (e.g. Caliban’s smelliness and earthiness (I.2.314),his association with the lower bodily functions (II.2.105–7) and sensualpleasures, like drinking, as against the “higher” operations of abstractreason). Moreover, his indulgence in festive misrule and flouting of author-ity identify him with carnivalesque culture and so, by extension, with theantics of the anti-masque figures (for example, the tipsy saturnalia of thesatyrs in Oberon (1611) or the ‘drunken orgies’ of Comus and his attendantsin Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618)). For a useful introduction to theRabelaisian/ Bakhtinian grotesque, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986) pp.6–23. On its liter-ary manifestations in England, see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque(London, 1980).

44 Leonard Tennenhouse argues that Shakespeare loads Caliban with ‘some ofthe more negative features of the grotesque body’, but does not explainwhat these are or admit the possibility of their being read in a morefavourable light (Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (NewYork and London, 1986) p.178).

270 Notes


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45 The Neoplatonic assumption that the body directly reflects the spirit, socentral to Shakespeare’s late plays (cf. I.2.458–60), is interrogated byGonzalo’s observation of Ariel and his fellow spirits, that ‘though they areof monstrous shape, yet note /Their manners are more gentle-kind than of /Our human generation you shall find / Many, nay almost any’ (III.3.31) – towhich, ironically, Prospero assents.

46 De Architectura, II.1.1–7.47 Dorsch ed., Classical Literary Criticism, pp.92–3. Cf. Wilson, Arte of

Rhetorique, Preface, and Elyot, The Gouvenor, p.117.48 On the contemporary mania for collecting and exhibiting the trappings,

customs and inhabitants of alien cultures, see Steven Mullaney, The Place ofthe Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago andLondon, 1988) chap.3.

49 We may read such a recognition, among other meanings, into Prospero’sfamously enigmatic reference to Caliban: ‘this thing of darkness I /Acknowledge mine’ (V.1.275).

50 Orgel ed., The Complete Masques, p.125. This expression of faith in his audi-ence is belied by the belligerently defensive tone of the preface toThe Haddington Masque and many of Jonson’s glosses on the printed texts ofhis other masques (e.g., ibid, pp.107–8, 516, 547, 549).

51 For documentation on contemporary reactions, see Herford and Simpsoneds, Ben Jonson, vol. X, and the comments on individual masques repro-duced in Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, vols 1 and 2.

52 Whilst not discounting the possibility that Jacobean masques exerted aninfluence on the ethico-political agenda of the monarchy, Martin Butler hascautioned against overestimating their educative or persuasive powers,which would inevitably have been compromised by ‘the contingencies ofcourt life’, including the constraints of the patronage system (see ‘BenJonson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric’, in Kevin Sharpe and PeterLake eds, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London, 1994)pp.91–115).

53 Ironically, the one character in whom spectacle does produce a change ofheart is Prospero, who responds with belated empathy to the mental imageAriel evokes of Gonzalo mourning over the witless courtiers (V.1.10–20).

54 For a pertinent discussion of wonder in the context of classical andRenaissance literary theory, see J.V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder, chap.4,and of art history, John Onians, ‘ “I wonder … ”: A short history of amaze-ment’, in Onians ed., Sight and Insight: Essays on art and culture in honour ofE.H. Gombrich at 85 (London, 1994) pp.11–33. Stephen Greenblatt’s stimu-lating analysis of wonder as the quintessential response evoked in theEuropean coloniser by his encounters with the New World is also germaneto the play (see Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford,1992) pp.14–23, 74–81).

55 For Aristotle’s views on the ‘marvellous’ as a dramatic prerequisite, seeDorsch ed., Classical Literary Criticism, pp.45, 49, 68. On the preoccupationof Italian critics with meraviglia and its affective impact, relationship to theverisimilar, and association with the higher genres of epic and tragedy, seeWeinberg, History of Literary Criticism, especially pp.172–3, 238–9, 340–2,397–8, 622–4, 650, 688, 773–5.

Notes 271


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56 See Chapter 3.57 Inigo Jones, I, 10–11.58 From The Vision of Delight, in Orgel ed., The Complete Masques, pp.252–3.59 Cf. Samuel Daniel’s self-deprecating reference to the authors of court

masques as ‘poor engineers for shadows’ who ‘frame only images of noresult’ in the preface to Tethys’ Festival (1610), or Plutus’s inveighing against‘the false and fleeting delight’ offered by masques in Jonson’s Love Restored(1612) (see Lindley ed., Court Masques, pp.55, 67). For further analogues inthe Jacobean masques, see Orgel’s Oxford edition, p.180.

60 ‘Music, masque and meaning’, pp.54–5.61 ‘Romance and Romanticism’, in The Uses of the Canon: Elizabethan Literature

and Contemporary Theory (Oxford, 1990) p.24.

272 Notes


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Index

285

Adelman, Janet, 180–1, 255, 260, 264,265, 266

Agricola, Rudolph, 17, 228, 229, 230Agrippa, H.C., 76–7, 243Alberti, Leon Battista, 1–8, 17, 31,

35–9, 41, 43, 52, 56–58, 62, 63,66–7, 77, 87, 94, 109, 111, 114,117, 126, 186, 232, 235, 239, 244,246, 247, 253

De Pictura, xv, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 77, 226theory of composition, 3, 4, 8, 24,

32Alpers, Svetlana, 39, 41, 226, 234, 240Altman, Joel, 17, 230anamorphosis, xiii, xvi, 38, 47, 55,

79, 135–40, 146, 162, 174,233–4, 244, 254

Anne of Denmark, 50Aristotle, 12, 57, 88, 90, 91, 168, 185,

221, 228, 229, 239, 246, 265, 271Armenini, Giovan Battista, 58, 244,

247, 270art collectors, 44, 46, 50, 235Aston, Margaret, 80, 244

Bacon, Francis, 100, 152, 170–1, 193,207, 227, 249, 259, 263

Baldwin, T.W., 227, 238Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, 136, 139, 233, 236,

257Barbaro, Daniele, 38, 234, 237, 239Barber, C.L., 227, 232Barker, Francis, 133, 250, 256, 269Barthes, Roland, 241Barton, Anne, 172, 227, 255, 263, 269Bath, Michael, 230, 242Baxandall, Michael, 4, 226, 227, 236,

238, 248Belsey, Catherine, 232, 250, 251Berger, Harry, 210, 226, 253, 260, 269Bevington, David, 243, 264Blunt, Anthony, 239, 240, 247Bolgar, R.R., 228, 238

Bono, Barbara, 264, 265Bradshaw, Graham, 4, 255, 259Brown, Paul, 223, 269Brunelleschi, Filippo, 232Bryson, Norman, 66, 240, 244Bundy, Murray W., 262Burnett, Mark Thornton, 250, 256Burckhardt, Jacob, 104, 250Burton, Robert, 262Buxton, John, 234, 235

Cassirer, Ernst, 67, 240, 257Castelvetro, Lodovico, 242Castiglione, Baldassare, 77–8, 97, 240,

244, 246, 249, 253catoptrics, 47, 236Caus, Salamon de, 46–7, 236Cennini, Cennino, 169–70, 234, 248Chapman, George, 44, 70–1, 72, 242,

244, 256Charles I, 209Cicero, 4, 5, 22, 88, 227, 229, 231,

239, 240, 246, 254, 259, 265Colie, Rosalie, 230, 254, 256, 258,

260, 265Colonna, Francesco, 183, 265commonplace, xv, 11–12, 19–21,

24–29, 229books 11–12, 14, 228, 229see also under rhetoric: topoi

(dialectical ‘places’)Condivi, Ascanio, 247, 266copiousness, 5, 9–10, 13, 17–18, 229

dangers of, 6–7, 10, 227costruzione leggitima, see under

perspectiveCurtius, Ernst R., 228, 230Cusanus, Nicholas, 257

Dacos, Nicole, 270Damisch, Hubert, 109, 252Daniel, Samuel, 139, 249, 257, 272Danti, Vincenzo, 64, 239, 247


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Day, Angel, 237decorum, 5, 7, 23, 24, 56, 87–8, 90,

92–8, 129, 151, 170, 187–90, 218,247, 248, 249, 254, 265

Dee, John, 45, 235Delaney, Paul, 251, 254Descartes, René, 108, 111, 139, 250,

257disegno, 50, 64, 236Dolce, Lodovico, 58, 77, 90, 92, 226,

240, 244, 247, 248, 254Doran, Madeleine, 231, 265Drayton, Michael, 45–6, 235, 237, 256dreams, 63, 169, 183, 192–3, 215

see also ‘fantasia’Dürer, Albrecht, 36, 39, 90, 92,

99–101, 126, 137, 233, 234, 238,239, 247, 249, 254, see also Plates2 and 3

Eagleton, Terence, 256, 258Edgerton, Samuel Jr., 233eicastic/phantastic debate, 83, 168,

193–4, 197, 262ekphrasis 46, 85, 246Elizabeth I, 40, 42, 44, 101Ellrodt, Robert, 120, 254Elyot, Sir Thomas, 236, 271Empiricus, Sextus, 138, 257epideictic discourse, 144–9, 153–4,

158–62, 199–200, 259Erasmus, Desiderius, 9–10, 18, 149,

228, 230, 259Evett, David, 41, 234, 237, 270

fantasia, 63, 64, 165, 166–72, 175,177–80, 184, 187, 190–4, 213–16,218, 239

feigning, 30, 75–9, 81–4, 175–6,191–3, 196–7, 245, 246

Felperin, Howard, 225, 269, 272Ferry, Anne, 105, 251Foucault, Michel, 88, 247Fracastorius, Girolamo, 242, 244Francesca, Piero della, 36, 65, 233Freedberg, Sydney, 126, 240, 255French, A.L., 113, 253Frye, Northrop, 211, 269Fumerton, Patricia, 106, 251

Gauricus, Pomponius, 58, 233Gent, Lucy, 44, 79, 234, 235, 237,

238, 244, 245, 251Gheeraerts, Marcus (the Younger), 41,

49, 52, 54, 56, 238, 250, see alsoPlate 9

Gilman, Ernest B., xiii, xiv, 217, 233,244, 257, 267, 268, 270

Gilio da Fabriano, G.A., 248, 270Golding, Arthur, 260Gombrich, E.H., 85, 240, 244, 246,

261Gordon, D.J., 267, 269–70Greenblatt, Stephen, 250, 251, 256,

269, 271Greene, Gayle, 258, 260Greene, Thomas, 241, 256grotesque, the, 56, 199–200, 217–20,

267, 270Guillen, Claudio, 243, 245, 257

Hagstrum, Jean, 226, 238Hakewill, George, 82, 245Harrington, Sir John 82, 246Hawthornden, William Drummond

of, 139, 257Haydocke, Richard, 39, 44, 46, 59,

60–2, 67, 69–70, 80, 99, 235, 236,237, 238, 239, 240, 244, 247, seealso Plate 12

Helgerson, Richard, 102, 249Herbert, George, 256Heywood, Thomas, 116, 253Hilliard, Nicholas, 41, 42–3, 80–1, 94,

98–102, 105–6, 234, 235, 249, seealso Plate 6

historia 1–8, 42, 50, 117Hogarth, William, 249Holanda, Francisco de, 248Holbein, Hans, 38, 44, 137, 256Holderness, Graham, 254, 268, 269Höltgen, Karl J., 238, 241, 264Horace, 5, 57, 63, 74, 87, 92–3,

218–19, 227, 239, 243, 244, 248,271

Hoskins, John, 241, 247, 259Hulse, Clark, 43, 101, 227, 235, 238,

240, 246, 249, 252humanists, 2, 22, 57–8, 228, 230–1

286 Index


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idolatry, 80, 81, 152, 154, 167, 242,245, 246

illusionism, 37–8, 74–82, 126, 134,136–9, 199–201, 205–7, 211,221–2, 243, 244, 245

imagination, see fantasiaimitatio, 141–3, 240, 258imitation, see mimesisinvention, 1, 4, 9, 13, 17, 24, 65,

169–70, 179–80, 184, 193–4, 231,232

James I, 199, 204, 207, 222Jardine, Lisa, 227, 228, 231, 232Javitch, Daniel, 246, 248Jones, Inigo, 49, 50–2, 53, 198,

200–1, 203, 207–8, 220–1, 236,237, 267, 269, see also Plate 16

Jonson, Ben, 14, 44, 70, 198, 201,202–4, 207, 220–1, 229, 237,242, 244, 256, 257

judgementof values, 23, 146–151, 174–5,

187–8, 231, 249, 157, 159of the eye, 62, 64–5, 89–91, 94–5,

99–101, 247, 248criterion of, 23, 94–7, 138–40,

151–3, 158–60, 180–1, 187,247, 248–9

see also decorumJunius, Franciscus (François du Jon,

the Younger), 81, 245, 253

Kahn, Victoria, 231, 247, 257Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, 236,

270Kemp, Martin, 39, 233, 234, 239, 240,

244, 262Klein, Robert, 233, 238, 244Kubovy, Michael, 233, 244

Lacan, Jacques, 107, 108, 251, 252, 256Lakoff, George (with Mark Johnson),

16, 230landscape, 47, 51, 52–3, 55, 237–8Le Coat, Gerard, 238, 253Lee, Rensselaer, 238, 239, 248, 253Lee, Captain Thomas, 54, 238, see also

Plate 9

Leonardo da Vinci, 62–64, 65, 66,77–9, 80, 126, 179, 233, 240, 244,247, 253, 264

Lever, Ralph, 231 Levine, Laura, 263, 266licence (artistic), 55, 61–3, 65, 68, 74,

78, 83, 87, 92–4, 129, 151, 167,169–71, 180–1, 183, 192–4, 200,217–18, 239, 240, 248, 249, 270,see also under perspective,proportion, rhetoric

Lindley, David, 225, 267, 268, 272Lomazzo, Gian Paolo, 39, 42, 46, 58,

59, 60–2, 67–70, 72–7, 80, 89–92,94, 99, 117, 136, 238, 239, 240,242, 245, 247

Longinus, 187, 266Lyly, John, 252

McAlindon, Thomas, 151, 259, 266Mannerism, 37, 50, 64, 67, 71, 73,

91–3, 185–6, 240–1, 242, 248, 265marvellous (meraviglia), the, 77–8,

184, 186–7, 201, 221–4, 244,271

masque, xvi, 50–2, 178, 197,198–209, 213–17, 220–2, 224–5,237, 267, 268–70

Maus, Katherine Eisaman, 104, 250,251

memory, 15–16, 169, 214, 229, 269Mercer, Eric, 234, 237Michelangelo Buonarotti, 90–1, 170,

186, 239, 247, 248, 266, see alsoPlate 15

mimesis (doctrine of), 60–5, 68–9,70, 74, 169–71, 192–4, 239, 240,248

miniatures, 42–3, 50, 98, 100, 105–6,129–30, 235, 250–1, 255 see alsoportraiture

Minturno, Antonio, 92, 244Mirandola, Gianfrancesco Pico della,

169, 262mirrors, 107–8, 126–7, 201, 251

as metaphor for (self-)representation, 62, 66, 108,126–7, 141–2, 144, 162, 251,255, 258

Index 287


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Montaigne, Michel de, 120–2, 127,138–9, 253–4, 257

Montrose, Louis A., 26, 232, 250

Narcissus, 154, 157, 260neoclassicism 94, 102, 184, 197, 198,

205, 218, 237, 249, 250, 254, 267Neoplatonism, 64, 161, 170, 193, 203,

209, 222, 261, 270Norbrook, David, 268Norgate, Edward, 237, 245

Oliver, Isaac, 49–50, 51, 53, 236, 237,250, see also Plate 7

Ong, Walter J., 228, 229Onians, John, 246, 271Orgel, Stephen, 51, 201, 205, 222,

267, 269, 270, 271, 272

Paleotti, Gabriele, 248, 270Panofsky, Erwin, 66–7, 101, 233, 234,

239, 240, 241, 247, 254–5paragone, the, 73, 77, 170, 241, 243,

244, 246, 252Parker, Patricia, 249, 250, 252, 255, 259Parmigianino, Francesco, 37, 126–7,

186, 254, see also Plates 4 and 13pastoral, 10, 13, 15, 18–20, 25, 229,

230Peacham, Henry (the Elder), 150, 185,

190, 251, 253, 259, 265Peacham, Henry (the Younger), 41,

44, 47–9, 53, 80, 236, 237, 246Peacock, John, 237, 267Peake, Robert, 47–8, 52–3, 55, 56, see

also Plate 8Pelerin, Jean (‘Viator’), 233, 234perspective,

invention of, 2, 32–4, 232–3instruments, xiv–xv, 34–5, 257rules of, 3, 33–6, 60, 66–7, 75,

79–80, 238, 240deviations from rules of, 36–41, 52,

55, 59–60, 61, 65–7, 76, 89,136, 186

rhetoricization of, 46, 58, 68–70,109–10, 238

effects on beholder, 6, 51, 109, 186,235, 252

as cognitive metaphor, 76, 108–9,111–12, 243

as symbolic form, 67, 70, 201–2,225, 240, 267

English attitudes to, xiv, 31, 42–55,58–9, 139, 186

Phillips, John, 245Philostratus (the Athenian), 170, 262,

264Philostratus (the Elder), 85Philostratus (the Younger), 168, 262Pino, Paolo, 58, 78, 90, 244, 247Plato, 75–6, 138, 168, 170–2, 192,

243, 244, 261, 262Pliny, 238, 261Plutarch, 57, 261, 266Pope-Hennessy, John, 249, 250portraiture, 70–2, 111, 114–15, 245,

252, 253continental, 44, 105, 250English, 41–2, 53–5, 105self-portraiture, 106, 108, 120–2,

126–7, 254see also miniatures

Prince Henry, 46–7, 49–50, 53, 235–6proportion

canonical, 60, 89, 247–8, 270deviations from, 37, 60–2, 67–9,

89–93, 183–6, 218–19, 247–8,249

as rhetorical metaphor, 87–8, 93–5,103, 185, 187, 189–91, 248, 265

ideological meaning of, 69–70,88–9, 97–8, 100–1, 189–90,218–19, 247

English attitudes to, 94, 98–100,186, 249

Protestantism,doctrine on images, 80, 241–2, 245impact on English culture, 43–4,

59, 70, 72, 80–2, 242Puttenham, George, 83–4, 85, 94–8,

100–2, 150, 241, 245, 248, 249,259, 262

Pygmalion, 152, 154, 260

Quintillian, 5, 57, 93–4, 116, 147,227, 228, 229, 230, 240, 241, 248,249, 254, 259, 265, 266

288 Index


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Rabkin, Norman, xiii, 226Rackin, Phyllis, 232, 263, 266rhetoric

pedagogical training in, 9, 59, 238as basis of interarts comparisons,

xiv, 8, 57effects on listener, 5–6, 109–10,

115–19, 186–7, 195–6, 220–2,265

visual/spatial tropes in, xiv, 9–10,14–17, 87–9, 95, 103, 185, 187,189–90

abuse of, 118, 149–51, 253, 258limits of persuasion, 128–9, 132–3,

197, 216–17, 220–4, 243, 271figures of: adhortatio, 115–16;

affection, 5–6, 115–16;amplification, 146–7, 165,184–7, 259, 265; antimetabole,25, 254; chiasmus, 135;comparison, 145– 51, 159, 258,259; description, 68, 116;dubitatio, 114; ecphonesis, 115;enargia, 186–7, 242; epizeuxis,115; hendiadys, 254;hyperbole, 175, 184– 7, 248,265; metaphor, 18, 69;paradox, 135, 143, 189–90, 256,266; paranomasia, 254;prosopopeia, 18; topoi (thedialectical ‘places’), 12–15, 17,19, 21–3, 24, 150, 228, 228,230, 231; varying, 5, 9–10, 18,20–1, see also commonplace,copiousness, decorum

Rhodes, Neil, 9, 227, 270

scepticism, 31, 138–40, 151, 159–60,163–5, 180, 192, 230–1, 256–7

Scaliger, Julius C., 92, 94Schanzer, Ernest, 263, 266Schön, Erhard, 137, see also Plate 14selfhood,

Renaissance philosophies of, 104–7,109–10, 250, 256, see alsoShakespeare: treatment ofsubjectivity

Serlio, Sebastiano, 39, 47, 48, 53, 236,237, 238, 239

Shakespeare, Williamon mimesis, 73–4, 84–6, 102–3,

143, 171–2, 191–7, 243,254

dramatic viewpoint in, xiii, 8–9, 20,24, 27, 31, 55–6, 142–3, 162,171–80, 187–90, 191–3, 196–7,202, 204–5, 207–8, 213–16,219–21, 224–5, 230, 238, 252,255, 268

self-reflexivity in, xvi, 107–8,125–6, 128–9, 130–2, 141–4,154, 254, 160–1

self-dramatization in, 27–9, 108,113–14, 115, 117–20, 123–4,132, 175–6, 180, 196–7, 232,263

treatment of subjectivity, xvi, 31,104–14, 120–2, 124–8, 131–3,140, 143–6, 154–8, 252, 255,258, 260

treatment of epistemology, xvi, 31,110–12, 125–6, 129–31, 133,140, 151–4, 158–65

interrelation of visual andrhetorical ideas, 2, 8, 13–17, 56,106–7, 122, 144, 146, 160–1,184–5

works: As You Like It, xv, 3, 7, 7–31,56; All’s Well, 55; Antony andCleopatra, xvi, 31, 56, 73, 135,165–8, 171–97, 239, 243;Cymbeline, 55, 243, 267;Hamlet, 31, 104, 106–8, 110–33140; Henry V, 55, 194; JuliusCaesar, 107, 251, 265; KingLear, 55; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 9,20, 228, 259, 267; Macbeth, 86,252, 267; Merchant of Venice,242–3; Midsummer Night’sDream, 20, 167, 194, 239; Rapeof Lucrece, 84–6, 242, 246, 252;Richard II, 55, 135, 251, 254,259; Sonnets, 55, 164, 167, 252,259, 261; Taming of the Shrew,242; Tempest, xvi, 31, 56,197, 198, 204–25; Timon ofAthens, 74, 252, 267; Troilusand Cressida, xvi, 31, 86, 107,

Index 289


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290 Index

Shakespeare, William – continued134–65; Twelfth Night, 55, 135,262; Two Noble Kinsmen, 255;Venus and Adonis, 73, 243;Winter’s Tale, 222, 243, 246, 267

Shearman, John, 240, 248, 252Sherry, Richard, 265Sidney, Sir Philip, 71–3, 74, 81, 82–4,

101, 105, 193–4, 239, 242, 245,246

Smuts, Malcolm, 235Snyder, Susan, 253, 255, 264soliloquy, the, 105, 122–5, 251Spenser, Edmund, 81, 230, 231, 245Strong, Roy, 40, 51, 201–2, 222, 229,

233, 234, 235, 236, 250, 267, 271,272

Summers, David, 227, 239, 240, 247,248, 256, 262, 266, 270

Tasso, Torquato, 170, 262theorization of the arts, 46–9, 55, 94,

101–2, 249–50Trousdale, Marion, 228, 230, 244Tuve, Rosemund, 241

ut pictura poesisas a critical approach, xii–xiii, 57–8discourse of, xii, xv, 2, 56–7, 59,

70–1, 76, 85–6, 93, 99, 103,107, 117, 168–9, 171, 218, 226,227, 238, 240, 242, 243, 248,252, 254, 261

Valla, Lorenzo, 228, 230, 232Vasari, Giorgio, 65, 67, 126, 217,

218–19, 226, 239, 244, 247, 254,264, 266, 270

Vickers, Brian, 227, 231, 238, 243,250, 253

Vignola, Jacopo Barozzi da, 37, 233,see also Plate 1

Virgil, 180visual culture,

continental, 39, 64, 91–3, 101–2,217–18, 244, 247

English, 40–2, 45, 52, 54–5, 71, 73,80–1, 84, 94, 101–2, 218, 236,237, 238, 249

visual economies, 39, 55, 56, 181,183–4, 197, 205, 234

visual spectacle,as mode of persuasion, 70, 72–4,

116–18, 123–4, 128–9, 132–3,197, 198, 203, 207–12, 220–2,241, 243, 253, 271

Vitruvius, 38, 61, 69, 87–8, 181, 183,198, 237, 238, 239, 246, 247, 264,265, 270, 271

ways of seeing, xvi, 56, 134–6, 163–4,205, 213–15, 219–20, 226, see alsovisual economies and Shakespeare: dramaticviewpoint in,

Wilson, Thomas, 13–15, 19, 22, 229,230, 231, 259, 271

Wotton, Sir Henry, 244Weinberg, Bernard, 248, 271Wright, Thomas, 117, 253

Yates, Frances, 229, 268Young, David, 230, 261–2

Zuccaro, Federico, 64, 71, 235, 239,242


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Alison Thorne Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare Looking Through Language 2000

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