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Shakespeare’s Poetic Monumenta: Resisting the Reification of Orality in Legal Discourse
Part II Introduction In The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons (2007:25), Oliver Arnold names William Lambarde as one of the “more remarkable” MPs of Shakespeare’s day, from among those unique political “agents” and “power-broking advocates of the New World empire.” Arnold observes that these “stars” of St. Stephen’s Chapel “sustained a level of political discourse we can scarcely imagine: well-crafted and rigorous arguments, learned scriptural exegeses, long quotations in Latin and Greek, and allusions to classical literature and philosophy were commonplace.” Arnold notes, however, that Shakespeare posed a challenge to some of these Elizabethan and Jacobean formulations of statute law under the condition of representation by political agents (such as Lambarde), and that his “mockery of representationalism was the most ambitious aim of Shakespeare’s political art” (2007:25). According to Arnold, new practices and theories of parliamentary representation emerged during Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns, which “shattered the unity of human agency, redefined the nature of power, [and] transformed the image of the body politic” (2007: Front Flap). Arnold argues that Shakespeare was a “radical thinker and artist who demystified the ideology of political representation in the moment of its first flowering” (2007: Front Flap). In Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (1956), John Peter identifies Elizabethan Satire as a “movement” derived from the medieval tradition of Complaint, and he examines its deflection into Drama in light of the literary and social pressures that appear to have determined it. Peter considers that the formation of a “new satiric habit” can be discerned in works written between 1580 and 1600 (1956:106). He traces the movement’s beginnings as far back as, e.g., the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), in which Peter notes a capacity for “sustained irony” (a quality setting Wyatt apart from the previous tradition of Complaint), as well as numerous references to classical authors, such as Homer, Livy, Ovid, Plutarch,Virgil, Theophrastus, Suetonius and Plato: He [Wyatt] is in fact the inheritor of a civilized culture that had already attained, and passed, its climacteric, a conscious disciple of Horace, and it is not the values and ideas of Kent that we find in his poems so much as the values and ideas of Augustan Rome and Renaissance Italy…. (p. 107) Wyatt’s neo-classicism was not, however (according to Peter), sudden and unprecedented; it seems there was for many years a “slow seepage” (1956:107) into English from the works of the Latin satirists, becoming more untrammeled after the establishment of the early printing presses: Soon writers of reprobative verse began to assimilate the forgotten mode of Satire, to claim kinship with the Latin authors who had practised it, and to attempt, in their own works, to emulate or duplicate the effects which the Romans had achieved. (p. 107)
Peter notes that audiences, as well as the satirists themselves, were changing, becoming different
sorts of people altogether from the medieval audiences and complainants: usually, they were students from Oxford or Cambridge, or from the “even freer” environment of the Inns of Court (see e.g., “Inn Jokes” in Watson, 2015); and the common law of Christianity had yielded to the case law of Latin precedent (1956:112). He sums up the influence exerted by particular Romans on the satirists of the English Renaissance thus: One could say, roughly, that they took over Persius’ obscurity, Juvenal’s acerbity, and from Martial, that ‘most dissolute wryter’ as Webbe calls him, a fondness for salacity and double entendre. (p. 117) Considerations of the Present Study In our earlier explorations of this Eirenarcha’s evidence (e.g., Cohen, 2015), we began to bring such apparent satire to the fore by tracing connections to the Shakespeare canon from annotations marginal or proximal to various Latin and Greek quotations occurring in the Eirenarcha, including references in which Lambarde specifically cites Cicero and Martial. In the case of the previously documented1 Martial epigram invoked by Lambarde, a link to the ‘dog-asauthority’ theme and Edgar’s speech in King Lear was proposed in relation to this annotated quotation found on page 422 of the Eirenarcha:
Thus, here, in a section on statutes pertaining to rogues, beggars and vagabonds, Lambarde’s selection of a quotation from the Roman poet Martial is barely marked, a result of the annotator’s providing only tiny pinpoints to indicate the passage; but marked it is: Inter raucos ultimus Rogatores, Oret caninas panis improbi buccas. And ranged last among the roaring Rogues, In vaine a morsel may he begge of bread, So bad, as hungry Dogs disdaine to byte. This reference inspires us to consider it in relation to Edgar’s speech about “shifting into a madman’s rags” in King Lear, from which we can compare two cases of disdaining dogs and 1
(viz., Cohen, 2015; Cohen & Cohen, 2017)
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attempt to divine which great authority Shakespeare had ‘imaged’ in that animal: The bloody proclamation to escape, That followed me so near—O our lives' sweetness, That we the pain of death would hourly die Rather than die at once!— taught me to shift Into a madman’s rags, t' assume a semblance That very dogs disdained. (V.iii.186) Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar...and the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority. (IV.vi.159) Also previously documented2 is the ‘Achan’ annotation below, found within a table excerpted by Lambarde on page 222 of the Eirenarcha. The table contains the adaptation of instructions, taken from the discussion in Cicero’s forensic rhetoric, the De Inventione, of how to argue the case in a conjectural issue. In this example, the annotator is thus commenting on a combined classical-biblical reference cited by Lambarde: On p. 222- ‘Sermo Josuae, ad Achan, the Chapter: 19 verse’
Lambarde’s invoking of the biblical story of Achan may reflect an attempt to enforce Justice in the orthodox tradition (Parker, 1955); and it is interesting to note that King Lear possibly contains a protest of this specific example when Lear comments on seeing the murdered Cordelia: “Howl, Howl, Howl, Howl! O! you are men of stones:” On page 172, in a statute pertaining to ‘Rebellious and vnlawful assemblies’ (a section not only marked in the margin by the annotator but also referred to from the annotator’s personal index on the book’s end pages), Lambarde cites an intriguing reference to King Ina in Ancient Greek:
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(in Cohen, 2015) 3
In considering this reference, it is useful to note the background on King Ina that Malone (quoted in Reed, 1822) provides, since it may relate directly to the writing of King Lear (1605?): The story told by Camden in his Remaines, 4to. 1605, is this: “Ina, king of the West Saxons, had three daughters, of whom upon a time he demanded whether they did love him, and so would do during their lives, above all others: the two elder aware deeply they would, the youngest, but the wisest, told her father flatly, without flattery that albeit she did love, honour, and reverence him and so would whilst she lived, as much as nature and daughterly dutie ant the uttermost could expect, yet she did think that one day it would come to passe that she should affect another more fervently, meaning her husband, when she were married; who being made one flesh with her, as God by commandment had told, and nature had taught her, she was to cleave fast to , forsaking father and mother, kiffe and kinne. [Anonymous.] One referreth this to the daughter of King Leir.” (Reed, 1822:130)
Additionally, one may glean from other annotated evidence in this Eirenarcha that confrontation and satire on the part of the Poet may not be limited to his focusing on Lambarde’s use of classical and biblical references but also on numerous other aspects of overreaching and “inarticulate” (Mazzio, 2009) rhetoric from Lambarde. For example, Lambarde’s run-on description of jurors on page 384 of the Eirenarcha might have served as a precursor to the exaggerated mocking by Shakespeare in Dogberry’s rhetorically similar, entertainingly mangled instructions to the constables on the watch in All’s Well That Ends Well:
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Similarly, as Lewis (2016) points out, at the start of the graveyard scene in Hamlet, Shakespeare quickly establishes that the Gravedigger, like Dogberry is prone to detach verba from res for self-aggrandizing rhetorical effect. In describing the prospect of Ophelia having drowned herself in self-defence, he asserts to his less talkative partner that “It must be se offendendo”. He means the opposite (i.e., se defendendo), but the chance to accrue some Latinate cultural capital is too good to miss.3
A possible stimulus source for this mocking may be derived from the remarkable annotation ‘Homycide or manslaughter 236 felo de se 249’ appearing in this Eirenarcha’s personal index to statutes, and Lambarde’s use of ‘Se defendendo’ on p. 236:
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From Rhodri Lewis, “Young Hamlet.” In ‘Commentary,’ The Times Literary Supplement, August 31, 2016.
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On page 166 of the Eirenarcha Lambarde offers a derivation from the French for the words ‘riot’ and ‘brawle.’ In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Adriano de Armado asks Moth: “How meanest thou? brawling in French?” There is a detectable presence here of a mocking tone that may reverberate back to Lambarde’s seemingly simplistic derivation:
Further possible evidence of the roots of mocking may be documented from page 115 of the Eirenarcha, where Lambarde provides the form for the Recognisance for Good abearing, in which the “common fashion” is for two Justices to be summoned to officiate, although the practice is “not of any necessitie in law” and one Justice would suffice: “I would not greatly feare…to undertake the thing my selfe alone.” In this case, Lambarde’s example names one of the two Justices, “Samuele Leonard armigero”: (p. 115)
Greenblatt (2010) notes that in previous centuries of Shakespeare criticism, both Rowe and Davies pointed to the opening scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor in which Shakespeare depicts how pompous Justice Shallow stands on his dignity in discussing Falstaff’s alleged deer-poaching, with his nephew Slender’s confirmation of Shallow as “a gentleman born,” one who “writes himself ‘Armigero.’” “Ay, that I do, and have done any time these three hundred years” (1.1.7-11): Laughter is directed at the self-importance that is crystallized in the lovingly reiterated Latinism “Armiger,” one who bears a coat of arms. The mockery ripples across a whole class of gentry inordinately proud of their birth…. (p. 154)
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And on page 376-377 of the Eirenarcha (marked by the annotator on p. 377), Lambarde outlines the office of Custos Rotulorum (‘Keeper of the Rolls,’ to which Lambarde was appointed by the Lord Chancellor in 1597), and describes how the power to appoint this “ancient authoritie” alternated between the Lord Chancellor and the Sovereign. In his Shakespeare vs Shallow, Hotson (1931:94) also refers to the opening scene in Merry Wives, and notes that “‘Custalorum and Ratolorum’, with its intentional scrambling of the words Custos Rotulorum, is probably satire…Shallow brags of the antiquity of his coat…”:
A final example: If Portia’s tone is not mocking in ‘The quality of mercy is not strain’d,’ it is surely boldly challenging to the political agent, the Sovereign, and to the common-law prince, when juxtaposed with the annotator’s marked passage in Lambarde’s legal instrument: ‘The grace and dispensation of the prince may not be strained beyond the words.’4
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Discussed in (Cohen, 2015), and in (Cohen & Cohen, 2017).
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In considering the specific evidence of the present study, if we pause at the sight of the section on page 59 of the Eirenarcha, as the annotator (awash in ink) has evidently done, we find Lambarde (appointed Keeper of the Records by Elizabeth in 1601) issuing a remarkable statement regarding what constitutes a valid record: ‘Records be nothing else, but Memorials, (or Monuments) of things done before Iudges that have credit in that behalfe.’ Saliently, embedded in this statement appears Lambarde’s invocation of Virgil’s line from the Aeneid (“Si ritè audita recordor”—"If what I properly [or ritually] heard, I can recall from memory, or ‘from my heart’”), assigning, thus, sole validation and signification to only those records which reflect time-honored, orally transmitted memorialization fixed in documentation and brought before judges. So, here, then, is a possible example of one lawmaker’s own personalized statutory perspective and prerogative within the underlying process of building Empire. As with our previous explorations of possible linkages pertaining to uniquely-relevant, obscure lexical items occurring in this Eirenarcha, the presence in this clause of various specific words— ‘monuments,’ ‘memorials,’ ‘records’—leads us easily to consider a connection here to Sonnet 55:
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Our aim here, though, is not to submit a comprehensive new explication of Sonnet 55; it is, however, to provide a pathway from a heretofore obscured and unavailable cache of evidence in this legal document, the annotated Eirenarcha, to new considerations of new explications of the Sonnets, and in particular, Sonnet 55. Initially, it may seem bold, for example, to suggest that the appearance of ‘Princes’ in 55 may not refer to typical conceptions of that royal title at all, but instead to the perfected vision of the physical embodiment of the common law—a ‘monument’ gilded with the sovereign’s Supremacy—known in Shakespeare’s day as ‘the Prince’ (see Endnote 1), with this term concomitantly reflecting (or deflecting) any possible Virgilian influences present, inasmuch as Virgil was known as the ‘Prince of Poets,’ with his own enduring ‘monument,’ the Aeneid. And Jonson “habitually affirmed” (James, 1997) King James’s Virgilian heritage: “Aeneas, the sonne of Venus, Vergil makes through-out the most exquisite patterne of Pietie, Justice, Prudence, and all other Princely vertues” (quoted in James, 1997:20). Encouragingly, scholars such as Zurcher (2010), e.g., appear to lend support to extending such novel considerations to the Poet’s lyrical works: The prevalence of a legal lexis in Shakespeare’s lyric works has been widely discounted or misconstrued, by readers and sometimes editors, for a number of reasons. Most simply, many editors and readers have failed to appreciate the legal semantic resonance of many of the words Shakespeare uses in the Sonnets: language change, and the profound historical ruptures in legal traditions that have rendered alien and archaic the terms of early-modern legal practice and thought, are likely to blame. It may be that editors have been reluctant to attribute careful and sustained legal wordplay to Shakespeare in a context of this kind, supposing that a poet of so omnivorous appetite and so universal appeal would not, or could not, limit himself in such a way. (p. 66)
Zurcher (2010) discusses further, for example, the “very precise technical knowledge of bail and mainprize” evident in Sonnet 133: ‘But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail./Whoe’er keeps me, let my heart be his guard:/Thou canst not then use rigour in my jail.’ Thus: To bail a prisoner, for Coke as for Shakespeare, was to take the prisoner into custody, and to act as his warder or even jailer. It is impossible to make sense of…Sonnet 133 without this emphasis, in the technical legal understanding of ‘bail’, on the delivery of the body of the prisoner from one keeper to another. (p. 94) It is noteworthy that an annotation appears in this Eirenarcha referencing Lambarde’s bail-ormainprize statute on p. 337 pertaining specifically to ‘Baile for manslaughter’:
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Zurcher (2010) concludes that, while legal-related language does not appear in every one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the recurrence of legal diction and its structuring concepts throughout the poems pushes the usual ethical preoccupations of lyric into something newly and decidedly social and economic…grounded in an innovative focus on the common rights and obligations of universal human experience. (p. 97) Documenting ‘sustained legal word-play’(?) In the course of reconsidering the lexis, legal or otherwise, of Sonnet 55, some consideration may need to be given toward deciding whether to accept the 1609 Quarto as authorial. This decision has implications—on whether to accept, for example, Q’s ‘monument’ vs. Malone’s edit, ‘monuments’; or to assign special status to those words that appear in italics (e.g., Statues); or to accept Q’s unique punctuation. Wyndham (1898) sides with Q: To sum up:—the use of italics, capitals, and stops in the Quarto of 1609, though often obsolete, is most rarely irrational; the number of undoubted corruptions is so small as to be negligible; the weight, therefore, of the argument inclines irresistibly towards maintaining the text wherever it will yield a meaning. Acting on this conclusion, I have more than once reinstated the Quarto text in preference to a modern emendation. (p. 268) This view is tempered, however, by that of Booth (1969), who states: The quarto is the closest thing we have to an authoritative text for the sonnets, but it is a careless printing, almost surely unauthorized by Shakespeare…spelling and punctuation reveal more about the accidents of the printing house and the idiosyncrasies of the printer than they do about the poet or the poems...I have decided, therefore, that persistent citation of the 1609 quarto can only add gratuitous complications… (p. xiii) Similarly, Muir (1979), writes: Some of the Quarto spellings may be authorial, but there is no certain evidence that it was printed from Shakespeare’s own manuscript. Indeed, the most careful study of the habits of the compositors makes it seem unlikely that the poet’s punctuation or spelling has survived. (p. 5) Upon considering these arguments vis-à-vis the authorial qualities of Q in the case of the capitalized and italicized ‘Statues’ in 55, it may then be useful, also, to consider the term as, possibly, a special malapropism referencing ‘statutes’; A.R. Braunmuller (2006) provides intriguing detail: In the abstract, a malapropos word has to be close enough to the expected, àpropos, word to be both itself and that other word; the distance between them semantically has to be great enough to cause pleased surprise, usually because the ‘wrong’ word has an inappropriate signification in its verbal context, and both right and wrong words have to be available almost instantly in the audience’s perception. From an editorial viewpoint, there’s a fine example in Much Ado. The Watch are 10
discussing whether they have the authority to ‘stay’ a man. Verges thinks not. Dogberry disagrees: ‘Five shillings to one on’t with any man that knows the statutes he may stay him’ (Much Ado, 3.3). So the quarto. The Folio reads the same except that ‘statutes’ is printed as ‘statues.’ The Folio reading, ‘statues’ is a respectable Dogberryism…One can never solve the crux. (p. 144)5 Moreover Zurcher (2010), in describing certain sonnets in the sequence, cites a similar common strategy in Elizabethan poetic language, viz., the use of a form of hypallage: the transferred epithet, whose “use is rife in Shakespeare as in other contemporary poets” (p. 59). Classical referents In Themes and Variations on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1961), J.B. Leishman, in a chapter titled “Poetry as Immortalisation—Shakespeare and the Roman Poets,” considers the possibilities of Shakespeare’s familiarity with Horace, given the “Horatian resonance” seemingly evidenced in Sonnet 55: Was Shakespeare familiar with Horace’s Odes? …We cannot assume that Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Latin poets was small and superficial simply because it is so hard to trace…the contrast between the publicness of Horace…and the privateness of Shakespeare, for whom the humanity threatened by Time seems to exist only in the person of his nameless and unidentifiable friend, and who, though he elsewhere [55] speaks at times with an Horatian resonance of his poetry Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. (pp. 36-37)
The uncovered presence in this Eirenarcha of Lambarde’s quotation of Horace’s famous Shakespeare/Greene-related third Epistle: Moueat Cornicula risum, Furtiuis nudata coloribus— and the associated warning not to pilfer from other writers any longer, lest those he has robbed should return one day to claim their feathers, when like the crow (cornicula) stripped of its stolen splendor (furtiuis nudata coloribus), he would become a laughing-stock… (J. Dover Wilson, 1951:65)
raises the potential of a stimulus-inducing Horatian encounter being perhaps ‘not so hard to trace’ after all, given that the quotation appears on page 2 of the Eirenarcha’s Proheme, within visible proximity of the Trymbelrod signature’s reverse bleedthrough:
Similarly, Katherine M. Wilson (1974) opines that 5
The statute granting the Watch the authority to ‘stay’ a man is marked ‘night watches’ in the margin by the annotator on page 12 of the Duties of Constables (1602), bound with this Eirenarcha:
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Poets promising their friends immortality in their verse originally copied Horace. His monument, however, was more enduring than brass, not marble, as in this sonnet [55], where Ovid is more relevant… Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire rewards a close analysis. Ovid as Golding has it at the end of his Metamorphoses says, Now I have brought a work to end which neither Jove’s fierce wrath, Nor sword, nor fire… Are able to abolish quite. This has been recognized as Shakespeare’s source, but the question asked is where does Mars come from. (p. 222)
One possibility, again ‘not so hard to trace,’ is that Shakespeare’s Mars mention in 55 may arise from the encounter, marked by ink smudges, with Lambarde’s invocation of Virgil on page 59 of this Eirenarcha. Virgilian Visions/Revisions According to Martindale (2004:90-93), “Virgil is one among those pervasive and diffused classical presences within Renaissance culture which, in the words of Leornard Barkan, ‘are present everywhere in the formation of the plays via some deep acculturation’…We need, then, to be alert to the modes in which Shakespeare made his acquaintance with Virgil.” Thus, if one ‘mode of acquaintance’ was an encounter with Lambarde’s Virgil quotation on page 59 of this Eirenarcha, and this succeeded in sparking an anti-Virgilian, Ovidian pacificst overlay in Sonnet 55, then such a response would seem to be consistent with similar evidence found throughout the Shakespeare canon. Martindale notes further that in most of the plays in which Shakespeare evokes Virgil we find him combined with Ovid in “imitative contaminatio" (the scholars’ word for the conflation of models), and in many cases “it is Ovid who imaginatively triumphs and more obviously modifies Shakespeare’s style” (p. 92). It is very likely, however, that Shakespeare had initially ‘made his acquaintance with Virgil’ long before, at grammar school. Enterline (2006) describes the Elizabethan schools’ interest in the good of the ‘commonweal,’ and the pride of place ‘epic’ held—epic, that is, in its Virgilian mode—and especially, as Heather James points out, the anodyne reading of Virgil as encomiast of empire that emerged from the habit of appropriating the Aeneid’s translation of empire to legitimize state authority. (p.183)
At the same time, a similar reading of Virgil would have also clearly resonated with the ideological purposes of the state ‘authorities’ (and their political agents) themselves, as legitimizing grounds to “underwrite the structures of authority and privilege in place” (TudeauClayton (1998:12). In this regard, William Lambarde would have been serving in multiple roles, as both an MP and also a legal educator at Lincoln’s Inn, when he decided to include Virgil on p. 59 in support of his interpretation of the Ancient Constitution and the primacy of orality in the law’s transmission. But from this moment onward, it seems, increasing pressures were brought to bear on the oral traditions of legal education at the Inns of Court (Raffield, 2004): The common law’s evolution from ‘common learning’ into strict case law had exerted a destructive effect on
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the oral authoritative origins of common law (pp. 39-40). Thus, if we envision an annotator such as Shakespeare, with the literary and hermeneutic skills of the poet, encountering Virgil exploited for these purposes by Lambarde—Virgil, the writer known to everyone as “perhaps most responsible for receiving, transforming, and transmitting the imagery of authority to the early Christian Middle Ages” (Collins, 1996:132), it is likely Shakespeare would have known from his own experience that the personages of the Aeneid, in considering their critical decisions, were inclined to consult their private records in the form of memory stores of experience (Collins, 1996). And he was also likely aware of the ‘books’ of monumenta and fata, which provided a context for those consultations: The monumenta are the collective thoughts of a society, the sayings that are repeated over and over, generation after generation, the knowledge of beginnings and the prophecies of the future – in effect, the documents that, when they are written down, become a sacred scripture. Until they are so written, they exist intact only within the mental archives of certain elders. When Apollo’s oracle advises the Trojan refugees to seek their ancestral home, Aeneas’ father, Anchises, ventures to interpret it: ‘Turning-his-inner-scroll of the admonitions of the ancients’ (veterum volven monumta virorum; 3.103), he tells the assembled leaders to hear, “audite.” This is an epos, the correct oral transmission of a chronicle: ‘If what I properly (or ritually) heard I can recall from memory (or “from my heart”) (si ritè audita recordor; 3.107). (Collins, p. 132)
It is intriguing, therefore, to consider what sort of literary response we might anticipate from such an informed annotator. Martindale (2004) brings to the fore the observation that Shakespeare, even when immersed in Virgilian subject matter, seemingly does not try to copy the style of Virgil. Interestingly, in Hamlet, Martindale notes, the sack of Troy seems to be relegated to an ancient story, associated with an old-fashioned and to some tastes (though not Hamlet’s) bombastic mode of writing. Scholars often see it as a parody of a version of epic style…Rather the design—or at any rate the effect—is to make the verse of the main play seem by comparison with this retardataire epic mode, modern, naturalistic, and fluent. (2004:102).
Burrow (2013), furthermore, points to Shakespeare’s “programmatic scepticism” about the role of Virgilian allusions in Jacobean imperial ambitions, as evidenced in Cymbeline: [Shakespeare] resisted the potentially rather flat-footed use of Virgil’s Aeneid as a source of simple panegyrics for James I, and instead offered his own style of ‘antiquity’: gods who speak in a Latinizing idiom, ‘ancient’ Romans who use slightly old-fashioned poetic forms, fusions of ancient British and ancient Roman sources. This was a political act in its effects, since Shakespeare’s play [Cymbeline] clearly did not slavishly adopt the public association between Virgilian imperium and Jacobean rule which had been established early in James’s reign…Shakespeare wanted still to speak in his own distinctive, slightly archaic, classical voice. (p.89)
In considering Shakespeare’s response to Virgil in The Tempest, Tudeau-Clayton (1998) finds The Tempest in its non-reverential, interrogatory—and Protestant—mode asserts rather
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its own difference as well as the difference of history and nature to the Virgilian model. Dis-placing this model it simultaneously invalidates the use of it as a legitimizing ground to underwrite the structures of authority and privilege in place— the use made of it, that is, both in early modern English culture generally and in the Jonsonian corpus in particular. (p. 12)
And, finally, James (1998) cites similar evidence in Troilus and Cressida: The Troy legend made abundant surrogate authorities available for exploitation and analysis: Ulysses [in Troilus and Cressida] himself demonstrates the use of authoritative texts to bolster and mystify the sources and coercive effects of authority. Through surrogate authorities, it is possible to bring into view the institutional mechanisms cloaked by classical reference. (p. 117)
Themes in 55 On the topic of pacifism in Shakespeare, R.S. White (2008) argues that the ‘pacifist preference’, which [Theodor] Meron detects in Shakespeare’s works as a whole, reveals itself even in some of the Sonnets, and especially Sonnet 55…War denies and destroys life and the perhaps pyrrhic victory is a shadow of the person, a reputation or a poem…the equation of war and death as enemies to love and eternal life is too insistent through Shakespeare’s works to ignore. (p. 177)
—‘Shall you pace forth’: With this topic in mind, we find that on page 6 of the Eirenarcha, in a section on ‘Peace,’ the annotator appears to have marginally marked (with a tiny stroke) the Latin term ‘Pace tua’: ‘And in the same meaning, the Latine men say, Pace tua, by your good leave, or favour, without your offence or displeasure.’
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As with ‘Statues,’ if Pace tua / ‘pace’ were the sole exemplar of presumably linked metaphors in Shakespeare, then perhaps connecting these might seem highly speculative. However, as Muir (1979) makes clear, in a review of Molly M. Mahood’s Shakespeare’s Wordplay (1957), Mahood was able to demonstrate that Shakespeare’s wordplay ‘helps to fuse the metaphors into an imaginative whole’ (Mahood, 1957, quoted in Muir, 1979:146). —‘Nor Mars his sword, nor warres quick fire shall burn’; Thus, while 55’s ‘shall you pace forth’ may reference Lambarde’s recycling of ‘Pace tua’ in some way, it may also be noteworthy that within the same passage under the Peace section on page 6 of the Eirenarcha (consistent with the theory that any theme observed in Shakespeare might emanate from a stimulus encounter through reading), Lambarde includes an arguably patronizing mention of Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457), humanist, whilst pointing out the uselessness of deploying force without arms. Bono (1984) notes that Valla, through the biographies of Laertius, “dialectically lines Epicurean joys in transient, worldly things with eternal heavenly joy in his dialogue De voluptate, or De vero falsoque bono” (1984:173). Late versions of Valla’s dialogue featured, as a voice of revised Epicureanism, a providential ‘thirteenth book’ of the Aeneid—and suggested how such providential reading “warms the Vergilian impersonal Stoic Fatum, turning harsh destiny into a parable of individual salvation” (1984:174). Bono (1984) identifies Lucretius’s invocation of Venus as the source for Shakespeare’s additions to Plutarch’s description of Cleopatra at Cydnus: “The Venus genetrix not only of the Roman race but of all things under heaven, she conceives the good and dispels evil…Venus’s creative activity overcomes the god of war”; (1984:175-76): ‘What Venus did with Mars’ is not the subject of moralistic condemnation, but rather a hopeful allegory of how love may conquer strife: Mars mighty in battle…who often casts himself upon your lap wholly vanquished by the everliving wound of love, and thus looking upward, with shapely neck thrown back, feeds his eager eyes with love, gaping upon you, goddess, and as he lies back, his breath hangs upon your lips. There as he reclines, goddess, upon your sacred body do you, bending around him from above, pour from your lips sweet coaxings. (1.33-40)
This passage is one important source for those many Renaissance idyllic paintings of Venus’s ‘victory’ that implicitly re-evaluate the icon of ‘the choice’ and the condemning judgment of what it might mean to be ‘unmanned’ by a woman. (1984:176)
If Shakespeare, like Valla, “warms the Vergilian impersonal Stoic Fatum” in Sonnet 55, it may be in response to encountering Lambarde’s Virgilian statute-stimulus, in the service of what Zurcher (2010:97) has termed “social peace.” Eternizing This possible evidence of a pacifist theme in 55 appears draped over a scaffolding of ‘eternizing,’ observed throughout the poem. As noted by Muir (1979), the theme of immortalizing power (traced by J.B. Leishman in 1963, from Horace, Ovid and Propertius, through Petrarch, Tasso and Ronsard to Shakespeare’s English predecessors) “was a
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commonplace, though Shakespeare does not use it in a commonplace way” (1979:102). As noted by Hammond (1981), Philip Martin, in his Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love and Art (1972), sees Sonnet 55 as “the apotheosis of eternizing poetry” (1981:74). Indeed, Martin refers to 55 as “probably the greatest immortalization poem in the language…one of the four or five greatest of the Sonnets…a ‘builded’ and a ‘powerful rime’…being a monument in verse (and not just talking about being one)” (1972:157). Hammond reminds us that “the parallels between this claim to poetic immortality, and the last lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Horace’s ‘Exegi monumentum’ ode, are noted by every editor, and many critics have drawn usefully upon the fact that where Ovid and Horace are referring to themselves, Shakespeare’s is a claim for the immortality of his subject” (1981:71): Where the Roman poets are celebrating their own immortality, Shakespeare lays his stress elsewhere and characteristically transforms his sources completely. The Romans say: Because of my poem I will never die. Shakespeare says: Because of my poem you will never die.” (Martin, 1972, p. 158, quoted in Hammond, 1981, p. 71)
Interestingly, Landry (1963) traces other examples of the ‘eternizing’ form, and references the 16 C. Whitney emblem, which, in some startling parallels to 55, pictures the fall or overthrow of large buildings, while books remain unharmed (see Endnote 2). th
Conclusion Jonathan Bate (1998) has observed that the sonnets have an “extraordinary capacity to elicit categorical statements from their interpreters…but somehow they then sneak up behind you and convince you of something completely different.” Bate reasons this occurs because of what the sonnets leave out: much as the plays leave interpretive space for the audience, “so the sonnets drop hints to draw the reader into their implied narrative, but have a cunning reticence which allows our fantasies to run riot” (p. 43). Bate (2009) adds further to this view by having us question tentative assumptions regarding who, exactly, is being addressed in the Sonnets: “When Shakespeare’s purpose is to write about the power of art to defeat the ravages of time…the identity of the addressee is immaterial” (2009:199). Tudeau-Clayton (1998:214), in discussing The Tempest and figures of Virgil, observes: “The ironic shadows of imitation/commentary ‘translate’ the radical negativity of a new world, which cannot be contained by Old World forms, and which indeed call for new forms, new visions.” With the present, previously unavailable evidence considered, perhaps similar ‘new forms’ and ‘new visions’ wrought by imitation/commentary may, in some ways, be seen to describe Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, and thus Sonnet 55, as well. Zurcher (2010) sees this as an observable trend in Spencer, Daniel and Sidney, in which all three poets consistently surrender self-interest in struggling for self-realization, reflecting the shift of a lyric culture during the 1590s “from court, to the Inns of Court” (2010:67), with Shakespeare’s own sonnet sequence beginning to look “decidedly oppositional, and in political terms even, perhaps, seditious” (2010:67). 16
With this view, according to Zurcher, Shakespeare offers through the Sonnets an epistemological challenge to the courtly lyric, in which the codes governing the self, social relations with the friend, and erotic relations with the beloved are not rooted in the love-objects themselves, but in a hypostasized system, transforming the sonnet sequence from a revelatory narrative to a much more static, argument-based exploration of different facets of the known. (p. 97)
Moreover, in comparison with the “retardataire” epic modes of preceding poetic epochs, the transformation is into something modern, naturalistic and fluent (Martindale, 2004). And yet, from this possible evidence of a “satiric habit” (Peter, 1956) within the Poet’s political art, we might also say that Shakespeare claims kinship with the Latin authors who practiced it before him.
Works Cited Arnold, Oliver. The Third Citizen: Shakespeare’s Theater and the Early Modern House of Commons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Bate, Johnathan. The Genius of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Bate, Jonathan. Soul of the Age. New York: Random House, 2009. Bono, Barbara J. Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy. Berkeley: UC Press, 1984. Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Braunmuller, A.R. “On Not Looking Back: Sight and Sound and Text.” In From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, edited by P. Holland and S. Orgel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Burrow, Colin. Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity. Oxford: OUP, 2013. Cohen, Gerald. “Shakespeare’s Martial Law, Etc., Via Dumb-Show Pandemonia.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, Sydney Australia, June 2015. Cohen, Hart and Gerald Cohen. “When Old Interfaces Were New: Shakespeare Anatomizes the Prince.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Victoria, B.C., June 2017. Collins, Christopher. Authority Figures: Metaphors of Mastery from the Iliad to the Apocalypse. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996.
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Dover Wilson, J. “Malone and the Upstart Crow.” Shakespeare Survey Vol.4. Cambridge: CUP, 1951. 56-68 Enterline, Lynn. “Rhetoric, Discipline, and the Theatricality of Everyday Life in Elizaethan Grammar Schools.” In From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, edited by P. Holland and S. Orgel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Hammond, Gerald. The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets. London: Macmaillan, 1981. Hotson, Leslie. Shakespeare versus Shallow. London: Nonesuch, 1931. James, Heather. Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Lambarde, William. Eirenarcha. London: 1604? Bound with Duties of Constables, 1602. Landry, Hilton. Interpretations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Berkeley: UC Press, 1963. Leishman, J.B. Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1961. Mahood, M.M. Shakespeare’s Wordplay. London: Methuen, 1957. Martin, Philip. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love and Art. Cambridge: CUP, 1972. Martindale, Charles. “Shakespeare and Virgil.” In Shakespeare and the Classics, Edited by C. Martindale and A.B. Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Mazzio, Carla. The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an age of Eloquence. U. Penn Press, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Allen & Unwin, 1979. Parker, M.D.H. The Slave of Life: A Study of Shakespeare and the Idea of Justice. London: Chatto & Windus, 1955. Peter, John. Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Raffield, Paul. Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Reed, Isaac, ed. The Dramatic Works of Willian Shakespeare, With Copious Annotations. Vol X. Offor, Sharpe and Sons: London, 1822. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret. Jonson, Shakespeare & Early Modern Virgil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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Watson, Jackie. « Satirical expectations: Shakespeare’s Inns of Court audiences », Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [Online], 33 | 2015, Online since 10 October 2015, connection on 30 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/3352 ; DOI : 10.4000/ shakespeare.3352 White, R.S. Pacifism and English Literature: Minstrels of Peace. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Wilson, Katherine M. Shakespeare’s Sugared Sonnets, London: Allen & Unwin, 1974. Wyndham, G. The Poems of Shakespeare. London: Methuen & Co., 1898. Zurcher, Andrew. Shakespeare and Law. London: Arden, 2010.
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Endnotes 1 See, e.g., Paul Raffield, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-
1660. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004, 59: At the Inner Temple in 1561, Gerard Legh [in The Accedens of Armory, 1576] encountered and described the prototypical body of law, the Prince, at whose feast by virtue of his love of honour, Legh was a guest. The Prince, personification of common law virtues, was ‘a man of tall personage, of manlye countenanunce, somewhat browne of visage, stronglye featured, and thereto comely proporcioned in all lineaments of bodye’. It is clear from the above description that there was an attempt to liken the invisible principles of common law to the complex workings of the human body. The interest in the perfect physiognomy is axiomatic of Renaissance appreciation of bodily proportion, extending through visual art to architecture, in which proportion becomes a symbol of order, hierarchy and the divine plan.
2 If mightie Troie, with gates of steele, and brasse,
Be worne awaie, with tract of stealing time: If Carthage raste: if Thebers be grown with grasse. If Babel stoope: that to the clouds did clime: If Athens, and Numantia suffered spoile: If Aegypt spires, be evened with the soile. Then, what maye laste, which time dothe not impeache, Since that wee see, theise monuments are gone: Nothinge at all, but time doth over reache, It eates the steele, and weares the marble stone: But writings laste, thoughe yt doe what it can, And are preserved, even since the worlde began. And so they shall, while that they same dothe laste, Which have declar’d, and shall to future age: What thinges before three thousand yeares haver paste, What martiall knightes, have march’d upon this stage: Whose actes, in books if writers did not save, Their fame had ceaste, and gone with them to grave. Of Samsons strength, of worthie Josuas might. Of Davids actes, of Alexanders farce. Of Caesare greate; and Scipio noble knight, Howe shoulde we speake, but books thereof discourse: Then favour them, theat learne within their youthe: But love them beste, that learne, and write the truth.
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