Strangeness in Jacobean Drama

Callan Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000174311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Callan Davies presents "strangeness" as a fresh critical paradigm for understanding the construction and performance of Jacobean drama—one that would have been deeply familiar to its playwrights and early audiences. This study brings together cultural analysis, philosophical enquiry, and the history of staged special effects to examine how preoccupation with the strange unites the verbal, visual, and philosophical elements of performance in works by Marston, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, and Beaumont and Fletcher.

Strangeness in Jacobean Drama therefore offers an alternative model for understanding this important period of English dramatic history that moves beyond categories such as "Shakespeare's late plays," "tragicomedy," or the home of cynical and bloodthirsty tragedies.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern drama and philosophy, rhetorical studies, and the history of science and technology.

1Speech

Strange doctrines in The Dutch Courtesan, Macbeth, The Roaring Girl, and The White Devil

The first decade of James’s reign sees a concentrated interest in strange speakers—individuals whose speech is characterised by foreign inflections or associations, by studied ambiguity, and by the potential danger or violence arising from their use of language. Strange speakers represent a major subset of “strangeness” in the period and they—or commentaries about these often-imagined groups of individuals—bring together the concept’s cultural connotations of foreignness, of paradox, and of euphemistic evasiveness. They also represent the moral undercurrent at the heart of strangeness. Anxiety about “strange speech” is part of a legal, social, and ethical debate in a period where speech itself could threaten the safety of the realm.

This chapter therefore concentrates on the conceptual and social uses of the term “strange” in order to understand how the word was appropriated for both political commentary and theatrical vocabulary, and I explore how strangeness became associated with foreign-inflected forms of speech that pose a threat to human communication and to the security of the English state. Anxiety about this issue taps into wider concerns about the spoken word and its relationship with meaning. That relationship is particularly tested from 1603 onwards: William Hamlin deems 1603 a “watershed year in England’s reception of scepticism” (70), seeing, among other texts, the publication of Florio’s Montaigne, whose essays articulate various doubts about language and rhetorical expression. Over the following two years, searches in private properties in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot add to elite and popular interest in the concept of “equivocation,” and ensuing commentary on equivocators and their apparently duplicitous art adds to concerns about the impious manipulation of the spoken word. Contemporaries linked strangeness with such a practice and by extension aligned it with foreign influence, with strangers present in London, and with inherent “stranger”-ness of English recusants themselves. Both Robert Cecil and the Earl of Northampton applied the phrase “strange doctrine” to equivocation during the high-profile trial of Henry Garnet (Y2v; C3v), and Garnet himself employs the phrase in his guide to equivocation (Malloch fn. 3). Discussion of the possible uses of this strange doctrine continues over the following decades, despite the aim of the Oath of Allegiance of 1606 to “stamp out” ambiguity and reassert the certainty of speech.¹

The term “strange” applies beyond these explicit uses regarding equivocation to a matrix of strange speakers in these years seen to practise heretical modes of moral, doctrinal, and verbal ambiguity. The word is associated with members of an imagined criminal society whose slang language—canting—merges neologisms, cod-Latin, and English in a manner designed to mislead or confuse uninitiated hearers. Indeed, almost all comments on “how strange … words sound” (3.2.301), as Flamineo puts it in The White Devil, indicate such a manipulation of language. Often, this manipulation was seen to have a subversive intention, and so comments about strange speech served to demonise the marginalised individuals associated with impious linguistic practices. Thomas Dekker sees homeless men, women, and children as speaking their own strange perversion of English, but he associates it with their marginal condition and their perceived criminal activities: “as these people are strange both in names and in their conditions, so doe they speake a Language … which is more strange” (Lanthorne B4r). Both recusant Catholics and vagrants trouble the relationship between language and understanding: their modes of speech allow a separate form of communication not clearly understood by outsiders, as well as a radical destabilisation of the relationship between spoken word and meaning. Strange speech is therefore not only an aberration but a threat to the English state on both a philosophical and a practical level.

James himself is, in essence, a “stranger” to the country of England with an attendant stranger’s accent. Mockery of accent, dialect, and modes of speech cluster around the early modern stage; conjecture about the imprisonment of George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston for Eastward Ho! suggests, for example, that mimicking the Scottish accents at court landed authors and actors in hot water (see C.G. Petter’s edition and appendices). Similarly, in 1606, John Day’s The Isle of Gulls

contained unmistakable and unflattering allusions to James and his countrymen … Sir Edward Hoby reported that: ‘At this time there was much speech of a play in the Black Friars, where in the ‘Isle of Gulls,’ from the highest to the lowest, all men’s parts were acted of two diverse nations: as I understand sundry were committed to Bridewell.’ The implication is that the boy actors had systematically employed English and Scottish accents to distinguish the Arcadian characters from the Lacedemonians.

(Christopher Highley, “The place of Scots in the Scottish play” 56)

As much as they are mocked for various satiric ends, accents are only one small feature of “strange speech.” Jonathan Hope reminds us that “early modern language users were used to, and at ease with, high frequencies of variation in the written as well as spoken language,” and “there is no certainty about what … ‘usual speech’ might be” (122–23). Yet on the level of syntactic, grammatical, and stylistic construction, strange speakers are often marked as both unusual and unacceptable in the period, partly because of the political connotations associated with commentary on the matter. Preachers such as Thomas Adams associate “strange divinity” with “strange, and unproper … speech” (The Blacke deuill C4v). Contemporaries see linguistic style and the philosophy of language as not only an abstract and academic diversion but as the grounds in which heresy is expressed and must be resisted.

Dramatists in turn use strange speech to explore the various doubts and difficulties attendant on language in early modern England. Yet in adopting that strange speech to form the plays themselves, they reflexively ask questions about theatrical construction and representation. John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605), William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611), and John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) use the visual and verbal media of theatre to explore the topical dangers posed by strange talk and in turn suggest how strangeness is central to dramaturgical ambiguity. Marston’s tragicomedy is defined by its linguistic liveliness, making it a play that, in Richard Danson Brown’s terms, “encompasses a huge range of styles and registers” but “whose supreme linguistic artefact is the dizzying, street-wise, fart-obsessed patois of Cocledemoy—a micro-language which repurposes scraps of Latin, bogus Greek, a dangerously satiric Scots accent, alongside seemingly meaningless cant phrases … terminology from falconry, and pornographic songs” (§1). Cocledemoy’s speech combines with Franceschina’s cross-European idiolect and with the socially aspirant Mulligrubs’ fashion for new coinages and sophisticated-sounding phrases. These elements come together not only to characterise Marston’s long-recognised stylistic eccentricities (similar, indeed, to Webster’s, as discussed in the following chapter); they also generate a playworld marked by strange speech, in which the difficulty and the nonsense of slang, bad accents, and cod-imitation are the key foundation for the “hurtless mirth” (5.3.175) of the narrative. Its very action depends on the range of characters’ difficult, sometimes sense-less, verbal expressions, and so The Dutch Courtesan paints a picture of a London not only populated with various tongues but in which characters’ meaning, like their shifting onstage identities, is continually obscured by their strange vocabularies—with consequences that bring them or their victims perilously close to ruin or to death. Indeed, the verbal world of The Dutch Courtesan roundly rejects plain speech in favour of obfuscation, stylisation, and pretence. Marston’s determination that characters continually “make’t so strange” (3.4.23) makes the play a rich glimpse into the earliest years of the seventeenth century, not least because such strange speaking would take on incredibly powerful resonances in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot that occurred just months after its first staging. The fallout from this political and religious storm would see Marston’s obscure wordplay translated into even more sinister guises in The White Devil and Macbeth.²

Indeed, Shakespeare’s Macbeth has long been read as a response to the political events of these early years of James’s reign, associated with equivocation and the Gunpowder Plot. However, Shakespeare goes beyond topical references and remarks about Jesuits and embraces strangeness by making it integral to the play’s dramatic quiddity: Macbeth is marked by premonitions and “strange matters” (1.5.415) and its five acts are populated by individuals who “speak things strange” (1.2.70). It also sees the beginnings of a strange and contorted Shakespearean style in the verse itself. Its thematic interest in strange words speaks to their paradoxical nature, especially in a climate where words were considered both impotent and terrifyingly powerful. The strangeness of speech pervades all aspects of Macbeth in performance—translating to reading actors’ faces to theatrical conventions of costume and representation. Indeed, strangeness is the chief theatrical as well as political trope of the play, and rather than being synonymous with equivocation it brings with it wider cultural meanings, particularly the paradoxical union of articulation and inarticulation, as well as a mixture of abstract and visual representation that raises wider questions about social, political, and theatrical truth. At the same time, Macbeth insists upon the philosophical power of strange expression: it should be approached sceptically, as any ambiguous speech should, but it nonetheless contains the possibility of spiritual and moral edification as much as of destruction. Strangeness ultimately complicates the play’s representation of equivocation by gesturing to its potential productiveness and its affiliation with related forms of “strange” ambiguous expression in early modern culture.

Canting and neologisms must be considered alongside Marstonian idiolects and Shakespearean equivocation as a fellow form of theatrical strange speaking, one that carries with it the dangers of religious speech so demonised following the events of late 1605. Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611) brings canting on stage to explore the relationship between the vagrant, the foreign traveller or “stranger,” and contrasting elite and non-elite characters. The play’s central figure, the cross-dressed Moll Frith, acts as an intermediary, exploiting facility with beggars’ cant to stage a translation of the criminal register of the “strange creature” (10.101) into a “respectable” one—a translation that structures the play’s closing moments and that suggests strange speech can serve as both a social and a theatrical tool.

These issues are both explicitly and implicitly at issue the following year when Webster uses them to interrogate issues of justice, power, and comprehension in a Red Bull play saturated with the term “strange.” The White Devil is centrally concerned with similar issues to Shakespeare’s Gunpowder Plot drama and Dekker and Middleton’s play—with words and their interpretation. The difficulty of understanding is signalled by characters’ repeated outbursts of strangeness—from the “strange tongue” (3.2.18) of the law court to the simple outburst by Francisco, “strange!” (l.203)—as if the term itself were enough to mark testimony as morally dubious. Flamineo’s distracted ramblings are “strange,” his intrusion on the court a “strange encounter,” and he a “strange creature” (3.3.50, 60, 80). The term features in the rest of the play to mark morally questionable action. Like The Dutch Courtesan, Macbeth, and The Roaring Girl, The White Devil prompts audiences to be sceptical about speech in the face of the myriad difficulties, doubts, and complexities attendant on the play’s “strange” language, while also suggesting its usefulness as a flexible tool of representation—a reading of the play’s strangeness that is carried forward into the following chapter on rhetorical and material construction. All four of these early Jacobean plays show that, while it can lead to violence, strange speech also has its uses: its ambiguity and moral complexity encourage a critical interrogation of language and theatrical representation crucial during a period where surface meaning often promises to be deceptive.

“The lying creature will swear some strange thing on it now”: The Dutch Courtesan

Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan provides a perfect way into the verbal explosiveness of the first years of James I’s reign. Michel de Montaigne, Marston’s favourite source of direct citation, characterises the age as one in which “we obscure and bury understanding” (Ggg2r [Hhh2r]).³ He describes the wars of religion stemming from Reformist movements in Europe as a trial of language: “there’s more adoe to interprete interpretations, than to interprete things … We doe but enter-glose our selves. … Our contestation is verball. … The question is of wordes, and with wordes it is answered” (“Of Experience” Ggg2v [Hhh2v]). The Dutch Courtesan is not a play explicitly focused on contemporary religious conflicts, but the cosmopolitan London it charts is in part a result of immigration from the continent that follows the religious turmoils lamented by Montaigne. It accordingly sets forth a five-act verbal contestation, one that prompts audiences, readers, and students of the play to do as the Jacobeans did—“to contend for words themselves,” as Samuel Daniel has it, “and make a question whether they be right or not” (G3r). Marston encourages listeners to be sceptical of the play’s language, to appreciate that not everything within its polyvocal bounds translates to any sense at all. In the final act, the cynical and brilliantly astute Crispinella dismisses a potential suitor by comparing his mere presence with Latinate verbosity: “His discourse is like the long word, Honorificabilitudinatatibus—a great deal of sound and no sense. His company is like a parenthesis to a discourse—you may admit it or leave it out; it makes no matter” (5.2.23–27). Crispinella’s translation of the entirety of Caqueteur’s identity (whose name tellingly echoes the French word meaning “to gossip” or “chatter”) hints at the play’s conflation of selfhood and strange (sometimes empty) speech.

The play’s contemporary detractors picked up on this quality. William Nixon commented on the publication the following year, noting that writers’ wits “are sacrificed in Paules Churchyard for bringing in the Dutch Curtezan to corrupt English conditions.” As part of this attack, he observes how booksellers have a bounty of books to sell “for that many write, that flowe with phrases, and yet are barrein in substance, and such are neyther wise, nor wittye: others are so concise, that you need a comentarie to vnderstand them, others haue good wittes, but … criticall” (B2r). Nixon’s reference in this last point to the poetomachia—or poets’ war between (among others) Marston and Jonson—demonstrates that, for all his co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Speech: Strange doctrines in The Dutch Courtesan, Macbeth, The Roaring Girl, and The White Devil
• 2 Rhetoric: Rhetorical strangeness
• 3 Technology: Strange special effects in The Tempest and The Alchemist
• 4 Philosophy: Desire, scepticism, and spectacle in A King and No King and the Age plays
• Conclusion
• Index