Shakespeare's martial law, etc , via pandemonia16 04 26 pub by Eirenarcha

Shakespeare’s Martial Law, Etc., Via Dumb-Show Pandemonia

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Sydney, Australia June 2015

Gerald Cohen Independent Scholar https://trymbelrod.com https://x.com/masterquickly

Upon my life the tracks have vanished, We’ve lost our way, what shall we do? It must be a demon’s leading us This way and that around the fields. . . . . . . . . How many are there? Where have they flown to? Why do they sing so plaintively? Are they burying some household goblin? Is it some witch’s wedding day? A.S. Pushkin, “Demons” (Epigraph, F. Dostoevsky, Demons) … he threw up his hands and cried, ‘Shakespeare!’ John Dover Wilson1

Shakespeare’s Martial Law, Etc., Via Dumb-Show Pandemonia

Introduction: Replicating Conscious Perception My title, I know, is assumptive: To suggest William Shakespeare of Stratford-uponAvon as our document’s annotator is to be brave in a brave new world of evidence. But there is much encouragement to be derived from the convincing face validity of this artefact’s evidence, evidence that presents itself with an effect that is at once cohesive, compelling, and, as one scholar recently noted, mind-boggling.2 It has been a labour-intensive ten years since I debuted this Eirenarcha and its annotations online after it had lain untouched for centuries in obscure collections. At that time, I established an initial digital presence through various e-mail inquiries to preeminent scholars. Many of their responses surprised me, not only with their boldly encouraging (if rather sparse) content: “Good news.” “Where did you get this?” “Have you shown this to…? [fill in name of world-renowned 1

J. Dover Wilson, ‘The New Way with Shakespeare’s Texts: an Introduction for Lay Readers. II. In Sight of Shakespeare’s Manuscripts’, Shakespeare Survey 9 (1956): 69-80. 2 Noted in a peer response to Cohen & Cohen (2013), in the course of the paper’s presentation at a meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Toronto, 2013.

palaeographer, bibliographer, etc.],” but also with the lightning speed with which they were dispatched. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, my long-abandoned background in cognitive psychology sprang to life, and into my mind popped some purely academic-sounding questions: If so many of these knowledgeable people seem to be recognizing Shakespeare’s true hand in these annotations after only a quick perusal—when only a limited body of exemplars of his hand actually exists—what is the perceptual system they are all using, and could we all learn how to use it? What set of complex cognitive processes has led them to exclude other, non-Shakespearean candidates in identifying the annotator of this Eirenarcha? Is it Pandemonium?

Pandemonium Architecture. Pandemonium (Selfridge, 1959)3 was an influential early model (still accepted) of cognitive connectionism, viz. how, theoretically, an object can be identified from its visual appearance using feature-detection processing at a sophisticated level. Within the Pandemonium model, it is ‘demons’ that perform the job of information processing. Individual demons seek out specific features and then shriek when they see them. Higher-level demons attend to lower-level shrieks as they attempt to detect features with particular relationships; these higher-ups then shriek themselves when they think the relationships may be there. Successively higherlevel demons increasingly shriek as they recognize patterns based on the presence of feature relationships, until the top demon identifies the object and it becomes our conscious perception. The following table and accompanying depiction of the model provide a summary of the four processing stages:

O. G. Selfridge, ‘Pandemonium: A paradigm for learning’, In Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanisation of Thought Processes, eds. D. V. Blake and A. M. Uttley, London, 1959, 511–52.

The four major processing stages of pandemonium architecture4

Stage 1 2

Demon name Image demon Feature demons

Cognitive demons

Decision demon

Function Records the image that is received in the retina. There are many feature demons, each representing a specific feature. For example, there is a feature demon for short straight lines, another for curved lines, and so forth. Each feature demon’s job is to "yell" if they detect a feature that they correspond to. Note that, feature demons are not meant to represent any specific neurons, but to represent a group of neurons that have similar functions. For example, the vertical line feature demon is used to represent the neurons that respond to the vertical lines in the retina image. Watch the "yelling" from the feature demons. Each cognitive demon is responsible for a specific pattern (e.g., a letter in the alphabet). The "yelling" of the cognitive demons is based on how much of their pattern was detected by the feature demons. The more features the cognitive demons find that correspond to their pattern, the louder they "yell". For example, if the curved, long straight and short angled line feature demons are yelling really loud, the R letter cognitive demon might get really excited, and the P letter cognitive demon might be somewhat excited as well; but the Z letter cognitive demon is very likely to be quiet. Represents the final stage of processing. It listens to the "yelling" produced by the cognitive demons. It selects the loudest cognitive demon. The demon that gets selected becomes our conscious perception. Continuing with our previous example, the R cognitive demon would be the loudest, seconded by P; therefore, we will perceive R, but if we were to make a mistake because of poor displaying conditions (e.g., letters are quickly flashed or have parts occluded), it is likely to be P. Note that, the "pandemonium" simply represents the cumulative "yelling" produced by the system.

The original pandemonium model proposed by Oliver Selfridge in 1959:

Peter H. Lindsay and Donald A. Norman, Human Information Processing (2nd ed.), New York: Academic Press, 1977.

Some researchers argue that feature accumulation theories such as Pandemonium Architecture have the processing stages of pattern recognition almost backwards. Advocates of the global-to-local theory (e.g., Lupker, 1979)5 have provided some evidence that perception begins with a blurry view of the whole that refines over time, implying feature extraction does not occur in the early stages of recognition. Either of those perceptual scenarios could be tentatively adopted for the interests of the present research case; however, an updated version of the model itself now serves to more fully cover the complex process of moving from, say, a perception of the annotated ‘features’ on this Eirenarcha’s pages to a meaningful identification of ‘Shakespeare’s hand’—with all of it accomplished, seemingly, in warp time, as evidenced by the scholars who responded so quickly to my queries. Crucial to that process would be the presence of a veritable army of another type of Pandemonium demon, the so-called ‘Contextual’ demons,6 which (theoretically) would provide an abundance of semantically primed associational effects, all of them arising from (in this case) a thorough grounding in and easy familiarity with: • • • • •

the palaeographic descriptions of Shakespeare’s hand provided by Thompson, Pollard, Greg, Wilson, Dawson, et al.; hundreds of years of Shakespeare criticism pertaining to the manifold editorial and interpretive demands of his canon and the apocryphal works; the complexities of early modern law and justice, and the interest in the topic taken by dramatists of Shakespeare’s day; Shakespeare’s engagement with early modern political thought; early modern classical learning, including the classical corpus of texts on history, moral philosophy, grammar, rhetoric and poetry.

In drawing upon Selfridge’s classic model and working within the framework of its architecture, I initially defined my central task as one of attempting to replicate, in online resources, some of the conditions that had prepared my e-mail scholarcontacts so well in these comprehensive areas—and which had afforded them such (apparently) effective Shakespeare-detecting Pandemonia. To that end, I have since augmented the online presence of the document and have managed to generate increased public engagement with it by developing a Wordpress site, www.trymbelrod.com and popular Twitter account, https://twitter.com/masterquickly to showcase the discovery. In order to minimize any heady implications of considering the evidence as ‘Shakespeare’s hand,’ a mostly indirect approach (“by indirections, find directions out”) to these showcases became necessary. Users, it seemed, would grace the platforms with their support by ‘following’ if the ‘showcase’ has been (ironically) ‘marginalized’ to the fringes of academia, purged of any excess express attribution to the Poet—and kept within the 5

Stephen J. Lupker, ‘On the nature of perceptual information during letter perception,’ Perception & Psychophysics 25 (1 July 1979): 303–312. 6 Gerald M. Reicher, ‘Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material,’ Journal of Experimental Psychology 81 (2) (1 January 1969): 275–280.

confines of a critical digital dumb show: the dream of a crowdsourcing bonanza would have to wait. And yet, despite all of these restrictions, to date, these platforms have served the research case well. To borrow from Pierre Nora’s7 terms, our followers have apparently allowed their imaginations to invest this archive with a Shakespearean “symbolic aura” after all: In 2013, we were invited to a meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Toronto to present a summary of our beginning elucidations of these data (Cohen & Cohen, 2013) within a seminar titled Shakespeare and/in Manuscript. The present paper aims to add to those elucidations (again drawing on published Shakespeare criticism) and outlines further strands of evidence that appear to link this Eirenarcha’s hand to Shakespeare and his works. Summary of the Annotations Presented in Cohen & Cohen, 2013: The following are the major annotations appearing in the copy of Lambarde’s Eirenarcha under investigation, along with an accompanying transcription, taken from the summary provided in Cohen & Cohen (2013) and provided here for ease of reference. The complete digitized text of this Eirenarcha can be viewed at www.trymbelrod.com.

Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Vol. I, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 14.

Transcription On the Front Parchment: WamS. (upside-down: ‘Will’) Page A2: Willm Trymbelrod Endnotes Page 1: Servantes. 326. 179 huy and Crye the partyes robbed ex and [i.e., ‘examined’] bound to prosecute the offenders 189 187 fol – 448 Inmates & Cottages 31 Eliz. 43 Eliz & 43 Eliz Bastardes fol 482 340/346 The Recapitulacion etc. 303 Guns 294 Alehouse. 398 3[?] /343/ Bal [i.e., ‘bail’] for 343 – 337 Appendix or presidents [i.e., precedents] ar next before the Indictmetes [i.e., ‘indictments’] & processes in this bokk [i.e., ‘book’] 302 Rate the assess upon the parise [i.e., ‘parish’] 293 Rougue 189 [line coursing downward from ‘Rougue’ and connecting it to ‘This…’] This the same [ ] Soe for why [Shake]S[peare] taucr (?) Hathn’t yot another HamLet aut—[authored] W [topped with an abbreviation diacritic and bearing an apparent thumb- or fingerprint] Endnotes Page 2: Alehouse without lycense vide Baylemt [i.e., ‘bailment’] 340 Bastard reputed father or Mother fol 340 Servant that will not serve. fol 340 prophesaes etc. fol end The oth [i.e., ‘oath’] of the undershref [i.e., ‘under-sheriff’] fol 346 2 Justyces must nomynat oversers [i.e., ‘two justices must nominate overseers’] for the poore fol 349 a proclam [i.e., ‘proclamation’] for unlawfull assemblies – 8 183 173 laborers. 176. vide the statute apprentices la: [i.e., ‘labourers’ ?] & servantes 179 unlawfull games fol 180 [upside-down] Richard Prenton ? Oliver Porter ? Endnotes Page 3 : Egiptians 183 - Semynarie or Jesuit 185 Rougue 189. Testymonyal of a roge 190 193 Parsons or vicars to releve the poore fol 195 Homycide or manslaughter 236 felo de se 249

Research Review: Trending related flaps Over the past decade, scholars working at the intersection of law and literature in an early modern British context have conveyed an “increasing methodological assurance” that “make[s] law and literature seem like a conjunction that is at once organic and necessarily central to early modern cultural studies.” So wrote Curtis Perry (2009) in introducing his useful reviews of some of those new works: Cormack (2007), Hutson (2007), Kezar (2007), and Visconsi (2008). In recent years, however, the floodgates have effectively burst open on this ‘organism,’ with the ensuing quasi-frenzy of publication to date now comprising a richly diverse selection of books. Within this new group of current-century releases relating to our topic, sub-groups, it seems, can be discerned, as each writer is careful to delineate his or her individual focus: some situate their work within the broader disciplinary spectrum of ‘Law & Literature,’ while others stay more narrowly within the confines of ‘Shakespeare & Law’ exclusively. For example, Shuger (2001) states that she decided to place her focus on Measure for Measure “for the issues at the heart of Shakespeare’s play—the legislation of morals, the competing claims of law and equity, the relation of equity to Christian justice and to the prerogative powers of the crown…” (front flap). Hutson (2007) says her book “argues that important changes took place in the rhetoric of dramatic narrative…in late sixteenth-century England that corresponded closely to developments in popular legal culture…” and that her study “joins a growing body of critical work [such as] Victoria Kahn’s Wayward Contracts (2004), in which Kahn suggests that a range of early modern writers ‘struggled to find a language for the idea that political obligation was a human artifice, a contract, rather than a divine command’” (2004:1). Raffield (2010) frames his study with the notion that “[t]he autonomous subject of law is represented in the plays…as a sentient political being whose natural rights and liberties found an analogue in the narratives of common law” (Front flap). Zurcher (2010:15) reasons that “[a] comprehensive survey of legal ideas and language in Shakespeare’s plays would include some discussion of spousal contracts in Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and The Taming of the Shrew; some analysis of the great ‘trial scenes’ of King Lear and The Merchant of Venice; or an assessment of the importance of natural-law theory to plays from Hamlet to The Tempest.” In his own work, Zurcher sees one of the main purposes to be “to test the degree to which law functions in Shakespeare’s work as a bridging discourse that joins one kind of philosophical representation, or reasoning, to another…” and “to understand Shakespeare’s legal language and thought in the broadest possible philosophical terms…” (2010:14). Syme (2012:20) clarifies that his work is “not even an endeavour in law and literature studies (although it engages in depth with the period’s legal history).” Skinner (2014:8) asserts that some of the recent scholarship on the subject of Shakespeare and the law “has shown a tendency to exaggerate the extent of Shakespeare’s legal competence. Sometimes he is taken to be making use of legal sources when he can instead be shown to be drawing on rhetorical texts…it

is likewise one of my principal arguments...that if we wish to explain the distinctive vocabulary and arrangement of forensic scenes, it is to the rhetorical sources that we need basically to turn.” And finally, Williams (in Beecher et al, 2015:17) reminds us, through a reading of Cormack’s (2007) A Power to do Justice, that “[s]ixteenthand seventeenth-century literature…bears witness to an early modern jurisdictional crisis, in which an earlier era concerned with protecting English secular courts against the Church’s legal authority clashed with the development of a rationalized and centralized common law”; accordingly, Williams points out, the Beecher et al (2015:15) essays thus “pay their due to literary anti-jurisprudence. ‘Exception,’ in the [book] title’s phrase [Taking Exception to the Law], euphemistically signifies an objection, which, according to some of the volume’s contributors, Shakespeare’s plays take to a particular legal instrument. Despite his impressive grasp of legal matters, Shakespeare’s continued engagement with the law—as one contemporary scholar notes [Julius, 1999]—betrays a strong anti-jurisprudential stance.” The 20th Century. If we survey a longer-term retrospective of the critical literature, viz., the contributions of Shakespearean researchers from the past hundred years or so, something becomes particularly evident and noteworthy: our task of linking a primary document (the annotated Eirenarcha) to a tradition of published Shakespearean criticism can’t help but engender certain unanticipated and very special encounters with the critical work of certain scholars in particular (i.e., in addition to those cited in Cohen & Cohen, 2013), including: Bradley (1949), Rowse (1951), Jones (1995), and Widmayer (1995). One is struck by the continuing resonance and relevance of these scholars’ work in relation to the ever-emerging Shakespeare archive, insofar as the influence of their work remains unsurpassed. In the present investigation, their accurate and, at times, almost prophetic analyses of Shakespeare’s middle-period works can be readily discerned, as revealed by the unique implications of our rare corpus. Anyone who embarks on research in these areas, now or in the future, must clearly be indebted to these special scholars for their deep and keen insight, always applied and delivered so eloquently and with such strong conviction. In some respects, their work is not unlike the Poet’s—for the ages. Considerations of the Present Study. With their simple act of ‘following’ my online documentation of this discovery, scholars across numerous disciplines have already tacitly acknowledged the inherent transhistorical explanatory power of a rare corpus such as this. In return for that engagement, the corpus itself obliges us as digital humanists to master the detailed knowledge of how these data, with their potential for such wide-ranging influence, can interact with the full scope of social media networking. Accordingly, a detailed description of the dumb show methodological approach (and its limitations)—utilized exclusively in the online presentations of the archive—is outlined, along with examples, below.

Re: Methodology - The Digital Dumb Show as Demon-Nurturing Vehicle The stunning visual impact of the study’s annotative evidence—‘the hand’ (and its attendant markings)—is itself the main guiding force in delineating two broad methodological areas of challenge: 1. Which mode or method of online presentation will best satisfy the confluent demands of this deeply complex, mega-linking, and potentially transformational material? 2. What is the nature and scope of present scholarship in the research areas of Shakespearean palaeography and Shakespeare & Law, and how can this knowledge be best brought to bear upon the task of elucidating and authenticating such uniquely rare evidence using the Twitter platform? In choosing how to satisfy the individualized, case-specific methodological demands of such an intriguing corpus, a glimpse at recent advances in digital archival pedagogy informs us that the skills required to build a scholarly online digital archive from primary source materials include an in-depth consideration of textual materiality, the processes through which literary scholarship must inform technological building decisions, and the ways in which the act of digitization can be used to ask new questions of the text (or to prompt the text to ask new questions of itself). (Engel & Thain, 2015) As mentioned above in the Introduction, from the outset of this research, I was convinced that in order to “ask new questions” of this evidence, the course of digital curation needed to somehow generate from the entire corpus at once a fully charged gestalt-effect of a genuine Shakespeare presence, perceived in toto and obtained in situ upon viewing the images and reading the commentary. Thus, the challenge became to present major elements of the corpus in juxtaposition with published criticism to the point that their significance could be revealed and readily perceived by sophisticated, yet restrained followers: the presentation needed to be cogent, though devoid of any overt point of view from me—especially in terms of its relative balance of épistème versus doxa. Consequently, it was probably for more practical than ironic reasons that I gravitated so readily to the Elizabethan dumb show as a methodological source for an online debut of these annotations. From the outset, I had perceived the pragmatic need to provide a sharing and pointing function within my showcase in order to introduce and manage the large body of published Shakespeare-related criticism which was extant and available to help elucidate these annotations and the significance of the Eirenarcha itself. The dumb show, adapted from its usual function 13

as a dramatic convention, offered a pristine, untouched-by-dialogue-or-commentary approach—along with a user-friendly, novel stimulus: the method provides a refreshing break from the perpetually raging Twitter-seas of endless talk. Mehl (1964) provides a definition: Any piece of silent action where one would normally expect dialogue may be called a dumb show, for example the pantomime in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (p. xii) Action, however, was not always a characteristic requirement. In fact, some dumb shows achieved their didactic effect solely by a visually impressive tableau display rather than by any particular action. Mehl notes further: They [dumb shows] are an outcome of a characteristic trend of the time, the desire to make abstract spiritual experiences and conflicts visible as concrete scenes and to impress a moral idea on the spectators by appealing directly to the senses. (1964:17) And dumb shows could save time, as Thomas Heywood in The Four Prentices of London readily admitted: Now to auoide all dilatory newes, Which might with-hold you from the Stories pith, And substance of the matter wee entend: I must entreate your patience to forbeare, Whilst we do feast your eye, and starue your eare. For in dumbe shews, which were they writ at large Would aske a long and tedious circumstance: Their infant fortunes I will soone expresse, And from the truth in no one point digresse. (quoted in Mehl, 1964:23) Dumb Shows and Montage. In terms of our modern visual media’s comparable attempts to embed dialectic processes into its modes of expression, McLuhan8 reminds us that “In the beginning was montage…,” and as with dumb shows, montage does seem to provide a similar, nascent form of unconscious mechanism that we can draw upon and adapt to suit a digital-age methodology. There is much appeal in, e.g., Eisenstein’s notion of coaxing an affective quality—pathos—from the organic unity of a visual work, thereby

Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Vanguard Press, 1951.

encouraging superficial notions to give way to deeper, more meaningful notions that may be brought to the surface. It is, he says, that result which forces the viewer to jump out of his seat. It is what forces him to flee from his place. It is what forces him to clap, to cry out. It is what forces his eyes to gleam with ecstasy before tears of ecstasy appear in them. In word, it is everything that forces the viewer to ‘be beside himself.’9 New ideas are seen to emerge from the collision of the montage sequence (synthesis), where the new emerging ideas are not innate in any of the images of that edited sequence. Thus, the goal of producing, via this methodology, some form of dialectical material that would ultimately emerge from the process is what drives the present study. It seeks to use historical traces to illuminate an ever-emerging Shakespeare archive. Taking a leap to current biological perspectives, it may be useful to note that some dialectical scientists working within the field of modern evolutionary synthesis have found this type of process to be one that is consistent with natural evolution: Dialectical materialism is not, and never has been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, a dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, ‘Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in time and space and not lose them in utterly idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated.’ And above all else, ‘Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent.’10 By default, then, this methodology must acknowledge and play a role within the ‘natural evolution’ of early modern texts such as those produced by Lambarde and Shakespeare under examination here. And it must recognize the fact that, customarily, old texts have often been given new life and new meaning in new circumstances,

Sergei Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987, 27. J. Beatty, ‘Lewontin, Richard’, in Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, eds. Michael Ruse & Joseph Travis, Harvard University Press, 2009, 685. 10

because the conditions in which the texts were reproduced and were received had changed, making them new or different works…[e]specially in a case of a canonical author like Shakespeare, whose sociocultural status as a sign of Englishness was signaled by his appropriation by a conservative nationalist ideology in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (Brown and Marotti, 1997:1) And so, in addition to reflecting historical contingencies, this methodology embraces the present change in the cultural circumstances of our ‘real world’—viz., our new ability to present, via digital media, not only an in-depth look at (possibly) an original Shakespearean textual artifact but also easy access to a revealing description of some of the original, local circumstances of its production, as well as the production of other, inter-related texts. The consequent ‘evolutionary destruction’ alluded to by the above-noted dialectical scientists and the subsequent emergent ‘material,’ i.e., ‘a different understanding of Shakespeare,’ along with, perhaps, even a change in our perception of the Poet’s essential physiognomy, may all turn out to be the product and consequence of some new form of digital ‘desemiotization’ at work here: In other words, scholars have attended to the phenomenon Maria Corti calls ‘desemiotization’—that is, the destruction of a syntax of codes in a cultural system and the creation of a ‘new and different type of semiotization,’ resulting in the production of new texts within the new codes and a different understanding and interpretation of older texts whose survival and readability testify to their adaptability within the historical process. (Brown and Marotti, 1997:2) ~~~

Methodological Overlay: Let them anatomize tweets. See what breeds about their heart. By “appealing directly to the senses” with these tweets, I have tried to tailor this methodology to the current status of the early ‘presentation’ stage of this research case. And thus, I have confined the study’s online investigative methodology to a limited perceptual overlay: a montage of images of the Eirenarcha’s annotations juxtaposed with links to an explanatory body of published criticism, all communicated via Twitter. Tweets are intended solely to foster individual dialectic responses to the evidence; the desired outcome, ultimately, is that any ‘ex-stasis’ appreciation of the potential scope, significance and implications of the larger discovery will be developed through dialogue engagement, and expressed in the ‘material’ form of published scholarship.11 Tweet Series #1 -- ‘Testymonyal of a Roge 190 193’:

The reader’s patience is gratefully acknowledged in tolerating some lengthy, direct quotations from criticism. There were certain complex matters which were more clearly elucidated when expert scholars ‘spoke’ about their related ideas directly, rather than when they were filtered through a nonspecialist.

This ‘important’ annotation (i.e., the only one underscored by the annotator) was previously examined in Cohen & Cohen (2013); however, this specific Twitter focus salutes and celebrates the stunning prescience of the preeminent Shakespearean scholar, John Jones. In this instance, the annotator has referred to page 190 in the Eirenarcha containing the referenced Testimonial; within the Testimonial, the terms refer to “tenne daies,” the period within which a John-at-Stile (John Doe) ‘rogue’ must return to his town of birth. Prof. Jones (1995) highlights the importance of Shakespeare’s “numerical details,” such as the ‘tenne daies,’ and defends the facts with calm logic, thereby informing, with great cogency, the ‘Testymonyal of a Roge’ annotation. Prof. Jones recounts:

Next let us look, in Quarto, at the numerical details of Lear’s banishment of Kent: Four days we do allot thee for provision To shield thee from diseases of the world, And on the fifth to turn thy hated back Upon our kingdom. If on the tenth day following Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions, The moment is thy death.

Prof. Jones continues: Folio, as it were systematically, changes ‘Four’ to ‘Five’ and ‘fifth’ to ‘sixth’. But it leaves ‘tenth’ unchanged. Kent has to pack his bags and put his affairs in order. Then he must make himself scarce. The enforced schedule is touched with comedy, like so much in Lear, and the timing of it has made editors and commentators uneasy. They cannot deny that Shakespeare gave his mind to this trifle. Did he, on reflection, decide Kent needed longer? Did he come to think the stipulations as to four and five days unreasonable? But the King is titanically unreasonable. In any event the changes from four to five and from five to six can be no sort of textual accident. Yet Shakespeare left Quarto’s ‘tenth day’ alone. So there it stands in both quarto and Folio. I pause here because it is one of those moments when, as happened with Hamlet, the practice of editors proves a warning signal to the student of revision and indeed of the whole relationship between two texts. This shared ‘tenth day’ has proved a stumbling-block. Most recently, giving the world King Lear in two texts, the Oxford editors emend ‘tenth’ to ‘next’ in Quarto and to ‘seventh’ in Folio. Emending two different ways, they offer two different rationales. Quarto’s wild leap from four and five to ten cannot stand because it is an ‘evident error’; Folio’s change of four and five to five and six seems to be shaping rationally, purposefully, towards seven, so ‘tenth’ should be emended to ‘seventh’. We recall that the Oxford men are committed to respecting the integrity of both texts, 1608 and 1623 (Folio). Shakespeare wrote two versions of King Lear, and this obliges his editors to admit all sorts of trivialities and surprises, and even infelicities, since the procedures of artists who make a second attempt are often, from the outside, wayward. But then think of the first attempt! The law of respect runs there too. However, it bears with special force upon the 1608 Quarto, which is very badly printed and abounds in undeniable corruption, so that our editors affirm ‘Naturally we have retained Q wherever we could make defensible sense of it’. And yet the editorial ‘we’ could not bring itself to defend the reading ‘tenth’ here— or in the Folio. (1995:169) Prof. Jones then invites us to ponder Shakespeare’s “pretty reason” for introducing quantity in King Lear with these small, “contrasting, yet cognate structures”: The Fool bombards his master with questions, and the last is the only one Lear gets right. In fact it is not posed in question form. ‘The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.’ The distraught, abstracted old man replies ‘Because they are not eight’. …[T]he fool comes back with ‘Yes, indeed, thou wouldst make a good fool’. …Despite the seemingly random jinking movement, Shakespeare’s grip is at its firmest, and what the Fool calls the ‘pretty reason’ hides under an

inane little tautology. The Pleiades constellation consists of the number of stars it does consist of. Things in the world are as they are and happen as they do happen. Rather as the composer’s exhaustive analysis yielded an entire sufficiency, a plenum, by way of thirty-three variations upon a fatuous waltz, so quantity in King Lear provides the unpromising ground on which contrasting yet cognate structures arise, some grand but most of them small and varying in type and tone from the indecency about penises being ‘cut shorter’ to the off-the-cuff lyricism of the seven stars. …Of course the seven stars are a floating scrap in the vast troubled sky of the play, but they also confirm an unlocalized openness and emptiness, the mood of the featureless heath which under that sky permeates as well as dominates the action. Wilson Knight once said of a fussy production that the only convincing stroke was afterwards when the cast took their call in front of a grey curtain. (1995:184) ~~

The prolific scholar A.L. Rowse (1951) is also featured here in a tweet, revealed as one of the few historians to have directly reproduced the actual language of the Eirenarcha’s Testimonial clause:

And A.L. Beier (1983) informs the annotation with a clear summary of the background facts of the Testimonial:

The able-bodied, transient poor were all expected to have valid papers. The poor law of 1536 exempted servants for one month after their service ended, but required them to obtain a testimonial stating the date of their departure. Later legislation, including the Statute of Artificers of 1563, provided that those who failed to carry passports were to be punished for vagrancy, and these provisions were enforced for a further century, whatever the state of the labour market. In addition, the passport was used to control the movements of convicted criminals, including vagabonds. An Act of 1572 stated that persons leaving gaol were to have a licence from two JPs, if they wandered to ‘beg for their fees,’ or simply travelled home. Another in 1597 laid down that convicted vagrants were to carry papers stating their birthplaces or last residences, that they had been chastised for their crimes, and their destinations. Despite widespread fraud, the passport was the only effective method of controlling the movements of the vagrant poor. (1983:154) ~~~

Tweet Series #2 -- Shakespeare’s ‘Martial’ Law in King Lear:

On page 422 of the Eirenarcha, 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 morsell 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 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) Thus, to connect the Martial quotation to King Lear, I tweeted a cryptic footnote reference from a renowned Shakespeare 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)

Prof. Bradley covers much of the necessary ground in this brief note, and the effect of the dumb show here is: clarity, and a dog-disdain-induced conscious perception of Shakespeare as annotator. ~~ Another tweet in this series provides a link to a Google Preview for Brian Vickers’s Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford (Cambridge UP, 2007), in which Prof. Vickers argues for Davies, and not Shakespeare, as a source for the Roman poet Martial’s presences found in the work. Zurcher (2010) disagrees with Prof. Vickers’s view, finding Shakespeare’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint “strong.” He cites MacDonald P. Jackson’s review of Vickers’s book in the Review of English Studies as support for his view that “certain words in A Lover’s Complaint may point to Davies’s authorship, but a different set of words might point to a different author (even Shakespeare, whose name appears on the first printed edition of the poem)...the value of Vickers’s stylistic evidence is dubious because arbitrarily selected” (Zurcher, 2010: 290).

Judy Kronenfeld (1998) might have been predicting this type of “ad hoc use” of historical data, with the exception she takes to certain Shakespeare criticism12 for its lack of “historical convincingness” and for being “constructed from selective evidence”: Too often recent political and historical approaches just aren’t historical enough about what actually was subversive, what orthodox, what marginal, what central. They may make a very ad hoc use of historical data; they may assume rather than fully investigate the ideological characteristics of political and religious opposition; they may argue from the language they assume expressed that opposition, without a sufficient sense of how that language actually was used in a wide variety of texts. (1998:230) Alas, Prof. Kronenfeld may have ended up flouting her own admonition, if we weigh all the assumptions contained in her interpretive approach to this ‘dog’/ ‘authority’ matter in King Lear in light of the present Martial discovery:13 The equation of the “image of authority” with “dog[] obey’d in office” is most immediately related to the metaphor Lear has been developing: see how yond justice rails upon yon simple thief….Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? Glou. Ay, sir. Lear. And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the Great image of authority: a dog’s obey’d in office (4.6.151-152; 154-59)

The “farmers dog [that] bark[s] at a beggar” parallels the “justice [who] rails upon yond simple thief”; hence, the ”creature [who] run[s] from the cur” parallels the “simple thief.” Lear’s metaphor demotes the justice to a barking dog, yet promotes the thief to a beggar not clearly guilty of the crime of stealing—or perhaps, it implies that beggars are automatically, if not necessarily justly, considered thieves. Figured as a barking dog that scares a beggar, the “image of authority” is here ironically reduced to a brute animal who terrorizes the powerless and not necessarily criminal beggar (who hasn’t even threatened anyone’s possessions). The barking dog is instantly obeyed because the insignia of office—those “robes and furr’d gowns” behind which he hides—spark immediate blind fear in the powerless upon whom he preys.

Viz., Stephen Greenblatt, The Forms of Power and Power of Forms in the Renaissance, Pilgrim Books, 1982, and Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, University of California Press, 1988. 13 Of course, one large, collateral benefit afforded by the higher calibre of potential evidence such as is offered here, includes its power to tame a runaway hermeneutic through the rare luxury of genuine historical hindsight.

Like the “costly ornaments and rich attire” Phillip Stubbes14 describes, they indeed “strike a terror and fear into the hearts of the people to offend against the majesty of their callings”, but in a particularly unsettling way. The injunction, “Behold the great image of authority, a dog’s obey’d in office,” taken with the assertion that follows a few lines later, “Robes, and furr’d gowns hide all,” presents a horrific discrepancy between distinguished appearance and subhuman reality: an animal in a justice’s robe. And that image is the most “radical” metaphorical analysis yet of the corruption of justice. It is an image intensified by the play’s other references to dogs who are sheltered by the fire while humans are locked outdoors in the howling storm, or to dogs that still breathe (5.3.307), although Cordelia no longer does. At this point, the starkest of images do seem to sum up the play: the powerful are dogs in furred gowns preying upon “poor, bare, fork’d animal[s]” (3.4.107). (1998:226) “An animal in a justice’s robe” is only part of the story, however, inasmuch as the Eirenarcha’s Martial evidence tells us much more. It was clearly William Lambarde here, in the voice of the Puritan ‘Eirenarch’ or ‘Peace Ruler,’ who originally appropriated and deployed Martial to illustrate the broader intent of his draconian statute. When the reference re-appears in King Lear, it is that appropriation by Authority that is being ‘reported’ (Syme, 2012) by Shakespeare, as we witness the outraged Poet actively ‘taking exception‘ (Beecher et al, 2015) to it in his presentation of Edgar’s experience. Burrow (2013) points to Shakespeare’s “situational” knowledge of the classics: Learning and knowledge spread around books in Shakespeare’s mature plays, rather than being simply located in them—and he tends to give the authors of onstage books generic rather than specific names which reflect his interest in the effect rather than the exact origins of reading. They are identified as ‘strange fellows’ or ‘satirical slaves’ rather than as Plato or Juvenal. That sounds like a tiny point, but it’s actually very significant. In analysing Shakespeare’s classicism it is necessary to be as sensitive to theatrical contexts as it is when analysing any other aspect of his plays. Classical sources tend to be adapted to their theatrical situations. The really big point that follows from these examples, indeed, is that for Shakespeare, ‘knowledge’ of the classics tended to be situational. That is, a particular scene or setting might recall some more or less dim memory of a classical text: a reference to ‘Aristotle’ could come to mind in a scene or a play about imitation if it was associated with literary imitation in the work in which Shakespeare came across it; a piece of pastiche ‘Juvenal’ might seem right for a scene in which a younger character is being rude to an older, partly because Juvenal is sometimes rude about the old, but also because Juvenal’s name means ‘juvenile’. Allusions to Lucan, who wrote an epic poem about Rome’s civil wars, occur most frequently in historical works about England’s civil 14

Phillip Stubbes, Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakespeare’s Youth, A.D. 1583, edited by Frederick J. Furnivall, London: N. Trubner, 1877-89.

wars, the Wars of the Roses. What Shakespeare ‘knew’ about classical literature is inseparable from the ways he used it, and he often used his knowledge in ways that create complex implied dialogues between characters onstage, and between his own writing and his reading. These effects all suggest that we should think of Shakespeare’s knowledge of classical writing dynamically, as a changing and theatrically inflected resource rather than simply a static body of learning which he acquired during his teens and then used throughout his career. (2013:30) Tweet #3: ‘Vnlawfull Games fol 180’

This dumb-show tweet provides a blend of Feature and Context demons, although the annotation lends itself most conveniently to ample opportunities in the realm of palaeographical analysis. For context, Shakespeare’s use of ‘loggats’ in Hamlet is referenced. For the graphical analysis, a portion of Sir E.M. Thompson’s chapter, “The Handwriting of the Three Pages Attributed to Shakespeare Compared with his Signatures”15 is reproduced and provides descriptions of Hand D’s exemplars for two forms of the letter f, as well as the letter g.

Sir E. M. Thompson, “III. The Handwriting of the Three Pages Attributed to Shakespeare Compared with His Signatures”, in Alfred Pollard, ed., Shakespeare’s Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, (Cambridge, 1923).

http://archive.org/stream/shakespeareshand00polluoft#page/n5/mode/2up

Tweet Series #4 – ‘Sermo Iosuae, Ad Achan’:

Hutson (2007) reproduces this table from the Eirenarcha (annotated in the present copy) as an example of material illustrating “the early modern conjunction of classical forensic rhetoric and vernacular legal culture” (2007:253) on which Shakespeare might have drawn in his Histories, specifically, 2HenryVI: In 1588 Justice William Lambarde enlarged his Eirenarcha…to include 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. Lambarde equates the Justice’s examination and taking of informations from 27

witnesses with the Ciceronian issue of fact: ‘The examination of an offence, is a conjectural state of a cause’, he writes. He then arranges Cicero’s classification of arguments of ‘suspicion’ into a table, dividing the material for proving the case into matter ‘Precedent’, Present’, and ‘Subsequent’. Precedent includes motive, or ‘cause’; ‘Subsequent’ includes rumour and witnesses, as well as bodily signs, and traces at the scene of the crime… (2007:253) This Eirenarcha’s annotator, however, has chosen to focus on the biblical Achan/Joshua VII reference contained in the table:

This purposeful reference brings to mind the Jephthah story from Judges 11, which Shakespeare used in Hamlet. Zurcher (2010) summarizes: There is no question that Hamlet’s abrupt allusion to the story of Jephthah in Judges 11 is motivated by the important narrative parallel between Ophelia and Jephthah’s daughter. Before leading the host of Israel against the Ammonites, Jephthah had sworn to God in prayer that, if Israel were victorious, he would sacrifice the first living creature he encountered upon his homecoming: God having given him the victory, and Jephthah having returned home to the sight of his daughter, coming out of the house to greet him, he fulfilled his vow. (2010:248) In “Cromwell and the Sin of Achan,” Blair Worden (2012)16 illustrates the place of biblical conviction in the thinking of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) and those around him. Prof. Worden addresses “how their sense of purpose was nourished and shaped by their alertness to what they took to be divinely‐appointed parallels between current events and episodes in the Old Testament.” He studies “the applications by Cromwellians to their own circumstances of the story told in Joshua VII of the divine retribution that was visited on the Israelites in consequence of the sin of one of their number, Achan…” and how “Achan's iniquity reduced the Israelites to an unaccustomed military impotence that was relieved only after the sin had been investigated and punished.” A similar appropriation and invocation of the Achan/Joshua VII story appears in this Eirenarcha, and serves as an historical precursor to its use by the 16

Blair Worden, God's Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell, Oxford Scholarship Online, May 2012.

Cromwellians. Once again, the Eirenarcha’s annotator appears to be “reporting” (Syme, 2012) on ‘Puritan’ Lambarde’s invocation of an inappropriate external source in formulating his common law statutes. The focus of this tweet series, thus, is on two of Shakespeare’s plays falling within the dating range of this Eirenarcha: King Lear and The Book of Sir Thomas More. A reproduction of G. Harold Metz’s chapter “Voice and credyt’: the scholars and Sir Thomas More”17is provided, in which Prof. Metz points to some underlying themes in that play, as noted by prominent scholars: H.W. Crundell called attention to two characteristically Shakespearian ideas which are intertwined in Add. III [of The Book of Sir Thomas More]: the ‘law of children’ – More’s relations with his father – and ‘corruption of the blood’, a criminal law conception regarding such crimes as treason. He cites Julius Caesar, III.i.36-42 and the ‘treason of Goneril’, apparently II.iv.152-68. In a response, R.W. Chambers endorses Crundell’s twin points and accepts the assignment of Add. III to Shakespeare… (1989:24) The dumb show comes into its own here, juxtaposing the biblical story of Achan with the scene from King Lear in which Lear is carrying the murdered Cordelia. This reference from the Eirenarcha is thus suggested as a source for the line “Howl, Howl, Howl, Howl! O! you are men of stones:” – a source that, for editors, has proven elusive:

In T.H. Howard-Hill, ed.: Shakespeare and ‘Sir Thomas More’ - Essays on the play and its Shakespearian interest. (1989), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Also provided is a reference from M.D.H. Parker’s chapter, “The Idea of Justice in the Orthodox Tradition”:18 Shakespeare and his generation were, as artists, in a position of peculiar and intense power. They too stood at the end of an era, but they stood also at the end of a continuous tradition, and they do not forget, as modern men are inclined to forget, precisely what they doubt. In solving their dramatic problems—which are inescapably the problems of justice—they had all the data of the Graeco-Jewish-Christian civilization in which they were born. It should perhaps not strike us as strange if, in the plays of the greatest of them, we find the Christian hypothesis subjected, as it were, to a recapitulation of its own history, a bombardment by all the questions to which it claimed to reply. Shakespeare did indeed so subject it with an intellectual ruthlessness unparalleled by any other artist of any faith, and perhaps it was to himself as the tragic dramatist that the Shakespeare of the final plays wrote the words of Prospero: You do yet taste Some subtleties of the isle, which will not let you Believe things certain.

Tweet #5 -- ‘Night Watches’:

The bold appearance of ‘night watches’ triggers some especially distinctive Shakespearean connections, as revealed by Keeton (1967). A description by Sir E.M. Thompson (in Pollard, et al., 1923) helps bring out the implication of the (characteristically Shakespearean) slightly higher right horn of the g in ‘night.’

In M.D.H. Parker, The Slave of Life. Chatto & Windus, 1955, 234.

Tweet Series #6 -- ‘Shoale’ Underlined:

In this section, Lambarde uses ‘shoale’ (which the annotator has underlined) as a verb, ostensibly lamenting Catholics who ‘shoale themselves out from ordinary government’ with attempts to ‘increase their jurisdictions’—a perceived insult to the sovereign: ‘to no small detriment of the royall efface and dignity.’ This tweet series references Macbeth: But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. Tweets reproduce a chapter by historian Michael Hawkins (1982:158), in which he develops the notion that Shakespeare’s awareness of the “current vocabulary” of the political scene of his day informed the writing of Macbeth. ~~~

Tweet #7 -- ‘Alehouse’; ‘Alehouse without lycense vide bailment’; ‘Bastard’; ‘Bastard reputed father or mother’:

These ‘Alehouse’ annotations may effectively separate beginning Shakespeareans from those who are more ‘Shakesperienced,’ since these items appear to relate to one of Shakespeare’s so-called ‘problem’ plays, Measure for Measure. In Cohen & Cohen (2013) the ‘bastardy’ annotation clusters were linked to the comprehensive (i.e., covering several Shakespearean periods) criticism on the topic offered by Danby (1949); this tweet leads the user to discover the germane qualities of Prof. Widmayer’s (1995) arguments in relating the ‘alehouse’ and ‘bastardy’ annotations to Measure for Measure; e.g.: “Among the most inequitable personal conduct regulations were the bastardy statutes, the enforcement of which Shakespeare seems to condemn through his sympathetic treatment of the plight of Claudio and Juliet…” and “The alehouse was, quite literally, a ‘nurserie of naughtiness’ Justice Lambarde told his quarter sessions…” (1995:190).

Tweet #8 -- ‘The Oth of the Undershref[?]’:

This tweet aims to network the annotation’s Context demons, and presents it in a Sir Thomas More ‘cluster,’ including ‘laborers,’ ‘apprentices,’ and ‘a proclam [i.e., proclamation] for vnlawfull assemblies’. Saliently, the statute language reminds us that it is “touching Supremacie” (notable association: Sir Thomas More, himself, had been Undersheriff of London, from 1510). With regard to the annotation’s unique spelling, which is far from clear, Jowett (2011), in Appendix 6, “A question of Modernization: Sheriff/Shrieve,” discusses the highly varied spellings for ‘sheriff’ in the Sir Thomas More manuscript. On Shakespeare’s use of the form ‘shrieve,’ Prof. Jowett states: The Shakespeare examples of ‘shrieve’ all appear in prose….the form ‘shrieve’ in Sir Thomas More seems to be a distinguishing feature that may

well characterize the citizens’ speech. Moreover, it is reinforced by Doll’s distinctive abstract noun ‘shrievaltry’. (6.51) A further point in favour of accepting ‘shrieve’ as Shakespeare’s considered localized preference relates to the metrical qualities of the prose….With monosyllabic ‘shrieve’, a similar pattern can be found in an exchange that accounts for all five Shakespeare occurrences: ‘Shrieve More speaks. Shall we hear Shrieve More speak’ (49-50) and ‘Let’s hear Shrieve More! Shrieve More, More, More, Shrieve More!’(53-4)…To print ‘Sheriff’ would be to disrupt the iambic motion of the prose. (2011:472) Tweet #9 -- From the Biography: ‘Amending Highwaies’:

The intent with this tweet was to introduce a form of varied evidence relating to the Poet’s private life, in this case, tying this book’s marginalia evidence found on the highway-related statutes to the appearance of Shakespeare’s name, entered on an official (1611) Stratford record listing, as a contributor to a fund for promoting repair of the highways (Lewis, 1941:416). 34

Tweet #10 -- Marked in Margin: ‘The grace and dispensation of the prince19 may not be strained beyond the words’:

Here, it seems, we encounter the methodology’s profound limitations. No dumb show could ever do justice (as it were) to the bombshell discovery that this tiny marginal marking may represent. There are no Feature demons here to fire up any Pandemonium, and the prospective Contextual demons, viz., the many lexical collocations of the marginal marking’s famous referent (‘strained’), are too complex 19

See, e.g., Paul Raffiield, 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.

to be handled by any passive montage. Simply finding the word ‘strained’ unmarked in the Eirenarcha’s text would clearly have been considered, on its own, a momentous occurrence, since the Lambarde tract is not mentioned in Bullough (1957-1975)—or anywhere else—as a possible source for Portia’s famous speech in The Merchant of Venice. However, if we agree, after careful analysis, that here may actually be Shakespeare himself in this Eirenarcha pointing to his source for ‘strained’ in Merchant, then the implication of this action on his part necessarily confounds and compounds the hermeneutic case for that play so exponentially that some major ‘adjustments’ to currently accepted editorial readings almost certainly would be required. In considering this marginal annotation as Shakespeare’s, a series of plausible, tentative analogies takes shape (and remains open to adjustment): •

• •

Shakespeare/Portia has taken up Lambarde’s term ‘strained,’ which is found within the wording of this Eirenarcha’s particular common law instrument. Shylock/Lambarde is beaten by a verba fortius accipiuntur contra proferentem [‘a man’s words shall be taken most strongly against himself’] (Bacon, 1630:11, quoted in Zurcher, 2010:271). Shylock’s bond fails on a matter of flesh and blood wording, and he is thus forced to withdraw it. Lambarde’s legal instrument-maxim similarly fails (after Shakespeare-asPortia is done with it) because the ‘grace’ (i.e., ‘mercy’) which Lambarde withholds through its wording—‘may not be strained beyond the words’— has been proven by Portia to be unstrainable according to the lex contraria [contrary law of superior force] (Skinner, 2014:222) afforded by her biblical references relating to Mercy/Grace, viz., “The quality of mercy is not strain’d,” etc.

‘Strained’ Discussion. Platt (2009) helps us begin to weigh the above interpretation with his discussion of readings of Merchant that consider Shylock’s Jewishness to be metaphorical: Critics attempt both to soften the hatred evinced by the play and resolve the play’s contradictions by turning Shylock into an idea. A related point has been made about the tension between strict legalistic justice and equity: the play is an assertion, this reading goes, of the importance of interpreting the law according to the spirit and not its letter, of trying to reach a decision based on equity and the particular facts of a case instead of rigid, strictconstructionist justice that applies the law rigidly and universally. (2009:79)

Platt then leads us into Robin Wells’s (2005) conception of “value pluralism,” which he finds in Shakespeare’s Shylock: Instead of focusing on whether the play is pro- or anti-Jewish—the play certainly has moments of both antipathy and sympathy for Shylock—I would like to stress that Shylock is the most tangible example in the play of what Robin Headlam Wells has called Shakespeare’s interrogation of ‘value pluralism’, a concept he derives from Isaiah Berlin, in which ‘any value system inevitably involves choices between incommensurables.’ (2009:78) It is useful to quote Robin Wells (2005) at length, for his background information on Puritan-Jew parallels has the effect of easing us into an effortless comingling of the personas of William Lambarde and Shylock in Shakespeare’s mind: That’s not to say that Shylock would have been an uncontroversial figure for a contemporary audience. Though he is portrayed as a Jew, his values seem almost indistinguishable from those of a puritan: he is thrifty and selfrighteous (“What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?’ – IV.i.88); he hates music, masquing and revelry; his house is ‘sober’ (II.V.36); he places great importance on his family (unlike his wifeless, ‘prodigal’ adversary); and his idea of justice is based on the old lex talionis. Jews may not have been a pressing social issue in Elizabethan England, but puritans certainly were. They weren’t just killjoys who disapproved of feasting and merrymaking. They wanted to close the theatres; they sought to control government policy; they wanted to criminalise adultery; and, most dangerous of all for Catholics, they were anxious to see the sternest possible measures taken against heretics. And for convicted proselytisers that meant public execution with the usual live disembowelling, and sometimes removal of the still-beating heart. For a playwright with Catholic connections they were a very unwelcome presence indeed. In Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure Shakespeare satirised puritans quite openly. But in Elizabethan England you had to be careful when dealing with religious matters. In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare was more circumspect than he was in the two later plays, and used a politically uncontroversial hate-figure to stand for the puritan sensibility. The link was not entirely arbitrary. As a way of confirming their status as God’s chosen people, some fundamentalist puritans actually referred to themselves as Israelites. ‘We are the same Israelites…[who] shall be sent unto the land promised us…[in] this queen’s day that now reigneth’, wrote the puritan Ralph Durden. In the seventeenth century some Levellers actually called themselves ‘Jews’ and advocated the adoption of the Torah as the basis for English legislation. The parallel between puritans and Jews was sufficiently familiar to be made a topic of anti-puritan satire. In 1608 one pamphleteer published a spoof apology supposedly written by a Jew who becomes a puritan: ‘if I am to say on my honour why I am become a Calvinist, I shall

have to confess that the one and only reason which persuaded me was that among all the religions, I could find none which agreed so much with Judaism, and its view of life and faith…the Jews everywhere are at pains to cheat people. So are we.’ In the twenty-first century no dramatists with any sensitivity to racial issues would think of using a Jew as an easy symbol for what he or she regarded as undesirable religio-political tendencies. But Elizabethans had no qualms about racial stereotyping; Elizabeth actually gave orders for the city of London to be ethnically cleansed of ‘Negars and Blackamoors’. Though Portia avoids being openly rude to her African suitor, she makes it clear that she doesn’t care for those of ‘his complexion’ either (II.vii.79). In much the same way that Othello draws on the popular Elizabethan association of Moors with the darker side of human nature, so The Merchant of Venice adapts an earlier play about a scheming Jew (Marlowe’s Jew of Malta) and casts him in the role of ascetic, self-righteous avenger. (2005:52) Wilfrid Prest (1995) strengthens our consideration of this possible role for Lambarde with his description of him as a puritan: Possessing a detailed grasp of the law's practical deficiencies, built on his Inns of Court background and professional experience, Lambarde's concerns and proposals for change prefigure those of mid-seventeenth-century puritan barrister law reformers, such as John Cooke, Thomas Faldoe, Matthew Hale, John Sadler, and William Sheppard. His radical, indeed revolutionary, scheme for attaching particular counsel to specific courts, which would have totally transformed the structure of legal practice and with it the relationship between the legal profession and the state, almost certainly derived from contemporary Continental usage rather than local precedents (which in any case were of no great antiquity). The call for the judiciary to ignore considerations of clientage or patronage in serving both their prince and the cause of justice also seems anything but backward looking. Yet his apparent failure to discern any possibility of conflict between these two latter imperatives tends to confirm Alsop and Stevens's insistence that Lambarde was a man of the sixteenth, not the seventeenth, century. That his precepts were not invariably reflected in his personal practice doubtless underlines the frailty of all human aspirations, past and present. (1995:474) Skinner (2014:220) analyzes the implications of the dramatic action in Merchant by emphasizing its rhetorical constructs; he begins his highlight of ‘the legal issue’ by suggesting that “Shakespeare is less interested in legal than in juridical issues, but the great exception is the trial scene in Act 4 of The Merchant of Venice.” Within this scene, Prof. Skinner points out that after Portia delivers her sentence, and at the moment when Shylock steps forward with the knife, “she suddenly turns to ‘something else’, namely the precise wording of the bond. As she now reveals, the issue before the court is not juridical after all; rather it is legalis or legal, and centres on the interpretation of that particular text.”

Shylock insists on the Ciceronian principle of verba ipsa—"the very words”: I, his breast, So, says the bond, doth it not noble Judge? Neerest his hart, those are the very words. (4.I. 248-50); He insists again on the principle when Portia suggests a surgeon’s visit to ensure that Antonio doesn’t bleed to death: “I cannot finde it, tis not in the bond”. Thus, Portia is forced to examine the connection between Shylock’s bond and the larger framework of Venetian law. She focuses in on what “The words expresly are”: The bond doth give thee here no jote of blood, The words expresly are a pound of flesh: (4.I. 302-3) Prof. Skinner summarizes: Many critics have seen in these lines the turning point of the case. What Portia demonstrates, they argue, is that Shylocke ‘cannot have the flesh’ after all, and is guilty ‘of attempting to enforce a fraudulent contract’. He has asked for the verba ipsa of the bond to be enforced, but ‘the very words’ make it impossible to execute. It is arguable, however, that this reading misunderstands the rhetorical construction of the scene. As Portia has just made clear, the issue before the court is not a constitution iuridicalis; rather it is a constitution legalis, in which the question at issue is the proper interpretation of a legal text. But…the wording even of a legally valid text may turn out to be in conflict with the requirements of a lex contraria, a contrary law of superior force…Shylocke’s problem is not that he cannot have the flesh at all. Portia concedes that his bond remains a valid one: ‘The law alowes it, and the court awards it.’His problem is rather that he has been unaware of the fact — which Portia now fiercely underlines—that if he takes his pound of flesh, and if in doing so he spills so much as a jot of blood, he will be acting in violation of a lex contraria that forbids the shedding of Christian blood… The fulcrum of the trial is thus supplied by the passage in which Portia informs Shylocke about the relevant lex contraria. Here Shakespeare goes beyond anything in his narrative sources, drawing instead on his own knowledge of judicial rhetoric in order to produce his coup de théâtre… Shylocke is stunned: ‘Is that the law?’ Portia responds by further informing him that the relevant lex contraria takes the form of an Act of the Venetian state: Thy selfe shalt see the Act: For as thou urgest justice, be assured Thou shalt have justice more than thou desirst. (4. I. 310-12)

The significance of the addition is that, as the rhetoricians always emphasize, where there is a conflict of laws, the law that is permitted to prevail must be the one with the greater weight. But it is too obvious to need stating that an Act of state will always be of greater weight than a private contract, and must therefore be enforced. (2014:224) And thus, if considered within the immediate context of the present investigation and, specifically, William Lambarde’s legal instrument in the form of the Eirenarcha’s clause pertaining to ‘grace,’ the perpetual ‘Act’ of God’s unstrained grace/mercy will always be of greater weight than a draconian puritan common-law instrument that attempts to strain it, at least in Shakespeare’s court of law. Zurcher (2010) provides further background information that may help us place Shakespeare in position as the margin-marker of the ‘strained’ maxim in this Eirenarcha. Zurcher (2010:214) finds Lambarde’s account in Archeion of the Chancery and the Chancellor to be “conciliatory and constitutional”: A good Chancellour will permit the Common Law to hold her just honour, and not make such violent irruption upon her borders, but will so moderate his power, and provide, that the Gate of Mercie may bee opened in all Calamitie of Suit: to the end, (where need shall bee) the Rigour of Law may bee amended, and the short measure therof extended by the true consideration of Justice and Equitie.20 It is salient to note, however, that Shakespeare would never actually have seen or read these generous points, inasmuch as Prof. Zurcher (2010:308) acknowledges that, “significantly,” Archeion was likely “considered too controversial to reach print … and was not published until 1635, when the political climate had changed enough that the council could not be embarrassed by the tame absolutism of some of Lambarde’s points.” Shakespeare would have had unfettered access to an Eirenarcha, however, and it is exciting to read Prof. Zurcher’s (2010) discussion of the “degree of interestedness” inherent in Shakespeare’s ‘use’ of legal elements such as verba fortius in Merchant: Shakespeare reads the maxim in a manuscript copy of Bacon’s work, sees the potential of the interpretative razor that it encodes and decides to harness it in order to bring down one of his villains in a paradoxically villainous way. (2010:278)

William Lambarde, Archeion, or A discourse upon the high courts of Justice in England, E. Pursloe for Henry Seile, 1635, 74.

The suggestion of a vision of Shakespeare reading something somewhere (e.g., ‘strained’ in an Eirenarcha? or ‘forfeiture of the Recognusance’ in an Eirenarcha?21) and bringing down a ‘villain’ (e.g., Puritan Lambarde?) is, in our case, one possible scenario that may be useful to ponder. Moreover, Lambarde’s legal instrument, in the form of the ‘strained’ clause, has the undeniable rhetorical ring of a common-law maxim. Prof. Zurcher (2010) rounds out this theoretical Shakescene further with the possibilities offered by analogies: Early modern English common law gave unusual pre-eminence to custom and to the very purest form of the regula, the proverb or maxim – a form so close to reason itself that it hardly needs writing down, because it is always, palpably, on the tip of the mind’s tongue. What is not often enough appreciated is that the maxim shares, by virtue of its universality, a kind of sympathy with custom and precedent that more specific forms of regulae – like statutes – do not. Custom and precedent authorize judgment or action by analogy. A maxim would seem to work slightly differently, though of course the basis of precedential thinking – in consimili casu consimile debet esse remedium (‘like judgment in cases like’) – can be expressed as a maxim. A maxim would seem to require application guided by reason, where a precedent invites imitation that works – given the basic parity between cases – automatically. And yet a common-law maxim, so close as it is to the rational principle that gives rise to it, has an analogical extensibility that looks very much like precedential logic, the only difference being that this precedence is not narrative, or temporal, but conceptual. Shakespeare’s blurring, in his plot construction, of the relation between contiguity or contemporaneity, on the one hand, and causality or at least affinity on the other, suggests to us how we might see narrative precedentialism as a marker for conceptual precedentialism. Analogies work diachronically, like precedent in law; but they also work synchronically, by connecting ethics to politics, politics to metaphysics, metaphysics to epistemology, epistemology to the linguistic. This analogical extensibility, like precedential imitation, is an intellectual reflex, and one legacy of Shakespeare’s legal humanism. (2010:280) 21

Underlined on p. 108, ‘…whatsoeuer Act is a breach of the Peace, the dooing thereof doth also beget a forfeiture of the Recognusance that is made for keeping of the Peace.’ —ed.

Dating considerations for ‘strained’. Ultimately, it appears that Shylock may have suffered more from Shakespeare’s wrath than Lambarde ever did, since this Eirenarcha’s assumed date of publication, viz., sometime after 1603, comes a few years after Merchant was written and performed (1598), and Lambarde’s ‘merciless’ statute still looks intact, showing no signs of any strain. The assumed late date of this copy of the Eirenarcha in relation to Merchant does give us some pause, although not in relation to Measure for Measure (1604), in which ‘grace’ appears when Lucio appeals to Isabella: “All hope is gone unless you have the grace by your fair prayer to soften Angelo.” However, the presence in the corpus of other earlier (and later) time-referenced annotations, e.g., such as ‘night watches’ [which could relate as strongly to Much Ado About Nothing (1598) as it could to Hamlet (1602-05)], or the ‘amending highways’-related portion of the annotated corpus, found within the book’s Duties of Constables section (which could relate directly to the mention of Shakespeare in a highways bill of 1611), all seem to indicate a broader and deeper purpose in their appearance here. While they may seem topically out-of-date in relation to the limited documented glimpses of Shakespeare’s life and activities we’ve come to rely on from the usual sources, the presence of these off-date markings may simply reflect the possibility that Shakespeare as Eirenarcha annotator was interested in the statutes that were familiar to him, and that they continued to preoccupy his ongoing concern over the course of his life.

Conclusion: Exit the dumb show, pursued by… In the end, this evidence must speak for itself in winning our acceptance of it; oddly, though, the possibility that we may have found, of all things, the Poet’s source for ‘strained,’ comes with an uneasy feeling of regret. The word is so famously linked with Shakespeare that it is, as Lawrence Danson (1978:18) observes, “almost intolerably familiar.” Thus, with this discovery, if we haven’t quite plucked out the heart of the Poet’s mystery yet, we must (alas) at least be taxing some of its major organs. But despite these misgivings, for the many scholars deeply and passionately engaged with Shakespeare’s works, finding ‘strained’ marked in a copy of Lambarde’s Eirenarcha—a copy signed by ‘Trymbelrod’ in a rich brown ink— heralds, for that field, a sea-change into something rich and strange. Accordingly, and from the scope of the findings presented here, we should soon prepare to exit the dumb show: It is time to dedicate more ‘real-time’ professional expertise to the task of delving into the many possible Shakespearean connections yet to be found in this insistent corpus. Happily, it is now entirely within our capabilities to digitally distill, with global scholarly participation (and publication), the grand and complex essences of this ghostly artefact.

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