When
Old Interfaces Were New: Shakespeare Anatomizes the Prince
Part II of a Paper Presented by Cohen & Cohen at the Annual Meeting of
The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
Victoria, Canada
June 2017
Gerald Cohen
Independent Scholar
https://trymbelrod.com
https://x.com/masterquickly
When Old Interfaces Were New: Shakespeare Anatomizes the Prince 1
Part II
The Interface of Resistance: A Model
Equipped, thus, with an awareness of the need in our analysis for an expanded conception of media to include a structured interface within defined boundaries, we can turn to formulating an underlying representative model to help guide our discussions. Such a model would reflect the interrelationships of three major interface elements, viz. those of law text/annotations, resistance literature, and public theatre, and how these elements might interact within the religio -political context, as well as within the harsh and harrowing misery of the underclass social context of the day.
Political Context: Expanding the View
In furthering our examination of the possible Shakespearean attributes of our document’s annotator and the markings under consideration, any new iteration would be remiss if it didn’t acknowledge a remarkable phenomenon occurring since the outset of our investigations: a growing reversal, in recent years, of critics’ political interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, moving from ‘genteel’ conceptions of Shakespeare as conservative (e.g., E.M.W. Tillyard, 1943-44) or ambiguous (Blair Worden, 1991), to one of a subversive, radical dramatist “steadily articulating in the public amphitheatres contemporary class angers, indictments of power, and sympathy for an oppressed commons” (Fitter, 2012:31).
Reflecting this evolving perspective, Andrew Hadfield, for example (2008:57, quoted in Fitter, 2012:25), finds Shakespeare “a highly politicized and radical thinker, interested in republicanism.” Fitter (2012:263) argues, however, that Hadfield’s “sunny appraisal…misses the bleak intensity of Shakespearean scepticism…in its scale of demystification…regarding reforming political agency…Shakespeare seeks to destabilize establishment ideology.” Such a revised appraisal, according to Fitter, thus challenges “fundamentally that traditional conception of a ‘genteel’ bard which has so confidently underlain expositions of Shakespeare from Coleridge to Eagleton” (2012:81).
Thus, in addition to this expanded view of republicanism, Chris Fitter’s (2012 ) study (a detailed and passionately argued book that scholars, e.g., Charles Ross [2013] and Peter Holbrook [2015 ] have found to be a stunning and convincing academic achievement) identifies and situates Shakespeare’s work within numerous other lineages of critical, anti-
hegemonic thought flourishing during the dramatist’s time, including Radical Humanism, Commonwealthmen preaching, peasant egalitarianism, Catholic polemic, and a growing body of resistance theory (Fitter, 2012:99). As an example of the latter theory’s expression of angry popular dissidence in its “indictment of despotism,” Fitter finds Renaissance resistance theory at its “most radical” dramatized in King Lear, in which Shakespeare is
heroizing a nameless servant for drawing lethal sword upon the Duke of Cornwall in defence of the bound and tortured Gloucester. (2012:23)
Indeed, the appearance in the present corpus of the annotation ‘Servant that will not serve’ appears to reference this element of King Lear:
For Fitter (2012:33), such “thematics of demystification, embarrassment and delegitimation of power” may be recurrent throughout Shakespeare, and he wonders if they represent “paradigmatic coherence” across the full Canon. Furthermore, Fitter, in fact, seeks to dispel the common claim that Shakespeare turned radical in his middle age, with King Lear or Coriolanus: William Shakespeare, he finds, on thematic and dramaturgic levels, proved a radical political thinker from the outset (2012:254).
The wide-ranging scope of our present annotator’s contribution to the present interface also seems to conform to that view; and, as we have cited previously, in the course of materializing injustice in this manner, via plays that “betray an antijurisprudential stance” (Anthony Julius, 1999, discussed in Williams, 2015), Shakespeare would have found a surfeit of protest-worthy material in Lambarde’s Eirenarcha. By studying Lambarde’s implementation of central government directives (which had produced their own habit of dissent), a reader could scrutinize the power that propagated the doctrine (among others) foundational to Tudor rule, that of “investment of supreme authority in a monarch appointed by God and blessed with superior powers, requiring submission to that official authority without right of active resistance” (Fitter, 2012:11).
Social Context: Expounding the View
In his benchmark study, Fitter (2012:4) presents extensive details of the large-scale social and economic realities of the period, including such phenomena as
levels of poverty, hunger, unemployment, instability of real wages, and the operations of the Poor Laws.
Specifically, among these conditions, he notes that just prior to the turn of the sixteenth century, inflation was 400 or 500%; and while the price of grain had risen 400%, real wages had sunk 22%; in addition, war had sent taxes shooting up. Justices of the peace had fixed wages at the lowest possible rates, assuming (wrongly) that the poor relief system would alleviate hunger where necessary. By the end of the sixteenth century, the poor were a substantial portion of the population (25% of Stratford); average life expectancy was 35, less for the poor.
To counter subversion, according to Fitter, “Elizabeth’s government mounted a sustained propaganda campaign to demonize restiveness and foes of the state church” (2012:8), and “with the use of oligarchic parish officers, preserved an ideological control reinforced by traumatizing public savagery and an order of brutal social inequity” (2012:9). Elizabeth suspended common law “by diktat” of central government, establishing martial law, executing vagrants and the poor, and declaring “open season on the dispossessed” (Curtis Breight, 1996:86, quoted in Fitter 2012:4).
Thus, it fell to the aforementioned Tudor reformers to assume a repeated advocacy in the elimination of the sufferings of the poor. Accordingly, they redefined poverty as “a distressing social aberration” rather than an eternal consequence of original sin (Neal Wood, 1994:5, quoted in Fitter, 2012:17).
Rhetorical Strategies of Resistance
In addition to the above-noted abundant evidence of shared thematic links with Shakespeare’s plays, our corpus reveals an annotator who has also:
• marked multiple occurrences of specific, obscure lexical items (e.g., ‘shoale,’ ‘strained,’ ‘charity,’ ‘ felo-de -se’), all of them hallmarks of the Shakespeare canon;
• pointed to evidence of the crude, authoritarian practice of commonplacing Roman epigrams to enforce draconian poor laws;
• heightened the salience of rhetorical flourishes (e.g.,‘touching the Supremacy’) and other stylistic devices notably present in the official statutes themselves (such as hendiadys-like phrases), all of which happen to appear via various forms of patterning and allusion throughout the Shakespeare canon, thus sharing a practice with a dramatist who, as Fitter (2012) suggests,
appropriated rhetorical brilliance to educate his audiences against manipulation by official political rhetorics...deploying in stagecraft… a variety of ideologically potent subtextual mechanisms, strongly hinted at in the scripts themselves… [the combination of which]…opens up the canon in a striking way to reveal populist, at times even radical meaning at the heart of the drama. (p. 31)
Devon Hodges’s seminal (1985) study of the form and genre of literary anatomy noted the anatomists’ concern with the epistemological problem of the search for truth and the restoration of the “proper relation between words and things” (1985:18). Citing Reiss (1982) and Vesalius (1949; 1964), Hodges argues that the “impulse to dissect…by cutting away illusory forms” noted in a range of Renaissance writers’ anatomies2 was a symptom of cultural transformation from a metaphorical to an analytical worldview:
Our own mode of ‘analytico-referential’ discourse emerged during the Renaissance from within a discourse of resemblance, a medieval system of patterning. (p. 1)
The central ambition of the anatomist is outlined here to negate false representations of reality and present the unadorned truth to the eyes of his readers. (p. 3)
Hodges (1985:17) also points to Philip Stevick’s (1968:163) remarks on the anatomist’s delight in manipulating forms as a signal of the anatomist’s distrust of language and as an assertion of the domination of “words over things…to pursue abstract design, form for form’s sake, to construct a rhythm of interruption, digression, and calculated inconsistency…,” thus making anatomies “radical forms of literature.”
In revealing the hollowness of language (and thus of reality), the anatomist “encourages a liberating movement to expand knowledge and develop new styles of discourse,” and therefore “its transformative power may depend on severing meaning from form” (1985:18).
Paul Raffield (2017) studies the various aesthetic devices employed both by common law and Shakespearean drama to capture the imagination and emotional commitment of their respective audiences. A principal theme of Raffield’s analysis of the centrality of classical rhetorical skills to legal education at the late Elizabethan Inns of Court is the “insularity and exclusivity” of common law and common lawyers (p. 17). He points to Abraham Fraunce’s The Lawiers Logike (1588) as evidence during that period of published critique of the ethical and scholarly shortcomings of forensic rhetorical techniques as acquired at the Inns. Raffield reasons that, as so obvious a target, it was perhaps inevitable that the English legal profession would feature as a
subject of satire in late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Specifically, Raffield references the satirical epigrams of Sir John Davies and likewise considers the ‘little academe’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost as a “fictional analogue of the Inns of Court”:
In the court of Navarre, Shakespeare depicts an enclosed society of young men, for whom rhetoric is a tool with which to beguile and bedazzle, rather than an art by means of which community may be established and enhanced. The parallels with a legal academy, the primary objective of which was the assimilation and employment of self-referential rhetorical skills, are clear and compelling. (p. 18)
In The Inarticulate Renaissance (2009), Carla Mazzio also refers to Abraham Fraunce, noting that Fraunce “took issue with ‘confused’ forms of speech and writing…unmoored from logic…that posed cognitive, moral and professional challenges to English lawyers” and that Fraunce
addressed the Sisyphean pains of lawyers attempting to frame their thoughts and speech using lexical and textual materials that resisted clear abstraction. (p. 116)
In this regard, it may be possible to assume that Shakespeare’s goals were compatible with Kyd’s, who, as Mazzio finds,
drew on a problem of legal language, a specialized form of discourse that did not mesh well with vernacular language or ‘common’ representation, and converted it into a visceral and conceptually productive dramatic moment. (p. 122)
Current Findings
Mindful of the limitations of space here, the following cursory summary provides a limited selection of this Eirenarcha’s burgeoning streams of evidence (potentially linking its annotations to the Shakespeare canon) not previously examined, in addition to several annotations revisited for their possible qualities of political resistance. Fortified by our previous findings, this copy of the Eirenarcha continues to represent a possible primary resource document for the dramatist, inasmuch as its markings (the appearance of which signify a priori that its annotator is an active participant in an interface) as a group appear to reflect a subversive resistance to the rhetorical strategies employed by Lambarde in framing his authoritarian laws. Such a specific political stance is entirely compatible with the growing critical current (e.g., Fitter, 2012, above), which has drawn upon historicized evidence to identify similar resistance attributes in the social and political reformers of Shakespeare’s day, as well as in Shakespeare’s works, as an underlying characteristic:
1. ‘Shoale’ underlined, p. 23: Macbeth“But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'd jump the life to come.”
A longstanding assumption about Macbeth’s originating context is that it is based on the current events unfolding during 1605, the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics seeking revenge for the anti-Catholic laws set by King James I, plotted to kill the King with the help of Guy Fawkes (a soldier of fortune).
Within this section, Lambarde laments the actions of ‘sundrie Abbats and Religious persons’ (ostensibly, Catholics, as stated expressly by Lambarde in other statutes previously examined, e.g., in ‘Seminarie or Iesuit’) who, by appointing their own Justices, have in the past been seen to ‘shoale out themselves from the ordinarie government…severed from the crowne, to no small detriment of the royal efface and dignitie.’ As a lexical item occurring in both Lambarde and Shakespeare, ‘shoale’ is obscure, and the annotator’s underscore implies it has been discretely targeted here. In discussions of Macbeth, Raffield (2017) references Ernst Kantorowicz’s reflections on time in The King’s Two Bodies (1957), in which Kantorowicz considers two contrasting theories, notably the proposition of St. Augustine that time was created
and finite, versus the premise of Aristotelianism (to which St. Thomas Acquinas subscribed), that time was continuous and infinite. Insofar as such concepts relate to the existence of the angels and saints, according to Kantorowicz, they are also relevant to the character angelicus of the monarch, which “endowed the king’s body politic with the mystical quality of immutability within time.” Moreover, Raffield (2017:95) remarks,
The nature of time is an issue with which Macbeth obsesses. Might it be possible, he muses before the murder of Duncan, ‘upon this bank and shoal of time’, to ‘jump the life to come’ (1.7.6-7)? By the end of the play, time has become for him merely a relentless succession of days ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ (5.5.19) which ends abruptly, at ‘the last syllable of recorded time’ (5.5.21).
Raffield (2017) notes that Macbeth was performed at the royal court, in the presence of James I. Salient, then, is the view of Peter Herman (2010:208, seemingly compatible with those of Fitter, above), who sees a recent reversal in critics’ political interpretations of Macbeth. According to Herman, unlike earlier critics who regarded the play as complimentary toward James and who thought it endorsed the theory of absolute kingship, more recent students of the play see Macbeth “as more contestatory, as exposing the illogic of absolutism and demystifying absolutism’s providentialist rhetoric.”
2. ‘Touching the Supremacy’ indexed: Hamlet "Touching this vision here, It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.”
This Eirenarcha’s annotator has indexed the statute on page 346 pertaining to ‘the oath of the undersheriff,’ which Lambarde affirms is ‘touching the [Act of] Supremacie,’ ‘as touching his office.’
Mazzio (2009:202) suggests that the dominant concern of the opening act of Hamlet, marked by the phenomenon of the ghost, is thus “detachment of a body from itself and its deployment for the operations of metaphor.”
“Touching this vision here,” says Hamlet after his encounter with Old Hamlet, “It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you” (1.5.143-44). Touching, meaning “concerning, or pertaining to,” is here a conceptual gesture as detached from the domain of physical touch as the ghost himself. (p. 202)
In fact, according to Mazzio, the entire play can be seen to “reimagine forms of inarticulate speech integral to religion, humanism, legal rhetoric, vernacular expansion, historiography, and print culture” (2009:13). Stephen Greenblatt (2001) finds that Hamlet is addressing the ghost
in words that would have been utterly familiar to a Catholic and deeply suspect to a Protestant: “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit” (1.5.183).
There is, moreover, something suspect (or at least strange), as scholars have long noted, about the precise terms of Hamlet’s response to Horatio’s remark, “There’s no offense, my lord”:
Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio, And much offence, too. Touching this vision here, It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you. (1.5.139-42)
The assertion that the Ghost is “honest” seems to mark Hamlet’s acceptance of its claim that it has come from a place of purgation, and that acceptance may in turn be marked by the invocation unique in Shakespeare’s works of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Purgatory. (p. 233)
The assertion of honesty may also have represented an attempt to avoid running afoul of Lambarde’s statute, which criminializes the conjuration of “euill spirites for any cause”:
Can we conclude, then, that where Lambarde elevated a mortal to a deity (‘Touching the Supremacy…touching his office’), a resistant Shakespeare (“Touching this dreaded sight…Touching this vision here”) deconsecrated that deity to a ghost, albeit an honest one?
3. The Eirenarcha, page 21, marked in the margin (Book 1- Ordaining JPs): ‘3. or 4. of the mightiest men in that countie.’
Measure for Measure-
“some six or seven, the most sufficient of your parrish.”
David Bevington (2013) argues that in Measure, “Shakespeare invites special sympathy for a middle position in the legal tangle that afflicts the citizens of Vienna.” On the matter of recruiting authority, Bevington notes:
How are constables chosen? He [Escalus] learns that when others are selected
for the burdensome duty of constable of the parish, they pay some money to Elbow to take their places. He gathers a little pocket money this way and gets to wear his constable’s uniform. A perfect arrangement for him. But not for Escalus. He sees clearly that what he must do is to have Elbow bring in the name of “some six or seven, the most sufficient of your parish,” so that Elbow can be replaced (2.1.256-71). (p. 169)
Virginia Lee Strain (2017) references Lambarde’s “good abearing” statute (Book 2) as an “early modern stop and search law”:
Binding over entailed, as Lambarde writes, “An acknowledging of a bond to the Prince, taken by a competent Iudge of Recorde, for the keeping of the Peace.” Binding over helped a community establish who was a lawbreaker and who was a criminal…
While preventive justice played an essential role in law and governance at the local level in early modern England, its extent and effectiveness were entirely dependent on the personal initiative and discretion of the JP. (p. 31)
Consequently, Strain views Angelo’s rejection of the dowerless Marianna as evidence of his crass social ambitions and points out that he “is not the first aspirational Puritan to be publicly exposed in a Shakespearean comedy” (p. 34). Moreover, Strain notes:
By collapsing preventive justice into the punitive realm so entirely and irrevocably through capital punishment, Angelo limits the magistrate’s function to the mere oversight of trials and to sentencing by the letter. (p. 36)
The makeshift resolution that the Duke manages for the city has a powerful affinity with the legal value of social harmony, or “peace”…. (p. 37)
Whatever his motivation, ultimately, Shakespeare’s line for Escalus sounds as though he has directly patterned it after Lambarde’s matching statute language.
4. Isabell and Isabella (p. 18):
Considering further the annotated section described in #3, above, focusing on the ordaining of JPs, it is noteworthy that Queen Isabella of France (1295-1358) is referenced by Lambarde on page 18 of the Eirenarcha in an introductory narrative, using the form ‘Isabell.’ Mary Lascelles (1953) finds a similar dual use in Measure, in which ‘Isabella’ appears in the list of dramatis personae, and in almost all stage directions. The ‘Isabel’ form, she notes, appears, with two exceptions, throughout the dialogue: “Francisca calls her Isabella; in IV.iii.156, Lucio calls her Isabella, but presently changes to Isabel, the form used wherever she is addressed or mentioned by the Duke” (n.3, p. 56). This may prove fertile ground for future investigations, especially since Lambarde’s Queen Isabell does share one stunning, visceral characteristic with Shakespeare’s Isabella in Measure for Measure: both aspired to be nuns.
5. Marked in Margin: King Richard/lands.
On pages 127-133 of the Eirenarcha the annotator has repeatedly marked passages within the statute pertaining to land title/possession. As was the case with the reference to the historical figure of Queen Isabella, Lambarde introduces this statute with a reference to “the troublesome Raigne of King Richard the Second.”
Raffield (2010:84) observes that
ownership of title and possession of land are complex and contentious narrative themes both of Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Elizabethan law relating to real property. The peaceful enjoyment of property and the occasional incursions by the Crown upon those traditional liberties associated with private dominion are notable themes in the history of English constitutional law. (p. 84)
Seizure of property, despoliation of land and disputed claims to lawful title provide the narrative foundations of the plot in Richard II, but property serves also as a metaphor for the divided self, illuminating and lending form to the idea of the king’s two bodies. (pp. 102-103)
Raffield points to Richard’s profession of love for his realm:
…weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, And do thee favours with my royal hands. (3.2.6-11),
and deems it antithetical, in light of Richard’s ruthless exploitation of the land through the exercise of illegal or unconstitutional procedures:
Richard’s confiscation of Bolingbroke’s ‘plate, his goods, his money and his lands’ (2.1.210) is patently unlawful: 28 Ed.3.cap.3 (1354) states that no Man of what Estate or Condition that he be, shall be put out of Land or Tenement, nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to Death, without being brought in Answer by due Process of Law. (p. 106)
William Scott (2010) suggests that Shakespeare, in Richard II, sought to
strengthen the material content of the play’s discourse about property and kingship by paying attention to the practices of more mundane land transactions as well.
The noblemen’s critique of Richard’s conduct is expressed not only through this argument about succession or inheritance but through an analogy with forms of property ownership and use that applied among commoners as well as among the nobility. Some of these had great urgency, for landowners and tenants, in the economy of Shakespeare’s own time. (p. 59)
Katherine Eisaman Maus (2013) explores how Shakespeare engages in an elaboration of a “poetics of property,” focusing on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, and of chattel property. Maus traces changes to the meaning of property from the reign of Richard II to Henry V; thus, it may be possible for us to tie the present annotation to the previously explicated “Huy and Crye”/Robbery annotations, which we had linked to the Gadshill robbery episode in Shakespeare’s 1HenryIV:
‘Huy and Crye the partyes robbed ex and [i.e., examined] bound to prosecute the offenders 187’
In this apparent contribution to the widening scope of our already sweeping interface, Maus suggests some of the ways in which Shakespeare reconfigured the world of his plays to reflect the shift from feudalism’s land inheritance concerns to an urban economy of chattel consumables:
The new prominence and prestige of the chattel in the Henry IV plays is remarkable. (p. 43)
6. Marked: Roman poet Martial epigram
King Lear: Dog/authority imagery.
This faint annotation appearing on page 422 of the Eirenarcha was previously explicated in Cohen (2015) and was identified as a marked instance (by a single annotated pinpoint) of Lambarde launching into a supplementary diatribe on rogues, in which he references the Roman poet Martial. The corresponding Shakespearean dog imagery in relation to authority/prosperity in King Lear, as discussed by A.C. Bradley (1949)3 was introduced, including Edgar’s speech about “shifting into a madman’s rags”:
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)
Raffield (2017) outlines some of the critique (e.g., Fraunce, 1588) that emerged on the ethical and scholarly shortcomings of forensic techniques as acquired at the Inns of Court of the day. He concludes that some of those techniques resulted in legal discourse that was characterized by the influences of classical texts and neoclassical humanist literature, all suddenly enabled and facilitated by the mass-producing printing technology of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries:
Medieval books poured from the press. These included works of jurisprudential importance, which hitherto had been available only in manuscript form…the list extended to the political, philosophical and rhetorical texts of the ancient world: Plato, Aristotle and (especially, regarding the acquisition of rhetorical skills by early modern common lawyers) Cicero…provided the means and motivation for the legal profession to expand in unprecedented manner. (p. 21)
However, citing Peter Goodrich (1990), Raffield suggests that this expansion was accompanied by a comparable “discursive imperialism.” Lambarde’s deployment here of a Martial epigram appears to exemplify that expansion.
Raffield (2017) discusses the satirical epigrams written by Sir John Davies, lawyer and poet (as well as the subsequent burning of that material), on the subject of Sir John’s fellow common lawyers. Raffield finds that through the analysis of such subversive, satirical texts, it is possible to identify an “alternative, ethical jurisprudence” in the legal discourse of the day (p. 18). Similarly, Fitter (2012) points to Shakespeare’s resistance-use of “elevated aphorisms” (p. 231) to aid in the “penetration of official platitudes” (p. 17).
7. ‘Trymbelrod’+Serpent+Flower: ‘ Tibi, or not…?’ Macbeth“Look like th’ innocent flower, but be the serpent under't.”
If we consider the playful stealth inherent in the document’s astonishing signature on the Proheme page, Willm Trymbelrod, and if we set aside, for now, the obvious
potential connection of the flower+serpent imagery (magnified inset, above) to Lady Macbeth’s line, perhaps it is not unreasonable to wonder if we can extend and generalize that playfulness to include further wordplay from this annotator, material that is in fact influenced by the motto over which Trymbelrod hovers, Deo, Patriae, Tibi. (for God, Country, Yourself.), material, moreover, that he could have used to fashion a soliloquy about whether the law really is ‘for thee’ (tibi), or not, in Hamlet. It is insightful to examine this annotation alongside another equally astonishing and seemingly related annotation appearing at the end of this Eirenarcha:
Here, the annotator has referenced a relationship to one of Lambarde’s most draconian statutes pertaining to ‘rogues’ on page 189, in which vagrancy is criminalized. The annotator has pointed to this statute by drawing a line to connect its indexed page to some indignant lines of doggerel, all of it signed with a Formal Text ‘W’ bearing an apparent thumb- or fingerprint. It is noteworthy that this affronted tone on the part of our annotator is certainly echoed in Hamlet’s “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” line. Andrew Fitzmaurice (2009) posits that the choice facing Hamlet is between freedom and slavery, and that his consciousness of his slavery implies his desire for freedom. Fitzmaurice stresses the importance of recalling that the republican ideal of self-rule,
the notion that a city and its citizens could be sibi princeps, or rulers unto themselves, drew upon the broader ambition in medieval and Renaissance moral philosophy that each individual should strive to be a ruler of his or her self. (p. 154)
Thus, according to Fitzmaurice, Hamlet’s
pursuit of self-rule, particularly in the context of perceived corruption, was symptomatic of the unresolved tensions between monarchical rule and republican culture. (p. 154)
Moreover, notes Fitzmaurice, in the course of Hamlet’s struggle against selfenslavement,
Hamlet debates his withdrawal throughout the play, notably in the ‘To be or not to be’ speech (3.1.58-90). It is striking that a number of modern commentators take this speech as a meditation on suicide. Interpreted in this way, ‘To be or not to be’ is consistent with Hamlet’s exploration of his interiority through a contemplation of life and death. Again, this interpretation reflects a broadly moral, rather than political, understanding of Hamlet’s motivations. He certainly does discuss suicide once or twice, perhaps even in this speech, but he only ever does so in order to dismiss that course as the surest way to lose his soul: ‘that the Everlasting had not fixed/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!’ (1.2.129-32). ‘To be or not to be’ is not a choice about suicide but a choice about whether to be actively engaged in political life. (p. 155)
8. Marked in margin: ‘grace and dispensation’; Hamlet- “rogue and peasant slave”
Setting aside for now further discussion of the stunning appearance of ‘strained’ in this annotation (p. 530) and its obvious potential connection to Portia’s speech in The Merchant of Venice, and focusing instead on the rhetorical form of this statute in relation to the corresponding rhetorical form of, for example, “rogue and peasant slave” in Hamlet (i.e., in addition to the semantic attributes of “rogue and peasant slave” explicated above by Fitzmaurice, 2009), Fitter (2012) notes that “the Cambridge School of political theory still blindfolds contextualizations of Shakespeare…” (p. 26). Thus, it may be useful instead to consider the form of “rogue and peasant slave” in the context of James Shapiro’s (2005) discussion of hendiadys in Shakespeare:
Hendiadys literally means “one by means of two,” a single idea conveyed through a pairing of nouns linked by “and.” When conjoined in this way, the nouns begin to oscillate, seeming to qualify each other as much as the term each individually modifies.
Hamlet often speaks in this way…the more you think about hendiadys, the more they induce a kind of mental vertigo…The destabilizing effect of how these words play off each other is unnerving…
In Hamlet there are sixty-six of them. (p. 287)
The following is a cursory compilation of hendiadys-like phrases employed by Lambarde and found to appear proximally to annotations in the Eirenarcha. It is noteworthy that Lambarde has conflated ‘Rogues and the poore,’ which seems to correspond to a patterned version by Shakespeare in Hamlet’s “rogue and peasant slave”:
9. Marked in Duties of Constables (1602, bound with this Eirenarcha): ‘Churchwardens’ (p. 64); As You Like It:
From the annotated corpus: ‘2 Justyces must nomynat oversers for the poore fol 349’
Fitter (2012) finds in As You Like It the critical centrality of the state church to the prosecutorial climate of the new repressiveness. He cites Christopher Hill (1964:2 29), in highlighting Hill’s point that “[t]he ecclesiastical unit of the parish had been completely fused with the administrative hierarchy of the civil State.”
Fitter remarks:
Crucial to the ferocious bite of the new parish elites as to the salve of As You Like It was their escalating empowerment as Churchwardens…for by statute of the 1597 -98 parliament, ‘Churchwardens of every Parishe’ were made also Overseers of the Poor. It was now their additional role to assess their fellows for the poor rate, and to place paupers and children from six years old in work. Positioned to classify the poor as deserving or undeserving, the Churchwarden as Overseer… enjoyed discretionary powers to supplement or not the income of the workers paid too little to survive: a brutally substantial number. (p. 197)
10. ‘E’ (liz=concealed?)
On page 387, the annotator’s purpose in the ‘E(liz=concealed?)’ marginalia, appearing next to Lambarde’s clause, in which he points out that the people have a right to be informed of the laws, ‘lest they offend unwares,’ seems to relate to discussions by Carolyn Sale (2017:131), of what Habermas was seeking to articulate in the 1990s, viz., a “renovated and strengthened conception of the ideals of early modern common law jurisprudence.”
Accordingly, Habermas’s “legitimate law” requires that the law’s creative authority “be assumed and exercised in public by those for whom the law obtains, and exercised in processes of deliberative reasoning.” Sale argues further that Isabella’s situation in Measure for Measure, compromised in part by being subject to judgments “rendered in one or another form of private adjudication,” confronts us with this reality, i.e., that legal facts are not necessarily even publicly known, never mind publicly tried, thereby making it impossible for a given polity to exercise its capacities for judgment together in relation to legal matter; and even those who believe they know the facts of such arrangements are publicly positioned in such a way that their capacities to use their discursive powers for another kind of law are, like Isabella’s, foreclosed. (p. 134)
11. Finis:
Considered on its own, this annotation could be mistaken for a pen trial. Seen in the light of the larger corpus, especially that of the affronted tone of the lines of doggerel, however, ‘finis’ looks increasingly like the marking of a playwright who “countered official doctrines of demonization…unreconciled to morally untenable social and political order…by flipping them back against the establishment” (Fitter, 2012:246).
Summary
For a busy playwright eager to “break spectators’ incorporation in a range of state ideologies” (as Fitter, 2012 describes him), Lambarde’s Eirenarcha offered a wide range of just such state ideologies in a compact compendium. That fact, combined with the current critical shift to a powerful Shakespearean motive of subversive political resistance (derived from multiple streams of historicized evidence) brings the relevance of this copy’s evidence to the fore, thus adding some material weight, finally, to Richard Schoeck’s insightful (1975) conclusion:
“I would send Shakespeareans to Lambarde ad fontes.”
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Notes
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.
2Anatomies (from Hodges, 1985:127, n.13): The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man, Thomas Vicary, 1548; Anatomy of a Hande in the Manner of a Dyall, anon., 1554; Anatomie of the Minde, Thomas Rogers, 1576; A Newe Anatomie of Whole Man, John Woolton 1576; Euphues: The Anatomy of Wyt, John Lyly, 1578; Valour Anatomized, in a Fancy, Sir Philip Sidney 1581; The Anatomy of Abuses, Philip Stubbes, 1583; Anatomy of Lovers’ Flatteries, Robert Greene, 1584; Arbasto, The Anatomie of Fortune, Robert Greene, 1584; The Anatomie of Absurdity, Thomas Nashe, 1589; Anatomie of the Metamorphosed Ajax, Sir John More, 1596; The Anatomie of Pope Joane, John Mayo, 1597; The Anatomie of the True Physition and Counterfeit Mountebanke, Johann Oberndoerffer, 1602; Anatomie of Sinne, Anon, 1604; The Anatomie of Popish Tyrannie, Thomas Bell, 1603; A New Anatomy, Robert Underwood, 1605; Times Anatomie, Robert Pricet, 1606; The Anatomie of Humers, Simion Grahame, 1609.
3Shakespeare scholar, A.C. Bradley:
I fear it is not possible however, to refute, on the whole, one charge that the dog is a snob, in the sense that he respects power and prosperity, and objects to the poor and despised. It is curious that Shakespeare refers to this trait three times in King Lear, as if he were feeling a peculiar disgust at it. See III.vi-65, ' The little dogs and all,' etc.: IV.vi.159, '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': v. iii. 186, 'taught me to shift Into a madman's rags: t’assume a semblance That very dogs disdain'd.' Cf. Oxford Lectures, p. 341.
(1949:268)