Reading Shakespeare Historically

Lisa Jardine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415134897
• eBook ISBN: 9781134780600
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today. Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from laws of defamation in Othello to the competing loyalties of companionate marriage and male friendship in The Changeling. In doing so she reveals a wealth of new insights, sometimes surprising but always original and engrossing. At the same time, these essays also provide a fascinating account of the rise of feminist scholarship since the 1980s and the diversifying of `new historicist' approaches over the same period.

Reading Shakespeare Historically will fascinate and provoke students of shakespeare and his historical age, and general readers with an urge to understand how the culture and history of our past illuminates the key scoial and political issues of today.

1

‘WHY SHOULD HE CALL HER WHORE?’

Defamation and Desdemona’s case

Emilia.

Why should he call her whore? who keeps her company? What place, what time, what form, what likelihood?^1

My concern in this work is to use the textual traces of early modern social relations as the point of encounter with early modern agency—specifically the agency of those whose point of view has tended to be excluded from dominant cultural production (non-élite men and all women). My proposal is that the social relations in the community, as conveyed to us in the ‘shaped’ accounts which come down to us, position the self (the subject) at the intersection of overlaid maps of acknowledged interpersonal connections. This in turn can helpfully sharpen our response to the dramatisation of interpersonal relations on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, if we regard stage dramatisation as the focusing of otherwise inchoate ‘experience’ into socially constructed units of meaning, for the purpose of clear and distinct transmission of plot to audience. So the present piece of work is not just offered as one more novel way of enhancing our reading of Shakespeare’s texts; it is proposed as a very particular way of recovering some sense of connection between the textual and the social—recovering, perhaps, a distinctively cultural dimension in early modern textual production.²

The shift towards such a cultural dimension has come, in my own case, from a sense of limitation within textual studies. Specifically, in some recent ‘historical’ work on Othello, a commitment to textuality has seemed to carry the consequence that the critic is no longer to be held responsible for distinguishing verbal suggestions of Desdemona’s guilt which enter the play as interpretations or anticipations of her actions, from the ‘tale’ (the construction as plot, in the text) of those actions themselves. The result has been that Desdemona has come increasingly regularly to be ‘read’ as guilty by association (with what had been said of her), and her death has been presented as punishment (ideologically and individually), instead of tragic injustice.³ In my view, methodologies which erase the agency of any main protagonist so effectively from the interpretation are fundamentally flawed.⁴ It is one thing to suggest that, textually, female figures are deprived of the power and authority to control the interpretation and evaluation of their actions (that texts place them permanently in the object position in the narrative); it is quite another to continue to sustain the traditional historical view that the lived experience of women down through history has been as objects.

In seeking to develop a methodology which would restore subject status (subjectivity, even) to the female figure in history, one significant objective seemed to be to find some means of distinguishing in a text between casual verbal formulations involving women, and what I shall specify as events in which women participate. Here I take event to be a configuration of circumstances and persons which was perceived as having a shape, so that it carried a shared meaning for the early modern community: although our access to such a configuration is necessarily via surviving textual remains which give it shape, we are able (I shall argue) to distinguish such an event as socially and culturally meaningful in the flow of incidents and social interactions.⁵ Take, as an extreme case of the former, the following piece of scurrility on lago’s part, in the opening scene of Act 2 of Othello:

Iago.

[Aside.] He takes her by the palm; ay, well said, whisper: as little a web as this will ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon her, do: I will catch you in your own courtesies: you say true, ‘tis so indeed. If such tricks as these strip you out of your lieutenantry, it had been better you had not kiss’d your three fingers so oft, which now again you are most apt to play the sir in: good, well kiss’d, an excellent courtesy; ’tis so indeed: yet again, your fingers at your lips? would they were clysterpipes for your sake.… [Trumpets within.] The Moor, I know his trumpet.

Cassio.

’Tis truly so.^6

Lewd innuendo at Desdemona’s expense enters the text without on-stage acknowledgement; and the overly-courteous Florentine Cassio’s reply adds to the joke, as he apparently assents to the implied unchastity of her behaviour (Iago. ‘The Moor, I know his trumpet’/Cassio. ‘’Tis truly so’). None of us, I think, imagines that this piece of wordplay weighs very heavily in the balance of the play’s developing value-system; indeed, we do not imagine that the figure Cassio, on the stage, has heard the pun. Yet the play on words is there (as it is also, at equivalent moments, in Troilus and Cressida and in The Merchant of Venice) and, in the increasingly intricate games that Shakespearean critics play with the text, it is made increasingly to count as part of a case against Desdemona —a case for making Desdemona take the critical blame.⁷

Play on words in itself does not damage a reputation; innuendo alone does not shift the emphasis from potentiality for blame (an incautious marriage, provocative behaviour) to blameworthiness. Reputations are damaged by harmful accusations made under socially significant circumstances. At the other pole of the scale of cultural meaningfulness for which I am concerned to construct a methodology stands substantial defamation—an offence against an individual which had consequences, historically, in the community, which was an event with a kind of concreteness and stability to which we are able to give our critical attention, in a specifically historical sense (and making such a distinction is, for me, crucially what it means to read Shakespeare historically).

If we treat Desdemona simply textually—as a ‘representation’, in a uniformly illuminated discourse (without the light and shade of historical context)—then the vectors of agency (who acts, and upon whom) will necessarily end with her as object to some male subject.⁸ Yet, in history, agency is a dynamic in relation to women and to men (both women and men have acted, have been acted upon). It is this historical agency which I am concerned to retrieve, in theory as well as in practice. The distinction between scurrility and an accusation which requires a formal hearing (offensiveness and substantial offence) is designed to retrieve the category of agent, as the intersection of a set of social relationships and cultural expectations.⁹ To understand what happens in Othello, I shall argue, it is important to distinguish an offensive remark or gesture (of the kind which remains all too accessible and current) from what was once an indictable offence (but one which, as an integral part of the system of social relations of the early modern period, we no longer recognise).¹⁰ It does not just matter that a woman is called ‘whore’, it matters when and where she is.¹¹

If we fail to sustain that dynamic relationship between history and text, we may mistake the shared textual conventions of a period for an authentic Renaissance subjectivity (because separate subjects share access to matching cultural conventions). That in turn may be taken as evidence as to the intrinsic nature of the event these conventions represent (the closest to the ‘real’ to which the textual can give us access).

The lure of such a textual ‘authenticity’ can be illustrated with an example which turns out to be particularly relevant to Desdemona’s case in Othello. A recent article on A Midsummer Night’s Dream juxtaposes a passage from the private diary of Simon Forman, which draws attention to the biological femaleness of the ageing Queen (dated 1597, when Elizabeth I was in her sixties) with two passages of description of the Queen from the journal of Hurault de Maisse, ambassador extraordinary of King Henri IV of France (also dated 1597):

I dreamt that I was with the Queen, and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready; and she and I walked up and down through lanes and closes, talking and reasoning of many matters. At last we came over a great close where there were many people, and there were two men at hard words. One of them was a weaver, a tall man with a reddish beard, distract of his wits. She talked to him and he spoke very merrily unto her, and at last did take her and kiss her. So I took her by the arm and put her away; and told her the fellow was frantic. And so we went from him and I led her by the arm still, and then we went though a dirty lane. She had a long, white smock, very clean and fair, and it trailed in the dirt and her coat behind. I took her coat and did carry it up a good way, and then it hung too low before. I told her she should do me a favour to let me wait on her, and she said I should. Then said I, ‘I mean to wait upon you and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coats out of the dirt.’ And so we talked merrily and then she began to lean upon me, when we were past the dirt and to be very familiar with me, and methought she began to love me. And when we were alone, out of sight, methought she would have kissed me.¹²

The descriptions of the Queen’s appearance by de Maisse are also from a private journal:

She was strangely attired in a dress of silver cloth, white and crimson, or silver ‘gauze’, as they call it. This dress had slashed sleeves lined with red taffeta, and was girt about with other little sleeves that hung down to the ground, which she was for ever twisting and untwisting. She kept the front of her dress open, and one could see the whole of her bosom [gorge], and passing low, and often she would open the front of this robe with her hands as if she was too hot. The collar of the robe was very high, and the lining of the inner part all adorned with little pendants of rubies and pearls, very many, but quite small. She had also a chain of rubies and pearls about her neck. On her head she wore a garland of the same material and beneath it a great reddish-coloured wig, with a great number of spangles of gold and silver, and hanging down over her forehead some pearls, but of no great worth. On either side of her ears hung two great curls of hair, almost down to her shoulders and within the collar of her robe, spangled as the top of her head. Her bosom [gorge] is somewhat wrinkled as well as [one can see for] [sic in text] the collar that she wears round her neck, but lower down her flesh is exceeding white and delicate, so far as one could see.

As for her face, it is and appears to be very aged. It is long and thin, and her teeth are very yellow and unequal, compared with what they were formerly, so they say, and on the left side less than on the right. Many of them are missing so that on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Why Should He Call Her Whore?’: Defamation and Desdemona’s case
• 2 ‘No Offence I’ Th’ World’: Unlawful marriage in Hamlet
• 3 Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines: ‘These are old paradoxes’
• 4 Twins and Travesties: Gender, dependency and sexual availability in Twelfth Night
• 5 Reading and The Technology of Textual Affect: Erasmus’s familiar letters and Shakespeare’s King Lear
• 6 Alien Intelligence: Mercantile exchange and knowledge transactions in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta
• 7 Companionate Marriage Versus Male Friendship: Anxiety for the lineal family in Jacobean drama
• 8 Unpicking The Tapestry: The scholar of women’s history as Penelope among her suitors
• 9 Conclusion: What happens in Hamlet?
• Notes
• Index