Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England

Inscribing the Time

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics

Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor

1. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, by Caroline Walker Bynum

2. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century, by Walter Benn Michaels

3. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, by David Lloyd

4. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, by Stephen Greenblatt

5. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, by François Hartog, translated by Janet Lloyd

6. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, by Leah S. Marcus

7. The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry, by Richard C. McCoy

8. Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, edited by Lee Patterson

9. Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare, by Jonathan Crewe

10. Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext, by Samuel Kinser

11. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre, by Adrian Frazier

12. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain, by Alan Sinfield

13. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture, by Debora Kuller Shuger

14. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America, by Gillian Brown

15. The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700, by David Harris Sacks

16. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest, by Jeffrey Knapp

17. Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetics, by José E. Limón

18. The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, by Jacqueline Lichtenstein, translated by Emily McVarish

19. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600, by Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge

20. Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France, by Philippe Hamon, translated by Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire

21. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life, by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

22. Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements, by T. V. Reed

23. Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France, by Gabrielle M. Spiegel

24. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family, by T. Walter Herbert

25. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, by Daniel Boyarin

26. Dilemmas of Enlightenment: Studies in the Rhetoric and Logic of Ideology, by Oscar Kenshur

27. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381, by Steven Justice

28. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism, by Jenny Franchot

29. The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity, by Debora Kuller Shuger

30. Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920, by Christopher Craft

31. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820, by Catherine Gallagher

32. Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, by Frank Lestringant, translated by David Fausett, with a Foreword by Stephen Greenblatt

33. Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England, by Eric S. Mallin

34. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts, by Richard Strier

Inscribing the Time

Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England

Eric S. Mallin

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1995 by

The Regents of the University of California

Chapter 1 appeared in a slightly shorter form in Representations (vol. 29, winter 1990).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mallin, Eric Scott.

Inscribing the time: Shakespeare and the end of Elizabethan England I Eric S. Mallin.

p. cm. (The New historicism; 33) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-520-08623-6 (alk. paper)

i. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616— Contemporary England. 2. Literature and history—England—History— 16th century.

3. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558

1603. 4. Historicism in literature. I. Title.

II. Series.

PR2910.M32 1995

822.3'3—dc2o 94-28943

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For my mother, and the memory of her mother

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry Troilus and Cressida

TWO Word and Plague in the Second Quarto Hamlet

THREE Succession, Revenge, and History The Political Hamlet

FOUR A twenty years’ removed thing Twelfth Night’s Nostalgia

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I am delighted to acknowledge those who have helped, directly or indirectly, with this book.

Thanks go to the University of California Press for permission to reprint chapter i, which appeared in a slightly shorter form in Representations (vol. 29, winter 1990). I would also like to acknowledge the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin for giving me two important things: ample time to write and a fine place to work.

Leah S. Marcus and Frank Whigham have been guiding lights in my time at Texas, and their generosity has been sustaining. Dolora Woj- ciehowski read much of the manuscript and made several brilliant suggestions, sometimes causing me to wish that she had written it. John P. Rumrich worked through the book heroically, staying enthusiastic about it even when I could not. I thank them all for their remarkable collegiality. I would also like to express deep appreciation to Bill Sutherland, Joseph Kruppa, and Wayne Lesser for finding ways to make my life easier throughout the arduous process of completing the manuscript.

Doris Kretschmer of the University of California Press has been extremely helpful and attentive, shepherding this work in a timely manner (despite my delays) through various stages of production. The Press’s three anonymous reviewers offered excellent suggestions on matters both essential and ornamental. At a critical stage in the preparation of the book, Melissa Gilbert cheerfully provided superb research assistance.

Inscribing the Time had its origins as a Stanford University dissertation written under the auspices of David Riggs, John Bender, and Ronald Rebholz. They helped me, as someone once said, to acquire form and to avoid pitfalls; they also prepared me for some of the pleasures of Shakespeare studies. Michael T. Gilmore, Alan Levitan, and Allen Grossman first introduced me to literary analysis before I could fully understand what they were teaching, but some of what they taught and how they taught it has stayed with me. I am grateful for that, and my readers should be too.

I have also learned from my friends. Hilary M. Schor and Christopher Ames have been smart, steady, and extraordinarily supportive long-distance companions for many years now. Others who have helped with this work or with more important matters: James Bookless, Peggy Bradley, Seth Brody, Paul Howe, Ronald H. Iscoff, and Leonard Lipitz.

My best influences have taught me to read, to reason, and not to give up too soon. Elissa Mallin-Dawe first showed me the power of art to express strange joy. Rebecca W. LaBrum teaches me daily about love and labor; she remains my most important colleague. And my mother, Sonia R. Lipitz, gave me everything I needed to complete this book. The project and its author could not have made sense without her.

Introduction

I

History never repeats itself, but it offers analogies. J. E. Neale, Essays in Elizabethan History

This book is a study of three Shakespeare plays—Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night—in their contemporary historical contexts. These plays disclose three very different accumulations of English political and social anxiety during the tense transitional years between the Elizabethan and Jacobean regimes.¹ I argue that the dramas imagine their stories as versions of contemporary history: they contain formations and deformations of plots, ideologies, events, and psychological accommodations at the end of the Elizabethan era. Throughout I shall claim that history—by which I narrowly mean the specific past of Renaissance sociopolitical and literary conditions—proves in Shakespeare’s theater to be a constant force with variable coefficients. Sometimes history is the direct referent of the dramatic business; more often it is the deferred, submerged conspirator in the plot; at still other times it proves to be an alienated, hostile presence dislodging the work from secure moorings or meanings.

Shakespeare’s Troy, Denmark, and Illyria are not repetitions of England; they are, as the epigraph from J. E. Neale is meant to suggest, analogies.² As analogies of history the plays constantly approximate and appropriate forms of the real—governmental organizations, physiologi cal processes, spiritual struggles—in their fictions. My arguments depart from some new-historical studies by taking the texts’ topicalities not only as referent but as literary structure-, the contemporary history materially shapes and misshapes the drama. I examine in the first chapter the way divisive Elizabethan court politics and self-delusional ideologies are mapped into the chiastic relationships of violence in Troilus and Cressida. In chapter 2 I consider another cultural fact with structural implications for the plays: epidemic disease. In Hamlet (as to a lesser extent in Troilus and Cressida), the idea of contagion afflicts the root relations of language, mind, and rule, and these relations have clear historical correlates—not necessarily determinants but, again, definite analogies.

The study of plague in Hamlet continues figurally in the third chapter with a reading of selected contaminating histories in James’s royal succession. By a contaminating history I mean an episode or memory that problematizes the tidy order and meaning of the new reign—specifically, a set of events that interacts with and undermines Shakespearean theatrical architecture. In Hamlet, contagion and succession are complementary topical anxieties, but to come to terms with these we must confront an even more sharply focused issue of locality: the status of the text itself. In chapters 2 and 3, I examine the second or good quarto of Hamlet because that text registers most suggestively, and recoverably, the material interactions of imagination and history. Of course, just because a text interacts with its environment does not mean that it necessarily becomes culture’s glassy essence. Hamlet’s formal and textual perturbations are anything but passively reflective of the turmoil at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Aesthetic products typically rewrite their surrounding circumstances. To do so, however, they often submerge or displace the historical referent to ease the stress of the moment—thus speaking volubly about that moment and subliminally reintroducing stress. In the final chapter, on Twelfth Night, I attempt to dislocate my own premises, that is, to read referentiality that has moved away from the moment of theatrical production. In Illyria, Shakespeare shifts the contextual frame away from 1601. With its memorial treatment of a kind of Puritan threat, its mediated courtships, and its unalloyed feminine triumphs, Twelfth Night tries to evade the present and sets itself back in the historical middle distance.

These texts sometimes ruthlessly display, sometimes avoid or inter history’s most upsetting implications. They convey multilevel anxiety, concentrations of cultural trauma that they do not, indeed cannot, fully organize or analyze. And 1600 to 1603 are especially good years—keeping in mind the Renaissance double edge of the phrase good years— to examine.³ The late Elizabethan era had a preternatural sense of its own ending; the close of the period was self-consciously likened to the end of Troy, a great civilization in its death throes. At the same time, the hope of a new king compensated for the debility, as many male courtiers saw it, of an aged queen. This was, in other words, a period bristling with half-revealed personal, ideological, and political activity. My original idea for this study was to seek in historical information some wattage to brighten these plays’ dimmer passageways. But as the inquiry progressed, it became apparent that information itself offered only elusive simulacra of historical meaning; and the semantic slipperiness, the limited capacity of histories to fix their own (let alone Shakespeare’s) significances, led me to the present set of readings, which seek to analyze how language and local knowledge codetermine Shakespearean evasiveness.

This book, then, attempts to illuminate three temporally contiguous plays by excavating their possible relations to historical origins and contexts. To some extent, however, the idea of origins is a fiction, a magic bullet that shatters interpretive obstructions to the past; an origin, like a reference, is really only an infinite regress of references. Like origin and reference, context too represents a construct shaped from a desire to know, to stabilize what is always in motion. The notion of context in postmodernity must seem a quaint and factitious convention. Nonetheless, it is an indispensable one. Understanding that the historical context is to some extent an arbitrary construct does not alter the fact that such constructs are epistemological necessities which orient cognition in crucial ways. If we connect verbal texts to social ones, we cannot but admit that people live, know, converge, fail, fight, create, and adapt in contexts, experienced not as arbitrary but as the bounded real. This reality is factored through a wide array of social possibilities: gender and sexuality, class and status, race and creed. What makes the idea of contexts epistemologically thorny is that persons in different subject positions move through a broad range of experience or Althusserian lived relation to the real; the real changes, depending upon one’s aesthetic or historical contextualization of the particular subject position. Context inevitably alters the understood nature of persons and their histories.

This interdependence of text (historical subject, aesthetic object) and context (historical moment, ideological condition or structure), however lacking in explicit social reference, is neatly figured in Wallace Ste vens’s well-known poem Anecdote of the Jar. This work smartly reverses polarities of text and context, properly erasing each as a separate entity. The poem’s speaker sets or has set an object, a text of sorts, in a notoriously general region or context:

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.⁴

Even though uncontained, the context is made to do the bidding of the text; the jar enforces compliance from the wilderness. But the text, the jar, is itself literally a container: it is a figure for context, ajar to the possibility of (semantic) openings and closings; and the slovenly wilderness, seemingly the frame for the jar, itself stands for a very traditional artistic text—unruly nature, tamed by art. So Stevens’s opening stanza engulfs in one landscape of understanding the interpenetration of text and context, both of which inhabit and disrupt the frame that describes them. Some of the theoretical difficulty of contexts can be alleviated in a Stevensian way, by seeing them as continuous with or transparent to the text—or better still, as having been created or made to surround the text by the text, even as the jar eventually took dominion everywhere inside the poem and inside the landscape it controls.

Shakespearean contexts always recreate this border indeterminacy: the plays extend from the formations that are their subtextual subject. Far from being the preserve of disinterested cultural information, this theater is always a version of what it contains, implicated in the world it describes. As Fredric Jameson has said:

The literary or aesthetic act … always entertains some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow reality to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at a distance. It must rather draw the Real into its own texture. … The symbolic act therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its measure with a view toward its own projects of transformation.⁵

A flexible category in and of itself, context varies dramatically as well among recent Renaissance literary theorists. For some new historicists, a relevant frame for interpretation may be far displaced from the text’s temporal or spatial vicinity. The margins of context can stretch out over oceans, years, and artistic forms. For example, to Stephen Greenblatt, an Albrecht Dürer print shows something critical about the representational status of rebellion which is reconfigured in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI; a story about French hermaphroditism furnishes a way of understanding sexual homologies and erotic exchanges in Twelfth Night.⁶ Walter Cohen calls this interpretive technique arbitrary connectedness: The strategy is governed methodologically by the assumption that any one aspect of society is related to any other. No organizing principle determines these relationships: any social practice has at least a potential connection to any theatrical practice. … The commitment to arbitrary connectedness inevitably limits the persuasiveness of much new historicist work.⁷ Cohen proceeds to expose some of the contradictions in Greenblatt’s work, but he admits that because theater itself is a contradictory institution, the desultory evidentiary procedures of new historicism are somewhat mitigated at a higher level of abstraction. Cohen is right to perceive virtues and flaws in the technique. This mode of reading tends not to be specifically explanatory because it so often strays far from the text at hand; but it does often work at a higher level of abstraction to dissolve the notion of context in a productive rather than reductive way. This hermeneutic reminds us that an element of arbitrary connectedness inheres in every interpretive act. What, after all, counts as a relevant piece of information? The arbitrary or perhaps nonlocal form of new historicism reconstructs ideological or discursive formations and practices and relates them to semantic flashpoints in a given text. But for all its sophistication, the method frequently depends on the presumption of a stable set of historical meanings which, however unpredictably connected, tend to cast an even light over the ragged surfaces of the text. Power, authority, even gender have often worked similarly in new-historicist readings over severely differing contexts, and history in this discipline can come to seem too disciplined, a surprisingly confined signifier.

For better or worse, I have sought to limit arbitrariness by focusing on a specific temporal region of disruption: the transition from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean regimes. I have also tried to convey the sense of flux and destabilization inherent in this historical moment. As much as possible, I confine my inquiries here to local pressures that operate, often unpredictably, within a space of change.⁸ Because I am not describing a general poetics of culture so much as a particular poetics of the theater’s use of culture, I am pledged to pertinent contexts insofar as these can be determined and curtailed. Locality, employed as a main interpretive template, allows the critic to read the literary text through its most probable stresses and histories and to delimit the profusion of narratives that cause both arbitrary and likely influences to blend. Local reading can narrow the bewildering semantic range of the plays by pinning them to a nearby context; it can also, however, enlarge a drama’s signifying potential should the text (like Hamlet, for instance) fail to specify limitations to contextual meanings. Because contexts, like historical moments, are theoretically infinite, construing them always involves an act of containment, a resistance to the alluring fact or alternative story.

Here, then, are some of my self-imposed interpretive guidelines in this book. Although it is difficult to mark the termini of historical moments, I have generally confined my analyses to the period defined in the book’s subtitle, or—as in the case of Scottish succession history and the early Puritan movement, discussed in chapters 3 and 4 respectively—to those histories which have clear and ongoing implications for this period and these texts. Likewise, I have attempted to limit context spatially. This book assumes that these are English histories that Shakespeare is on the verge of writing; their foreign settings distantiate reference only to secure, not frustrate, local interest. Given the fact that fashion, religion, and even genre circulate among nations, it may seem unnecessary to restrict topicality to English concerns, which could never—as some of the breathless reports of foreign ambassadors attest—remain strictly English. But in this particular historical niche, Shakespeare’s plays concern themselves with the cultural peril of specifically English politics and ideology. These dramas are hardly cogent vehicles for jingoistic sentiment; but their central concerns are local, however broadly representative (i.e., universal) that locality manages to be. Finally, I proceed on the assumption that historical contexts must demonstrably play into plot, theme, genre, image, or staging; the drama’s central literary features must be apposite to or cognate with some significant cultural fact or presence and so create a representational resonance with history. Selective narrowing of contexts offers the best chance to recover the intercourse between text and time. I have tried, then, to slow down the frames of historical reference that blur past in Shakespeare’s plays; or to put it another way, I have placed the jar of the text within and about its known historical conditions.

The trick word in that last sentence is known. This book attempts to deploy but also to extend and reconfigure the historically known. No small presumption for a nonhistorian, this effort can nonetheless be justified by the nature of historical knowledge, which I take to be largely documentary—that is, textual, and thus always legitimately subject to rereading. An interpretive instability must be acknowledged at once: the past that I read through Shakespeare’s texts has already been read by those texts and finessed, over time, by generations of historians and critics; and the idea of the theater that I attempt to nourish through cooked (i.e., selected and processed) data cannot provide any certain access to the lived past of the plays. This dilemma of mediated histories can be eased if we see the text itself as an historical repository, with a direct, participatory relation to its time. In this regard, we may follow Foucault’s early work in attempting to establish archaeologies of knowledge resident in cultural productions.

Perhaps an analogy in more traditional archaeological terms is in order. One interesting formation common in the Middle East is the tell, a hill-shaped site on which several generations or even civilizations have successively built. An artificial construct—the accumulated remains of one or more ancient settlements⁹—the tell stands to a modern age as comprehension’s rough draft, a version of historical fact anticipating the refinements of taxonomists, curators, and theoreticians. Compressing the past, the site presents a convenient if deformed epitome of cultural activity. Because the tell displays without making definitive disclosures, it is, befitting its homonym, a kind of narrative. Like any story, the tell is an occasion for analysis, the groundwork for topical understanding.

To read literature by way of the past, one may usefully regard the text as a tell-like structure: a repository of tiered and culled histories compressed into shapes that forerun meaning. The archaeological site resembles the literary artifact in that both comprise superposed layers of significance.¹⁰ The more deeply submerged the level, the more difficult it is to retrieve and reconstruct without altering it—but the better preserved that level may be because of its chthonic embeddedness. In texts as in tells, crucial referentiality tends not to be disposed too close to the surface. The archaeological model offers the hope that some trace essence of the real can be reclaimed—certainly not without losing some data, but perhaps without scattering entirely the forms of the distant past. The literary artifact differs in important ways, of course, from the tell, particularly in its constitutive materials: the verbal work assembles subliminal, cognitive, and tonal elements from its culture, the "prior historical or ideological subtext" in Jameson’s words, of the society (Political Unconscious, 81). But the analogy of text to tell can illuminate the theoretical pitfalls of interpretive excavations. In hoping to find the thing in itself, the past-as-it-was, archaeological work may accidentally erase periodic or epochal divisions; later historical intrusion often disturbs the stratifications that can, in the best case, act as a diachronic key to the local(e). What is more, because of its spatial limits, the tell, like the text, is bound to skew the sample of cultural activity; it cannot be fully representative. Finally, the structure can silently, unintelligibly absorb encounters with other civilizations by which the culture under study has become enriched or infected. The uncertainties of reading such a dig suggest some of the hazards of historical inquiry. But the site, like the text, remains opaque to every understanding that is not historical.

So in arguing that Shakespeare’s theatrical plots tell versions of historical events or meanings, I depend on this flexible, archaeological sense of tell: a provisional ordering of artifacts; a narrating of uncertain histories that have been assembled but not wholly interpreted. The plays write across regimes, conjoin the real and the fictive, without always marking the boundaries. This uncertainty leads us to the notion of inscription.

In exercising the conceit of the tell—the articulate culture or artifact—I have begun to define inscription through an antithetical term. For inscribing, or writing-in, is the opposite of telling, or speaking out. Yet they are complementary opposites. Whereas the tell speaks a collective voice, synecdochically sampling or disinterestedly compressing a whole cultural structuration, inscription posits selective, individual agency and intentionality: a person who inscribes is up to something. When Shakespeare writes the culture that shapes his texts, he becomes more than merely an indifferent producer of cultural objects or a medium through which events are told; he is also reader, redactor, and rhapsode. Meanings lodged in scripti ve acts are rarely governed completely by a unified authorial intention. But the author function that belongs to the name of Shakespeare is hermeneutically useful and not necessarily simplistic. What’s in that name is the presupposition of a set of conscious designs that the plays and their staged histories sometimes obey, sometimes subvert. To understand the idea of inscription—the idea that history is, and is susceptible of, representation in texts—we must accept that there are points at which text, history, and authorial intention work in concert, points where they clash, and yet other points where they conspire to create ambiguous impressions. The theater writes and records diffuse cultural intentions, transcending any single historical subject’s or author’s business or desire. But this characterization of the stage should not obliterate the notion of the author, the inscriber. True to my own poststructural academic contexts, I understand the text as multiple: the intersection of a range of discourses. Thus the early modern culture as a whole can be said to have helped write Shakespeare’s plays, even as late-twentieth-century American culture helps write the way I interpret them. If the dramatist cannot avoid inscribing the time into his texts—whether or not he intends the ramifications of the inscriptions¹¹—he also has the ability to reconstitute, through the fierce endeavor of [his] art, specific histories in particular ways.

One locus for theater’s inscriptive intertwining of cultural and authorial intention, and one that bears heavily on my readings of each of these plays, is the repeatedly staged historical figure of Queen Elizabeth. There was little doubt that playwrights and poets placed her in their work in various guises. She spoke of her own position as theatrical (We princes, I tell you, are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed, she is famously supposed to have said),¹² and the theater borrowed a royal prestige by openly and subtly performing her. What emerges from the practice is the multiplicity of her perceived selves, an impression of polymorphism partly created and partly perceived that did not always accomplish its stated goal of honoring her. In the well-known letter of 1589 annexed to the first edition of The Faerie Queene, Spenser wrote to Walter Ralegh of his allegorical method in the poem, a representational strategy of the sort that I have tried to retrieve and analyze in this book:

In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generali intention, but in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I doe expresse in Belphoebe, fashioning her name according to your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phoebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana.)¹³

This somewhat coy description of the poem smooths over the political dissonance inherent in these allegorical divisions, separations, and multiple namings. By confessing that in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her, Spenser is edging toward a statement about the darker, more shadowy representations of Elizabethan policy and character in the poem, made justifiable by the human imperfections in the most vertuous and beautifull Lady. This letter of the authors expounding his whole intention in the course of this work cannot possibly live up to its billing, because the author’s understanding of his own intention is at once veiled and extraordinarily conflicted. There are designed and accidental leakages of meaning in the allegorical technique—Spenser’s mul- tiple personifications of Elizabethan qualities and strategies—that no account of intentions can caulk. It would be wrong to suggest that the fragmentary inscription has a life all its own; but the life it receives from the poet certainly outlives attempts (even the poet’s attempts) to confine it semantically. The point is that, as Spenser admits but understates, inscription is multiple in practice and result, and it is not completely answerable to intentionality. Any text that attempts to collate multiple historical realities will find itself, or those realities, fragmented, like a cubist work that tries to represent three dimensions on a single surface. Thus the meanings of history suffer, in literary inscriptions, emergencies of disjunction, contradiction, and discord. These crises may have been part of an original perception about the particular subject, but they may also arise as a result of that subject’s incarnation in representational flesh of many figures. Such an aesthetic procedure opens the text to oppositional, unflattering, or uncontrolled lineations.

We can stay with the example of the queen. John Lyly’s Endymion: The Man in the Moon (c. 1591) stages the metaphorics of frustrated courtiership in Elizabeth’s sphere. Endymion, the lover who fails of favor (indirectly, Lyly himself) has wasted his youth in worship of the unattainable monarch, here mythologized as Cynthia. In love with the moon, Endymion is cast into a forty-year sleep by Cynthia’s jealous rival, Tellus, who has failed to secure his affections and seeks to prevent those affections from aiming elsewhere. Homage to the queen brings (at first, it seems) no rewards, only a horribly premature senescence; but finally the ruler restores Endymion to youth with a kiss. By the end of the play, Cynthia, still romantically unattainable, becomes somewhat less emotionally distant as she manages and sanctions several romantic couplings which secure the comedy. But more interesting than the main plot of deflected romance is a mirroring subplot featuring an amusing braggart warrior named Sir Tophas. Like Endymion, whom he resembles in his narcissism and his appetites, the miles gloriosus finds himself in love with a powerful woman, one just as unattainable in her way as is the queen. Sir Tophas’s choice is none other than an old witch, Dipsas, the enchantress who was employed by Tellus to cast the spell on Endymion. The inscriptive mechanism here could scarcely be more conflicted. Endymion’s predicament can be traced to three women, a trinity that is subliminally a unity: an unattainable queen, a jealous lover, and a haggard, ugly witch. Without a doubt Endymion is bewitched, his friend Eumenides comments long before the spell is cast (1.1.116).¹⁴ The clear parallel of Dipsas and Cynthia, and the rivalry (converging on indistin guishability) of the queen and Tellus, conspire to undermine what the play seems to announce: the supposed incomparability of Cynthia. The multiplicity of the queen’s images and roles—goddess on earth, mystical provider of bounty, controller of erotic relationships at court—activates an artistic process that admits unfavorable aspects of Elizabeth’s (human and monarchical) personality into the representational field. And these aspects, of course, will bear differential weight depending on the temporal and social context of the work.

I think that Lyly attempts a genuine if misguided contribution to the queen’s mythology in this play, fending off—with mixed success—some of the more unbecoming associations of inconstancy, distance, and tyranny with which the moon could be associated, so as to claim for Elizabeth an image (as did Ralegh in The Book of the Ocean to Cynthia) of eternally regenerating youth and gravitational power. But this is, as the figure of Dipsas suggests, an image with some local, temporal pressure on it. For in 1591, the queen was fifty-seven years old. Around the last decade of her reign, inscriptions of Elizabeth could no longer evade the force of time; the years gathered on the monarch’s mortal body and on her image in texts. By the end of the decade the problem had grown plangent. Thomas Dekker, for example, begins The Pleasant Comedie of Old Portunatus with this sugary exchange:

1. Are you then travelling to the temple of Eliza?

2. Even to her temple are my feeble limmes travelling. Some cal her Pandora, some Gloriana, some Cynthia¹: some Belphoebe, some Astraea: all by severall names to expresse severall loves: Yet all those names make but one celestial! body, as all those loves meete to create but one soule.

(Prologue, 1-6)¹⁵

All these names, however, have their own mythologies, which can collide to form impacted ideological contradictions that undercut the supposed obeisant intent. One wonders, for instance, how the troubling sexual image of Pandora and the implications of the unstable Cynthia (still inconstant, yet never wavering, as Lyly ambivalently calls her [3.4.223]) rhyme with the juridical seriousness of the Astraea name. Writers under the queen’s impress—Elizabethan writers—frequently played these images off one another, some to an effect of bland homage, but others to the discord sounding here. The problem is not simply that the profusion of royal images becomes unmanageable; as I discuss in my treatment of Troilus and Cressida, the more serious point is that the profusion sometimes betrayed an inability to remain unambiguously en- thusiastic about the queen. Dekker’s play appeared in 1599, in Elizabeth’s sixty-sixth year, and the topic of Eliza (whose age goes unmentioned in the passage) is introduced by two old men. The younger generation, of which Dekker was part, had conspicuously greater difficulty than do these characters in sustaining such praise. It is hard to imagine that the darker subtext of the queen’s age purposively lurks beneath the lavish praise of Elizabeth at the beginning of Dekker’s play; it is harder still to suppose that the taboo subject of her years does not figure into the meanings of this passage. A reading of inscription cannot resolve intention, but it can suggest the conditions that enable and strain it.

As a study of inscriptive processes, this book is a close reading of history’s functional complexity in Shakespeare’s plays. Alan Liu’s insight that new historicism’s formalist biases and vocabulary generate many of its characteristic interpretive maneuvers will apply here.¹⁶ The technologies of close reading can profitably describe—and of course, produce—qualified destabilizations of historical meaning. New-critical principles can also tease surprises from the intercourse between texts and events that seem by now exhausted or overread. (Surely there is no justification for two more chapters on Hamlet unless a new play or a play