Close
About
FAQ
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
Shakespeare's speaking pictures
(USC Thesis Other)
Shakespeare's speaking pictures
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
SHAKESPEARE’S SPEAKING PICTURES
by
Amanda K. Ruud
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
ENGLISH
August 2020
Copyright 2020 Amanda K. Ruud
ii
Acknowledgments
I wish I could trace a detailed record of the many kindnesses, small and large, that have given
life to this work, but here, a simple “thank you” must suffice. Believe me, these thanks are
deeply felt.
To my excellent, incisive, and generous advisor, Heather James: thank you. You continuously
cleared space for me to think freely and helped me recognize when my words or my thoughts
were unfree. Thank you for your hospitality, and for helping me to discover my own strong
speech.
To my committee members, who have been true mentors to me: thank you. Emily H. Anderson
has not only been a trusted advisor but also an intellectual companion, a model of brilliant
teaching, and a kind friend. Working as her research assistant was both a great joy and a
privilege. Rebecca Lemon was a superb teacher and a truly astute reader. Her enthusiasm for this
work came at precisely the moment I needed it, and her advice—in many areas of life and
work—has been unfailingly keen. Bruce Smith made a generous and welcoming space for me at
his seminar table and trusted me as a teaching assistant. His joyful support and invitations to
original thought buoyed me from the very beginnings of this project. Susanna Berger’s arrived at
USC just in time to join my committee as a representative of the Art History department and
quickly made herself invaluable. She is a brilliant reader, a wise tutor, and a model of intellectual
precision and generosity.
To Amy Braden, Peter Mancall and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute: thank
you. Your support shepherded the first major steps in this research and gave me an opportunity
to explore it with some wonderful USC undergraduates. The EMSI community has been
unparalleled in its intellectual and social resources during my entire tenure at USC. To the Visual
Studies Research Institute and its visionary leader, Vanessa Schwartz: thank you. This project
would not have come to fruition without the support of two grants from the VSRI and the
excellent interdisciplinary training I received while pursuing a certificate in Visual Studies. I am
particularly grateful to the many Art Historians who engaged so patiently and collaboratively
with me, in effect (and sometimes literally) tutoring me in art historical methods. I have in mind
Vanessa Schwartz, Amy Ogata, Susanna Berger, Kate Flint, Akira Lippit, Susan Dackerman,
Hector Reyes, Megan Luke, Daniella Bleichmar, Suzanne Hudson, Jessica Brier, Lauren Dodds,
Emily Anderson, Christopher McGeorge, and Robin Coste Lewis.
To the many Research Librarians at the Huntington Library, the British Library, the Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust, and the Folger Shakespeare Library: thank you. And to the Shakespeare
Association of America, for multiple travel grants and a dynamic conference model that
produced invaluable feedback on much of this work: thank you. These institutions, alongside the
USC Provost’s office and the USC Graduate School supported me generously.
To my beloved writing group: thank you. Megan Herrold, Lauren Wiendling, Betsy Sullivan,
and Michael Benitez, you have shared your labors, your victories, and your struggles with
remarkable generosity and been an unwavering source of support. I look forward to many more
years together.
iii
To my now-and-forever cohort members Brianna Beehler, Darby Walters, Catherine Theis,
Doug Manuel, and Robin Coste Lewis and my dear classmates at UConn Jarred Weihe, Matt
Jones, Patti Taylor, Nathaniel Windon, and Emily Carminati: thank you. My work is indelibly
marked by your friendship.
To my tutors at Oxford who persuaded me that I could do this work: Jonathan Thorpe, Julianna
Dresvina, and Elizabeth Baigent, thank you. And to my undergraduate and graduate professors
Dave Smith, Aaron Kleist, Virginia Doland, Natasha Duquette, Marc Malandra, John Mark
Reynolds, Melissa Schubert, Amanda Bailey, Greg Semenza, Claire Costley King’oo, and
Charles Mahoney who fostered my curiosity and love for this work: thank you.
To Mom and Dad and Michelle and Joel for taking me to see The Winter’s Tale when I was
eight, playing endless games of make-believe, and crying with me at the end of Hamlet and
Cyrano de Bergerac and Othello: thank you.
My greatest debt of gratitude is owed to the community whose invisible, unpaid labor and countless
hours of childcare carved out the time for me to do this work. To Peter Gross, Lisa Oka, Naomi
Geier, Lindsey Robertson, Melissa Schubert, Barak and Veronica Wright, Kathy Ruud, David and
Rebekah Gross, Emily Gross, Glenn and Elizabeth Gross, Tessa McQuillan, Sam Hayashida,
Rachel and J.D. Neal, Johana Diaz, Josh Watson, Abby Basile, Joanna Insco, and others I have
surely missed: a thousand times thank you.
Lastly, to Peter, Wesley, and Kathryn: you are the best part of my life.
And to Grandma, Grandpa, and my Papa: losing you shaped this work.
iv
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………….
ii
List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………...
v
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….
vi
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..
1
Chapter 1: Speaking Pictures in Early Modern Rhetoric……………………………….
48
Chapter 2: Refusing Consolation in Shakespeare’s Lucrece……………………………….
97
Chapter 3: Hamlet’s Absent Images……………………………………………………
130
Chapter 4: King Lear and the Art of Death……………………………………………..
178
Chapter 5: Art, Apostrophe and Animation in The Winter’s Tale…………………………
246
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….
298
v
Figures
0.1 Death’s Coat of Arms, Hans Holbein the Younger. Woodblock Print. 1538. …………..45
0.2 Diptych of Saint John and Saint Veronica (reverse), Hans Memling. Oil on panel.
ca.1475. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C……………………………………..46
0.3 Vanitas Still Life, Jacques de Gheyn II. Oil on wood. 1603. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art………………………………………………………………………...…47
1.1 Imprese by Paulo Giovio, published in Dialogo (1556)………………………………...96
1.2 Dürer’s Rhinoceros. Woodblock print. 1515……………………………………………96
3.1 Mary acts as witness to Jesus’s suffering in Masaccio, Holy Trinity with the Virgin
and Saint John and Donors, Fresco (1427-1428), Santa Maria Novella, Florence…….177
4.1 Photographic still of Ian McKellan and Romola Garai in the 2007 RSC production
of King Lear…………………………………………………………………………….238
4.2 Pompeiian Fresco thought to be modeled on Timanthes’ Immolation of Iphigenia,
as described by Pliny. 1
st
C. A.D……………………………………………………….239
4.3 Anon., Death and the Maiden (c. 1570). Shakespeare Birthplace Trust……………….240
4.4 Frontispiece to The Mirrour Which Flatters Not (1639) British Museum…………….241
4.5 Printer’s Device in The Glasse of Vaine-glorie (1600), London: John Windet.
Huntington Library……………………………………………………………………..242
4.6 Pieter Claesz, Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball (1628)……………………………..243
4.7 Jean Morin after Champaigne, Memento Mori (1625). British Museum……………...243
4.8 Antony Sher as Lear in King Lear (2016), Royal Shakespeare Company. Photo by
Richard Termine………………………………………………………………………..244
4.9 Michelangelo, Pietà (1498-1499), Rome……………………………………………...245
4.10 Detail of mirrored hands in Michelangelo’s Pietà and Sher’s performance…………..245
vi
Abstract
In the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, both the visual arts and the verbal arts were
praised using a metaphor of liveliness. Writers celebrated paintings that were “brought forth in
living color” and described sculptures that engaged their viewers “as if alive.” Meanwhile,
rhetorical handbooks encouraged rhetors and poets to employ “lively” figures of speech such as
ekphrasis, enargeia, apostrophe, and prosopopoeia—figures that were said to summon absent
scenes and persons “as if before the eyes” of hearers and endow them with an ability to speak.
However, Shakespeare consistently employs these “lively” figures of speech at moments of
extreme grief, when characters are faced with an experience of mortality. In these scenes,
Shakespeare inverts the confidence of rhetorical claims that art can animate and instead
envisions verbal art as a space between life and death that is also an ideal space for mourning.
This dissertation traces allusions to life and liveliness in the examples and explanations of
rhetorical figures of speech found in Elizabethan handbooks and then studies the ways in which
these figures are employed in several Shakespearean scenes. Each of these scenes is focused on a
moment of visual engagement or description: when characters look at, describe, or respond to
visual images. Shakespeare borrows forms of rhetorical speech and vivid description that had
been used to persuade in classrooms and courtrooms and reemploys them as a means for
reflecting on the inability of art to animate; that is, as a means of mourning. These scenes
demonstrate how Shakespeare contributed to transforming the imaginable uses of eloquence
following the Ramist reforms in education and championed a revised literary ethics that favored
mourning over action. Shakespeare’s scenes of visual engagement employ rhetorical poetics to
identify, mourn and wrestle against art’s inability to overcome human mortality.
1
Introduction
In the Renaissance, both visual art and rhetoric shared an epideictic lexicon of animacy.
For Shakespeare, the fictionality of that shared fantasy produced a suggestive opportunity.
Shakespeare’s works are punctuated by moments in which dramatic action slows, lingers, or
abruptly pauses, giving way to heightened visual experience. With striking frequency, these
visual scenes occur at moments of tragedy or suffering (after the experience of rape, at the point
of despair, when mourning a death) and they invite (or in some cases, are made of) inventive
rhetorical poetry. Lucrece turns to the painted victims of the Fall of Troy and “lends them
words,” both responding to and supplementing the “lifeless life” that they are already given by
vivid art.
1
Edgar invents and describes a vibrant image of the Cliffs of Dover that, he hopes, will
prolong his father’s life.
2
Leontes addresses a statue—“chide me dear stone”—with a forlorn
hope that it will respond with living breath.
3
In each of these instances, Shakespeare’s grieving
characters employ rhetorical devices (prosopopoeia, ekphrasis, and apostrophe respectively) that,
in early modern rhetorical treatises, were said to lend life, speech, or presence to inanimate
things. As John Hoskins advises in his handbook Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1600),
such devices are “convenient…for the bringing in of life and lustre.”
4
At the same time, they
1
William Shakespeare, Lucrece in The Complete Sonnets and Poems ed. Collin Burrow (Oxford University Press,
2002), lines 1498 and 1374. References, hereafter parenthetical, are from this edition.
2
William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes, Arden Third Series, (London: Thompson Learning, 1997), 4.6.
3
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher, Arden Third Series, (London: Bloomsbury, 2010),
5.3.24. References, hereafter parenthetical, are from this edition.
4
John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935),
47-48.
2
address (or verbally generate) images that themselves strive toward life, in which “the very life
seems warm” (Winter’s Tale 5.3.66).
As often as Shakespeare appeals to the vivid and animating qualities of visual and verbal
art, his scenes of engagement with images accentuate and rely on the failure of this animating
fantasy. Hamlet addresses the skull of Yorick with an apostrophe that personifies the image of
the skull and invites a spoken reply: “Where be your jibes now—your gambols, your songs?”
5
But if the prince’s address takes one step toward animating Yorick’s remains, one expects—and,
remembering that the speech of a death’s head will always constitute a threat, hopes—that
Yorick’s skull will not become animate enough to answer back.
6
As both Hamlet and his
theatrical audiences know, Hamlet’s interrogative is a figure of speech: whatever liveliness
Hamlet’s apostrophe lends to Yorick’s skull remains a rhetorical fiction. Aware that both poetry
and images ultimately fail to animate the subjects they represent, Shakespeare uses scenes of
verbal engagement with pictures to stage a paragone, a competition, that reflects on what both
verbal art and visual art has to offer in the context of loss, death, and suffering.
7
In short, these
scenes in Shakespeare’s drama audition both visual and verbal art, and the relationship between
them, to find a fit medium for mourning. Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures accounts for these
ambiguously animating scenes of visual description and exchange between speaker and picture
in the context of early modern English visual and rhetorical culture. Even while English writers
5
William Shakespeare, Hamlet ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 5.1.179-
80. References, hereafter parenthetical, are from this edition.
6
In The Pursuit of Signs Jonathan Culler describes apostrophe as a figure that tropes on the circuit of
communication between a speaker and an addressee. See “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics,
Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 135-154. Though apostrophe invites a spoken
response, imagining that spoken response would require a second figure, a prosopopoeia. Both tropes are necessary
to the project of personification.
7
On the paragone, or competition between the arts, see Leonard Barkan, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures
(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2012).
3
praised both visual art and rhetoric in terms of liveliness, English art maintained a focus on
mortality through the prominent memento mori motif and, as this dissertation uncovers, English
rhetorical treatises associated vivid description with elegy, absence, and loss. By tracing these
occasionally paradoxical trends in English rhetoric and rhetoric about art, this dissertation
explores the sources—and the productive, poetic work—of Shakespeare’s simultaneously
animating and elegiac pictorial scenes.
Shakespeare’s pictorialism concentrates on moments in which the promise of
animation—proffered in the period’s celebrations of both rhetoric and the visual arts—fails or is
significantly qualified, opening up an opportunity for images to take on new meanings.
8
Lucrece
speaks for the figure of Hecuba in the Troy painting precisely because she is anticipating her
own suicide and appropriation as a figure in an epic history. One of Shakespeare’s longest and
most enargeic speeches—summoning images before the mind’s eye as if they were actually
occurring—is spoken by a ghost.
9
What is at stake, then, in Shakespeare’s engagement with
these lively images that fail to animate? This dissertation argues that Shakespeare’s pictorial
moments are, like most instances of comparison between the arts, highly reflexive.
As Alison Thorne has argued, the visual arts in Shakespeare exist “only as a textual
effect” and therefore “function reflexively as a trope for Shakespeare’s own rhetorical
8
I follow James A.W. Heffernan in using the term “pictorialism” to refer more broadly to scenes which invoke
pictures or respond to pictures, but do not necessarily attempt to represent a representation or work of art. Heffernan
argues that pictorialism may “remind us of graphic representation. Pictorialism generates in language effects similar
to those created by pictures," Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3.
9
For a rich discussion of enargeia, the feature of vividness in language that summons images or phantasms before
the mind’s eye, see Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).
4
virtuosity.”
10
One of the upshots of this reflexive habit is that Shakespeare’s allusions to the
theme of the paragone between poetry and painting say a great deal about Shakespeare’s sense
of his own art. Though Thorne argues that Shakespeare’s allusions to pictures, which have little
reference to actual art objects, are “mostly unremarkable additions to the stock of Renaissance
commonplaces” about inter-art dialogue, Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures demonstrates how
Shakespeare employs the word-and-image relationship as a tool for poetic innovation.
11
Shakespeare draws on descriptions of absent images and scenes of meditation on tableaux as still
and lifeless as Yorick’s skull as a resource for a deeply elegiac poetic and a revised literary
ethics in which artful speech attempts to compensate for absence and mourning interrupts
narrative action. Put differently, Shakespeare invents a poetics of mourning by way of scenes in
which verbal and visual art fail to live up to the rhetoric of liveliness and animation that early
modern writers applied to both arts. This dissertation reads the Shakespearean scenes that engage
the relationship between the visual and verbal not primarily for their insights into early modern
English visual culture or mimetic theory, but for their reflections on the capacity of
Shakespeare’s hybrid art to represent and address human experiences of loss.
On a formal level, Shakespeare’s scenes of sympathetic engagement with pictures
produce a melancholy outcome. To speak to or for an inanimate image even with the liveliest of
language—as both Shakespeare and his characters do—is to be drawn into an exchange with
absence. The silence of the addressed image anticipates or foreshadows a moment in which the
speaker, too, will be inanimate and absent.
12
In such moments, the image becomes a mirror that
10
Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language (New York: MacMillan, 2000),
73.
11
Ibid.
12
Here I draw on the deconstructive criticism of Jonathan Culler, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis
Miller. See Culler, The Pursuit of Signs; Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” MLN (1979): 919-30;
5
reflects one’s own mutability. Viewed in this way, Hamlet’s speech to the death’s head is a more
fitting model for Shakespeare’s other scenes of visual engagement than we might at first
imagine. Hamlet’s address to the skull—like all of Shakespeare’s lively rhetoric circulating
around mute images—both accentuates the silence of the deceased Yorick and underscores the
fragility of his own speech. This is what Paul de Man describes as “the latent threat” inhabiting
tropes like apostrophe and prosopopoeia.
13
Apostrophe to an inanimate image is metamorphosed
into a memento mori. In turn, even the most ambitious acts of poetic invention lending speech to
poetic figures can turn back on their makers, undercutting traditional promises of authorial
immortality through a performance of mortality.
14
For Shakespeare, the failure of either rhetoric
or images to make good on their figurative promises of animation and liveliness makes space for
a self-reflexive poetics that replaces immortal ambition with mourning.
15
Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1970); J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1990). See also James J.
Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
13
de Man, “Autobiography,” 928.
14
I am referring to the promises of immortal life through fame –and the possibility of being reanimated through the
breath of one’s readers—that would have been passed down to Shakespeare through Horace, Ovid, Vergil, and
Petrarch. On Shakespeare’s engagement with the myth of authorial immortality, see Aaron Kunin, “Shakespeare’s
Preservation Fantasy,” PMLA 124.1 (2009), 92-106 and Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Playing Fields or Killing Fields:
Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003), 127-141.
15
Shakespeare’s emphasis on mourning and mortality represents a shift in aesthetic values, one that drifts from the
politically inflected triumphalism that Spenser borrowed from Vergil, and moves toward a more self-reflexive
poetic, in which art responds to and compensates for loss. In this regard, my argument is similar to Rachel
Eisendrath’s argument that Shakespeare advances a self-reflexive poetics that “recoils from rhetoric’s commitment
to instrumentalizing modes of thought” and is fulfilled in the aesthetics of Kant, in “Poetry at the Limits of Rhetoric
in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece,” in Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play, ed. Lynn Enterline
(London: Arden Shakespeare, 2019), 46.
6
Ut Pictura Poesis
What is accomplished in Shakespeare’s scenes which appeal to visual description and
meditation on images at moments of mourning? Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures addresses this
inaugural question by returning to the source material that enabled these Shakespearean scenes;
namely, the art of rhetoric and a literary inheritance replete with rhetoric about images. The
animating rhetorical forms to which Shakespeare turns at moments of loss are each significantly
inflected by a dialogue with the visual arts, which was, at the time, commonplace. This
dissertation, then, participates in a genre of criticism that focuses on the ut pictura poesis motif
and the wider relationship between the visual and verbal arts in early modern England.
16
In
recent years, scholars have shown a renewed interest in understanding the visual culture of
Shakespeare’s England and its influences on Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and drama.
17
One
problem these studies consistently encounter, however, is the difficulty of accounting for how
the commonplace classical motifs passed down from Horace, Simonides, and Pliny actually
relate to the visual arts as they were practiced in early modern England. While Renaissance
writers return to classical maxims like “as in pictures, so in poetry” (Horace) and assert that
poetry is a kind of speaking picture and poetry a mute painting (Simonides), critics studying
English poetry and drama have struggled to find parallels to the aspects of Renaissance visual art
most familiar to art historians: a transition from the Grotesque to the Renaissance, Mannerist and
16
While I offer a more complete bibliography of this material below, two texts that have been particularly
influential merit particular attention: Leonard Barkan’s Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures and Alison Thorne’s Vision
and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language (New York: Macmillan, 2000).
17
Recent titles on Shakespeare and Visual Culture Cite include Keir Elam Shakespeare’s Pictures: Visual Objects in
the Drama (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Armelle Sabatier, Shakespeare and Visual Culture: A Dictionary (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017); B.J. Sokol, Shakespeare’s Artists: The Painters, Sculptors, Poets, and Musicians in his Plays
and Poems (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Stuart Sillars, Shakespeare Seen: Image, Performance, and Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and John H. Astington, Stage and Picture in the English
Renaissance: The Mirror Up to Nature (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
7
Baroque styles; the development of perspective; references to design (disegno), chiaroscuro, or
drawing from life; robust distinctions between painting and sculpture.
18
While England did have
a lively pictorial culture in the early modern period, these are not among its most prominent
features. If, as early modern writers consistently assert, English poetry does indeed share ends
and methods with the visual arts, then one of scholars’ tasks is to set aside the traditional art-
historical description of “Renaissance art” to find out what the axiomatic comparison actually
meant in the English literary renaissance.
For one, parallels between art and poetry in England allude to a different range of artistic
practices than they would in Italy. England’s robust visual culture in the early modern period, for
example, maintained a large emphasis on the decorative and ornamental arts (as opposed to large
easel paintings and sculptures), and older styles and more rudimentary forms (the Grotesque,
woodblock prints) continued to thrive through the sixteenth century.
19
While English artists did
continue to produce “religious” art after the Reformation—memento mori prints and Protestant
emblem books are key examples—they steered away from depicting the New Testament subjects
that were so pivotal to Catholic Renaissance art.
20
Even the lexicon for the visual arts in England
was distinct. As Lucy Gent, Keir Elam, and Armelle Sabatier have each demonstrated, English
18
There have, of course, been projects that follow this method and produce great insight. See for example Thorne’s
Vision and Rhetoric, which compares dramatic and pictorial perspective, and Michael Baxandall’s Giotto and the
Orators Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450, which
draws comparisons between rhetorical and visual composition. On the uneven appearance of Renaissance terms for
art or styles of art in English literature, see also See also Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560-1620 (Leamington
Spa: James Hall, 1981); David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens and London:
University of Georgia Press, 1990); and Judith Dundas Pencil’s Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of
Painting (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993).
19
Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England, emphasizes the continued influence of the Grotesque style
in English literature.
20
Catherine Belsey warns against the argument that the Reformation’s rejection of religious art decimated England’s
visual culture, emphasizing the rich visual culture that continued to flourish in early modern English households.
“Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63.2 (2012), 175-198.
8
writers employed a wide range of terms for the visual arts, but words like “limn,” and “shadow”
were far more common than the Italian preference for “design” and “composition,” and “image”
was, in England, a term that could refer to widely to painting, sculpture, an idea, or even a
ghost.
21
In early modern England, references to the visual arts in poetry serve a distinct, highly
reflexive, purpose, not necessarily determined by ongoing developments in visual artistic
practice. The doctrine of ut pictura poesis was, primarily, a literary practice. In appealing to it,
English poets returned to incidental remarks in the discourse of classical authors such as Horace,
Aristotle, Simonides, Quintilian, Plutarch and Pliny, and to the ekphrastic poetry of Homer and
Vergil. Following the examples of their ancient tutors, English poets turn to references to the
visual arts at moments when certain capacities of the visual arts as they were celebrated in
ancient literature—their immediacy and vividness, their erotic immanence, their ability to make
the absent seem present—are most in want.
22
Meanwhile, painters and sculptors desire the
subtlety and nuance of poetic speech, which is why so many of the commonplaces circulated in
classical and Renaissance discourse involve the fantasy of images that can speak.
23
Interpreting
the inter-art dialogue in early modern England, then, demands a careful balance between the
21
In Hamlet, the Ghost of King Hamlet is referred to as an “image” (1.1.80). Elam’s Shakespeare’s Pictures
includes a lexicon of Shakespearean works for art, and Shakespeare’s Visual Culture: A Dictionary, by Sabatier,
traces early modern terms for art even more extensively. Gent’s Picture and Poetry connects changes in words for
talking about art with the increased availability of Italian art treatises in England. In English poetics, the word
“image” is was heavily inflected with Platonic and neo-platonic valences, so that “images” were generally
understood to represent or “shadow” things and ideas that had a real existence elsewhere. Dundas, Pencil’s
Rhetorique, emphasizes the neo-platonic aspects of Sidney’s use of the word “shadow.”
22
Leonard Barkan argues that “When writers tell stories about artworks…it may be for the purpose of locating them
as objects of desire.” Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, 86.
23
See Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), for ample examples of this motif in relation to sculpture
from antiquity to the Renaissance.
9
study of England’s particular visual culture and a constant awareness of the rhetorical, classical,
and literary nature of that discussion.
Two features distinguish the literary and rhetorical appeals to the visual arts in the period
this dissertation examines, and both are pivotal to Shakespeare’s poetics. First, in the 1590’s and
the first decades of the 17
th
century, as Lucy Gent has argued, references to painting and
sculpture in poetry and rhetoric became increasingly associated with the poet’s license to
invent.
24
The visual artist’s power to produce vivid illusions through color, line, and shadow
served as a metaphor for the poet’s freedom to create without being bound to reality. In other
words, art and poetry was increasingly less invested in a prescriptive version of verisimilitude
and more interested in presenting an original treatment of an idea or generating a vivid scene.
B.J. Sokol writes that, in early modern art criticism, “artists producing sharply illusory
verisimilitude were dispraised by the knowing, and those conveying impressions of liveliness
and interiority were seen as excellent.”
25
Hence, one of Philip Sidney’s most prominent
illustrations of poetic license in the Defense of Poesy draws a comparison to a painting that does
not represent Lucrece as she was, but represents an ideal Lucrece, in which her virtues are
immanently apparent, and, in King Lear, Shakespeare’s Edgar fabricates a description of Dover
Cliff so compelling that his blind father believes he stands on “the very brim,” of cliffs that are
24
Gent, Picture and Poetry, 4. Importantly, the increased favor for invention and creative license indicates the
beginning of a transition in the perceived purpose of both art and poetry. Much as rhetoric’s long-standing ties to the
aim of persuasion were being steadily loosened in this period, poetry was showing signs of increasing alienation
from the grounding ancient artistic ambition to instruct and delight. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the
growing detachment from verisimilitude meant that poetry and art could be imagined to serve purposes other than
the moral instruction that humanists had long championed.
25
Sokol, Shakespeare’s Artists, 11. For another example of the uses of verisimilitude in early modern English
literature, see Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth Century
England (London: Routledge, 1994). Hutson emphasizes how the goals of verisimilitude should not be equated with
a pseudo-Horatian prescriptiveness or contrasted with vividness.
10
nowhere near.
26
If painting could “make the absent present,” —as Leon Battista Alberti
declared—poetry too could lend presence to absent, ideal, or non-existent things.
27
English poets’ increased interest in this form of illusion does not, however, mean that
they were up to date on contemporary theory about how to produce visual illusion. Even as
English poets slowly gained wider access to Italian art treatises, Gent notes, there was “an
explosion of literary allusions to Pliny’s anecdotes about painters, particularly, the stories of
birds, animals, and even men deceived by trompe l'oeil effects,” that is, to stories of ancient
painters who made absent things seem livingly present.
28
This trend is exemplified, and possibly
seeded, by the many allusions to Pliny’s Natural History in the prefatory matter to John Lyly’s
1578 Euphues.
29
English poets found justification for creative invention in the version of
painting that was represented to them by their classical sources, and those sources are as useful
for understanding English poetic illusions and references to art as are, say, Holbein’s paintings.
One of the things that stands out most clearly when we accept the ancients as authorities in early
modern thinking about the nature and purpose of art is a preoccupation with art’s ability to stand
in for loss and absence. So, for example, the English translation of Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s 1584
treatise on art identifies the tomb Ninus erected for his father as the origin of the sculptural arts.
In crafting the tomb, Lomazzo writes, Ninus drew on Prometheus’s power to make art that
“seemed to be indued with spirit and life” in order to “mitigate some part of the sorrowe of his
26
Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’ in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary
Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 11; King Lear 4.1.78.
27
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Classics, 1991, 60.
28
Gent, Picture and Poetry, 34.
29
Ibid. For more on Lyly’s aesthetics, see Cloe Porter, Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama:
Spectators, Aesthetics, and Incompletion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).
11
father’s death, and in some measure to restore a great losse.”
30
Ninus’s tomb provided an origin
story for a key aesthetic claim of Shakespeare’s contemporaries: an artist’s license to invent
enabled creative compensation for loss.
31
The second distinguishing feature of the ut pictura poesis motif in this period is that poets
increasingly recruited allusions to the visual arts to aid the assertion that they could instill an
extraordinary, even supernatural, degree of life into their works. With remarkable boldness, the
verbal artists of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods claim that, like the famed Giulio
Romano in The Winter’s Tale, they can make art in which “the very life seems warm” (5.3.66).
George Chapman writes that poetry’s “Promethean facultie / Can create men, and make even
death to live,” and Richard Haydocke, prefacing his translation of an Italian artistic treatise,
claims to have undertaken the work during a plague year as “a kind of preservative against Death
and Mortality.”
32
Meanwhile, rhetoricians such as John Hoskyns and Henry Peacham describe
their art as a form of “giving life and lustre” and “raysing” “the deade” so that they can speak.
33
To borrow a phrase from Valentine Cunningham, these writers endow the verbal arts with a
30
Trattato della arte della pittura (1584). I quote the English translation by Richard Haydocke, A Tracte Containing
the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge (Oxford, 1598), Aiiii.
31
The tomb Lomazzo references is a predecessor to the tomb Semiramus build for Ninus himself, and which is a
source of a joke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, wherein Bottom and Flute refer to the scene of Pyramus and
Thisbe’s reunion as “Ninny’s tomb,” 5.7.200.
32
George Chapman, “Poems…to the Iliads and Odysseys” (c. 1598) in The Poems of George Chapman ed. P.
Bartlett (New York and London, 1941), 388, lines 137-138, and quoted in Gent, 56; Haydocke, “Letter to the
ingenious reader,” in A Tracte Containing the Artes, 3. This motif is also connected to the classical tradition for
Shakespeare. In the Sonnets, Shakespeare quotes and extends, but also questions, Horace’s claim from Ode 3.30 to
have made a monument “more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramid’s royal pile,” a claim that would also
have been familiar from Ovid’s Amores1.15, which Marlowe had translated in 1599. While Shakespeare’s sonnets
assert an ability to preserve the life of the subjects represented therein, even lending them breath, they are also
consistent in qualifying the form of life that is preserved in literature (on which, see Kunin, “Shakespeare’s
Preservation Fantasy” and Belsey “Playing Fields or Killing Fields”). When Shakespeare interrogates the liveliness
of poetry he is also interrogating a long-standing tradition of claiming immortality through poetry.
33
Hoskyns, Directions for Speech and Style, 47-48; and Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577),
Oiii r.
12
resurrectionist power.
34
While poets’ claims to eternality were a long-standing part of the
ambitious poetic tradition extending from Horace and Ovid and Virgil to Shakespeare’s
contemporaries, early modern English practitioners of the verbal arts were particularly interested
in extending this claim.
35
To a remarkable degree, the liveliness these writers claim for poetry and rhetoric is
specifically associated with their likeness to forms of visual art, especially painting, and more
specifically with the colors of painting. Henry Peacham, for example, praises vivid description in
which a speaker paints “each thing in his due collour,” just as “the cunning Paynter paynteth all
manner of things most lyvely.”
36
Likewise, Erasmus attributes colorful speech with a kind of
presencing power when he encourages orators to amplify and adorn their speeches with
descriptive enargeia, by which “we do not state a thing simply, but set it forth to be viewed as
though portrayed in color on a tablet.”
37
When enargeia succeeds, he writes, a scene will seem
as present as if “the reader has seen, not read” the sight described.
38
In this period in England,
art’s claim to liveliness is intimately bound up with the idea of an artist’s use of color. Indeed, a
quick search of EEBO turns up over 2500 books with references to the phrase “lively colour”
between 1550 and 1630, with the greatest prevalence of the phrase (in about 500 texts) occurring
34
Valentine Cunningham, “Why Ekphrasis?” Classical Philology 102 (2007), 63.
35
Lucy Gent argues that English poets in the decades surrounding the turn of the 17
th
century moved past claims that
their art was deceptively lifelike to claim that it actually allowed poetry to draw breath, Picture and Poetry, 55.
36
Peacham, Garden of Eloquence 1577, Oiir; Gent, argues that the English preference for “lively color” as opposed
to perspective emphasizes how little they knew about the practice of visual art, Picture and Poetry,17. I take a
different direction here.
37
Desiderus Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and David H. Rix (Milwaukee, WI:
Marquette University Press, 2012), 47.
38
Ibid.
13
between 1600 and 1616.
39
This association of life with color contributed to the entanglement
between the visual and verbal arts because speech, too, was described as having color.
40
Figures
of speech, the decorative or ornamental “colors of rhetoric,” lent their own liveliness to the
verbal arts.
41
This is one reason why my understanding of Shakespeare’s animating pictorial
scenes is driven by the close examination of “colorful” and “ornamental” figures of speech. The
“lively colors” celebrated in this period point to a form of liveliness that was shared across the
verbal and visual arts. The following chapters show how these close associative connections
between illusion, invention, compensation, and liveliness, which shaped the meaning of the ut
pictura poesis motif in early modern England, also motivate and inflect Shakespeare’s creation
of scenes of engagement with pictures.
Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures
While the poetic trend in the decades surrounding the turn of the 17
th
century was to
appeal to the liveliness of visual images and colorful speech, Shakespeare consistently employs
both lively rhetoric and vivid pictorial scenes in a manner that inverts or qualifies their animating
claims. At precisely the moments that poets, rhetoricians, and painters make their greatest claims
for their art’s ability to make the absent present and animate the inanimate, Shakespeare instead
invokes loss and shows an intense preoccupation with mortality. In Shakespeare, lively
39
EEBO word search conducted June 23, 2020. Note that this search does not include variants on the form of this
phrase, and therefore would not catch any of the examples I have already cited. The actual number of references to
this concept in general is likely much higher than the number of references to the single phrase.
40
This was not merely a metaphor employed by writers and orators to elevate their art, either; visual artists also
draw the comparison. Lomazzo even shows deference to rhetoricians’ use of color. The rhetoricians, he writes, can
better handle certain tasks than him, “a plaine Painter, who am onlie acquainted with the varietie of materiall
colours," Aiiir.
41
As Gent notes, the liveliness of colored painting was sometimes used to justify highly figured speech, 50.
14
descriptive speech is perhaps most likely to occur at a moment of profound tragedy or to issue
from the mouth of a ghost. And though Shakespeare is as likely as any other English poet to
draw on commonplaces about the liveliness of art, he is inclined to do so with a dodge. In short,
Shakespeare feints. In a commonly cited passage from Venus and Adonis (1593), for example,
Shakespeare calls up the example of a painter who “would surpass the life” in “limning out” a
steed.
42
Art, the poet writes, contends with nature “As if the dead the living should exceed”
(292). What at first appears to be a repetition of the commonplace about art’s miraculous
liveliness in fact states the opposite. The artist’s picture is flatly “dead,” echoing Venus’s
accusatory description of Adonis as a “lifeless picture” (211). Likewise, Shakespeare describes
Lucrece engaging the “lifeless life” of the figures in an image of the Fall of Troy (1374) and
Cleopatra stages her suicide as a statuesque re-enactment and replacement of Enobarbus’s
aesthetic and highly animating description her meeting with Anthony on the river Cydnus.
43
Shakespeare is clearly aware of the evolving dialectic between the visual and the verbal arts in
England, including the lively and animating claims of both arts, but his emphasis on mortality
and loss is distinct.
A central argument of Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures is that Shakespeare turns to the
ut pictura poesis motif and the fraught relationship between word and image at specific
moments—tragic moments—in order to address the larger literary-social challenges of
representing mortality and grief. Death and loss represent a literary challenge because they are,
both traditionally and in a fundamental sense, unrepresentable. Though the early modern popular
42
Venus and Adonis in The Complete Sonnets and Poems ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics,
2002), 288-289. References, hereafter parenthetical, are to this edition.
43
Antony and Cleopatra ed. John Wilders (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 1995), 5.2.
15
theatre did not always concede to the qualms about tragic spectacle that had been passed down
through Aristotle’s Poetics, English dramatists return frequently to meditations on the challenge
of putting tragic experience into words, including the Ovidian motif of the unspeakability of
loss.
44
Whether onstage or on the page, representing tragedy required Shakespeare to apply
himself to an aesthetic problem that his literary sources had identified as particularly difficult.
Representing tragic experiences also presented an ethically inflected challenge to
Shakespeare as an ambitious author. Artfully crafted scenes of loss and mourning—especially
when they represent historical figures such as Lucrece or Lear or Cleopatra—raise the question
of whether it is ethically problematic to garner fame, authority, or even a form of immortality,
from representing another’s suffering.
45
This form of instrumentalization was a source of
concern for other Elizabethan writers, and, as Colin Burrow and Heather James have both
shown, it especially inflected their translations and adaptations of classic epics.
46
Elizabethan
poets and playwrights were keenly aware of the classical inclination to vividly represent a scene
of loss and then submit it to the larger aims of a political narrative, as when Lucrece’s suicide
leads to a Roman revolution, Dido’s kingdom is sacrificed for Aeneas’s epic fate, or a murder
launches a revenge narrative. Among Shakespeare’s contemporaries, however, the dominant
44
On Aristotle’s concern with tragic spectacle, see Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and
Modern Problems (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 209 ff. On Shakespeare’s references to
the unspeakable nature of loss in Ovid, see Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare
(Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2000). I address this issue at greater length later in this
introduction.
45
As his contemporary Richard Barnfield claimed he did: “And Shakespeare thou…Whose Venus, and whose
Lucrece (sweet, and chaste) / Thy name in Fame’s immortal Book have plac’t,” from “A Remembrance of Some
English Poets,” in Poems, ed. George Klawitter (London and Toronto: Susquehanna University Press, 1990), 182.
46
Colin Burrow, “Virgil in English Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil , ed. Charles Martindale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109-127; Heather James, “Shakespeare and Classicism” in The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 202-220 and Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
16
argument about the ethical nature of literary response only reinforced this implicit problem.
Sidney and other humanists argue vehemently that viewing “images” of tragedy and honor
onstage or in poetry would inspire readers to virtuous action.
47
Loss, in this scenario, is quickly
instrumentalized toward other, heroic or socially productive ends. Shakespeare’s experiments
with pictorial description at moments of loss and scenes of engagement with still images, I argue,
are in part aimed at interrupting the movement from loss to action that defined Elizabethan
literary ethics.
48
Shakespeare’s interruptive aesthetic scenes invert the perennial ethical
command to hurry up and get something done. Rather, these moments suggest that, like Hamlet,
one might be wise to slow down and grieve.
Shakespeare’s most innovative responses to the problems of tragic representation,
however, are empowered by his inventive use of rhetorical figures. Through figures of speech
like ekphrasis, prosopopoeia, and enargeia, Shakespeare summons the power of language to slow
down narrative, animate the inanimate, and make the absent present, often while invoking the
visual sense or addressing a visual image, but then undercuts the triumph of these tropes with
consistent reminders of their fictionality. His descriptive and pictorial tragic scenes are
motivated by what poetry can accomplish when it borrows analogously from images. For
Shakespeare, images represent an immediacy or presence that poetry longs for combined with a
pivotal absence: pictures represent things that aren’t there.
49
Shakespeare draws on this
paradoxical relationship between word and image at moments when the abilities—and
47
Sidney, Defense of Poesy, 16-25.
48
See William Weaver on how the genre of the epyllion interrupts rhetorical and narrative trajectories in order to
subvert traditional Humanist ethics, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press, 2012). See also Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004) on the transformation of Elizabethan ethics and aesthetics in the 1590’s.
49
Descriptions of absent images or scenes are, therefore, doubly inflected with elegy.
17
limitations—of the sibling medium are most needed: that is, at moments that are, in a sense,
unspeakable or unnarratable. Many of his most memorable, and most highly aestheticized
scenes, from Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost to Lear’s howling entry with the body of
Cordelia, benefit from this rhetorical inventiveness. As Hugh Grady argues, following Theodor
Adorno, the aesthetic is a reserved space for negotiating both eros and death.
50
Shakespeare,
then, employs multiple early modern aesthetic resources—and the relationship of desire among
them—to attend to the problems of tragic representation. His images and his rhetoric are engaged
in a mutual effort to lend a shape and a space to death and loss.
Much as a painting or a print selects a still moment from a scene of action, the delay for
description or meditation on an image represents an interruption in unfolding narrative action.
Within Shakespeare’s poetry and plays, these aesthetic circumstances yield an ethical insight. By
turning to pictures and interrupting narrative time with the temporality of an image, Shakespeare
can allow dramatic action to give way to mourning even within a medium that is defined by
performed action. My argument here draws on and transforms W.J.T. Mitchell’s foundational
argument that word-and-image interplay, especially in the figure of ekphrasis, represents an
attempt to overcome the “relationship of otherness” between the visual and the verbal, which
Mitchell, drawing on Lessing, associates with a tension between stillness and movement.
51
Shakespeare, I suggest, inverts the early modern discourse in which liveliness was attributed to
art in order to imagine verbal and visual interplay as an interface between animacy and
inanimacy. As Shakespeare’s ekphrastic scenes repeatedly assert, the stillness of images also
50
Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
51
Picture Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 154-156.
18
anticipates the stillness of death.
52
For Shakespeare’s characters, engaging a still and silent
image with living speech performs a confrontation between the action of life and the stillness of
death: just as the image is the other of the word, death is the other of animation. When
Shakespeare borrows the lingering time of images for his poetry—when, for instance, Gertrude
describes Ophelia borne up on the brook awhile before her death—he explores his art’s capacity
to confront this relationship of otherness and act as a monument in the context of loss and death
(4.7). These vivid rhetorical images, employing lively figures of speech to address scenes of
mortality, place both speakers and the subjects or objects they address in a state that is neither
fully dead nor fully alive, that is both absent and present. Like a monument, or Ninus’s tomb,
these aesthetic spaces elegize the figures they also make liminally present.
This memorializing effect turns back on the author, too. By crafting scenes in which
poetic engagement with pictures performs a memorial function, Shakespeare gestures toward his
own desire to create an art through which he can be remembered. But Shakespeare’s focus on the
ultimate failure of speech to animate in these images inverts the claims to immortality that are
more familiar in the poetic tradition in which he participates, and which appear in some of his
sonnets. While Sonnet 55 claims that no monument can outlive a poet’s “powerful rhyme,”
Shakespeare repeatedly crafts scenes that contradict this claim.
53
As Gertrude and Hamlet know,
neither rhyme nor vivid description nor memorial painting can fully reanimate the dead. And as
Lucrece understands, there are moments in which becoming as still and as silent as an image is
52
James Heffernan offers a different take on ekphrasis, arguing that in classical poetry ekphrasis represents the
narrative impulse to deliver the visual image from stubborn fixity. The ekphrases of Homer and Vergil animate the
still images they describe, gifting them with the dynamic movement of narrative. Museum of Words 5-7.
Shakespeare, however, is interested in what is gained when the opposite occurs: when characters in a narrative yearn
for fixity.
53
Shakespeare, “Sonnet 55” in Burrow, Complete Poems and Sonnets, 55.2.
19
preferable to enduring the meanings that will be made out of one’s living actions. In effect,
Shakespeare’s pictures reconstruct poetry, not as a place of immortality, but as an invented space
between life and death and an ideal site for mourning.
Here, my thinking draws obliquely on the arguments concerning memorialization and
memory from performance critics such as Joseph Roach and Emily Hodgson Anderson.
54
Despite its inability to be preserved, performance wields cultural power through its attempts to
fill up “the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure” with surrogate
bodies and actions.
55
Performance, these scholars suggest, is empowered to serve as a
“commemorative act” in part because of its tendency to disappear, dramatizing the loss for
which it compensates.
56
I suggest that Shakespeare’s scenes of pictorial engagement perform
their own acts of surrogation, or compensation, through rhetoric. By addressing speech to
inanimate images at moments of loss, Shakespeare imagines a form of verbal art that replays the
losses for which it also serves as a consolation. Shakespeare’s tableaux hold a temporary space
for acknowledging the losses that art cannot replace, even with the most spirited and inventive of
mediums.
54
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
Emily Hodgson Anderson, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).
Performance theory’s broader preoccupation with both loss and liveness was pivotal to the early formation of this
project. Performance is a live medium concerned with the passing of time and the inevitability of absence. It’s sense
of liveness also relies on the presence and response of an audience, an element which inflects my interest in onstage
responses to images, which are, in effect, stand-ins or surrogates for the theatre audience. In addition to Roach and
Anderson, I have drawn on Peggy Phelan, Unmarked:The Politics of Performance (London and New York:
Routledge, 1993); Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2001); Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (University Park, PA: Penn State
University Press, 1992); Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York:
Routledge, 2008). Criticism on the sense of loss in photography has further inflected my thinking. See Barbara
Hodgdon, “Photography, Theater, Mnemonics; or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still” in Theorizing Practice:
Redefining Theatre History, ed. W.B. Worthen and Peter Holland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Susan
Sontag On Photography (New York: Macmillan, 1977); Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1980).
55
Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2.
56
Anderson, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss, 9.
20
Shakespeare dramatizes this memorial effect at the level of language by employing
figures of speech that themselves perform fictional animations. Among them: enargeia, which
summons phantasms before an audience’s eyes; prosopopoeia, which lends imagined speech to
the dead and absent; and ekphrasis, which strives to use words to achieve material presence.
57
Each of these forms is able to achieve, in little and in fiction, the acts of animation and
consolation that are finally denied in Shakespeare’s drama: where King Hamlet’s Ghost
disappears forever after three acts, Yorick’s skull does not speak back, and Hecuba has no real
presence. The paradox of Shakespeare’s lively rhetorical images, then, is that they are ideal
spaces for mourning the dead and imagining death.
On Rhetoric
Rhetorical figures of speech are a primary and essential resource for Shakespeare’s
inventive use of pictorial scenes, and Shakespeare was particularly empowered by ongoing
transformations in the teaching of rhetoric in late Elizabethan England. In late sixteenth- and
early seventeenth-century England, poetry and the visual arts already shared the influence of
classical rhetoric as a common denominator. As Alison Thorne writes, rhetoric was the “main
discursive agency through which the visual and verbal arts were welded together.”
58
In practical
terms, rhetoric provided ways of thinking about the aims and methods of both poetry and the
visual arts. Among the gifts that both Renaissance painting and poetry received from classical
57
In developing readings of these prominent figures of speech, my main focus has been on English rhetorical
handbooks from the early modern period, which offer explanations and examples of rhetorical devices, schemes,
tropes, and figures of speech that are incredibly rich and suggestive. For a list of Renaissance rhetorical handbooks
in English see the appendix to Jenny C. Mann’s Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s
England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
58
Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric, xiii-xiv.
21
rhetoric were a persuasive function, an ability and a habit of shifting perspectives, and a sense of
balanced composition.
59
However, the teaching of rhetoric in this period was also undergoing a
significant transition: as Jenny C. Mann narrates, the Ramist reforms—which divorced logic
from rhetoric as it was taught in Elizabethan grammar schools—produced a rhetorical curriculum
that was “narrowly devoted to the production of style in language.”
60
English rhetorical
handbooks thus focus almost exclusively on a single aspect of Ciceronian rhetoric (elocutio or
the selection of figures of speech to maximize eloquence), while giving short shrift to the
elements of invention (inventio) and logical organization (dispositio) that were more closely tied
to the study of logic.
The scope of rhetoric in England was narrowing to encompass little more than verbal
ornament. As Mann argues, however, the wider social ambitions of classical rhetoric do not
necessarily disappear in these handbooks; rather, they migrate, so that the explications of the
figures of speech within these handbooks wind up providing “a covert content.”
61
To borrow
language from George Puttenham’s handbook, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), rhetorical
figures offered both “ornament” and “efficacy.”
62
Mann is interested in how these rhetorical
59
See Thorne on the persuasive function of images; Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry
and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press,
1978) on the rhetorical habit of shifting perspectives; and Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, on the relationship
between rhetoric and pictorial composition.
60
Mann, 15. See also Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities:
Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1986).
61
Mann, 19.
62
George Puttenham, “The Art of English Poesy,” in Alexander, ed. Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected
Renaissance Literary Criticism, 148.One might say that the branch of criticism exploring rhetorical poetics in early
modern England is dedicated to identifying different ways in which verbal “ornament” is efficacious, whether
socially, politically, intellectually, or ethically. In my reading, I am drawn to scenes in which rhetoric is
performatively efficacious and able to animate at the same time that it is efficacious for mourning the failure of
animation.
22
figures became infused with a sense of place, contributing to the development of an English
vernacular identity. I aim to point out another cache of covert content: the explications of
rhetorical figures reveal both an outsized imagination of rhetoric’s ability to animate inanimate
things and a preoccupation with language that elegizes lost or absent things. English rhetoricians
talk about verbal effectiveness in terms of animacy and inanimacy and celebrate language that
moves hearers to grief and pity.
63
This language is heightened in discussions of figures of speech
that invoke the visual sense, such as enargeia, hypotyposis (a broad term for description), and
certain forms of amplification. One of my suggestions, then, is that the transformation of the
most prominently discussed aims of rhetoric in this period enabled Shakespeare to experiment
with new ways in which to imagine rhetorical efficacy in his poetry and plays. Figures of speech
still retain their power to move and persuade audiences and garner social authority (in Henry
Peacham’s memorable phrase, to make an orator an “emperour of mens minds”), but they also
provide a poet like Shakespeare a means to mediate between the living and the dead.
64
63
Brian Vickers’s influential In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) would attribute these
effects to “the expressive function” of figures of speech: their ability to represent a speaker’s affect and reproduce it
in their audience. As Colleen Rosenfeld notes in Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), this account has been useful for explorations of rhetoric’s social
effects and for work on the history of affect and the formation of dramatic character, but comes with the less salutary
assumption that uses of rhetoric that stray from the end of persuasion are actually “abuses,” in effect, “bad art,” 9. I
would echo Rosenfeld’s qualification of Vickers’s certainty here. I argue that Shakespeare’s rhetorical poetics
employ figures of speech to ends that are quite distinct from persuasion (toward mourning, toward pity, toward
ethical reflection). I do not see these aims as abuses of rhetoric, but rather as transformations in the art.
64
Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593) iii
v
. Here, my methodology is informed by a strand of
criticism significantly launched by the work of Patricia Parker. This criticism identifies figures of speech as the
sources of Renaissance literary forms and marries formalist and historicist methodologies in order to address larger
social questions. See Mann’s Introduction to Outlaw Rhetoric for an excellent description of this methodology, esp.
10-12. Parker’s work leverages this method toward feminist readings of literary form, and others have employed a
similar method to discuss the emergence of an English vernacular identity (Jenny C. Mann, Catherine Nicholson)
and uncover the literary and aesthetic response to the emergence of empiricism in the Renaissance (Rachel
Eisendrath). See Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York and London:
Routledge, 1987) and Inescapable Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Mann, Outlaw
Rhetoric; Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics
and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018). The argument
23
In crafting his pictorial scenes, Shakespeare draws on the humanist and pedagogical
literature that shaped the early modern rhetorical and poetic tradition and inverts the confidence
of their claim that verbal art can animate. When writers from Quintilian and Homer to Erasmus,
Shakespeare, and Sidney claim that their art generates images that are “livelier than life,” they
appeal to a commonplace that tells only half a truth.
65
Indeed, the friction produced through the
fictionality of this rhetoric is one aspect of its enduring appeal. Renaissance rhetoricians and
poetic theorists speak about images in terms that are both animating and elegiac, and an
awareness of absence and loss inflects references to pictures and images in the rhetorical
tradition in multiple ways. As my first chapter uncovers, models of enargeia, or descriptive
vividness, that appear in rhetorical handbooks tend to focus on examples of loss, as when
Quintilian demonstrates amplification by describing the sack of a city.
66
The rhetorical tools and
figures of speech that Shakespeare had at his disposal—figures such as ekphrasis and
apostrophe—are themselves seeded with elegy: on a formal level, they involve both absence and
presence at once. The explications and examples of these figures in rhetorical manuals, which
return again and again to scenes of loss, amplify this elegiac theme.
that literary form engages in social projects is also connected to the larger field of criticism on classical rhetoric in
the early modern period, because classical rhetoric was a form that shaped social subjects and formed humanist
patterns of mind. See Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind; Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the
Renaissance (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985); Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature
and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Stephen Greenblatt,
Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1980).
65
William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton, Arden Third Series
(London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 1.1.39.
66
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education Ed. And trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), 8.3.66.
24
On another level, rhetoricians describe their art as lively because it is like a painting or a
sculpture.
67
But the images that are invoked to authorize the liveliness of rhetoric are themselves
absent or imagined. Humanists who participated in the discourse comparing poetry and painting
drew heavily on the writings of Pliny who described ancient works of art that achieved
lifelikeness and almost seemed to move and breathe.
68
Yet Pliny himself actually saw very little
of the art he describes. Even real material images are not free of a shade of loss. As Keir Elam
notes, drawing on Lacan, absence is always observable in a representational picture because the
“pictorial presence” of a representation depends on the object of representation being gone.
69
These dynamics in verbal and visual art establish the conditions under which Shakespeare
reimagines the role of images in his poetry and drama. Taking a cue from the frequently elegiac
examples of rhetorical efficacy that humanists such as Erasmus, Philip Sidney, and Henry
Peacham use to explain descriptive figures, Shakespeare’s poetry and drama approaches both
described images and performed tableaux as spaces for reflecting on what poetic and dramatic art
has to offer in the face of loss and death.
70
Viewed in this way, the role of Shakespeare’s art is
not to animate—a project that will fail—but to mourn by making a space in which loss has
immanent presence. In other words, Shakespeare uses the tension implicit in these
simultaneously elegiac and animating figures to make the failure of animation its own aesthetic
67
Philip Sidney is particularly keen to refer to the liveliness of images as a point of reference for the liveliness of
poetry, as my first chapter examines.
68
Pliny. Natural History, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, Vol. 9. Loeb Classical Library 394 (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 1952); See also Philostratus Imagines and Callistratus Descriptions, trans. Arthur
Fairbanks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931) for classical descriptions of lifelike art.
69
Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures, 14.
70
My thinking here is also influenced by Colleen Rosenfeld, whose Indecorous Thinking argues that figures of
speech act as ways of thinking and exploring what is possible in any given literary form. She defends “the
epistemological value of form: not as a sign of the aesthetic but as the source of a particular kind of knowledge we
might call poetic,” 1.
25
ambition. Performed reflections on images become spaces for suspending life in order to reflect
on its loss. As meeting places between absence and presence, Shakespeare’s speaking pictures
become a means of responding to loss by suspending time, making space for mourning, and
anticipating death.
Notes on Absence
Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures demonstrates how the development of the arts of
language in early modern England benefited from a dialogue with images that were for the most
part absent. These images were absent not because England lacked a robust visual culture, but
because the paintings, sculptures, and visions to which English poets and rhetoricians appealed
primarily existed in the imaginations of classical figures like Pliny and Quintilian. Though other
scholars interested in the verbal and visual dynamic in early modern English poetry draw
attention to the heavy influence of classical sources on the English conception of art, and a few
scholars—notably Alison Thorne and Richard Meek—have drawn attention to the rhetorical
forms that shape Shakespeare’s visual scenes, most pose the absence of advanced forms of art
and the limited knowledge of Italian art theory in England as a significant limitation to England’s
ability to participate in Renaissance inter-art dialogue.
71
In this respect, I take up Leonard
Barkan’s suggestion that “we may learn more about the place of the visual arts in Elizabethan
literature by focusing on absence than by focusing on presence.”
72
Barkan argues that the
71
Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric, Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing
Company, 2009). Titles that emphasize England’s limited knowledge of Italian theory include Lucy Gent, Picture
and Poetry; Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England; Sabatier, Shakespeare’s Visual Culture; and
David Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in its History and Art (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 1954).
72
Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship,” Renaissance
Quarterly 48.2 (1995), 335.
26
absence of both classical civilization and the material things of Renaissance art inspires the
uniquely inventive Elizabethan consciousness in which something is made out of nothing
73
This
dissertation reveals the central importance of Elizabethan rhetorical culture in shaping the
aesthetic consciousness Barkan celebrates. The absence that Barkan identifies as central to
Elizabethans’ visual aesthetic also corresponds to the dialectic between absence and presence,
animacy and inanimacy that defined rhetorical devices such as ekphrasis and prosopopoeia; that
is, the devices Shakespeare turns to at pivotal aesthetic moments.
My methodological emphases on rhetorical figures of speech and scenes of verbal
engagement with images distinguish this dissertation from other criticism about early modern
English visual culture, which often focuses on the continuities and discontinuities between
English literature and artistic methods, styles, and iconographies.
74
So while my readings of
Shakespeare’s scenes are informed by Judith Dundas’s excellent work on English mimesis and
the use of shadows in painting, Alison Thorne’s productive dialectic between dramatic viewpoint
and perspective in painting, and Stuart Sillars’s and John Astington’s rewarding explorations of
the parallels between Shakespearean staging and the symbolism and structure of early modern art
forms, this dissertation does not reproduce their methods.
75
One of the benefits of taking a rhetorical approach to understanding the verbal-visual
dynamic in Shakespearean aesthetics is that the still-lingering historical questions about the
degree of interaction between English and Italian art theory have less sway over my
73
Ibid
74
See for example Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England and Stuart Sillars, Shakespeare and the
Visual Imagination (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
75
Dundas, Pencil’s Rhetorique; Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric; Sillars, Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination;
Astington, Stage and Picture.
27
interpretations. Nonetheless, I do propose that some of Shakespeare’s scenes are influenced by
values shared between English rhetorical culture and Italian art theory: for example, an
investment in theories about aesthetic response. There is ample evidence that whether or not
English writers were becoming versed in Italian theories of design and composition they were
eager to allude to Italian art theorists who expressed opinions they already shared.
76
Sidney’s
Astrophil and Stella sonnet 7 borrows from Alberti’s treatise on painting; John Florio quotes
Doni’s I Marmi; and Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is referenced by Edward Norgate, George
Hakewell, and Thomas Haydocke, and was sought out by Henry Peacham.
77
Like England’s
poets, these Italian writers celebrate artists’ ability to delight, engage, entrance, move, and even
transform their audiences.
78
In chapter four, I explore how Italian writings about encounters with
visual art, especially sculpture, might influence the way Shakespeare crafts the concluding scene
of King Lear.
Shakespeare’s scenes representing engagement with images affirm a core insight shared
by recent critics of the visual arts in Shakespeare: that Shakespeare imagines pictures as a site of
exchange between a viewer and the elements that shape and make that picture. In this regard, my
work shares central convictions with recent books by B.J. Sokol and Kier Elam. As. B.J. Sokol
writes, “Shakespeare’s depictions [of artists] imply that an artwork is not essentially a thing but
76
John Astington, however, points to the significant influence of Italian artists and designers in the courts of Henry
VIII and Elizabeth, Stage and Picture.
77
These allusions and references can be found in Lucy Gent’s appendix of references to Italian treatises in Picture
and Poetry, 66 ff.
78
B.J. Sokol, in Shakespeare’s Artists, writes about the poets, musicians, and artists in Shakespeare and emphasizes
these qualities along with the ability of artists to make beholders think. The shared emphasis on response is
recognized by both artists and writers. Lomazzo is typical in making a comparison to poetry’s ability to move the
passions when he argues that the motions, or gestures, depicted in art “moove beholders to the selfe same passion of
mirth or sorrow” as the figures represented therein, Aair.
28
is, rather, a transaction” between “an artist, an audience and a culture.”
79
Keir Elam, who gives
an intersubjective account of the use to which Shakespeare puts visual objects in the plays such
as portraits and devices, might add that this artistic transaction is deeply informed by a viewer’s
relationship to the subject represented.
80
For example, absence and loss inflect and even define
the relationship between Hamlet and the portrait of his father he forces Gertrude to examine.
Both of these critics emphasize Shakespeare’s interest in what the beholder brings into the
exchange with a work of art, what E.H. Gombrich calls “the beholder’s share,” and what early
modern rhetoricians and artists describe as response.
81
An emphasis I add to this conversation is that, by nature of Shakespeare’s medium—in
which characters’ responses to images must be verbally scripted and some “images” are entirely
made up of words—the beholder’s share often represents audience’s primary access to visual
images in the drama. Shakespeare’s audiences participate intimately in his characters’ responses
79
Sokol, Shakespeare’s Artists, 3.
80
Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures. Other work on visual images in Shakespeare includes Meek, Narrating the Visual,
Frederick Kiefer’s Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge and London:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Philip Armstrong, Shakespeare’s Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis,
and the Gaze (New York and London: Palgrave, 2000), which offers a psychoanalytic reading of visual scenes in
Shakespeare.
81
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon,
1977). Though at times I draw on iconographic insights such as those articulated by Erwin Panofsky, my approach
to understanding the concepts about art reflected in Shakespeare is more informed by the cultural, response-focused
criticism exemplified by Gombrich and Michael Baxandall. Insights about the Renaissance interest in illusion,
invention, and absorption from Susan Dackerman, Michael Fried, Frederika Jacobs, Victor Stoichita, and Aby
Warburg have also significantly deepened this project. See Susan Dackerman, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge
in Early Modern Europe (Harvard Art Museums; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) on the relationship
between empiricism and invention in art; Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the
Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1980) and The Moment of
Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) for more on response; Fredrika H. Jacobs, The Living
Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) on animacy in Renaissance art;Victor I.
Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen,
Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and The
Pygmalion Effect (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008) on illusion and animacy respectively;
and Aby Warburg, “Durer and Italian Antiquity” on Renaissance associations between vitality and antiquity.
29
to images, and indeed, are invited to mirror them. Meanwhile, images themselves are often
pivotally absent. The absence of material images inflects Shakespeare’s pictorial scenes in a
manner that is profoundly elegiac. Moreover, it constructs viewers’ engagements with
Shakespeare’s pictorial scenes as an engagement with illusion, a structure that I will argue
replicates features of the memento mori prints and vanitas images that were increasingly popular
in Shakespeare’s England.
In what remains of this introduction, I briefly address two contextual issues that inflect
my readings throughout this dissertation: the classical literary inheritance in early modern
England and the structure of the memento mori motif in the visual arts. Though I reserve a
discussion of the religious context of Shakespeare’s pictures for the final chapter of this
dissertation, religious discourse does play a significant part in my argument. Many approaches to
the visual arts in early modern England focus heavily on the ambivalence toward images, even
iconophobia, that accompanied the English Reformation, and argue that this contributed to a
decline in English visual art.
82
I instead argue that Shakespeare’s art benefits from, and
secularizes, terms that were central to key religious debates. The relationship between absence
and presence that so heavily inflects the rhetoric circulating around images in Shakespeare’s
works also contributed to some of the largest theological questions of Shakespeare’s day:
questions about the efficacy of prayer to saints and the dead, the use of images in worship, and
even the presence of God in the Eucharist. In chapter five, I argue that The Winter’s Tale draws
82
On the impact of iconophobia on Shakespeare’s stagecraft, see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice
(Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1981); Ernest P. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English
Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); James A. Knapp, Image Ethics in
Shakespeare and Spenser (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye:
Iconoclasm and Theatre in Early-Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and
B.J. Sokol, Art and Illusion in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).
30
on a theological debate about the power of prayer to invoke presence, which turned on shifting
ideas about the power, and limitation, of the rhetorical figure of apostrophe.
Shakespeare’s Antique Subjects
While the argument of this dissertation is not about the classical tradition, its pages are
nevertheless haunted by classical figures. Ovid and Vergil and their characters—Orpheus,
Aeneas, Lucrece, Hecuba, and Philomela among them—arise with determined frequency. As a
student of an Elizabethan grammar school, these classical sources provided Shakespeare with the
raw material of invention and creative experiment. They, like the figures of speech and canons of
rhetoric, constitute Shakespeare’s lexicon. I found in writing these chapters that the more fluent I
became with these sources, the more eloquently Shakespeare’s pictures spoke.
These reappearing figures arise from Shakespeare’s most readily available resources. In
the chapters that follow, I show how he marshals them toward a revised vision of aesthetic
success, and one that, strikingly, undercuts parts of their legacy in the early modern period.
Despite Aeneas’s reputation as an iconic epic hero and Ovid’s and Horace’s claims to an
immortal life of fame in which they live forever, re-animated by the breath of their readers, I
show Shakespeare levying these sources toward an anti-heroic and anti-immortal agenda; that is,
toward a poetics of mourning. Aeneas’s heroism is refracted in Hamlet and Lucrece, who both
replay scenes from Aeneas’s story but resist his epic and imperial narrative while, for a time,
they “lose the name of action” in favor of lyric grieving (3.1.87). Cordelia’s silent corpse in
King Lear, Hecuba’s mute picture in Lucrece, and Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale are all
addressed with speech that lends breath and imagines the reanimation of the dead. But in each of
these scenes Shakespeare ultimately qualifies the vision of artistic animation that undergirds the
31
commonplace claim of poetic immortality. Indeed, Shakespeare reconstructs these tableaux as
memento mori—pictures whose stillness and silence anticipate and even perform the mortality of
their viewers by drawing them into a stony stillness. As I demonstrate, the most optimistic
classical visions of heroism and authorial immortality are qualified whenever Shakespeare
reflects on the ethical challenge of representing and responding to the losses of the past in
literature and art.
The distance and absence of the past pose a problem of representation which is
simultaneously a problem of craft and of ethics. Even the most vivid poetic images cannot
literally animate the dead or offer immortal life. Meanwhile, the attempt to represent the
sufferings of others on the way to garnering poetic authority is itself ethically opaque.
Shakespeare’s pictures instead construct poesie as an invented space in between life and death: a
space in which absence and loss can, like a painting, achieve immanent presence and in which,
figuratively, the dead can speak. It is to this end that poetic figures such as ekphrasis and
prosopopoeia—themselves tools that derive from classical poetry and rhetoric—are so useful to
Shakespeare. These figures summon fictional presence and fictional animation but leave room
for drawing attention to their own fictionality, as James Heffernan has demonstrated by attending
to the “representational friction” of classical ekphrasis.
83
As the many allusions to Ovid’s Orpheus in this dissertation will show, however,
Shakespeare’s relationship to antiquity cannot only be defined by a series of departures. Rather,
the classical tradition makes room for exploring the failure of animation in art. Orpheus appears
often in these pages because I employ him, as Geoffrey Hartman and Charles Segal have
83
Heffernan, Museum of Words, 4. See Also, Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion.
32
employed him, as a figure of animation that fails.
84
However, I am interested in how this failure
of animation can be reconstrued to construct a distinct aesthetic ambition. Orpheus’s persuasive
poetry allows him to journey to the underworld and there wields a remarkable stilling power—
lulling even the gods to stillness. Once he fails in the mission to bring his beloved Eurydice
home from the house of the dead, Orpheus’s poetry changes. He fills up the space between this
loss and his own death with song, weaving the tales that fill up book X of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, tales to which Shakespeare frequently alludes.
85
As songs that create in the
context of loss and failure, Orpheus’s inventions double as acts of mourning.
86
For my purposes, Orpheus is a figure for what one can do in the context of failed
animation and what one can make with the material of a past that cannot be made fully present.
In Shakespeare, scenes in which dramatic action decelerates, and attention is drawn to a visual
scene—Hamlet’s confrontation with Yorick’s skull beside Ophelia’s grave, Marcus’s description
of Lavinia’s mute and mutilated gestures—reenact an Orphic drama. The poetic speech that
arises in these scenes may appeal to the highest arts of lively poetic invention, but it does not
replace loss. Rather, it imagines poetry as a space to mourn loss. Poetic and performed images
borrow the stillness of visual media—a gesture that echoes Orpheus’s power to still action in the
underworld—and reconstruct these performed or described tableaux as living monuments of loss.
When the hope of animation fails, Orpheus’s poetry produces stillness and invents as a means of
mourning. Shakespeare’s speaking pictures borrow both of these features. By turning to figures
84
Hartman, Beyond Formalism, and Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1988).
85
Colin Burrow argues that Shakespeare alludes to Book X more than any other, though this may be an
overstatement, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013), 105.
86
On the figure of Orpheus in Shakespeare’s poetry, see also Jenny C. Mann, “Reckning with Shakespeare’s
Orpheus in The Rape of Lucrece,” in Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play, ed. Lynn Enterline (London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2019).
33
such as Orpheus, I show Shakespeare constructing a qualified vision of artistic success. When
the metaphors of animation are belied, what remains is a vision of art as a space of mourning.
My reading of Shakespeare’s employment of classical allusion toward mourning owes
much to scholars of the classical tradition in Shakespeare. Despite Ben Jonson’s slighting
reference to Shakespeare’s “small Latine and lesse Greeke,” Shakespeare’s classical allusions are
sufficient to prompt a significant body of criticism. Other scholars have produced encyclopedic
accounts of his classical references (T.W. Baldwin, for example) and carefully traced his
inspirations from and responses to the tragedies of Seneca, Euripides, and Aeschylus (Robert
Miola, Tanya Pollard).
87
Colin Burrow's excellently researched and nuanced readings
demonstrate that Shakespeare knew a great deal of classical literature and was keenly interested
in inventing on that knowledge. Moreover, the ways in which Shakespeare used his classical
knowledge transformed throughout his career, suggesting an author who was repeatedly
returning to classical materials as the ground of creative and reflexive thought. As Burrow has
argued, imitating the ancients was “just what you did” as an Elizabethan playwright, the question
was what you could make it do for you.
88
One of my repeated arguments is that classical examples did not do for Shakespeare what
an Elizabethan educator would have claimed they would do. That is, they do not
straightforwardly offer models of heroic behavior for imitation or refine lawyerly persuasive
skill. Rather, early modern educational models offered oblique lessons in empathetic
imagination, subject formation, and ethical reasoning on which I suggest Shakespeare was keen
87
T.W. Baldwin, Willam Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944);
Robert Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Tanya
Pollard, Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
88
Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, 5.
34
to invent. Here, I follow Colin Burrow, Lynn Enterline, and Jonathan Bate, who each outline the
opportunities raised by the oddities of an educational model in which boys imitated the personas
of suffering Ovidian women like Hecuba and Ariadne and translated both Vergilian set-piece
speeches and Ovid’s erotic lines, claiming that these exercises would mold courtly gentlemen
and successful citizens.
89
Each of these scholars has built upon Anthony Grafton and Lisa
Jardine’s defining 1986 work, From Humanism to the Humanities, which traced the development
of the early modern humanist curriculum, drawing attention to the ways that, in Burrows words,
it “didn’t quite add up.”
90
For Jonathan Bate, the result of this intermingling of Vergil’s heroics
and Ovid’s erotics is that “Shakespeare’s classical fabling is “profoundly antiheroic” and
“constantly attuned to the force of sexual desire.”
91
For Lynn Enterline, grammar school
instruction in expression and bodily movement—particularly while under the threat of
punishment—produced “a significant detour between event and feeling” generating “habits of
alterity” in the schoolboy experience of emotion.
92
Enterline accounts for the “classical cast” of
the passions in Shakespeare through a psychoanalytic reading in which classroom trauma
charges the classical scenes first encountered in the schoolroom with overdetermined meaning.
93
The educational model of the Elizabethan grammar school brought emotion and eroticism to the
fore by way of the classics. As such, classical literature offered early modern playwrights more
89
Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline,
Emotion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made
Shakespeare (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019).
90
Burrow, 43; See also Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities.
91
Bate, 15.
92
Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 8.
93
Ibid., 26-27.
35
than a source for morally exemplary behavior or myths of political authority. It gave them the
passions.
In my reading, the erotic is not the only force that softens the heroic and epic; so too do
simple scruples. Steeped as he is in the voices of Ovidian and Vergilian suffering, Shakespeare is
keen to attend to and amplify the experiences of loss that accompany his narratives rather than
accepting them as collateral damage in an epic trajectory. Dido and Hecuba are as important to
Shakespeare’s poetics as Aeneas. Attending to the sympathies and passions of these alternate
characters in the epic tradition contributes to Shakespeare’s steady dismantling of myths of
Tudor authority, a project that Heather James has outlined in Shakespeare’s allusions to the Troy
myth.
94
Even if Shakespeare and his contemporaries might have dismissed or qualified the moral
and social lessons their teachers attempted to convey by way of Latin sources, there is a distinct
shade of ethical thought in Shakespeare’s classicism.
Here my thinking has been spurred Burrow’s description of Shakespeare’s Ovidian
representations of suffering and Vergilian representations of the past. In the Metamorphoses in
particular, Ovid frequently returns to the dilemma of attempting to represent unrepresentable
pain. His rhetoric confronts the dilemma of attempting to speak for the subject of pain, suffering,
or tyrannical injustice while also acknowledging its own failure. So, Ovid’s suffering characters
are metamorphosed as they struggle to speak their experience. Philomela’s “jug jug,” Syrinx’s
humming reeds, and Hecuba’s mad barking are the voice of failed representation. If in doing so,
rhetoric draws attention to itself (perhaps even, in Burrows words “at the expense of the
suffering to which it supposedly testifies”) it also points to the ruptures between what language
94
Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy.
36
can evoke and what humans can suffer.
95
For Enterline, this failure is a root source, in Ovid, of a
highly self-alienated and self-conscious authorial voice that often produces artistic speech at the
expense of violence to female bodies.
96
For Shakespeare, the conflict between authorial self-
promotion and human suffering is posed as an authorial ethical dilemma, a dilemma I explore
particularly through Shakespeare’s attempt to represent Lucrece in his ambitious epyllion. As
Burrow argues, Shakespeare was keen to hear this “mute music of pain, which was perhaps
Ovid’s greatest and most lasting creation.”
97
One of my central claims is that Shakespeare
employs the tableau as an aesthetic space in which to engage this dilemma. Shakespeare uses the
still moment of visual display to register and reflect on the dangers of a poetic tradition that
privileges the mute (and primarily female) sufferer as a symbol of a poet’s aesthetic power.
Shakespeare’s tableaux enforce attention on the difficulties of representing the pain of the past in
art, while the figures of rhetoric enact both the desire to give the past new life and the
impossibility of doing so.
The oldness of antiquity is also a resource for Shakespeare’s investigation of
representational ethics. Burrow has argued that Shakespeare borrows Vergil’s voice in order to
sound antique.
98
When Hamlet or Lucrece replay scenes from the Aeneid, Shakespeare produces
emotional drama by juxtaposing the stylistic effects of antiquity with the tragically modern affect
of speakers who, Burrow writes, “cannot quite bring back to life the passions of the ancient
95
Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, 112.
96
Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature
and Culture (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
97
Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, 118.
98
Ibid., 70.
37
world, or of Aeneas.”
99
As a result, “the gulf of time becomes an emotional gulf.”
100
Burrow is
quick to clarify: this does not mean that Shakespeare shows a historical awareness of his own
distance from Vergil’s Rome or expresses a nostalgia for a lost past, though he is aware of the
dramatic effects that are made possible through layered temporalities.
101
Even if Shakespeare’s
plays avoid a humanist nostalgia for antiquity, however, his choice to “make classical passages
sound ‘old’ and powerfully moving because they were old” shows a distinct awareness of the
representational limitations posed by the absence of the past.
102
As, for example, Lucrece
struggles to bring to life the emotions of Aeneas and Hecuba, her difficulty also gestures to her
own fate. She too is on the way to becoming an antiquated and inaccessible fragment of
historical emotion. Lucrece’s ability to engage and sympathize with these figures from the past is
amplified by the form of the Troy image. The image, too, is antiquated, and it participates in a
kind of suspended animation, or absent presence, that signals the state into which Lucrece sees
herself entering.
103
To borrow from the work of art historian Michael Ann Holly, Lucrece is
aware of the melancholy that infuses works of art that retain a form of material presence but have
99
Ibid.
100
Ibid.
101
Ibid., 71. An awareness of the distance and difference of the historical past does, however, seem to have been
arising in this period through the emergence of antiquarianism and the rediscovery of ancient sculpture. See Leonard
Barkan, Unearthing the Past; Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things; and Peter Burke, The Renaissance
Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970).
102
Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, 70.
103
Note Peter Schwenger on Virgil's shield ekphrasis: "There is a melancholy associated with physical objects...The
melancholy I am speaking of...is generated by the act of perception, perception of the object by the subject. This
perception, always falling short of full possession, gives rise to a melancholy that is felt by the subject and is
ultimately for the subject. It is we who are to be lamented, and not the objects that evoke this emotion in us without
ever feeling it themselves'" qtd. Elam, 49. Elam notes how Shakespeare, like Vergil, attributes affectivity to objects,
but he avoids Schwenger's, and my, bigger point—the object's failure to become a subject points to the subject's
future life as object.
38
lost the world that gave them life.
104
I argue that Shakespeare’s characters engage images—
whether visually performed or described—at similar moments of awareness that, as their
experiences of loss recede into the past, they too will become irretrievable and unnarratable. So,
King Lear employs rhetoric that seems to halt time and focus attention on the body of his
daughter Cordelia and Queen Gertrude constructs an image of the suffering Ophelia hovering
above the water that signals the passing of time. In these moments, the image or tableau becomes
a place to stop and mourn. They represent, in other words, a profound conflation of mourning
and melancholia.
105
One does not necessarily hope to work through and move past these scenes
of negative emotion and yet they remain ethically and aesthetically productive.
Memento Mori
In Shakespeare’s works, pauses in dramatic action afford a space for mourning in the
visual realm—mourning both the losses that have occurred in the past and those that will attend
the future: notably, the deaths of both the viewers in the fiction and their analogues in the
audience. The theatrical tableau, as a stilled or decelerated moment in time, serves as an ideal
medium for hosting these anxieties about future and past. As still spaces that both threaten death
and practice for its inevitable arrival, these scenes draw on the religious symbolism of the
memento mori and vanitas traditions. While anticipating the inevitability of decay, these images
also still time, forging a space for both mourning and ostentatious display. A compelling
example of this time-stilling effect can be found in Hans Holbein’s engraving, Death’s Coat of
104
Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art, Essays in the Arts (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2013), xi.
105
See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Vol. 14 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 243-258.
39
Arms (Figure 0.1). A death’s head glares out of the page at the viewer from the center of a
heraldic shield. Atop the crest of arms sits an hourglass over which a pair of skeletal arms holds
a heavy stone in a gesture of morbid self-coronation or imminent self-annihilation. While the
figures in the image engage the viewer’s attention, the suspended rock seems ready at any
moment to fall, smashing the hourglass and arresting time, much as this still image lures its
beholder into a contemplative and deathlike stillness. Similarly, the beauty and illusionism of a
vanitas painting may point to the highest possibilities of art, but to engage with the image is also
to be drawn into an act of self-negation.
Shakespeare’s scenes of engagement with images, then, take part in a larger trend of
recognizing that the illusionism of art—like the fleeting animation of rhetoric—ultimately points
to its own fictionality. Shakespeare writes his poetry and plays at a moment in which, in the
world of the visual arts, paintings begin to focus more heavily on their own representative labor.
As Victor Stoichita has demonstrated, the turn to the seventeenth century witnessed a new
preference for images that placed the narrative subject matter of traditional painting in tension
with a simultaneous reflection on the ultimate vanity and illusoriness of artistic representation.
106
In the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries, many paintings took the form of diptychs or
triptychs which might include on their reverse an iconographic reminder of the vanity of human
artistic labors, most often in the form of a skull, as in Hans Memling’s 15
th
century diptych of St.
John and St. Veronica, the back of which is haunted by a death’s head and a poisoned chalice
(Figure 0.1). One point of the painted skull was to assert a more ultimate reality—the reality of
death—than the painted image it haunted, a reality that rendered the labor of representative art
vain. In this tradition, the created image is haunted by its negation, by death. As Stoichita writes,
106
Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image.
40
“The skull is the negative of the painting in the same way that the 'reverse' is the negative of the
‘right way round.’ The right side is the space devoted to the ‘image,’ and its reverse the side
devoted to the ‘truth.’"
107
The art of painting, Stoichita suggests, had long been poised in
dialogue with its other, with negativity, absence, and death. In this dialectic, images become
aware of their representational status, their falseness.
It is also in this period, however, that still life and vanitas paintings begin to emerge as
their own form of art. The objects that had once haunted the backs of paintings migrated to the
front. The still life and vanitas images that would become so popular in the seventeenth century
could not have been recognized as paintings in their own right until, Stoichita writes, “what was
originally conceived as antiimage becomes wholly image.”
108
As still lives and memento mori
images emerge from their role as supplement to religious and narrative paintings, they establish a
new artistic focus on the problems of representation. Artistic illusion becomes a reflection of its
own vanity. Stoichita points to Jacob De Gheyn II’s 1603 Vanitas (Figure 0.2) as potentially the
first independent memento mori painting. The image prominently features a skull beneath a large
reflective orb. As Stoichita observes, the skull that is freed from the back side of a religious
image “re-establishes itself as the negative of the world which it now faces.”
109
The painting
acts like a mirror or a negative that reveals the fragility and illusoriness of both itself and the
world.
It is likely that, for instance, King Lear, composed somewhere between 1603 and 1606,
inflects its final theatrical image with a self-awareness that echoes the reflexiveness of De
107
Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 21.
108
Ibid.
109
Ibid., 29.
41
Gheyn’s 1603 Vanitas. In Lear’s concluding tableau, which is often compared to a Pieta, what
would have been recognized as the subject matter of an image or painting (the arrangement of
figures in a potentially religious scene) is merged with its negative, with the reminder of
mortality (“she’s dead as earth”) that underscores the illusoriness of representative art
(5.3.259).
110
In the context of theatrical performance, this reminder of mutability is particularly
apt: as Peggy Phelan has asserted, the liveliness of performance is conditioned on performance’s
status as a form that is always in the act of disappearing.
111
The theatrical tableau becomes like
the memento mori skulls of the visual arts, confronting its viewers with a self-reflexive “image
of…horror” (5.3.263). In Lear, however, this negative image is complicated by other aesthetic
messages. It occupies the same visual space as a tableau of figures that evoke a Christian
narrative of resurrection and redemption and might also borrow its monumental form from pagan
arts that appeal to the animating power of artistic labor. The result is an image of profound
ambivalence that simultaneously asserts the vanity of dramatic images and maintains a gesture
toward the animating and death-defying power of aesthetic production. The scene becomes like a
sculpture poised between hardness and animation, an aesthetic pause between death and life. My
final interest, then, is in the apparent confrontation between animating and mourning that takes
place in the space of Shakespeare’s speaking pictures. These scenes represent Shakespeare’s art
as efficacious in two senses. It is simultaneously performative, able to imagine a form of life
where life is not, and an apt tool for mourning in response to the failure of that exact fiction. The
aesthetic vividness of Shakespeare’s pictures acts as a consolation for their own failure to
literalize the animating motif; they represent, as it were, loss and consolation combined.
110
See Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 4, on the traditional subjects of a “painting.”
111
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, 87.
42
Chapter Outline
This dissertation begins with an examination of the rhetorical context in which
Shakespeare crafts his poetry before offering close readings of several of Shakespeare’s most
memorable visual scenes. Chapter One, “Speaking Pictures in Early Modern English Rhetoric,”
traces how early modern rhetoricians including Erasmus, Henry Peacham, John Hoskins, Philip
Sidney, and George Puttenham consistently leave open the possibility that rhetoric, especially in
the descriptive vein, should do work other than persuade or demonstrate verbal skill. Despite
their focus on generativity, a preponderance of examples concerned with grief and elegy suggest
that verbal description is also able to suspend time, to erect monuments for lost things, and to
make space for mourning and remembering. In making this argument, I draw on both the
ambiguous animation in Philip Sidney’s definition of poetry as a “speaking picture” and the
general absence, the rhetorical nature, of the “pictures” referred to in early modern rhetoric. Also
central to this chapter is the moment when a painter appears on stage to collaborate with a
grieving father in the revised edition of Sir Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy: Heironimo’s
ekphrasis imagines a picture of his son’s murder that is visually impossible but might indeed act
as an enduring aesthetic space in which he can mourn. In crafting this image, Kyd’s reviser
shows how early modern dramatists experimented with the ability of verbal pictures to act as
spaces of confrontation between inventive speech and mourning.
Shakespeare takes a cue from the elegiac examples of description that appear in these
works and in contemporaneous early modern handbooks. The subsequent chapters demonstrate
how, in his poetry and drama, descriptive speech and meditations on images weigh the
consolations his literary and dramatic forms can invent in response to human experiences of loss
43
and death in time. These scenes reimagine the functions of key descriptive rhetorical figures such
as ekphrasis, prosopopoeia, and enargeia even while they constitute an ethical demand to
evaluate how poetry and art respond to grief and suffering. In Chapter Two, “Refusing
Consolation in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” I read Shakespeare’s most familiar and sustained
ekphrasis alongside descriptions of the figure of prosopopoeia in early modern handbooks,
arguing that Lucrece’s choice to turn to prosopopoeia transforms an ekphrastic scene borrowed
from Aeneas’s epic into a place of perpetual mourning by using a rhetorical form that suspends
her in a form of half-life and resists the movement of the poem past her own experience of loss.
My third chapter, “Hamlet’s Absent Images,” uncovers a connection between the
descriptive rhetorical tradition and the always-asked but possibly unanswerable question of why
Hamlet delays. While attempting to persuade Hamlet to act, the Ghost of King Hamlet employs
speech so vivid that it summons images as if before the eyes of a listener, a technique
rhetoricians termed enargeia. Though the Ghost’s enargeic speech, in a literal sense, makes
absence present, it inspires mourning not heroic acts, interrupting the unfolding revenge
narrative. Other images summoned by the play, including the infamous tableau of Yorick’s skull
and Gertrude’s lyrical description of Ophelia’s death, reiterate the power of images to interrupt
narrative trajectories and make space for mourning. And yet, given that they take the form of a
ghostly speech or a commonplace reminder of mortality, the images in Hamlet also turn attention
to the complexities of memorializing loss in a form as fleeting as dramatic performance or lyric
speech.
The final two chapters address moments in which Shakespeare’s rhetoric engages with
explicitly visual onstage displays, including King Lear’s concluding tableau and Hermione’s
statue in The Winter’s Tale. Motivated by a surprisingly long record of allusions to sculpture in
44
responses to King Lear, my fourth chapter examines how Shakespeare’s tragedy recreates
Renaissance responses to the plastic arts in a tragic theatrical tableau. Records of Renaissance
reactions to art frequently describe works of art as striking their viewers speechless or bringing
“astonied” viewers to stillness, and yet King Lear laments the “men of stones” who witness the
death of his daughter while his own rhetoric declines to a howl (5.3.255). I argue that the play
reaches toward the still and stony forms of visual art in order to meditate on what form of ethical
or aesthetic response the theatrical image might successfully demand from its audience.
Lastly, in “Art, Apostrophe, and Animation in The Winter’s Tale” I argue that the
apostrophes addressed to Hermione’s statue at the end of Shakespeare’s romance borrow from
both ancient commonplaces about vivid and lifelike art and early modern religious debates about
real presence in the Eucharist, which turned on arguments about the rhetorical—and hence
ineffectual—nature of apostrophe. Borrowing from these discourses allows Shakespeare to
glance across the ongoing conversation about the danger of religious images even while
appropriating the apostrophic form of religious prayer, and its accompanying belief, for his own
art. In this play Shakespeare auditions the possibility that verbal art might be as powerfully
presencing as a divine prayer. This appropriation raises the stakes of the tension between
figurative and literal imaginations of verbal efficacy. Does artful speech animate or mourn, does
it motivate action or turn inward toward aesthetic reflection, does it summon the living presence
of others—an audience, the gods, God—or does it, like Prospero’s insubstantial pageant, melt
“into air, into thin air”?
112
112
The Tempest ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare,
2011), 4.1.150.
45
Figures
Figure 0.1. Death’s Coat of Arms, Hans Holbein the Younger. Woodblock Print. 1538.
46
Figure 0.2. Diptych of Saint John and Saint Veronica (reverse), Hans Memling. Oil on panel.
ca.1475. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
47
Figure 0.3. Vanitas Still Life, Jacques de Gheyn II. Oil on wood. 1603. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
48
Chapter One
Speaking Pictures in Early Modern Rhetoric
Some figures of speech have a habit of overachievement, often undertaking more work
than they are seemingly summoned to accomplish. The capaciousness of rhetorical and poetic
figures may be one part of what made them so attractive to early modern English writers,
inviting an entire genre of literary criticism dedicated to expounding their uses. Elizabethan
rhetorical handbooks lavish attention on the possible uses of eloquence. When George
Puttenham celebrated the usefulness of poetic figures in 1589, he wrote that figures lend a
“lively” grace to words with the effect of “giving them ornament or efficacy.”
113
What
Puttenham means is that figurative language beautifies speech (drawing attention to the skill of
the speaker) and also helps speech—whether poetic or oratorical—to achieve the ends toward
which it aims. Writing a humanist treatise on poetry in Elizabethan England, Puttenham is aware
of the commonplace schoolroom argument that eloquent speech served a primarily moral end:
that what figures of speech can be said to “do” is help writers make their language persuasive,
moving, and ultimately morally edifying.
114
And yet Puttenham’s “efficacy” is a stunningly
vague term. It suggests that rhetorical figures make speech effective but avoids suggesting any
limitations to that effect. In effect, Puttenham leaves open the possibility that figures of speech
might do, and do, and do without end. In the context of the Ramist reforms to educational
113
George Puttenham, “The Art of English Poesy,” in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance
Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 148.
114
On this humanist argument about the moral value of rhetorical training, see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine,
From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). See the introduction above for other scholars who have
dedicated critical attention to the other purposes—social, political, emotional, artistic, and poetic—toward which
rhetorical training was leveraged.
49
curriculum, wherein training in logic and dialectic was separated from training in eloquence, the
practice of eloquence in England was in the process of breaking free from primarily persuasive
and moral ends.
115
Many of the most celebrated passages of English literature seem to bear out
this possibility. Contrary to the humanist apologetic, they show what happens when poetic
figures land somewhere other than squarely on a moralist’s commonplace. Indeed, the very
metaphors that humanists used to argue for the value of poetry sometimes wriggle free of the
lesson for which they are recruited. This chapter takes its cue from one of those slippery
metaphors: the metaphor that appeals to an image, or, in Sidney’s famed phrase, of poetry as a
“speaking picture.”
Sidney’s metaphor is paradigmatically over-achieving. Admitting that he speaks
“metaphorically,” Sidney attempts to constrain the effects he attributes to poetry’s speaking
pictures by naming their end: “to teach and delight.”
116
But if Sidney tries to corral the effects of
the poetry he describes while using the metaphor of poetry as a picture, he does not constrain the
metaphor itself. Sidney’s metaphor about poetry as a speaking picture, alongside other
rhetoricians’ comparisons between effective speech and the visual arts, ultimately indicates a
role for inventive poetic speech that is distinct from persuasion, education, and even simple
delight. Rather, inventive speech—and particularly descriptive speech that offers an illusion of
vivid presence —is summoned to navigate a tension between absence and presence, making it a
particularly useful tool for representing experiences of loss and grief. This absent-present
115
On this transition and its effects on the practice of rhetoric, see Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and
Practice (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
116
Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’ in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary
Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 10. References to this text are hereafter
parenthetical.
50
dynamic in rhetorical references to pictures sets up the conditions for the Shakespearean
descriptions and tableaux I will explore throughout the rest of this dissertation.
117
Two vital aspects of Sidney’s metaphor motivate my reading of images in poetry and
rhetoric. First, it makes something where, strictly speaking, there is nothing. Poems are not
pictures, and even if they summon vivid images in the minds of their readers, they do not render
visual art present in any real sense. Secondly, it vivifies. Though pictures are inanimate, Sidney
makes them speak. These elements of Sidney’s metaphor react upon combination, and the result
is that poetic speech is granted a strange kind of semi-animating power. When Sidney’s
metaphor invokes poetry as an invented and living image where no image previously existed, he
reframes poetic speech as a way of wielding inventiveness against the spectres of absence and
even death. The moment Sidney turns to a metaphor about pictures to describe the work of
poetry is also the moment that he lends poetic speech the ability to vivify nothingness.
By way of a metaphor, Sidney poses poetic creation as a response to absence. His treatise
emphasizes again and again that the pictures in poetry are worthy of being praised because of
their inventedness. They are described as vivid and lively because they are summoned out of
nothing. The poet exceeds the astronomer and the natural philosopher because he is “lifted up
with the vigor of his own imagination” to make “forms such as never were in nature” (8). His
pictures exceed those of painters because they “borrow nothing of what is” (11). This central
117
Rhetorical references to images in this period show a heightened awareness of the absent-present dialectic in
language. The sorts of images to which rhetoricians commonly appeal—most often paintings—were celebrated for
their presencing effect. When rhetoricians appeal to images that are themselves not present, they amplify a sense of
longing for presence that words do not ultimately achieve. This dynamic anticipates the absent-present dialectic that
would become central to deconstructive criticism and its insights into the limitations of language. In Of
Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)
Jacques Derrida describes the logocentrism at the heart of the western philosophical tradition as a form of longing
for the absolute proximity of “voice and the meaning of being.” Language, however, will never deliver the presence
towards which it gestures. By triangulating words with images, then, early modern rhetoricians display their
alertness to the absence that haunts the material with which they practice their art.
51
metaphor in Sidney’s defense points to a larger connection in this period between appeals to the
vividness of rhetoric and poetry and a project of using evocative, descriptive speech to respond
to loss—both to represent loss and provide a form of aesthetic consolation for it. As I will
demonstrate through examples from several early modern rhetorical handbooks, models of
effective descriptive speech repeatedly return to scenes of loss and lament. Elizabethan rhetorical
handbooks regularly introduce figures of speech alongside both examples and explanations of
when and how the figure can be used, elements that deliver their own implicit content. The praise
for descriptive speech in these texts is consistently about inventiveness and vividness or
“liveliness,” while the examples employed are fundamentally elegiac. Ultimately, I argue, this
rhetoric employs “pictures” as a metaphor for what poetry and poetic speech has to offer in the
context of loss.
Leonard Barkan has explored the ways in which Elizabethan culture was aware of the gap
between the imaginary pictures they summoned in poetry and the “real” painted pictures which,
for the most part, they also didn’t see.
118
We might find it curious that English poets in the early
modern period described poetry as working like a picture or a painting given that these poets had
relatively little exposure to painting, sculpture, and other forms of high art, especially viewed in
comparison with the vibrant art scene of their continental neighbors. But this metaphor was
itself received. It arrived fully formed as a gift from the ancients who crafted that ambiguous
commonplace: ut pictura poesis, as in pictures, so in poetry. This metaphor linking rhetoric to
the visual arts, and to painting in particular, was used to praise certain qualities celebrated in both
art and poetry: its lifelikeness, expressiveness, charm, and its compelling ability to preserve the
118
Leonard Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship,”
Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), 326-351.
52
skillful labor of an artist. But for English poets this metaphor came layered with an awareness of
loss. Not only had the vibrant rhetorical culture that generated the metaphor receded into the
past, but so too had the artistic talent that motivated the comparison. These metaphors, then, also
included a backward glance at a world that perhaps was inhabited by lifelike and captivating
pictures. As a result, Barkan writes, pictorialism and the appeal to images in Renaissance
literature become “the site of a particular consciousness involving on the one hand absence and
loss and on the other the possibility of inventing something out of nothing.”
119
Without being
tied to a more robust visual culture, English rhetoricians could make “images” do whatever they
wanted them to do.
120
The tasks that rhetoricians ultimately set for poetic images, whether it is describing a
fallen city or making inanimate things appear alive, consistently attempt to tread a line between
inventive creation and awareness of loss. Not only does this tension between absence and
invention inhabit the rhetorical justifications for poetry that, like Sidney’s, recruit the visual arts,
but it is also fundamental to how poets employ the descriptive rhetorical figures that are most
image-like. Rhetorical figures related to imagery, description, and vivid representation hold a
prominent place in early modern rhetorical handbooks. Enargeia, or descriptive force that makes
something appear as if before the eyes of a reader or audience member, is key to rhetorical
effectiveness and verbal copia in nearly every early modern poetic or rhetorical treatise, largely
119
Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak,” 336.
120
Of course, early modern England did have a visual culture, relatively rich in decorative arts, portraiture, drama,
and prints, though the visual arts never gained the prominence in England that they had in the Italian Renaissance or
in Northern Europe. The images that were most prevalent, however, including memorial portraiture, emblems, and
memento mori prints paid a great deal of attention to mortality and absence. I suspect that early modern writers’
familiarity with these tropes in the visual arts would have also inflected how they thought about images in poetry.
On Shakespeare’s employment of vocabulary borrowed from the visual arts, see Kier Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures:
Visual Objects in the Drama (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). See also David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in
Tudor England (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990).
53
because it is emphasized in one of their key shared sources: Quintilian. Henry Peacham and
others group prosopopoeia, or the speech of an absent or imagined figure, among a series of
descriptive figures—descriptions of people, places, events, actions, and times—that are marked
by their ability to make absent or imagined things seem present and even animate. And while
ekphrasis, what we would tend to think of as the rhetorical figure of description, is rarely
referred to by name in these handbooks, verbal descriptions of visual scenes punctuate both
English literature and the exemplary texts of rhetoricians.
121
The descriptive figures that appear
in early modern poetry and drama are concrete manifestations of the rhetorical tradition of
speaking about pictures in the early modern period. In turn, the ways that rhetoricians talk about
images in their handbooks and treatises exert a powerful influence on what these poetic images
are seen as capable of accomplishing.
Poets and rhetoricians recruit imagined or absent images to aid in their defenses of poetry
and eloquence in a manner that suggests a counter-narrative to the primarily moral humanist
narrative about poetry. Metaphorical appeals to images, such as Sidney’s description of poetry as
a “rich tapestry” and a “speaking picture,” as well as explanations of the uses of descriptive
figures tend to allude to aims other than the persuasion or moral instruction that are more
familiar as humanist aims (9-10). Adam McKeown has argued that Renaissance poets use the ut
121
Ekphrasis appears as a rhetorical exercise in the Greek rhetorical textbooks known as Progymnasmata. The
Progymnasmata were influential in the shaping of humanist rhetorical training, and there was at least one translation
of Apthonius’s Progymnasmata into English in the period (Richard Rainolde’s 1563 Foundacion of Rhetorike). In
Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012),
20-21 Lynn Enterline cites an example of a 1592 edition of the Progymnasmata that was given to a pupil by his
tutor, though it is unclear whether the text was widely used in English schoolrooms. Classroom rhetorical training
and the rhetorical handbooks directed primarily at courtiers and poets show a much more direct connection to Latin
oratorical treatises by Quintilian and Cicero, which do not include discussion of the figure by its more familiar
name. Nevertheless, English poets were highly familiar with the figure from its appearance in the epic poetry of
Homer and Vergil, the writings of Petrarch, and others. English poets use ekphrasis with great acumen and nuance
of allusion to previous sources, as my chapter on the ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s Lucrece demonstrates. They simply
do not use the term with the same frequency as other terms such as descriptio, evidentia, or enargeia.
54
pictura poesis motif to slip between the aims of the visual arts and moral philosophy. Poets want
to be neither the producers of senseless, sensuous images, which are easily morally devalued, nor
bound by the limitations of moral teaching.
122
My argument here takes McKeown’s point that
images—both as metaphors and as described pictures—seem to stand out as odd recruits to a
moral project. What I hope to add, however, is greater attention to some of the particular, non-
didactic aims to which “lively” images are recruited, aims that are inflected by the inventive
nature of the figures themselves as well as by poets’ relationship to the lost antiquity from which
they received them. Namely, I argue that the “speaking pictures” of early modern poetry and
rhetoric depend upon a kernel of elegy and become a means of reflecting on language’s ability to
respond to loss. This chapter demonstrates how a primary, familiar example—Sidney’s Defence
of Poesy—struggles to integrate its appeal to the inventive, made-out-of-nothing quality of
pictures with its didactic claims. I then go on to demonstrate the other work that pictures are
called upon to accomplish in early modern poetry and rhetoric. The particular examples that
rhetoricians use to talk about images and descriptive figures are heavily laden with a sense of
loss and absence that shapes the work that description ends up accomplishing. In effect, poetry’s
made-up images become sites of reflection on what poetic invention has to offer in the face of
loss. Description, in the hands of poets and dramatists like Shakespeare, then, becomes a fertile
location for a kind of mourning and reflection on the possibilities and failures of representation
that is only possible in the invented space of a verbal image. This chapter shows how description
comes to straddle the line between ornament and efficacy in early modern rhetoric—generating a
contained but inventive space in which to confront poetry’s ambitions and its failures.
Sidney’s Speaking Pictures
122
Adam McKeown, “Enargeia and the English Literary Renaissance” (Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 2000),
29-30.
55
If Philip Sidney’s pictures speak, they may say more than he means them to say. For
Sidney, pictures are a useful metaphor for talking about poetry’s striking aesthetic power, and
yet, his references to pictures and paintings, of which there are many in the 1595 treatise,
consistently arise when he wants to emphasize something else, namely, poetry’s ability to make
something out of nothing. Poetry, for Sidney, is a creative power that makes men like gods: the
poet is ‘a little god’ in competition with the one God. By emphasizing poetry as invention ex
nihilo, however, Sidney constitutes poetic invention in a necessary relation to absence. This
infrequently explored aspect of the Defence’s rather familiar appeal to pictures is in fact
indicative of how the period consistently slips into exploring a fundamental relationship between
presence and absence by way of language about pictures and descriptions. Sidney’s claim, of
course, is that the poetry he celebrates has a morally ameliorative effect. Poetry, in the terms of
the Defence, is to be judged as much by its effects as by its ontology. And yet Sidney’s argument
and his aesthetic sensibilities are above all preoccupied with poetry’s inventive capacity to make
something out of nothing. Though Sidney speaks in favor of a Protestant aesthetic oriented
toward valorizing heroic, moral action, praising poetry that can not only “make a Cyrus” but
“bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses,” his reasoning in the Defence depends
upon a set of aesthetic claims that are not fully integrated by the action he calls for in response to
poetry (9). When Sidney appeals to the moving power of images (and, in his curious ending, to
the memorializing power of poetry) he hopes to appropriate the force of art to action’s ends. But
the images Sidney summons are not tame or containable within his argument. By briefly
examining Sidney’s argument, I will demonstrate how the humanist defense of poetry struggled
to clarify the relationship between poetry’s moral value and its inventive aesthetic force. When
these two aspects of Sidney’s argument fail to align fully, he leaves space for poetry to
56
accomplish ends other than those it shares with moral philosophy. As my subsequent readings of
other rhetorical treatises and several of Shakespeare’s works will show, one of these ends was to
present poetic creation as a means for what we might best call mourning; that is, for generating
art in response to death and absence.
123
While Sidney’s Defence hinges on the metaphor of the speaking picture and proffers
illustrations from painting, prints, and models, it is important from the outset to recognize that
Sidney is not particularly invested in discussing the visual arts. For Sidney, alluding to the visual
arts is an inherently self-serving means for articulating what he believes about poetry. As Barkan
and McKeown explain, arguments such as Sidney’s engage in “a cognitive move in which the
qualities named as painting become different aspects of the larger possibilities of poetry.”
124
Naming poetry a “speaking picture” allows Sidney to lay claim to the immediacy and
inventiveness of the visual arts without surrendering the moral commitments of humanist
oratory. Looking closely at Sidney’s metaphor, however, reveals that appealing to the visual arts
as a form of poetic flexing is a particularly slippery move for the poet interested in defending
poetry’s moral rectitude. Arguing by way of the image, Sidney repeatedly celebrates the
inventiveness and affective intensity of poetry without finding clear ways to direct poetry’s
energy toward moral instruction. As energetically as Sidney celebrates both poetry’s
inventiveness and its moral worth, the two lines of his defense rarely intersect.
125
123
For another take on early modern art as a response to death and absence, see Hugh Grady’s monograph on
Shakespeare in relation to Adorno and Benjamin. Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
124
McKeown, “Enargeia,” 49.
125
To be clear, Sidney certainly believes that the moral force of poetry is related to the creative force of poetry. He
simply doesn’t draw out the connection he assumes between being moved by poetry and acting in emulation of
heroic figures. What I mean to emphasize is that, particularly in the moments in which he turns to a pictorial
metaphor, a different, less didactic defense of poetry’s value slips in. Sidney also values poetry for the sake of the
57
This is not a problem unique to Sidney, and for the majority of humanist thinkers it was
not considered “a problem” at all. From its first reintroduction of the Greek and Roman models
of rhetorical training as curriculum for young gentle- and noblemen, humanist education
assumed a connection between excellence in the verbal arts and moral good. As Anthony
Grafton and Lisa Jardine explain in their extensive study of humanist curricula in Italy and
England, “All the detail is about grammar and oratory, all the evaluations concern ‘leading a
blameless life.’”
126
Rhetorical handbooks observe the effects of tropes and figures; classroom
lectures identify a tissue of allusions, metaphors, and plays on words in Latin and Greek
literature; student exercises encourage imitation of particularly effective speeches from Ovid and
Vergil. Throughout, humanists claim that this training will produce men of action and moral
rectitude, in Quintilian’s words: “the man who can really perform his function as a citizen, who
is fitted to the demands both of private and public business, who can guide a state by his counsel,
ground it in law and correct it by his judicial decisions.”
127
If Sidney relies on a non-sequitur, it
is nonetheless one that is received and culturally presumed from classical precedent. What is
most striking in Sidney, however, is the extent to which he celebrates the broadly aesthetic
virtues of poetry—its inventiveness, immediacy, and moving force—in their own right, and
nowhere is this more clear than in his appeals to the visual arts. The gap between poetry’s moral
value and its aesthetic qualities was, by the time Sidney and Shakespeare were writing, becoming
more pronounced. In Tudor England, a much more pragmatic and methodical version of
humanism prevailed (also made possible by the Ramist reforms to humanist curriculum) that
creative act itself, and because this doesn’t clearly align with his primary claim about its moral value, he winds up
speaking from two mouths.
126
Graftton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 34.
127
Quoted in Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, 5.
58
focused on training men, and some noble women, for positions of social influence.
128
Meanwhile, humanist training still relied on deep immersion in poetry. What remains
unintegrated in either the pragmatic or the moralist defense of this rhetorical training is the
compelling energy and affective efficacy of poetry itself.
In Sidney’s Defence, the affective and moving nature of poetry is intimately linked to
allusions to pictures. Sidney’s definition of poetry famously turns to an apparently extraneous
visual allusion in order to articulate the basic tenets of poetics. He writes that poetry is “an art of
imitation…a representing, counterfeiting or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking
picture with this end: to teach and delight” (10). Gavin Alexander breaks this definition into
three elements: an Aristotelian understanding of mimesis as the naturalistic imitation of action;
the commonplace rhetorical ambition to teach and delight, derived from Horace; and the
metaphor of the speaking picture, which is drawn from Horace and Simonides but uniquely put
to work by Sidney.
129
When used by poets, the commonplace that art is mute poetry and poetry is
a speaking picture acts similarly to the ut pictura poesis formula to appropriate the merits of the
visual arts in order to praise poetry. Sidney, however, seems to use the metaphor even more
precisely. Rather than appealing to the formula in order to describe the beauty or energy of
poetry or its ability to unite speech to a vivid image, Sidney wants to claim that poetry is like an
image because of its ability to “strike, pierce, and possess the soul” (16) and to “delight” in order
128
On the relationship between humanist training and the consolidation of social power see Wayne Rebhorn, The
Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1995) and Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1980).
129
Gavin Alexander, “Introduction” to ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed.
Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), lviii.
59
“to move” (11). The power to move—movere in rhetoric—is precisely what Sidney likens to the
power of the image.
Sidney’s general argument, drawn from classical rhetoric, hangs upon two tightly woven
understandings of what it means to be moved. One is moved to laughter or tears when an orator
succeeds in stirring up their emotions. And one is moved to act (often politically) or to make a
judgment when an orator succeeds in persuading them by way of those tears or that laughter.
130
This office of the orator was part of Cicero’s threefold description of the rhetorician’s task: to
move, to instruct, and to delight (movere, docere, delectare). Between 1540 and 1640, as Brian
Vickers has demonstrated, movere increasingly became the most discussed and most sought-after
aim of rhetoric.
131
Sidney shares this assessment. “Moving,” he writes, “is of a higher degree
than teaching” because it transforms knowledge into practice. “To be moved to do that which we
know” is the highest work and labor of the humanist (“hoc opus, hic labor est”) (22).
132
Vickers
argues that the Renaissance favor for movere was enabled by a subtle shift in rhetorical thinking
which allowed the orator’s power over the emotions to align with humanist ideals. Increasingly,
rhetoricians conceived of movere as “mobilizing the will to good ends” rather than simply
offering an orator carte blanche power over the wills of his listeners.
133
Vickers’s reading is
motivated, in part, by a suspicion that appeals to the emotions—what he calls the “expressive
130
Both of these uses appear in Shakespeare’s other works. The Roman plays tend to use “moved” in the rhetorical
sense of persuasion, but other works, including the Tempest, the poems, and lines Shakespeare wrote for Edward III,
clearly focus more on an affective sense of being moved.
131
Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 282.
132
Henry Peacham also uses this brief quotation from Aeneid 6 to name the work of rhetoric. Strikingly, these lines
reference the near-impossible task of returning from the dead. The repeated allusion amplifies my claim that, for
early modern writers, rhetorical labor carried an association with animation and with navigating a boundary between
presence and absence.
133
Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 276.
60
function” of rhetorical figures—run the risk of intercepting the fundamentally persuasive aims of
rhetoric.
134
In this same period, rhetoricians increasingly argued that the tropes and figures of
poetry—including the descriptive figures of hypotyposis, ekphrasis, and enargeia—were
guaranteed to move the emotions of readers, and yet they do not always leverage this moving
power toward other ends.
135
Sidney’s Defence offers a compelling illustration of this tension.
Sidney’s argument is that images of virtue that poetry presents are able to move the emotions of
the reader and in turn motivate their will to act in kind. Poetry, then, shares essentially the same
aims as rhetoric, but has more license and greater range with which to accomplish those aims. In
seeking to teach and delight the poet has “all from Dante’s heaven to his hell under the authority
of his pen” (20). Yet while Sidney claims a persuasive, moral function for poetry (“to teach and
delight”), his illustrations overwhelmingly emphasize the aim of movere, and attribute the
experience of being moved to the experience of encountering vivid and inventive art. This
tension is most apparent in Sidney’s idiosyncratic picture metaphors.
As much as Sidney’s larger argument is consistent with early modern humanist rhetoric,
his reliance on visual metaphors to describe poetry’s capacity to achieve movere remains
somewhat eccentric. Sidney requires the visual analogy to do a great deal of work. As Alexander
has articulated, the Defence presents the ‘speaking picture’ of fiction as “the link between an
author’s act of representation and the teaching and delighting of a reader.”
136
In other words, it is
by virtue of the image-like quality of a poet’s art that they are able to touch their readers and
accomplish the didactic ends of humanist rhetoric. However, Sidney’s explanatory examples
134
Ibid., 294-339. For responses to Vickers’s claim, see Colleen Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech
in Early Modern Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 9n.
135
Ibid.
136
Alexander, “Introduction,” lix.
61
emphasize certain aspects of the visual arts that seem to expand or fall outside of the realm of
teaching, even broadly conceived. In particular, Sidney attributes the rhetorical power of movere
to the artist’s creative license and to the immediacy or aura of presence afforded to images.
These analogies celebrate poetry’s power as immanent and generative by drawing comparison to
an image. The twist, of course—and what makes the metaphor so powerful—is that there are no
images qua images in the poetry that Sidney describes. The argument is built upon images that
are absent and summoned only by Sidney’s rhetoric. By describing poetry’s visual power, then,
Sidney’s metaphor makes something out of nothing, just as he argues a great poet can.
To demonstrate his comparison between inventive poetry and vivid pictures, Sidney
imagines a painting of Lucrece at the moment of her suicide. A great painter, he explains, will
not paint Lucrece with a face that he has actually seen, but will “bestow that in colours upon you
which is fittest for the eye to see,” and paint “not Lucretia whom he never saw,” but “the
outward beauty of such a virtue” (11). So, Sidney argues, can a poet offer images of “what may
be and should be” in order to stir up the wills of his audience. Sidney imagines both poetry and
the visual arts as untethered to concrete realities. In the absence of real examples of virtue, art
can create something out of nothing. What is less clear is why this creative freedom would be the
ground upon which an audience is moved to behave heroically. Sidney draws attention to aspects
of Lucrece’s narrative and depiction that are indeed moving. He notes how a painter could show
her “constant though lamenting look…when she punished in herself another’s fault” (11).
Attending to Lucrece’s face might move a viewer to pity her and to honor what Sidney sees as
her heroism (that is, her chastity). But this is not what Sidney praises. Rather, it is the artist’s
ability to “borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be” that will, in his mind, delight and
62
move a reader (11). Impressively but problematically, poetry and art move audiences precisely
because they are made up by an inventive artist.
A second example in the Defence reiterates this point. The poet makes “A perfect
picture” Sidney writes, “for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the
philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess
the sight of the soul so much as that other doth” (16). By analogy, Sidney suggests that poetry
borrows the potency of an image, which lies in its immediate totality of representation (it does
not rely on a “wordish description” relayed in time) and its ability to demand attention (to
“possess the sight of the soul”). Both are common notions in the paragone debate over the
comparative merits of poetry and the visual arts. Without any apparent self-consciousness,
Sidney attributes to poetry the same virtues that were typically aligned with images over poetry.
The irony of denigrating verbal description in order to praise poetry in not lost on this poet.
Sidney’s twist on the common talking points about words and pictures rather underscores the
extent to which his argument is less invested in comparing the sister arts than in expanding the
claims of poetry.
Viewed in the context of early modern visual culture, the illustration that follows
simultaneously suggests that the striking force of poetry does not lie only in its well-formed
examples, but in the creative act of poetry’s makers. He goes on:
For as in outward things, to a man that had never seen an elephant or a rhinoceros, who
could tell him exquisitely all their shapes, colour, bigness and particular marks, or of a
gorgeous palace an architector, with declaring the full beauties, might well make the
hearer able to repeat, as it were by rote, all he had heard, yet should he never satisfy his
inward conceit with being witness to itself of a true lively knowledge; but the same man,
63
as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or the house well in model, should
straightway grow, without need of any description, to a judicial comprehending of them
(16).
Writing in England in 1579, there was one image of a rhinoceros that Sidney would have been
familiar with—an imprese showing a rhinoceros and an elephant (Figure 1.1), which was copied
by Abraham Fraunce from Paolo Giovio, who himself copied the image from Dürer’s fantastical
1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros (Figure 1.2).
137
Dürer probably never saw a rhinoceros either, but
made his famous woodcut in response to a description he received by letter.
138
Prints, like poems,
were made with the intention of both delighting and instructing and seen as objects that could
teach (whether virtue or anatomy was the lesson at hand). Both also treat their objects of
representation with creative freedom. Dürer’s rhinoceros is fantastically exaggerated with scales,
plated armor, a pattern of spikes on its back, and an extraneous dorsal horn. These details—while
they would certainly increase the striking effect of the print—are made up, it seems, out of
nowhere. Of course, this is exactly what Sidney describes as the virtue of great poetry. Poesy is a
kind of making, a fabricating that allows the poet to deliver “a golden” world in response to
nature’s “brazen” one (9). If in Dürer’s art, as Susan Dackerman has suggested, “the empirical is
superseded by the creative act,” this is all the more true of poetry and of the acts of
137
Abraham Fraunce gave Sidney a manuscript gift that included both the imprese copied from Giovio and a treatise
on Ramist logic (Bodleian MS Rawl. D 345). Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed. Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), n.376; “Two Elizabethan Versions of Giovo’s Treatise on Imprese,”
English Studies 52 (1971), 120-121.
138
The idea that Sidney is describing the experience of learning from poetry as similar to looking at an impresse,
woodcut, or print is itself striking. As technologies of visual knowledge transmissible only through touching—the
image can only be produced by the direct pressing of the model onto the page—the imprese and the print point to a
sense in which the early modern viewing that Sidney here invokes was implicitly associated with touch. As Susan
Dackerman has explained following her extensive study of Dürer’s prints, copies pressed from woodblocks would
incorporate a “haptic echo of the image,” with raised patches of ink pressed onto the surface of the page offering the
viewer a chance to “feel” or “experience” or touch the image before them. Personal correspondence with author.
64
representation that Sidney describes through the visual metaphor.
139
The real virtue of images
lies in their creativity not their factuality, and mimesis in Sidney isn’t properly mimesis, but is in
fact invention. The best and most moving images, then, are ones that are laden with the sense of
their own made-up-ness.
While Renaissance rhetoric as a whole was inclined to celebrate the power of poetry to
move its readers, Sidney exemplifies an early modern English inclination to praise the moving
power of the creative act itself. When Sidney invokes the “speaking pictures” of “Anchises
speaking in the midst of Troy’s flames” or “Ulysses…bewail[ing] his absence from barren and
beggarly Ithaca” it is specifically to answer the question of whether “the feigned image of
poetry…hath the more force in teaching” than philosophy or history (16-17). These vivid
prosopopoeias have the force of an image not only because they exemplify (heroic) human
virtues and vices, but because Virgil and Homer invented them with such compelling detail.
140
The acts of creative license which Sidney presents as the heart of movere are also acts that force
the poet as creator into view. This is perhaps why the Defence so fervently and defensively must
remind its readers that it speaks “of the art and not of the artificer” (20). When Sidney suggests
that these aesthetic choices are what endow the “speaking picture” of poetry with its image-like
force, he also invites a metaphor which, to borrow Gavin Alexander’s phrase, “sees a whole
work as…a surrogate for the work’s author.”
141
This apparent reorientation in English poetics
offers to reinvent what it means to be moved by a work of poetry. One is not only affected
139
Personal correspondence with author.
140
Sidney describes these speaking pictures in language that could also be used to describe enargeia: they are “laid
to the view, so that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them” (17). As I will demonstrate later,
Erasmus follows Quintilian in using similar language to describe enargeia.
141
Alexander, “Introduction,” lix.
65
emotionally or encouraged to act on a motive, but one is also struck, pierced, and possessed by
the artful labor that produced such a response, and produced it, apparently, out of thin air.
142
This
emergent aesthetic response is likely what Prospero recognizes when he breaks off the “vision”
of his “insubstantial pageant” and addresses Ferdinand: “You do look, my son, in a moved
sort.”
143
Still, Sidney insists that the moving power of poetry works to didactic ends. In the
parlance of the Defence to be moved is nearly always to be moved toward ethical action. In one
of his many invocations of Vergil’s Aeneid, Sidney asks, “Who readeth Aeneas carrying old
Anchises on his back that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent and act?” (29).
Literature’s most vivid images and compelling speeches are to be “worn in the tablet of your
memory,” because, in theory, they are delightful and moving enough to remind one to act as
nobly as Aeneas. Viewed closely, Sidney’s moral claim for poetry’s examples can seem like a
non-sequitur. The speech of Turnus he quotes in the same paragraph is indeed powerfully
moving (“Shall this land see Turnus in flight? Is death so very sad?”), but the action it models is
open to interpretation, especially for the class of English gentlemen to whom Sidney writes.
Likewise, the heroic models of action that Sidney points to are not clearly linked to the creative
force that his explanations consistently attribute with the power to move. I do not think that
Sidney’s argument is impenetrable, however. Rather, heroic posturing allows Sidney to levy the
experience of being moved by poetry’s inventive lines toward the end of moral improvement.
144
142
As a surrogate for the work’s author it might also be said to leave something of them in the world, as, for
example, Ovid claims of his verse at the end of Metamorphoses. The line between surrogate and memorial, or, as in
Ben Jonson’s phrase, a “living monument” is porous.
143
William Shakespeare, The Tempest ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Thomson
Learning, 1999), 4.1.146.
144
Sidney might also be particularly motivated to offer a moral defense of poetry given that the Defence was written
in response to the moral critiques of Stephen Gosson. See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: The
66
But one can be moved by the enargeia and ingenuity of poetry and then choose to interpret its
images as models of virtue or not. Sidney leaves space for poetic invention to accomplish
something beyond didactic teaching. The question that Sidney’s Defence does not directly
answer is what else. In Sidney, appealing to the ut pictura poesis motif is consistently a way of
celebrating poetry’s ability to create something out of nothing. In other words, Sidney thinks of
pictures as a poet’s tool for giving substance to “airy nothing”.
145
What I will attend to in what
follows is the role that this generative capacity plays in shaping early modern poetic responses to
loss and absence.
In the closing salvo of the Defence, Sidney makes a final, albeit ironic, claim for the
immanent force of poetry. Given Sidney’s inclination to attribute power to the creative act itself
and his simultaneous desire to overwrite that power with moral appropriability, what is most
striking about this conclusion is its ironic embrace of poetry’s non-didactic powers. At first, the
conclusion reiterates the arguments that Sidney has made in favor of poetry as a tool of humanist
learning. He crows that poesy is “full of virtue-breeding delightfulness” and “void of no gift that
ought to be in the noble name of learning” (53) But Sidney then slips precipitously into a poetic
charm. The poet addresses his readers, intoning, “I conjure you all that have had the evil luck to
read this ink-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the nine Muses, no more to scorn the
sacred mysteries of poesy…” (53). Sidney conjures his readers to “believe” a host of myths
about poetry’s power: that it is divine, that it transforms men to be civil and honest, that it
contains “many mysteries,” that it “proceeds of a divine fury,” and that poets “will make you
University of California Press, 1981) and Gavin Alexander, “Introduction” to Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and
Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, xxxiii.
145
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Arden Third Series (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017), 5.1.16.
67
immortal by their verses” (53). The posture of these final paragraphs is simultaneously satirical
and triumphant. One initially assumes that Sidney is writing with his tongue firmly planted in his
cheek, that he does not in fact conjure or curse his reader. But these lines also have the force of
the last word. When Sidney curses the haters of poetry, wishing that when they die, their
“memory die from earth for want of an epitaph” (54), he holds up the memorializing claim of
poetry—which is nowhere else discussed in the Defence—as a kind of Shibboleth, identifying
himself as a member of a class with occult creative and memorialist power. This claim, like
many of Sidney’s claims about what the energy of poetry can accomplish, remains unintegrated
in the larger moral project. However a reader decides to resolve (or not resolve) this friction
between what Sidney claims to defend (poetry’s moral efficacy) and how he defends it (by
describing poetry’s generative force), the conclusion of the Defence inevitably gestures to the
forces of poetry that are not contained within Sidney’s stated didactic aim. Poetry might be
marshalled to encourage virtue and reject vice, but it might also indeed be able to conjure a
reader’s response, to woo a beloved, or bear the memory of the dead in the world.
What’s in a Metaphor?
Sidney’s method of arguing by appeal to images and his central, infamous metaphor does
far more work than is accounted for when he names teaching and delighting as the ends of
poetry. In a strong sense, the project of the following chapters is to demonstrate how much is
revealed about the shifting aims of early modern rhetoric and poetics when we recognize that
fact. What else does poetry—with its power to invent something out of nothing and animate the
inanimate—accomplish? Sidney’s metaphor of the speaking picture acts out in miniature a
phenomenon that comes to shape how certain features of rhetoric—namely, its descriptive and
68
generative powers—are employed to confront absence and loss. The parts of Sidney’s argument
that I have suggested are not fully integrated, such as his praise for the poet’s ability to create
things out of nothing and his final claim for the memorial power of poetry, do hint at the other
work that poetic and rhetorical speech will accomplish in the hands of Shakespeare and other
early modern poets and dramatists. In the context of a shifting rhetorical landscape, in which
eloquence and moral argumentation were increasingly untethered, Sidney’s appeals to images
explore alternate aims for rhetorical speech. Even while Sidney does not commit to an argument
about poetry’s ability to lend life to inanimate things or summon a ghostly presence from
absence, his employment of the “speaking picture” metaphor and his compulsive attention to
poetry’s creative and inventive power invites these alternate readings. Sidney’s defense reveals
the fertile ground in which other poets and playwrights were able to reimagine poetry’s aims
beyond humanist claims about its primarily moral purpose.
As I have suggested above, Sidney’s treatise defends poetry’s efficacy by appealing to
pictures that are in a strict sense non-existent. He then turns to a key explanatory metaphor that
hinges on a tension between animacy and inanimacy. A picture is inanimate, and yet poetry gives
it the ability to speak. Of course, Sidney is here borrowing from a prevalent classical
commonplace linking poetry to the visual arts” Ut pictura poesis. This commonplace was, in
turn, linked to familiar tropes from classical art history (prevalent in the writings of Pliny, the
Philostratuses, Callistratus, and others) that celebrated artists’ ability to animate inanimate
material, making images that seem to come alive. Callistratus, for example, celebrates
Praxiteles’s sculpture of a youth by attributing the artist with the power to lend breath to the
inanimate: “Though not endowed with breath, yet it began to breathe; since what the material has
69
not inherited as a gift of nature, for all this art furnished the capacity.”
146
What these references
together suggest is that the terms by which Elizabethan poets imagine their project—specifically,
the terms by which Sidney defends poetry—position poets in a dialogue with the absent and
inanimate. As Sidney approaches the kernel of his argument, he perhaps unwittingly generates a
slipperiness between describing, making, and representing. Though Sidney claims that the poet’s
work is mimetic, or a “representation,” the “counterfeiting,” and “figuring forth” of poetry—
what he will later claim is not a lie because it does not claim to speak the truth—appears less
mimetic than tropic (10, 34). That is to say, the poet does not imitate objects or persons observed
in the world, but rather crafts them as seemingly living figures made of speech, breath, air.
Nevertheless, by framing his art as a representation or mimesis, Sidney underscores the
illusion of reference that grounds descriptive acts in poetry, the fantasy that there is an other (a
subject or object) to be described. And yet, as Catherine Belsey and Barkan have both
underscored, there is no necessary relationship between descriptive poetry and real or existing
things.
147
More often than not, a description or ekphrasis summons an image that is at odds with
nothing. Or, as Barkan puts it, ekphrasis is, “like all tropes…a lie.”
148
To describe an image that
has no other being—or, as Belsey might prefer, no “presence”—is to collapse the distinction
between mimesis and creation. Moreover, that there is no actual object or person or image being
described underscores a fundamental, melancholy feature of tropes of rhetorical description. The
limitation—the grief—at the heart of ekphrasis is its necessary relationship to absence; it can
146
Philostratus Imagines and Callistratus Descriptions, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1931), 415.
147
Catherine Belsey, “Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond,” Shakespeare Quarterly
63 (2012),175-98; Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak,” 332-35.
148
Barkan, “Making,” 332.
70
only ever describe and create a desire for a thing that is not there. “Pictures,” Belsey reminds us,
“cannot restore the dead; representation does not deliver presence.”
149
Whether description
functions as a creation ex nihilo or as an elegiac apostrophe to that which is not there, it
necessarily exists in perpetual reference to absence. If descriptive poetry exhales world-creating
breath, it also hovers over a void.
Despite its familiarity, Sidney’s formulation may give us pause. Though the pictures
summoned by poetry are ghostly or chimeric, they also speak. Hidden in plain sight is the
possibility that the images poets create could speak beyond the control or mastery of the creating
poet, that they could do more work than the moral teaching that they claim to do. It is important
that we do not neglect the complex agency of these speaking pictures. On the one hand, the
speech of the picture is continuous with the speech of the poet. What words the poetic image
speaks are only ever those lent it by the creating poet. Still, were we to take Sidney’s trope
seriously, we would also grant that what the poet has lent to the picture in letting it speak is a
certain amount of agency, a fleeting, borrowed animacy. Sidney’s slippery metaphors thus set up
terms under which description can do other work: it can act like a prosopopoeia, lending breath
to an image that turns back to threaten its maker; it can create a space of confrontation between
the living and the dead; and it can mourn the life that it only metaphorically generates.
What then can this central metaphor tell us about the role of images in early modern
poetics? How does it play out the tension between the stated didactic and persuasive aims of
humanist poets and their aesthetic values? How does it set up the circumstances within which
Shakespeare will continually reimagine the uses of descriptive scenes? Sidney’s famed metaphor
draws on a longstanding rhetorical tradition of appealing to images and the visual arts to explain
149
Belsey, “Invocation,” 179.
71
effective speech. In form, these appeals are generally epideictic: their main purpose is to offer
praise for poetry and rhetoric, and often to describe the particular efficacy of a given rhetorical
figure or trope. George Puttenham is firmly planted in the commonplace when he writes that
ornament is given to poetry “by figures and figurative speeches, which be the flowers, as it were,
and colours that a poet setteth upon his language of art…as the excellent painter bestoweth the
rich orient colours upon his table of portrait.”
150
This traditional metaphor did not spring up sui
generis but was a pivotal turn in the writings of Cicero, who offers painting as a paradigm for
oratory.
151
Still, the commonplace itself is sometimes dismissed as uncritical and overtired.
Michael Baxandall labors to find instances of the metaphor that aren’t, in his terms, trite or “half-
dead,” even while he argues that the remarks have an “accumulative critical effect.”
152
And yet,
especially given the context in which many of these metaphorical references to the visual arts
appear (rhetorical handbooks) it seems short-sighted to dismiss them as uncritical.
Often, these metaphorical descriptions of effective speech would be printed a mere few
leaves away from an explanation of the importance and use of metaphor (commonly the first
trope defined in an early modern rhetorical handbook). Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence
provides a striking example here. Peacham has just laid out an explanation for the origin of
metaphors, arguing that metaphors arise out of necessity as well as art. Metaphors appeared, he
writes, “when there wanted words to expresse the nature and propertie of diverse things” and
150
Puttenham, “Art of English Poesy,” 134.
151
As Leonard Barkan and Michael Baxandall have both demonstrated, the commonplace had an effect on the visual
arts too. It presented the opportunity of making images rhetorical—a possibility that Baxandall shows being fulfilled
in the painting and theory of Alberti, which draws on the form of a periodic rhetorical sentence. Leonard Barkan,
Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 59; Michael Baxandall, Giotto
and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1971), 121-139.
152
Baxandall, 116, 66.
72
“men were begged and constrained to seeke remedie for the supply of so great a want.”
153
Metaphor is a trope that arises out of lack. Speakers use it to name formerly inexpressible things,
to artfully confront the unspeakable. Just a few pages later, Peacham offers an elaborate simile
about metaphors, which appeals to the visual arts. “In respect of their aptnesse to make
descriptions,” he writes, metaphors are “not onely as pleasant colours of all kinds, but also as
readie pensils pliable to line out and shadow any maner of proportion in nature. In respect of
their firme impression in the mind, & remembrance of the hearer, they are as seals upon soft
waxe, or as deep stamps in long lasting mettall.”
154
Peacham uses a commonplace metaphor to
explain metaphor. As tautological as this reasoning may appear, it also invites us to ask what this
appeal to artistic representation and artistic material might be trying to name. It seems less likely
that the metaphor is uncritical than that Peacham is interested in the degree to which metaphors
act like images that are memorable (like impressions in wax or metal), clarifying (like an outline
in pencil) and artful (like a painter’s use of color). The appeal to visual forms helps Peacham to
say something that is difficult to say, and it makes him appear skillful and inventive in the
meantime.
If, as Peacham argues, metaphors are a way of trying to articulate that which is
inarticulable, then what might these commonplace metaphorical appeals to images be trying to
name? With remarkable consistency, these metaphors reach for a certain, inventive quality of art
couched in terms of vividness, liveliness, and lifelikeness. Even when the metaphor an author
employs refers to an image that does not exist, cannot exist, or hasn’t been seen, the idea of an
image seems to come along with a sense of presence and animacy. The creative, animating,
153
Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, conteining the most excellent ornaments, exornations, lightes,
flowers, and formes of speech, commonly called the figures of rhetorike, (London: Richard Field, 1593), Ci
r
.
154
Ibid., Dii
v
.
73
lifelike force of poetry is the unnameable thing, the sine qua non of descriptive, effective speech
that, to borrow Peacham’s terms, “begs and constrains” the rhetoricians to reach for the metaphor
of an image. This is a use with a long history. A Byzantine commentary on Apthonius’s
Progymnasmata—a book of rhetorical exercises used to train students in oratory—describes a
vivid speech as “one that is clear and pure and as if alive, for, by the word alone, it all but makes
one see what one has never seen, imitating the painter’s art.”
155
Erasmus, in De Copia (1512),
argues that description will place events “before the reader painted with all the colors of rhetoric,
so that at length it draws the hearer or reader outside himself as in the theatre.”
156
And
Castiglione’s dedication in The Book of the Courtier (1528) laments that his “purtraict in
peinctinge of the Court of Urbin” can merely sketch out the principal lines unlike the “handiwork
of Raphael, or Michel Angelo” who can “set[ ] furth the truth with beawtifull coulours, or mak[e]
it appeere by the art of Prospective that is not.”
157
Each of these three examples uses an appeal to
painting as a hinge by which to explain description’s ability to make absent things appear alive
and present. Castiglione claims that the art of perspective can make something that “is not” (that
is, something that doesn’t exist) “appeere,” as a way of describing what he imagines the best
verbal art of being able to do. Erasmus emphasizes how the (verbal) artist’s ability to summon
things before the eyes has a profound effect on readers, who are drawn outside themselves—
moved in a profound sense—by the conjured spectacle. As with Sidney’s metaphor, to whatever
155
Quoted in Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice
(London: Routledge, 2016), 260, emphasis mine. Richard Rainolde translated Apthonius’s Progymnasmata into
English in 1563. His idea was that it would be useful for training students in rhetoric, though there is not evidence
that the progymnasmata were ever used in English classrooms. Even so their form and particular examples of
expressive speech bore an influence on English rhetorical training.
156
Disiderus Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and David H. Rix (Milwaukee, WI:
Marquette University Press, 2012), 47.
157
This is Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation, quoted in Judith Dundas, Pencil’s Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and
the Art of Painting (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 56.
74
degree these pictures have life, presence, or the ability to “speak,” theirs is an animacy
summoned from absence or invented out of nothing. The familiar metaphors of classical art
history and ancient rhetoric which link poetry to the visual arts are used to communicate
something about rhetorical efficacy that can be described as both inventive and necromantic. If
we are going to reclaim these commonplace metaphors as useful and insightful tools for
understanding the aesthetic and ethical commitments of early modern poetics, then we must
examine the force that this fundamentally elegiac explanation of effective rhetoric goes on to
wield over how rhetoric (and descriptive rhetoric in particular) is conceived and employed, that
is, how it shapes what poets do with pictures. My argument in what follows is that these figures
become tools for exploring a confrontation between absence and presence, loss and consolation,
inventiveness and mortality. The tension at the meeting place of each of these binaries becomes a
central feature of an early modern aesthetic that celebrates poetic invention even while it
wonders what poetry has to offer in the face of absence and loss.
The Rhetoric of Loss
Elizabethan defenses of poetry, despite their generative claims for poetry, arise from and
tend to a kernel of elegiac lament. Handbooks on rhetorical efficacy turn again and again to
examples of speech that lovingly and artfully attends to that which is absent. We might explain
this phenomenon by looking at the materials to which early rhetoricians turned to discover their
trove of examples: the most frequent sources are the epics of Homer and Vergil, marked as they
are by descriptions of fallen cities, dying heroes, and grieving family members. To view these
appeals to examples on the theme of grief and loss as mere habit or a matter of source-material,
however, would be an oversimplification. It would, to begin with, overlook the scrupulous
attention that rhetoricians paid to the minutiae of poetic technique. As Rosemund Tuve has put it,
75
even the most ornamental figures were seen “neither as delightful irrelevancies nor as mere
servants of the idea-structure.”
158
Instead, the tropes and figures of speech to which rhetoricians
lend such detailed attention act, as Colleen Rosenfeld has argued, as tools that define the aims of
poetic writing.
159
They are the nuclei of poetic energy. If rhetorical figures help define the work
of early modern poesy, then the particular examples of figures rhetoricians use become
paradigmatic of poetry’s work. Rhetoricians announce their own investment in choosing precise
examples by encouraging writers to use decorum in their speeches, taking care to match the
subject matter of their figures to the purpose of the oration at hand.
160
If then, the poets and
humanists of early modern England systematically turn to stories of loss, memories of absent
places and persons, and examples of elegiac speech, then perhaps these stories wield a more
directly shaping force over the nature of early modern rhetoric and poetics than has yet been
accounted for. Poetic and rhetorical speech, these examples might suggest, arises in situations of
loss and aims to be particularly effective in navigating responses to loss.
Many of these examples appear when rhetoricians are expounding the uses of rhetorical
descriptiveness (when defining enargeia or prosopopoeia), or when they are specifically
attending to how an orator can arouse passion in their audience to the end of persuasion, as
Quintilian encourages a speaker to do during the peroration or conclusion of a persuasive
speech.
161
Many and diverse, however, are the uses of these loss-oriented examples in the
158
Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth Century Critics
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 112.
159
Colleen Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2018).
160
See Rosenfeld for a robust discussion of the concept of decorum—and poetry’s resistance to it—in the early
modern period.
161
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. end trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), 6.1.
76
rhetorical tradition handed down from Cicero and Quintilian to Erasmus, Peacham, Hoskins,
Puttenham and other early modern poet-orators. Henry Peacham turns to a description of a
sacked city, borrowed from Erasmus and Quintilian, to demonstrate the art of amplification,
noting that amplification is “mighty to delight and perswade the mindes of men to the purpose
and drift of the speaker.”
162
And many samples of highly-effective word- or clause-level tropes
are loaded with a heightened sense of loss. Erasmus’s definition of synecdoche, for example,
appeals to lines from Vergil in which “one thing is understood from another,” such as “‘they did
live,’ for they are dead. ‘We too did flourish,’ and ‘we were Trojans.’”
163
Quintilian similarly
praises the quick potency of Vergil’s line describing the death of Antores: “and dying, he
remembered sweet Argos.”
164
These examples carry all the elegiac force of the et in arcadia ego
motif. To borrow a term from Roland Barthes, they are the punctum of poetic works, the details
that strike or pierce the reader.
165
They pack mourning for a lost past into a neat rhetorical parcel.
Erasmus and Quintilian choose them because of their ability to communicate efficiently, or
persuade, or describe, but both rhetoricians also seem keenly attracted by the element of elegy
that allows these brief clauses to accomplish even more. I submit that the preponderance of
rhetorical examples that carry this double weight—both accomplishing rhetorical aims and
modelling verbal responses to loss—is a highly suggestive source for how Shakespeare will
eventually put these rhetorical tropes to work.
162
Peacham, Si
r
163
Erasmus, 33.
164
Quintilian, 6.2.33.
165
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1982). Barthes uses language that parallels Philip Sidney’s description of how an image affects a viewer.
77
To illustrate, the example of amplification that re-appears most frequently in the
rhetorical tradition turns on rhetoric’s ability to elegize. When Quintilian sets out to model
enargeia, he turns to a detailed description of the destruction of a city. I quote it here in full:
This too is how the pathos of a captured city can be enhanced. No doubt, simply to say
"the city was stormed" is to embrace everything implicit in such a disaster, but this brief
communique, as it were, does not touch the emotions. If you expand everything which
was implicit in the one word, there will come into view flames racing through houses and
temples, the crash of falling roofs, the single sound made up of many cries, the blind
flight of some, others clinging to their dead ones in a last embrace, shrieks of children
and women, the old men whom an unkind fate has allowed to live to see this day; then
will come the pillage of property, secular and sacred, the frenzied activity of
plunderers carrying off their booty and going back for more, the prisoners driven in
chains before their captors, the mother who tries to keep her child with her, and the
victors fighting one another wherever the spoils are richer. "Sack of a city" does, as I
said, comprise all the parts. We shall succeed in making the facts evident, if they are
plausible; it will even be legitimate to invent things of the kind that usually occur.
166
Quintilian’s description of the fallen city is repeated in whole or significant part by multiple
early modern rhetoricians, including Erasmus and Peacham. One might say that, for the early
moderns, this becomes the most famous passage in all of Quintilian. Reasons for the
memorability of this passage are immediately evident. Its images are horrific, even difficult to
read for anyone with a vivid imagination. And this is precisely Quintilian’s point. An orator who
employs enargeia, or descriptive vividness, to amplify a plain relation of facts will, he writes,
166
Quintilian, 8.3.66.
78
“seem not so much to be talking about something as exhibiting it. Emotions will ensue just as if
we were present at the event itself.”
167
As this particular model of rhetorical effectiveness was
handed down from rhetorician to rhetorician to poet, so too was its emphasis on illuminating
detail, on vivid imagery, and perhaps smuggled among these emphases, apostrophizing absence
and articulating loss.
It is notable, certainly, that this principal example of rhetorical description is one that
includes loss, mourning, and trauma, and that it appeals to a key poetic trope of loss: the fall and
sack of a city. The vision would, for readers in the Renaissance, include overtones of poetic epic
as well as a sense of the loss of Rome itself. It is inventive but also fundamentally elegiac.
Equally important, however, is how this example contributes to framing the work that enargeia
is understood to accomplish. When early modern writers discuss enargeia, they consistently
emphasize the sense in which it makes absent things present, often while simultaneously
recruiting a metaphor of sight. Richard Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes and Tropes defines
enargeia as “when a thynge is so described that it semeth to the reader or hearer yt he beholdeth
it as it were in doyng.”
168
Similarly, Erasmus states that enargeia is used “whenever, for the sake
of amplifying, adorning, or pleasing, we do not state a thing simply, but set it forth to be viewed
as though portrayed in color on a tablet, so that it may seem that we have painted, not narrated,
and that the reader has seen, not read.”
169
He goes on to include Quintilian’s passage on the
sacked city in full. Both of these early modern writers describe enargeia as summoning an
elusive kind of presence and both pick up Quintilian’s visual cue. The vivid details he describes
167
Ibid., 6.2.31.
168
Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London, 1550), Ei
v
.
169
Erasmus, 47.
79
will, he says, “come into view” when the writer expands his statement of fact. But the sense in
which these images “appear” or become present remains firmly in the metaphorical realm of “as
it were” and “as though.” In this key example, a scene of loss is somehow preserved and made
liminally present by way of readers’ ability to participate in the image-eliciting power of authors.
In other words, enargeia enlists the imagination of readers to summon specters or ghosts. As a
later chapter will argue, this feature of enargeia is key to Shakespeare’s construction of the ghost
in Hamlet.
When Erasmus refers to painting while explaining the force of Quintilian’s enargeia he
makes an explicit connection between an early modern conception of the painter’s art and the
rhetorical power to summon absent things. As with Sidney, Erasmus’s allusion to painting
appears when he is interested in celebrating the verbal artist’s ability to invent something where
there was nothing. For in the Renaissance, painting is seen as a key mediator of absence. Witness
Leon Battista Alberti’s epideictic praise of painting: “Painting possesses a truly divine power in
that not only does it make the absent present…but it also represents the dead to the living many
centuries later, so that they are recognized by spectators with pleasure and deep admiration for
the artist.”
170
Alberti’s praise might just as easily be accused of recycling familiar, uncritical
commonplaces. But what would happen if we took his claims seriously? We would find that
painting can aid in memorializing the dead and giving them a ghostly presence at the same time
that it gives pleasure and contributes to the fame of an artist. This take on painting represents
painters with a complex knot of motivations, oriented simultaneously toward mourning and self-
promotion. When painting is enlisted as a metaphor for the verbal art of enargeia, these abilities
and aims come along for the ride. Word-painting or verbal image making is a kind of
170
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), 60.
80
demonstrative rhetoric that always has the reputation and skill of a poet in view. But, as
Quintilian’s sacked city demonstrates, it also thrives upon the invention of details that amplify
the sense of absence or memorialization, that are summoned only to be declared dead or lost or
imagined. Just as painting mediates between absence and presence, the descriptive force of
enargeia pulses between invention and loss.
What this study hopes to explore is a more fundamental paradox. This rhetorical
preoccupation with loss and absence runs alongside an incredible inventive energy, a celebration
of creation ex nihilo, and praise for the “liveliness” and animacy of both rhetoric and art. For the
authors of the Renaissance, this is consistently articulated not as a means for melancholy, but as
a source of pleasure. Bound up with that pleasure or delight is celebration of the inventive
maker’s skill. The maker who creates in the context of loss or grief offers generativity in
defiance of death and in doing so lays claim to a form of artful life even if it is a life of enduring
mourning. In the context of this tension, the invention of vivid or detailed images both asserts
life and amplifies the pathos of its loss, and it positions poetry and rhetoric as a space for
navigating that tension.
Among the rhetoricians of the Renaissance, Erasmus seems particularly keen to
acknowledge the triangulation between pleasure, invention, and mourning. For example, in his
On Copia of Words and Ideas Erasmus’s example of delectatio—a figure of dilation meant to
give delight and pleasure—retells Andromache’s last conversation with Hector and the grieving
of the women who were certain of his forthcoming death. The force of the example rests in its
simultaneous ability to provide delightful details and appeal to the emotions. The details Erasmus
celebrates (Hector’s “gleaming helmet” and Andromache’s “sweet-smelling bosom”) amplify the
affective force of the narrative’s conclusion: “And so,” Erasmus writes, “though he was still
81
alive, they mourn him as dead.”
171
The amplified details offer a sense of fullness but delighting
in them also constitutes them as worthy to be mourned. In the midst of his treatise, Erasmus
takes a significant amount of time to relay this narrative passage in detail. He does not quote
Homer directly, but retells the story himself, as if reliving and inviting his own reader to
participate in the pleasure he takes from the account. Erasmus’s evident delight and the space he
affords to the dilation, like the generative detail included within the narration itself, carve out
poetic and descriptive speech as a space of pleasure held in equipoise with the sense of loss that
pervades the example itself.
Erasmus’s elucidation of delectatio is one example of how rhetorical creation in the early
modern period brings invention and loss into a uniquely close relationship. The distinctiveness of
this relationship becomes even more clear if we look back at some rhetorical precedents for the
use of descriptive detail in oratory. For Cicero, as it would be for Quintilian, precise oratorical
detail and image-crafting was particularly useful in the courtroom. In order to move the mind of
a judge, Cicero explains in De Oratore, an orator must arouse his emotions through “fulness and
variety, and even copiousness of language.”
172
As his courtroom narratives demonstrate, this
fulness was most often aimed at arousing pity for victims so that justice could be accomplished.
Forensic success garnered honor for the orator, and Cicero’s attention to inventive copia as well
as his appeals to pathos are largely pragmatic and instrumental. The losses of the victims Cicero
describes are used as tools for wining a case, always one step removed from the orator’s personal
concern even if they do produce tears in him as well. In this sense, Cicero instrumentalizes what
171
Erasmus, 102-103.
172
Cicero, “De Oratore” in Cicero on Oratory and Orators ed. and trans. J.S. Watson (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1970), 144.
82
Erasmus will frame as a source of delight and dedicated attention. An even earlier and somewhat
contradictory precedent for copious detail can be traced to Greek epideictic monodies for the
dead. The Greek playwright Menander advises orators who are offering eulogies to the dead to
attend closely to details that demonstrate the contrast between the former beauty of the deceased
and their present state of decay. Describing the dead, a mourning speaker will enumerate “what
beauty he has lost, the blush of his cheeks, what a tongue has been stilled” and so forth.
173
As
Ruth Webb writes, this form of speech “exploit[s] the poetic capacity of language to evoke
absent things which are contrasted simultaneously with the present.”
174
In contrast to the details
evoked by Cicero, what this chiefly melancholic use of copia seems to leave out is the sense of
the speaker’s self-interest and creativity. Erasmus’s example somehow stakes out a place in both
camps. Somewhere between the classical and the early modern periods, rhetoricians seem to
have pivoted toward celebrating the particularly inventive triumph of language’s capacity to
evoke and learned to use melancholic detail as a tool to that end. While the persuasive aims of
Ciceronian oratory and the mournful details of monody continue to exert a powerful influence,
the capacity for copia becomes as much an aesthetic victory as a pragmatic one.
What this transformation means for early modern poets is that description and inventive
detail is not simply a tool for arousing emotion and empathy—as important as that function
remains—but it is also a means of controlling the boundary between presence and absence. It is
true that, as Webb writes, authors of descriptions or ekphrases following Quintillian wanted their
audiences to “reenact internally the act of seeing” grievous sights.
175
Likewise, I think that
173
Quoted in Webb, 216.
174
Webb, 216.
175
Webb, 158.
83
Richard Meek is right to point out that when early modern authors use ekphrastic passages, such
as the description of Troy that frames the Mirror for Magistrates, their use of the figure is
“concerned with empathy and serves as a means of both figuring and eliciting the reader's
emotional responses.”
176
However, early modern writers have much more than emotion in their
sight lines. These authors employ the pathos of their ekphrases in order to seize control of a
poetic moment and press toward other agendas. Quintilian modeled for early modern authors
how effectively the subject matter of grief and loss could heighten a rhetor’s ability to wield
authority in a text. He opens book 6 of The Orator’s Education, which gives a detailed
explanation for how an orator can craft a vivid and compelling conclusion using images, with a
lengthy prooemium describing his grief at the death of his wife and two sons. Quintilian claims
that his work on this text was delayed and almost abandoned due to his grief. Eventually, though,
he returned to his writing, and this piece of lamentation and simultaneous model for persuasion is
the result. Some editors suggest that Quintilian was fudging his timeline in this passage, that the
description of his bereavement—which is powerful indeed—rather serves as a well-placed
example of the vivid rhetoric he encourages orators to use.
177
In any case, the effect of the
passage is two-fold. It places the reader under the orator’s sway (who wouldn’t be moved by
Quintilian’s direct address to his son’s “fading eyes” and “fleeting breath”?) and it frames the
author as having in some sense mastered loss through his rhetorical art.
178
His son’s lost breath is
contrasted with the breath that goes on to speak these words. What Quintilian’s example models
is how in the context of a story of loss and grief the orator is not only what Henry Peacham
176
Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 17.
177
Donald Russell, for example, makes this suggestion in his Loeb edition. Quintilian, 3.
178
Quintilian, 6. proem.12-13.
84
would go on to call a “master of men’s minds,” but also to some degree a master over absence
and presence, life and death.
179
As the subsequent chapters of this dissertation will demonstrate,
early modern writers recognized that poetry and rhetoric—and descriptive figures in particular—
have a pivotal role to play at this boundary. Shakespeare’s most compelling descriptive moments
consistently explore the extent of that role, from the moment his Lucrece uses an ekphrastic
occasion to manage her own transformation into the material of a historical past to the moment
that Prospero surrenders his majestic control over both art and life.
How to do things with pictures
For early modern writers, I have argued, one of description’s greatest strengths—what made it so
variously useful—was its ambiguous ontological status, its ability to mediate between absence
and presence. Murray Krieger’s influential reading of ekphrasis draws on a similar tension: a
fundamental ambivalence between verbal art’s tendency to slip away in time and its desire to
attain stillness and “form itself into its own poetic object.”
180
To whatever degree poetry can, by
way of form or repetition, attain to spatiality, it gains the kind of presence enjoyed by the plastic
arts. What Krieger doesn’t go on to elucidate, however, is what can be done within this aesthetic
space, to what use a poet can put it. This, I suggest, is a key point of strength for early modern
poets. The ambivalent spaces created by description are fields of play for these writers, zones in
which they are free to do whatever work they choose.
179
Peacham, Biii
v
.
180
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins University Press,
1992), 9.
85
Yet another commonly recycled example cribbed from Quintilian demonstrates early
modern authors’ sensitivity to this possibility. When Erasmus and Peacham introduce the figure
of chronographia, or description of a time, they turn to an illustrative passage from the Aeneid.
What is striking about this example is the emphasis both authors place upon its usefulness, even
while the exact nature of that “use” remains rather open ended. As Erasmus writes, this kind of
description is “for the sake of giving pleasure…although even another purpose ought not to be
completely lacking.”
181
Both, however, follow Quintilian in suggesting that a main result of the
description is to amplify the effect of Dido’s sorrow. Here is Erasmus’s version (as translated by
Donald B. King):
‘It was night, when the stars turn
In mid-flight, when every field lies still;
And tired bodies over the earth
Were enjoying peaceful sleep; the woods
And wild seas were still,
The beasts and varicolored birds, those that far
And wide haunt the limpid lakes, and fields rough
With brambles, lay in sleep under the silent night,
Healed their cares, and hearts forgot their toil.’
For this description of nocturnal quiet tends to emphasize the grief of Dido who was not
resting even when all things else were resting. For immediately it follows:
‘But not the distressed Phoenecian queen, not
181
Erasmus, 55.
86
Ever was she lulled to sleep.’
182
Here, as Erasmus and Peacham both celebrate, Vergil leverages descriptive materials to the
poem’s other ends. The repeated appeals to stillness, quiet, and sleep act as a kind of charm,
lulling the passage to motionlessness. This is effective rhetoric in its own right, for, to borrow
from a later passage in Erasmus, its “pleasing charm holds the hearer.”
183
In Krieger’s reading,
we might even say it attains to a kind of spatiality. But what is more remarkable about this
passage in the minds of these rhetoricians is that the charm is not the final point. It is a means to
an end. As Peacham writes, the descriptive charm acts “to amplifie the dolorous sorrow of Dido
who could by no meanes finde rest at that time, when everie creature enjoyed rest.”
184
The
stillness and quiet of the night exaggerate the felt length of Dido’s grief, amplify her loneliness,
and make space for a reader to join her in that isolation. The descriptive passage, which is not
exactly about Dido, somehow acts to make Dido’s grief more important and central to the poem.
The passage forges the poem into a space of navigation between Dido’s isolated sorrow and a
narrative world that drives toward empire.
185
Descriptio becomes a pivotal tool for commenting
on the project of the epic as a whole.
Illustrative moments like this passage from the Aeneid punctuate the most celebrated
Elizabethan literature—recall the many florid passages of description in Spenser’s Faerie
182
Erasmus, 55.
183
Erasmus, 69. In another curious crossover between rhetoric and visual art in this period, Alberti also uses the
language of ‘charming’ and ‘holding’ to describe effective painting: “A 'historia' you can justifiably praise and
admire will be one that reveals itself to be so charming and attractive as to hold the eye of the learned and unlearned
spectator for a long while with a certain sense of pleasure and emotion," Alberti, 75.
184
Peacham, Uii
v
.
185
Colin Burrow discusses similar issues in his discussion of Surrey’s translation of Book 4 in which Dido’s solitary
experience is explicitly opposed to the collective experience of the Trojans. See “Virgil in English Translation” in
The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. C Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 112.
87
Queene and Sidney’s Arcadia—and decades of scholarship have demonstrated again and again
that the uses of these passages are manifold. What I hope to add in the chapters that follow is
evidence that the image in poetry becomes, for the early modern period, a specifically useful
place for navigating loss. In Shakespeare’s poetry and drama, descriptive moments act as spaces
in which to explore an ethical response to individual losses within historical and epic narrative,
to investigate the author’s relationship to the losses of the figures he depicts, and to invent
something novel out of the early modern period’s loss of the lively art and rhetorical culture of
antiquity. As early modern authors themselves acknowledge, the thematic through-line of loss
that ties so many examples of rhetorical efficacy together also shapes the ends to which poetry
and rhetoric can be put. In his Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham seems to say so much
himself:
Therefore of death and burials, of the adversities by wars, and of true love lost or ill-
bestowed are the only sorrows that the noble poets sought by their art to remove or
appease, not with any medicament of a contrary temper, as the Galenists use to
cure contraria contrariis , but as the Paracelsans, who cure similia similibus, making one
dolour to expel another, and, in this case, one short sorrowing a remedy of a long and
grievous sorrow.
186
In a sense, the chapters that follow each ask what it looks like for Shakespeare to give sorrow to
remedy sorrow. And how, I ask, does description in particular, alongside frequent reference to
images and uses of visual metaphors help to give that Paracelsan dose of dolor? Henry Peacham
binds together pleasure, vision, sorrow, and consolation as the work of rhetorical figures when he
writes that they are “as stars to give light, as cordials to comfort, as harmony to delight, as pitiful
186
Puttenham, 96.
88
spectacles to move sorrowfull passions, and as orient colours to beautifie reason.”
187
The task of
this project is to trace the work of Shakespeare’s descriptive figures—figures such as ekphrasis,
enargeia, and prosopopoeia—in winding these (sometimes apparently contradictory) aims
together.
The readings of rhetorical examples I have offered so far have already come a long way
in deepening and challenging Sidney’s stock humanist claim that the primary use of images in
poetry is to inspire virtuous action. While Sidney is able to marshal many examples of heroic
action modeled through poetic pictures, the poetry and drama of the early modern period play out
other roles for the image that are worthy of deeper exploration. Sidney’s choice to appeal to the
visual arts for his central metaphor is symptomatic of a more complex kind of imitation at play in
poetry than he is at first willing to own. The poets and dramatists of early modern England turn
to description and allusion to visual images at moments of loss and mourning. In doing so, they
generate reflection on the ability of their art to offer a response, whether in the form of a lament
or an attempt at consolation, to the central, inevitable human experience of death. I wish to
conclude this chapter by turning to one exemplary moment in which an early modern dramatist
explores both description and reference to the visual arts precisely as a way of responding to
death. This passage offers one brief preview of how descriptive figures—used in drama as well
as in poetry—took on a greater capacity than the cursory reader of Sidney would have expected.
A passage added to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy in 1602 explores description and
the pictorial arts as a response to tragedy in a manner that complicates or even critiques the
187
Peacham, Bii
r
.
89
resources for tragic representation available in a dramatic revenge narrative.
188
As an added
supplement, produced by a hand other than Kyd’s, what has come to be known as “the painter
scene” suggests that Kyd’s revenge drama was in some sense lacking. As riveting as Kyd’s
drama is in its original version, this supplemental scene appeals to the resources of description
particularly to fill out the play’s representation of mourning. The painter scene might anticipate
the play’s later turn to another form of art, performance, as a means of exacting revenge for loss.
I suggest, however, that the scene represents a possible “otherwise,” interrupting the revenge plot
to explore a different option for how tragedy might articulate and respond to grievous
experiences. In any case, the fact that the later addition makes more of the pictorial arts, and not
less, implies that early modern playwrights were increasingly attentive to the resources that the
pictorial imagination could offer their craft.
In Act 3 of the revised 1602 edition of Kyd’s play, a painter arrives to visit the bereaved
father Heironimo. As it turns out, both the painter and Heironimo have recently lost their sons to
murder. They meet at moment of mourning. When Heironimo first hears of the painter’s arrival,
he alludes to a notion (or desire) that an image might offer some form of consolation. “Bid him
come in,” he says “and paint some comfort. / For surely there’s none lives but painted
comfort.”
189
(3.12A.73-4). Heironimo’s welcome invokes a kind of solace that might be possible
through the painter’s art and immediately denies it. The bitter joke of the second line hangs on
the mimetic nature of painting: it is not real and cannot—despite the high claims of an Alberti—
truly make the absent present. But Heironimo’s first impulse is also to express a kind of hope
188
The identity of the playwright who wrote the additional lines for the 1602 edition is unknown, though Jonson and
Shakespeare have both been suggested. See Douglas Bruster, “Shakespearean Spellings and Handwriting in the
Additional Passages Printed in the 1602 Spanish Tragedy,” Notes and Queries 60.3 (2013).
189
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy ed. Clara Calvo and Jesus Tronch (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 3.12A.73-4.
90
about what an image could do for him at his moment of loss and it invites the reader to ask: in
what sense could a painting be a comfort? Heironimo goes on to inquire after the painter’s skill,
asking if he can fulfill a series of increasingly bold demands in the form of an image. When
Richard Meek discusses this passage, he ultimately takes the absurd demands Heironimo makes
as a subtle nod toward the superiority of narrative or drama over the frozen image. What
Heironimo describes, Meek points out, does not resemble “any conceivable piece of visual art,”
but rather shows the character “envisaging himself as a character in a narrative, or even a
play.”
190
And indeed, it is ultimately a play that Heironimo will use to exact his revenge on his
son’s murderer. If we view the passage with an eye to its implicit paragone, as Meek does, then
it is clear that an image cannot keep up with what Heironimo desires. But viewed in another way,
Heironimo’s increasing demands sketch out the possibilities of description. What if these
images—which are possible in verbal art if not in visual art—offer an alternative to revenge? In
what sense could the demands he makes amount to comfort?
Heironimo first asks for a painting that might indeed reflect on the claims of consolation
offered in early modern commonplaces about painting. In essence, he asks for an image that
returns what he has lost:
Look you, sir, do you see? I'd have you paint me in my gallery in your oil colours,
matted, and draw me five years younger than I am. Do you see, sir? Let five years go, let
them go, like the Marshal of Spain. My wife Isabella standing by me, with a speaking
look to my son Horatio, which should intend to this or somelike purpose: 'God bless thee,
190
Meek, 19.
91
my sweet son'- and my hand leaning upon his head, thus, sir, do you see? May it be
done?
191
Here, Heironimo casts the painter as someone with the power to turn back time, to manage who
is present and who is absent, and to make a picture appear to speak. Of course, in this moment, it
is Heiroimo’s speech that accomplishes these things, as his opening question (“do you see?”)
underscores. The image Heironimo imagines here does offer some consolation. If returns his lost
son and offers him a blessing. But this dream of an image is quickly replaced, perhaps because it
participates too much in consolatory fantasy, or perhaps because it resembles too closely the kind
of memorial paintings that were in fact made for deceased children in early modern England, and
hence has more to say about the aims of painting than of description.
192
Heironimo’s requests of the painter shift as he gets nearer and nearer to naming the
nature of his tragedy and acknowledging what it has made of him. His next requests return to the
location of his trauma and reflect the images that are seared in his memory. He asks the painter
to depict the “very tree” in which his son’s body was found and asks if he can draw “a youth, run
through and through with villain’s swords.”
193
Here the work of the image is not so much to
console as to offer a glimpse of the visual memories that haunt him. These concrete visual
memories are examples of the kind of phantasms that Quintilian argued an orator could employ
to make a vivid, enargeic description. These images are best, Quintilian suggests, when they
come from reality and observation.
194
In effect, Heironimo is here calling up—in rhetoric,
191
Kyd, 3.12A.112-120.
192
For examples of this sort of memorial painting see Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the
English Death Ritual c. 1500-c. 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).
193
Kyd, 3.12A.130-140.
194
Quintilian, 6.2.
92
inventing—the details that will make his vivid ekphrasis appear before the eyes of his listening
audience.
Finally, Heironimo bursts out with the image he truly longs for. As he speaks, he crafts a
complex kind of picture that is only possible in verbal form and at the same time offers a
strikingly full display of the many roles description can play in the context of loss:
HEIRONIMO: Well, sir, then bring me forth, bring me thorough alley and alley, still with
a distracted countenance going along, and let my hair heave up my nightcap. Let the
clouds scowl, make the moon dark, the stars extinct, the winds blowing, the bells tolling,
the owls shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes jarring and the clock striking twelve.
And then at last, sir, starting, behold a man hanging, and tottering, and tottering as you
know the wind will wave a man, and I with a trice to cut him down. And looking upon
him by the advantage of my torch, find it to be my son Horatio. There you may show a
passion, there you may show a passion. Draw me like old Priam of Troy, crying 'The
house is o'fire, the house is o'fire!', as the torch over my head. Make me curse, make me
rave, make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, make me curse hell, invocate
heaven, and, in the end, leave me in a trance, and so forth.
PAINTER: And is this the end?
HEIRONIMO: "Oh, no, there is no end; the end is death and madness.
195
Heironimo’s last request is for a full representation of the traumatic event of discovering his
son’s murder. Even while he adds more and more action and sound to his picture, imagining
himself like a character in an epic, the rhetorical frame of the passage (the request for a painting)
places all of the description’s actions in tension with the stillness of an image. The reader
195
Kyd, 3.12A.146-159.
93
encounters each action like another vignette in a crowded painting. The effect is something like
an early modern narrative painting of an epic in which multiple actions take place on the same
plane, placing each event in relation to the ones that surround it. Presented all at once to a
viewer’s freely wandering eyes, these paintings become like narratives that, to coopt
Heironimo’s phrase, have “no end.”
196
At the same time, Heironimo’s speech could also look like a compelling instance of
forensic oratory. Quintilian describes the role of a prosecutor in terms that anticipate Heironmo’s
speech. “When I am lamenting a murdered man,” he writes, “will I not have before my eyes all
the things which might believably have happened in the case under consideration? Will the
assailant not suddenly spring out…Will I not see the blow and the victim falling to the ground?
Will his blood, his pallor, his dying groans not be impressed on my mind?”
197
This, Quintilian
writes, is enargeia at work. For Quintilian, the occasion for such a speech is a prosecution, even
though he describes himself as “lamenting” the murdered victim. The speech then, borrows
effects and methods from both rhetoric and the visual arts. The weave of references to art, epic,
and oratory beg the question of whose task it is to “show a passion”—a painter, an orator, an
actor, or a poet? In this descriptive moment, Heironimo is all of these at once.
However, I suggest that whoever revised Kyd’s play in 1602, whether it was Jonson,
Shakespeare, or another unsuspected hand, makes the most of this kind of descriptive speech by
appropriating it as a space of mourning. Lodged in the middle of the passage is a description of
night that carries traces of the Vergilian description of that Erasmus and Peacham found so
196
Kyd, 3.12A.159. See Stuart Sillars Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015), esp. 45-56, for an examination of this mode of “reading” visual images in early modern painting.
197
Quintilian, 6.2.31-2.
94
capaciously useful. Here, however, the shrieking owls and croaking toads signify the
commonplace landscape of tragedy. They anticipate Heironimo’s horror even while they delay
its arrival within the speech. Heironimo is like Dido in the Aeneid passage—a figure whose
affective experience is amplified and made more sympathetic by the description into which he is
placed. But by imagining his description as a painting, Heironimo seems to enact a longing for
the kind of stillness to which that celebrated passage attained. Perhaps this grieving father does
not only want to perform his madness for revenge but also to be still like a painting himself.
“Draw me,” he begs, asking to be made still like the dead son he mourns and remembers. Or is it
rather that Heironimo imagines himself being made into the matter of poetry? Heironimo does
indeed cast himself as a Vergilian figure. He asks to be drawn “like old Priam of Troy, crying
'The house is o'fire, the house is o'fire!'” To be like Priam would be to have his suffering and loss
recorded in the annals of history and epic. But, as Shakespeare’s Lucrece will acknowledge in
her own affiliation with Hecuba, it would also mean to be rendered as still and silent as a painted
or historical figure. For a moment, Heironimo glimpses the image as a space to memorialize the
gravity of his loss and to remain with it rather than revenge it. But he also recognizes that the end
of this kind of immersion in a mourning image is “death and madness.” As Heironimo crafts his
speaking picture, he makes himself like the figures of legend even while he inters himself in the
still, imagined image as a space of enduring mourning. Drawing on epic narrative, on oratory, on
painting, and on the complex ontology of described images, Heironimo begins to demonstrate
what one can do with a speaking picture at a moment of loss.
When Heironimo turns to an ekphrasis in The Spanish Tragedy’s painter scene, he
engages in a form of mourning that Shakespeare first explored early in his career, in an epyllion
about the Roman heroine Lucrece. Heironimo’s imagination of the poetic image as a site for both
95
mourning his past losses and imagining his own death owes a great deal to Shakespeare’s poem
in which the raped Lucrece turns to a painting of the Fall of Troy in search of a “means to mourn
a newer way.”
198
198
William Shakespeare, Lucrece, in The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
line 1395. Parenthetical references to the poem are from this edition.
96
Figures
Figure 1.1. Imprese by Paulo Giovio, published in Dialogo (1556).
Figure 1.2. Dürer’s Rhinoceros. Woodblock print. 1515.
97
Chapter Two
Refusing Consolation in Shakespeare’s Lucrece
Shakespeare’s Lucrece is inconsolable. This fact, however, says less about her emotional
vulnerability than her ethical resolve. Lucrece refuses consolation in a literal sense when, near
the end of the poem, she turns away from the comforting words of her husband, father, and
Brutus. In Livy’s telling of the story, midway through his famous history of Rome, Lucrece
listens as the men argue that despite experiencing a rape, Lucrece’s mind, if not her body, is
chaste.
199
When this moment arrives in Shakespeare’s Lucrece (1594), the heroine deflects her
kinsmen’s consolation even before they have a chance to offer it.
200
Shakespeare’s Collatine
arrives to find his wife “clad in mourning black” (1585). As the men begin their ethical parsing,
his Lucrece “turns away” her face “carved” with tears, saying “no, no” (1709-15). Lucrece’s
choice to refuse consolation in favor of mourning condenses a larger poetic and ethical agenda of
Shakespeare’s epyllion. Her mourning critiques the instrumentalizing logic of Livy’s epic
history, which quickly subordinates Lucrece’s personal experience of grief to the epic unfolding
story of revolution it attributes to Brutus. At this haunting moment in Shakespeare’s poem,
Lucrece arrests a familiar historical narrative and chooses mourning, demanding that the poem
attend to her and her loss.
199
Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, chapter 58. For an Elizabethan translation of this scene, see William Painter, The Palace
of Pleasure Beautified (London: 1566), Bi r.
200
I follow Colin Burrow in using the shorter title rather than The Rape of Lucrece. Lucrece appeared on the title-
page of earlier quartos and emphasizes the agency of the heroine. See Burrow’s introduction to The Complete
Sonnets and Poems, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 40-73. Parenthetical references to Lucrece are from
this edition.
98
Lucrece’s choice to refuse comfort at the end of the poem is anticipated and explicated by
the earlier scene in which she stops to grieve the losses of another figure lifted from epic history.
“Pausing for means to mourn some newer way,” Lucrece interrupts the trajectory of the epyllion
(1395). She lingers before a painting of the fall of Troy and lends her voice to Hecuba, who is
herself a figure of grief in art and fiction.
201
Drawing on the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia —
speech proffered by an absent, inanimate, or imagined entity — Lucrece speaks words of grief
both to and for the image of the bereaved queen, declaring, “I’ll tune thy woes with my
lamenting tongue” (1465).
Shakespeare’s Lucrece pauses to contemplate the uses of consolation. As the victim of a
rape that follows quickly upon descriptive speeches about her beauty and virtue by men, her
power to redirect the poem’s mournful gaze might, in Peter Sacks’s terms, perform the
“consoling work” of “troping” her loss, and thus follow the model of Philomela, who represents
her ravishment in art.
202
As Lynn Enterline has argued, Lucrece borrows the more eloquent
voices of Ovidian figures, and with them, the “imagined compensations” of poetic song.
203
As
salutary as Lucrece’s exchange with Hecuba might appear, however, it offers the opposite of
poetic compensation to Lucrece. Readers of the poem will recall that if Lucrece’s mournful
address to Hecuba is an attempt at consolation, it is also a preparation for suicide. Lucrece’s
201
Cora Fox, “Spenser’s Grieving Adicia and the Gender Politics of Renaissance Ovidianism,” ELH 69 (2002): 389.
202
Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), 5. For criticism linking Lucrece’s rape to acts of description, see Joel Fineman, “Shakespeare’s Will: The
Temporality of Rape,” Representations 20 (1987): 25-76, and Nancy Vickers, “‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’:
Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 95-115. On Philomela see Marion Wells, “Philomela’s Marks: Ekphrasis and Gender
in Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays,” in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry ed. Jonathan Post (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 204-24.
203
Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 170.
99
prosopopoeia holds up the silent figure of Hecuba like a mask or a death’s head. Though
Lucrece’s apostrophe might perform the illusion of animation, it also acts as an implicit self-
defacement and anticipates the moment she will fall silent as the painted queen.
204
Lucrece’s
address to the Troy painting seems to work toward two mutually contradictory ends, providing,
on the one hand, the consolation of elegy, and on the other, an anticipation of her death. By
mourning for and with the painted figure of Hecuba, Lucrece seizes control of an ambitious
poetic scene, reframing an epic ekphrasis as a site of lament that acknowledges her own ongoing
transformation into an absent figure of poetry, unable to speak for herself.
205
Lucrece’s “newer way” to mourn interpolates scenes from Vergil into Livy’s history. As
she grieves before the Troy image, she becomes a second Aeneas. Like the Roman hero before
Dido’s murals in Book 1 of the Aeneid, she mourns in the space of an epic poetic description.
Aeneas’s grieving before the temple murals that depict his loss represents a moment of hesitation
within his larger trajectory toward becoming the heroic founder of imperial Rome, and yet
Aeneas’s grief resolves into action, action that brings about the eternal fame which serves as his
consolation. Like Vergil’s Dido, Lucrece’s subsequent choice to die by suicide is pointed at the
violence implicit in both imperial and poetic ambition. Lucrece’s scene of self-stabbing draws on
the versions of Vergil’s story that appeared in Elizabethan translations by Surrey and Phaer, and
Marlowe’s adaptation, Dido, Queen of Carthage.
206
In fashioning Lucrece’s mourning after
204
The term self-defacement borrows from Paul de Man’s foundational essay on prosopopoeia, “Autobiography as
De-Facement,” MLN (1979): 919-30.
205
On the ekphrastic Troy scene as poetically ambitious, see Catherine Belsey, “The Rape of Lucrece,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 100-102,
and Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 31-57.
206
As Colin Burrow points out in “Virgil in English Translation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed.
Charles Martindale (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109-27, Vergil’s early modern English translators
amplified the subtle hesitations over the imperial project punctuating the Latin epic. Meanwhile, translating Vergil’s
epic garnered literary authority, providing a form of consolation to writers on the margins of English society.
100
Aeneas’s and her death after Dido’s, Shakespeare signals his interest in exploring a revised
version of heroism and authority: his Lucrece translates scenes from Vergil into her own life,
and, like Marlowe, imagines Dido as a hero. Choosing Dido’s resolute grief over Aeneas’s
resolution to act, Lucrece signifies the poet’s investment in heroizing the lyric voice of loss and
suffering that might otherwise be overwritten by epic narrative.
Shakespeare’s invention of the Troy scene is, then, pivotal to the transformations in
poetry and rhetoric that scholars have identified as “both the topic and the mode” Lucrece.
207
As
Rachel Eisendrath has argued, the poem retreats from the instrumental ends of language
associated with rhetoric in the humanist tradition in order to pursue a more self-reflexive and
contemplative poetics and better account for the unnameable experience of rape.
208
Lucrece’s
prosopopoeia dramatizes Shakespeare’s thinking about these ethical and aesthetic aspects of his
own verbal art. In an ambitious poem “obsessed with rhetoric,” Shakespeare appropriates a
rhetorical schoolroom practice in order to explore a role for poetry as a means of mourning.
209
In
doing so, Shakespeare recruits the historically instrumental form of rhetorical speech in order to
undo the instrumentalizing logic of epic poetry.
210
Shakespeare’s epyllion, I argue, is attentive to how using the Roman narrative to appropriate literary authority
carries the risk of instrumentalizing suffering for the sake of an “imperial” agenda.
207
Jenny C. Mann, “Reckning with Shakespeare’s Orpheus in The Rape of Lucrece,” in Elizabethan Narrative
Poems: The State of Play, ed. Lynn Enterline (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2019), 21. Mann emphasizes the poem’s
transformation of rhetoric into a poetic medium.
208
Rachel Eisendrath, “Poetry at the Limits of Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece,” in Enterline, ed.
Elizabethan Narrative Poems, 45-68. Eisendrath draws on Enterline’s description of the difficulty of speaking the
wound of rape in The Rhetoric of the Body.
209
Mann, 21.
210
On rhetoric as instrumental or transactional, see Eisendrath, “Poetry at the Limits of Rhetoric,” 53-57.
101
The energy in this scene derives from Shakespeare’s choice to place two rhetorical tropes
in tension. The scene of epic ekphrasis, which might place Shakespeare’s poem in a tradition of
political myth-making, instead gives way to prosopopoeia, drawing attention to Lucrece’s
imminent dissolution into a poetic figure.
211
Shakespeare overwrites the claim to fame in his
aesthetic scene with another lyrical valence: in animating the inanimate image of Hecuba,
Lucrece also anticipates her own inanimacy. At rhetorical cross-purpose with itself, the scene
produces an apparent paradox which reframes a moment that would traditionally be used to
undergird poetic and political authority in order to mediate questions of representational ethics.
While pointing to the habit of ambitious poetry to appropriate the historical figures that it hopes
to animate, Shakespeare’s Lucrece revisits the promises of consolation that poetry can offer and
in their place offers a space for mourning that is only possible within the lines of poetry.
Lucrece’s choice of mourning the wordless dead of Troy and deflecting consolation represents a
mandate for poetry to find a “newer way” of responding to the losses of the past.
Heroic Lucrece
Readings of Shakespeare’s minor epic hesitate over whether to cast Lucrece as victim or
heroine. From the beginning to the end of the poem, Lucrece serves as an emblem of others’
rhetorical purposes. Her rape, as Nancy Vickers emphasizes, is the direct result of a contest of
epideictic description among men, “figuratively fought out on the fields of woman’s ‘celebrated’
body.”
212
As critics including Coppelia Kahn and Joel Fineman have demonstrated, Lucrece’s
211
On the politics of allusions to the Troy legend, see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the
Translation of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
212
Vickers, “Blazon,” 172.
102
face becomes a site of contested meaning where the embattled “red and white” evoke her
chastity, the projection of male desires, and the “colors” under which “heroic” men fight for
honor and ownership.
213
Lucrece’s heroism is again at stake in the political plot at the poem’s
end, where her corpse serves as a political emblem for a revolution spearheaded by Brutus.
214
With Collatine’s consent, he resolves “to show her bleeding body thorough Rome” and “publish
Tarquin’s foul offence” (1851-1852). At the sight of Lucrece’s body, the Romans agree “with
speedy diligence” to banish the Tarquins and install Brutus and Collatine as consuls (1853).
What neither man notices, however, is that in transforming Lucrece’s story into their own
mandate for revolution, they replace her role as an agent of change. For Brutus, her suicide is an
opportunity. Yet Lucrece staged the scene of her self-stabbing to regain control of her body, to
motivate Tarquin’s removal, and to rewrite scenes from Rome’s epic history with herself as
leading character (1693).
Like Vergil’s Aeneas, Lucrece experiences losses that ultimately regenerate a fallen
civilization. As Eisendrath notes, Lucrece’s choice to stab herself evokes the final lines of the
Aeneid (ca. 29-19 BC), when Aeneas stabs Turnus in the breast and founds Rome on an
equivocally violent and noble act. For the act of stabbing, Vergil uses a hitherto non-violent verb
condere, “to found”: this is the standard verb for laying the foundations for a city, and had been
since Livy wrote the story of Lucrece in his republican history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita .
215
213
See Fineman, “Shakespeare’s Will,” and Coppelia Kahn, “The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” Shakespeare
Studies 9 (1976): 45-72.
214
See Marion Wells, "‘To Find a Face Where All Distress is Stell'd’: Enargeia, Ekphrasis, and Mourning in The
Rape of Lucrece and the Aeneid," Comparative Literature 54 (2002), 97-126 for an argument that ekphrasis
precipitates Lucrece’s transformation into a political emblem.
215
Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (U. of
Chicago Press, 2018), 145. Sharon L. James, “Establishing Rome with the Sword: Condere in the Aeneid,” The
American Journal of Philology 116 (1995), 623-37.
103
Lucrece’s choice to die by self-stabbing draws on other key Roman sources. It recalls Dido’s
self-authoring and self-cancelling choice to stab herself with Aeneas’s sword in the Aeneid and
the more triumphant version of the suicide in Ovid’s Heroides. When Lucrece declaims
Tarquin’s active role in her death, declaring “he, he…’tis he / that guides this hand to give this
blow to me, ” she invokes and directly reverses the Ovidian Dido’s assertion that while the
sword and cause of her death came from Aeneas, “from Dido herself came the blow” (1721-
2).
216
The string of allusions to Livy, Vergil, and Ovid both complicate and clarify the high
stakes of suicide for Shakespeare’s Lucrece, who arguably understands that the meaning of her
death will depend on the meaning given by her survivors whether in a monarchical, a republican,
or an imperial Rome. Lucrece’s suicide lays claim to the regenerative outcome of Aeneas’s
heroism, even while it critiques the instrumentalizing logic according to which that outcome is
achieved at the cost of Dido’s life and kingdom. As both an Aeneas and a Dido, Lucrece aims to
heroize the acts of mourning and self-cancellation that are the undersong of Vergil’s imperial
narrative.
217
Although Lucrece’s tragedy issues in political renewal when, in Catherine Belsey’s
summary, Rome “opts for a new kind of government, this time based on consent,” the Roman
revolution that unfolds problematically makes no reference to her consent or initiative.
218
Lucrece’s body immediately becomes instrumental to a political narrative signed by a male
author. Brutus persuades his companions to show Lucrece’s “bleeding body thorough Rome, /
and so to publish Tarquin’s foul offence” (1851-1852). A kernel of imperial ambition exists even
216
Ovid, Heroides, trans. Harold Isbell (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 56-66.
217
On self-cancellation in Lucrece, see “Orpheus Unseen: Lucrece’s Cancellation Fantasy,” Philological Quarterly
92 (2013): 449-69.
218
Belsey, “The Rape of Lucrece,” 101.
104
within Brutus’s call for republican government. When Collatine and Lucretius swear to revenge
Lucrece, they do so “wond’ring at him,” Brutus (1845). Brutus tells the story of Lucrece as if she
were a figure in the painting she apostrophizes, an “instrument” without a tongue (1464), which
is precisely what Lucrece recognizes and fears when she sifts through the epic representation of
Troy’s fall and settles on the image of Hecuba as pivotal to the problem of her own depiction in
history. By meditating on another figure whose suffering is folded into an epic history, Lucrece
anticipates the triumphal story that Brutus ultimately claims as his own. At the same time, as she
studies the painting, Lucrece meditates on how she may reclaim authority over her own narrative
and commemoration; namely, by pausing the narrative to engage with figures that reflect her
own dissolution into the matter of history.
If poetic description victimizes Lucrece, it is also heroizes her. The poem’s ekphrasis
interpolates scenes from Vergil’s poem to suggest an alternate narrative for what Shakespeare’s
Lucrece can accomplish.
219
The artful scene of the Fall of Troy that she engages has no
precedent in Livy, Ovid (the Fasti), or Painter. It draws instead on The Aeneid and Marlowe’s
Dido Queen of Carthage (1593) and dwells on scenes of mourning.
220
It is, moreover, a
substantial set-piece: 224 lines of the poem are devoted to it in contrast to the forty-nine lines it
takes for Brutus to invent a political plot and found a republican Roman government. The scene
of artistic engagement is poised to pivot Shakespeare’s entire poem in a new direction.
219
On the ekphrasis as central to Shakespeare’s poetic project, see Catherine Belsey, “Invocation of the Visual
Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond,” Shakespeare Quarterly 63 (2012), 175-98 and Richard Meek, “Ekphrasis
in The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter’s Tale,” SEL 46 (2006), 389-414. I concur that the scene reflects on
Shakespeare’s project but argue that Lucrece’s use of the scene as a site of mourning is more central to that poetic
than has yet been acknowledged.
220
For more on Shakespeare’s sources see Burrow’s “Introduction” in The Complete Sonnets, 45-54. Though I focus
on parallels with Aeneid 1, the scene also borrows from Aeneas’s tale to Dido in Aeneid 2 which draws on Livy’s
account of the Fall of Carthage.
105
The scene acts as a meta-poetic reflection on what poetry has to offer to those who suffer
loss. It suggests that poetic figures like prosopopoeia and ekphrasis can offer resources for
representing loss neglected by epic history. When Lucrece apostrophizes the Troy painting and
offers to lend speech to the painting’s Hecuba she initiates a change in the meaning of epic
ekphrasis. Shedding tears for Hecuba, she emulates Aeneas, “halted, weeping” before the murals
at Dido’s temple, but she also transforms Aeneas’s epic plot.
221
For Aeneas, immersion in the
Troy image offers a pause for grief that, as Vergil writes, “lured [Aeneas] into hope of better
things to follow.” Those “better things,” as Vergil reveals later in the poem, have little to do with
Aeneas and his sufferings and everything to do with the imperial history that Aeneas shoulders
along with his divinely-forged shield. Ekphrasis, in this tradition, comes burdened with imperial
hopes, and so Aeneas’s heroism is defined by the action into which his immersion in grief and
pity ultimately resolves.
In the epic tradition, to linger before an image of the Fall of Troy is to reorganize
suffering and pity into political energy. In Vergil, this movement is dramatized in the progress
from Aeneas’s immersion in the Troy murals to his shouldering of the ekphrastic shield marked
with the symbols of political triumph. On the walls of Elizabeth’s palace at Whitehall, the call
for imperial action over lament was reflected in a set of tapestries depicting scenes from the
Aeneid: in the final piece Aeneas looks in pity at Dido’s suicide even while he is in the act of
riding away. Meanwhile, Mercury and Jupiter hover overhead, reminding the hero of his destined
purpose.
222
For Shakespeare’s contemporaries, constructing and then repurposing a scene of
221
Vergil, The Aeneid, trans. Sarah Ruden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1.459.
222
On the tapestries in the Aeneas series purchased by Henry VIII, see John H. Astington, Stage and Picture in the
English Renaissance: The Mirror Up to Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 65.
106
immersive pity reflected literary as well as political ambition. Spenser’s Britomart may be
moved by a Trojan scene, but the telling of the Troy story in The Faerie Queene Book III ends
with the wink of the national poet as his heroine lauds the “glory and great enterprise” of
Troynovant, or London, the third kingdom that will equal both Troy and Rome.
223
Lucrece,
however, transforms the scene of Troy’s fall into a site for a different kind of poetic and political
reflection. Contemplating the painting allows Lucrece to resist the dissolution of the ekphrastic
scene into imperial action; her heroic agenda, by contrast, throws into relief the ethical
challenges of representing and responding to loss in art.
Lucrece does not share the imperial hopes implicit in the tragic ekphrasis of Aeneid 1.
Aeneas takes up the burden of fighting for a Roman future emblazoned on his shield even though
he does not understand the historical acts, failures, and distortions represented there. Lucrece, on
the other hand, becomes a “shield” or a “heraldic image” that motivates the wars of men.
224
When she pauses the action of the poem in order to apostrophize Hecuba and mourn “a newer
way,” she poses what I take to be a critique of the imperial ambitions of poetry in that they
threaten to overwrite her tragic personal narrative. Lucrece searches the Troy painting for a face
in which “all distress is stelled,” and finds it in the image of Hecuba, a silent, lamenting figure to
whom she lends her voice (1444). In speaking for Hecuba, Lucrece animates a figure from the
past even while she identifies the parallel between herself and the bereaved queen’s image: she is
keenly aware of her likely fate as a subject of poetry and art. By transforming epic ekphrasis into
prosopopoeia, she disrupts the model of unhesitating action enjoined in the heroic epic and offers
in its stead the equally heroic pause for lament and compassionate attention.
223
The Faerie Queene, 3.6.43.
224
See Vickers, “Blazon.”
107
Speaking for Hecuba
Recent criticism has agreed that Shakespeare’s epyllion engages with rhetoric and
rhetorical theory in order to transform, rather than reproduce, the traditional aims of rhetorical
training.
225
While Lucrece and Tarquin both practice forms of rhetorical persuasion and
deliberation that might have been familiar from the English schoolroom, the poem recruits those
forms of rhetorical display to other, more self-reflexive, ends.
226
In the Troy scene,
Shakespeare’s heroine exercises her own power to repurpose rhetorical forms. Lucrece addresses
the Troy painting’s Hecuba because she is uneasy about the instrumentalizing potential in the
artist’s endeavor to represent the queen’s grief in the context of the epic scene. Her own success
turns on whether she, as a poetic speaker, will be able to improve on the artist’s failures:
On this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes,
And shapes her sorrow to the beldame’s woes,
Who nothing wants to answer but her cries,
And bitter words to ban her cruel foes.
The painter was no god to lend her those;
And therefore Lucrece swears he did her wrong,
To give her so much grief and not a tongue.
‘Poor instrument’, quoth she, ‘without a sound’,
I’ll tune thy woes with my lamenting tongue.’ (1457-65)
225
See especially the articles on rhetoric collected in Enterline, ed., Elizabethan Narrative Poems.
226
Eisendrath, “Poetry at the Limits,” argues that Shakespeare advances a self-reflexive poetics that “recoils from
rhetoric’s commitment to instrumentalizing modes of thought” and is fulfilled in the aesthetics of Kant, 46.
108
As Lucrece critiques the painter’s mute depiction of Hecuba, she raises the possibility that
rhetorical forms can recuperate the painter’s failures of representation. However, Lucrece’s
position is complicated by her own awareness of the dangers of instrumentalization in the
attempt to represent grief with rhetoric. Lucrece seems uncertain of what she has to gain from
straining her “untuned tongue” into eloquence to represent her own loss (1214). When she sits
down to write to Collatine just before turning to the painting, her eloquence is posed as an enemy
to her grief, as “conceit and grief an eager combat fight” (1298).
227
In this scene, then, Lucrece is
arguably concerned with whether she can speak for Hecuba without conceit crowding out grief.
Her subsequent choice to balance epic ekphrasis with prosopopoeia reflects the attempt to hold
representational ambition and the motives of personal grief in equipoise. In other words, Lucrece
appropriates a schoolboy exercise in order to pursue an ethical and poetic point.
Lucrece’s prosopopoeia echoes the English schoolroom practice of crafting speeches for
figures from history or literature, when boys were trained to imitate the art of the great poets
Ovid and Vergil, intoning the woes of literary figures as a way of tuning their own rhetorical
voice.
228
John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius or The Grammar Schoole (1612) recommends that
students practice speeches that express the heightened affect of characters: “Of which sort are the
Prosopopeyes of Iupiter, Apollo, and others in Ouids Metamorphosis, Iuno, Neptune, Aeolus,
Aeneas, Venus, Dido, &c Vergils Aeneids”
229
Such classroom exercises incidentally reframed
227
Enterline and Fineman note how, when writing, Lucrece seems imprisoned by a pun on Shakespeare’s name, as
“what wit sets down is blotted straight with will” (1299). See also Amy Greenstadt, “’Read it in me’: The Author’s
Will in Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006): 45-70.
228
For more on the classroom practice of this figure, see Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric,
Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), esp.120-52.
229
John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius (1612; repr., Menston: Scholar P Facsimiles, 1968), 212-13.
109
classical and epic narratives to attend to personal suffering and lament.
230
While these speeches
were highly performative, used to train young rhetoricians to display a skill, they also cultivated
language that attended to pity and sympathy. Following Cicero, students were trained that they
needed to share an emotion if they were to express it persuasively.
231
Crafting prosopopoeia (also
variously known as “ethopoeia” or “imitation”) required young speakers to focus attention on the
experience of suffering and loss even in the context of heroic political narratives, in effect
inverting the trajectory that lurks behind the famed ekphrasis of Aeneid 1.
Ekphrasis and prosopopoeia both appear in the order of figurae sententiae that early
modern rhetoricians considered the “grand style,” according to Brian Vickers.
232
Such figures
were known for their ability to move the emotions of readers, even sometimes at the risk of
derailing other persuasive functions. Employing both tropes at once, Lucrece’s speech is a “gale
force” wind of rhetoric.
233
Leveraging one rhetorical trope against another, Lucrece reframes the
tableau of epic ambition. She turns to prosopopoeia at the very moment that an epic ekphrasis
typically turns away from pity and toward imperial hope. In Shakespeare’s ekphrastic scene, the
heroine lingers on absorptive lament and mourns with a figure whose losses are profoundly
personal and whose narrative includes no salutary hope. In choosing to speak for Hecuba, she
affiliates with a figure who represents the dwindling of imperial hopes: though a queen and
mother, all fifty of her children are killed. Hecuba also fails to represent the poetic powers of
elegy. Ovid’s Hecuba brings the representation of grief to a crisis when her laments decline to
230
See Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, on how this practice troubles the gendering of epic, heroic action as
masculine and affective lament as feminine.
231
Enterline demonstrates how this Ciceronian argument entered the curriculum. Ibid., 121.
232
Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 283-5.
233
Ibid., 284.
110
the barking of a dog.
234
By affiliating with Hecuba, Shakespeare’s Lucrece becomes the
controlling voice of tragic representation, amplifying the mourning of a figure who does not have
the power to represent herself and resisting the dissolution of pity into action. Lucrece stages a
rhetorical coup that transforms epic ekphrasis into a poetic critique and initiative by which
female suffering motivates political reforms and reframes the ambitions of poetry.
Lucrece’s scene of contemplation rejects the imperial and instrumentalizing aspect of the
epic tableau but it leverages another feature of ekphrastic poetry to great effect. Lucrece follows
a tradition of using ekphrasis to ask whether art can represent the losses of the past, and more, to
what extent representation offers consolation for loss. The drama of ekphrasis rests in its
willingness to exaggerate the tension between absence and presence in poetry. On the one hand,
as Valentine Cunningham has argued, the trope exhibits an ameliorative hope of making the
absent present; it demonstrates “literature's persistent resurrectionist desires—the craving to have
the past return livingly, to live again, to speak again"
235
At the same time, it has the effect of
underscoring the impossibility of that hope. “Pictures,” Catherine Belsey remarks, “cannot
restore the dead; representation does not deliver presence”: ekphrasis confirms “the difference
between life and its likeness.”
236
In Vergil’s poem, ekphrastic moments accentuate this problem
and, while they aim to represent the past, they also underscore the inability of representation to
redeem loss or fully clarify it.
234
Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 13.508-688. For alternate readings of Hecuba, see Tanya
Pollard, “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?” Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012), 1060-93 and Jane O. Newman, “‘And
Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of
Lucrece,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 304-26.
235
Valentine Cunningham, “Why Ekphrasis?” Classical Philology 102 (2007), 63.
236
Belsey, “Invocation,” 179, 196.
111
Vergil modeled this fraught relationship between epic imperative and tragic interrogative:
an ekphrastic image such as Aeneas’s shield may impose an artistic scheme of order on the world
and the past in hopes to motivate a meaningful future, but it cannot dissolve the signs of past loss
and suffering. The Aeneid’s ekphrases puzzle over the challenges of representing absence and
failure within an epic narrative. In Vergil’s Troy mural, for example, Aeneas is particularly
moved by the point of Troilus’s spear which “scores the dust” as he is dragged behind his empty
chariot (1.478). The trailing marks of Troilus’s spear inscribe (in Vergil’s Latin: inscribitur) the
dirt with illegible lines that perform poetry’s struggle to write the story of suffering. Likewise,
Vergil’s ekphrastic description of the gates to the underworld emphasizes what cannot be
represented. Vergil tells us that Daedalus’s grief kept him from depicting the fall of his son
Icarus on the golden gates. “Twice his hands failed,” Vergil writes, pointing paradoxically at the
impossibility of narrating such a failure (6.32). If epic ekphrastic scenes tend to turn away from
pity and toward action, it is in part because lingering to describe loss only emphasizes what
ekphrasis cannot do. It cannot restore what time and history have taken away.
Lucrece’s engagement with the Troy painting forces the reader of Shakespeare’s epyllion
to pause at this point of tension. The Troy image raises the prospect of representing Lucrece’s
loss and placing it in the context of a larger political narrative, but Lucrece’s choice to affiliate
with Hecuba simultaneously underscores the failure of the heroic narrative to account for her
loss. Though Lucrece scans the painting for figures with whom she might identify, the painting
fails to represent her experience. Helen, the figure whose rape instigated the turmoil in the
image, is not pictured (1471). And though Lucrece arrives at the belief that Sinon, with his
“outward honesty” defiled by “inward vice,” is an apt stand-in for her rapist, there is no figure
who can stand in for her or indicate her loss (1527-1547). The painting as a whole could be
112
allegorized as an image of her own assault, but this option also seems troubled. Lucrece’s body
as a besieged city is a conceit that runs throughout the scene of her rape (425-448). To assent to a
metaphorical representation of her body as polis would mean repeating her objectification and
consenting to others’ politicization of her story.
237
In the absence of a figure that can represent
her experience of grief without instrumentalizing it, Lucrece attends to and speaks for Hecuba,
an “instrument without a sound,” and another figure without the ability to represent herself.
238
At first glance, Lucrece’s prosopopoeia seems to fulfill the poetic, ekphrastic hope of
making the past speak or giving voice to loss. But Lucrece’s offer to “tune” Hecuba’s “woes”
with her own “lamenting tongue” ultimately has a different effect (1465). The breath that
Hecuba borrows from Lucrece may, for a moment, animate her, but this exchange also
anticipates, perhaps even precipitates, Lucrece’s death. Shakespeare describes Lucrece’s speech
as a chiastic exchange: “she lends them words and she their looks doth borrow” (1498). In
exchange for her breath, Lucrece borrows the looks of the mourning figures in the painting. As
looks of grief, the faces Lucrece borrows from the painting are fitting to her situation. As
painted, inanimate looks, the faces she borrows also prefigure her own death. By speaking for the
painting, she takes on the image’s “lifeless life” (1374). Lucrece’s prosopopoeia reinvigorates
the hope of representing an experience of loss within an ekphrastic scene at the same time that it
arrests the poem’s epic action and threatens to still her. Lingering in the stillness of the ekphrasis,
Lucrece slows her transformation into an instrument of empire and imagines a version of
237
Lucrece does allude to her body as her Troy at 1547. But this allegorization is precisely what draws her out of her
immersion. When she accepts Sinon as a version of Tarquin, she tears at the figure with her nails and is shocked to
remember that “his wounds will not be sore.”
238
Ovid’s Hecuba arrives at unspeakable grief. See Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 152-97. Hecuba is absent from
representation in Marlowe’s telling of the Troy scene. Marlowe’s Achates asks “O, where is Hecuba? / Here she was
wont to sit; but saving air, / Is nothing here, and what is this but stone?” Dido Queen of Carthage, 2.1.12-14.
Hecuba’s absence and her status as nothing but air and stone anticipate Shakespeare’s reconceiving the ekphrastic
scene as a site of mourning for Lucrece.
113
descriptive poetry as lament, that is, as a “means to mourn.” In the mournful, ekphrastic pause
Lucrece asks what poetry has to offer to those who suffer. Representation, and even speech, does
not bring Hecuba back to life, nor does it redeem her losses. Rather, Lucrece’s affiliation with
Hecuba renders her an icon of the absent presence, the unnarratable loss, at the heart of
ekphrasis. Lucrece joins Hecuba in mourning the past and the inability of language or art to
retrieve it, and in doing so, identifies her own position as a lost figure imperfectly rendered in art.
Viewed through her apostrophe, what poetry seems to offer Lucrece is a place to preserve and
mourn her loss rather than offer consolation for it. As Lucrece addresses and mirrors the painted
figure, she manages her own transformation into the “graver” matter of Shakespeare’s poem.
239
Shakespeare’s description of Hecuba draws attention to the poetic material out of which
Lucrece fashions her means of mourning. Hecuba’s is the face where all distress is stelled”
(1444). “Stelled,” for Shakespeare, meant something between “portrayed” and “fixed.” In
Sonnet 24, the eye has “play’d the painter” when it “steeld” the beauty of the beloved in the
“table” of the speaker’s heart.
240
The word is burdened with reference to the material of art, as
“stelled,” also spelled “steeled,” recalls the act of etching or engraving on metal, stone, or wax.
But “stelled” also echoes “stilled.” By the eighteenth century the term would be used to refer to
a fixed stare, like the “glowerin’ e’en” of a “deid man” that are “stell’t in his heed.”
241
When
Lucrece searches the painting for the face in which “all distress is stelled,” she looks for a way to
stop at the surface of the ekphrasis, to still the poem, and mourn loss. And, as Lucrece attends to
and addresses Hecuba’s face “stelled” with distress, she chooses Hecuba as a mirror for herself.
239
Shakespeare’s dedication to Venus and Adonis promises a “graver labour” (10). This likely refers to his plans for
Lucrece.
240
Sonnet 24, 1-2.
241
OED 2b.
114
As Marion Wells argues, immersing herself in the painting’s mirror is a “proleptic death.”
242
Lucrece’s sympathetic aesthetic absorption performs a dramatic memento mori in which the
figure Lucrece addresses speaks: “as I am now, so too will you soon be.”
243
In short, Lucrece’s prosopopoeia reframes the poem’s epic image as a reminder of her
own—and, as I will suggest, the poet’s—intransient mortality. Lucrece interrupts Vergil’s
ekphrastic scene just before the imperial promise, pausing at that insoluble line, as James
Heffernan renders it: “These pictures weep for us and our mortality.”
244
As her speech makes
(poein) a face (a prosopon) for Hecuba, she also forges the still and inarticulate figure of Hecuba
as a mirror for herself. While early in the poem it is Tarquin’s gaze that entombs Lucrece,
attributing her sleeping face with “death’s dim look,” here, Lucrece chooses Hecuba’s mortal
stillness for herself (403). Lucrece’s pause suggests that suspension in a form of art such as
ekphrastic poetry, a form that is keenly aware of its own failure to redeem loss or resurrect the
past, is preferable to the fate of being instrumentalized by an epic narrative. Through the self-
cancelling, arresting rhetorical form of prosopopoeia, Lucrece ensures that this ekphrastic pause
remains a site of mourning.
Lucrece’s Invention
Lucrece’s prosopopoeia dramatizes one way in which an early modern poet was
reimagining the potential uses of rhetorical forms and figures of speech. In the Troy scene,
242
Wells, “To Find a Face,” 117.
243
On this memento mori commonplace, see Scott L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 109-35.
244
James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (University of
Chicago Press, 1993), 25.
115
Shakespeare recruits a scene of lively pictorial representation as a space for reflecting on the
animating ambitions and failures of verbal art. Leonard Barkan has drawn a parallel between the
“rendering of the image into discourse” that takes place in ekphrastic poetry, and the
prosopopoeic hope that “bestows a voice upon a mute object,” an object that rarely exists in
actuality.
245
Pictorialism, and description more broadly, thus become for the English Renaissance
“the site of a particular consciousness involving on the one hand absence or loss and on the other
the possibility of inventing something out of nothing."
246
Barkan’s reading of the descriptive
project invokes the creativity of prosopopoeia—its ability to generate the imaginary by way of
speech—and its relationship to absence: the insistence that the subject of description and verbal
animation has life only insofar as it is lent by the poet’s words. Barkan’s summary helps clarify
what Lucrece might be accomplishing when she takes on the role of poet and speaks for Hecuba.
She is inventing something. What Lucrece invents within the ekphrasis is a way of letting loss
speak, a form of art that carves out space in which absence and loss take center stage and
mourning is heroic action.
247
Figuring ekphrasis as a trope in which the poet’s art is predicated on an exchange with
absence is not unique to Lucrece. Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage also returns to the
Vergilian moment when Aeneas confronts Dido’s murals. Here, Aeneas’s speech offers a
striking parallel to Lucrece:
Achates, though mine eyes say this is stone,
245
Leonard Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship,”
Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), 332.
246
Ibid., 335.
247
On “invention,” as a rhetorical term indicating both creation and discovery see Rolande Greene, Five Words:
Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (U. of Chicago Press, 2013), 15-40.
116
Yet thinks my mind that this is Priamus;
And when my grieved heart sighs and says no,
Then would it leap out to give Priam life.
O were I not at all, so thou mightst be!
248
Like Lucrece before the Troy painting, Marlowe’s Aeneas frames the ekphrastic scene as an
exchange. Aeneas imagines that the figure of Priam might have life if he “were not at all.”
Aeneas’s offer lends clarity to Lucrece’s prosopopoeia. When she speaks for Hecuba and
borrows the lifeless looks of the painting, she fulfills what remains a wish-dream for Aeneas
here. Lucrece’s self-cancelling prosopopoeia thrusts her into the space between life and death,
presence and absence that this period associates with the pictorial project and the prosopopoeic
trope. Her speech asserts that inhabiting this space might constitute an act of mourning and that
this mourning is an ideal task for poetry.
The choice to mourn in an ekphrastic scene is available to other figures in the poem too.
After her suicide, Lucrece’s husband Collatine begins to mourn. He “falls, and bathes the pale
fear in his face” in Lucrece’s blood, “and counterfeits to die with her a space” (1775-7).
Collatine’s grieving echoes the sympathetic exchange that Lucrece modeled with Hecuba.
Bathing his pale face in her red blood, he becomes like the “red and white” image of Lucrece
that motivated her rape (11). His grieving is described in terms that aptly describe Lucrece’s own
engagement with the Troy painting: his mourning is a counterfeit death. Collatine, however, does
not linger here. He is interrupted by Brutus—traditionally, an heir of Aeneas—who leverages
Collatine’s grief into political action. “Do not steep thy heart / in such relenting dew of
lamentations,” he urges, “but kneel with me and help to bear thy part” in rousing the Romans’
248
Marlowe, Dido, 2.1.24-28.
117
anger (1828-30). Brutus berates Lucretius and Collatine for grieving over Lucrece’s body.
“Why,” Brutus demands, “is woe the cure for woe? / Do wounds help wounds, or grief help
grievous deeds?” (1821-22). The implicit answer to Brutus’s question is that, for Lucrece, woe
was the cure for woe. To grieve with Hecuba did help Lucrece to mourn Tarquin’s grievous
deeds, and by berating Lucrece’s father and husband, Brutus belittles both the mourning and the
meditation on mutability that Shakespeare has posited as the hope of ekphrastic poetry through
Lucrece’s speech. Brutus’s rejection of mourning speech amounts to a rejection of a sympathetic,
lamenting mode of reading and writing poetry in favor of his own epic interpretation of the
scene.
Strikingly, what Lucrece does seem to make out of the Troy painting is a tomb.
Eisendrath among others has noted the epitaphic language embedded in the painting’s
description. As the heroine scans the image, the poem narrates, “Lo, here weeps Hecuba, here
Priam dies…Here friend by friend in bloody channel lies” (1485-87). The “here lies” formulation
of the description repeats the language in which “a tomb is traditionally made to speak.”
249
The
poem’s “here” also seems to have a temporal shade. “Here” points to the ekphrastic present—the
moment, now, when we read a poem and encounter the weeping Hecuba and the lamenting
Lucrece. If the ekphrastic Troy image is a tomb, then so is the poem. Indeed, the Hecuba we
encounter here seems to have been recently exhumed from a grave. She is “anatomized” by the
painter (1450). The poem draws attention to her wrinkled “chaps”—much as Hamlet will later
gesture to the dead Yorick’s “chapfallen” face (1452).
250
And the “black” blood in her veins,
shows “life imprisoned in a body dead” (1456). The lines pick up the language Shakespeare used
249
Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things, 144.
250
Hamlet, 5.1.196.
118
earlier to describe the results of “the painter’s strife”: “A thousand lamentable objects there / In
scorn of nature art gave lifeless life” (1373-74). The “lifeless life” of the painting might, on the
one hand, demonstrate the animating power of verbal and visual art, but it simultaneously
acknowledges its own limitation. Such a lifeless life seems to be the extent of what Lucrece has
to hope for. The poetry that depicts her suffering constructs a place between life and death, a still
place of mourning that cannot resurrect the past. Lucrece’s speech threatens to absorb her into a
self-cancelling or reifying exchange with the painting. Nevertheless, Lucrece does choose to
offer a prosopopoeia to this mortal Hecuba.
Demonstrating this response has real implications for Lucrece, for the fate of becoming a
figure of poetry and art has already fallen on her. Her affiliation with the painting, along with the
poem’s ekphrastic insistence on pointing to the matter with which the painting is composed,
fulfills multiple moments from earlier in the poem. Just after her rape, Lucrece tears her own
flesh with her nails, anticipating the faces she will tear in the picture (739). And the matron’s
laments continually return to images of her face as matter other than flesh, as when she imagines
tears carving lines in her face “like water that doth eat in steel” (755). Lucrece’s absorption in the
painting, then, completes a transformation that has been occurring since at least the hour of her
rape and likely since the moment she was first described by Collatine and caught in the black
lines of poetry. The representational friction of this ekphrasis, then, works powerfully in the
historical Lucrece’s favor. Each mention of painting’s “dry drops” reminds the reader that the
image does not generate the presence it longs for (1375). In turn, Lucrece’s affiliation with the
figures in the painting underscores how incomplete a representation she is receiving: just as Troy
is not brought to life in the Troy painting, Lucrece is not made present by Lucrece. By lingering
119
here, Lucrece stages a critique of any attempt to make her an instrument, whether of empire or
poetic fame.
If Lucrece rejects some of the traditional consolations of poetry, what vision of poetic art
does it offer in their place? Key to this question is Lucrece’s role as a poet when she speaks for
the figure of Hecuba, an act which she specifically articulates as corrective. The painter, Lucrece
“swears” did Hecuba “wrong / To give her so much grief, and not a tongue” (1462-1463). But
Lucrece does not imagine her prosopopoeia as purely reparative. Rather, in speaking for Hecuba,
Lucrece willingly submits to a poetic figure that imagines her own imminent death and silence.
The image of poetry that Shakespeare puts forward in Lucrece anticipates a tradition that critics
more commonly associate with Romantic poetry, and the conception of prosopopoeia as an
elegiac figure, one that reflects on, and mourns the loss of, the past.
251
Paul de Man and J. Hillis
Miller have especially borne witness to the self-cancelling nature of prosopopoeia, which
projects a future in which the speaker, like the object they address or imagine, is mute or absent.
“The latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia,” de Man writes, is that the “symmetrical structure
of the trope…[prefigures] one’s own mortality.”
252
That is, even while a speaker’s address can
lend animacy to inanimate subjects, such an address might also turn back on the speaker,
freezing him or her in a moment of remembered mutability, a stony pause that foreshadows their
future silence.
253
To invoke the more apt early modern motif, the possibility of a reply—in which
251
J. Hillis Miller describes prosopopoeia as “a cover-up of death or of absence, a compensation,” Versions of
Pygmalion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4.
252
De Man, “Autobiography,” 928. De Man’s argument does not depend on prosopopoeia being the speech of the
dead. Rather, his reading relies on the figure addressed or given the ability to reply being inanimate.
253
For de Man, the rhetorical form of prosopopoeia echoes the “Pause, Traveller!” a pastoral traveler might find on
a monument. The interruption “is not only the prefiguration of one's own mortality but our actual entry into the
frozen world of the dead,” “Autobiography,” 78.
120
the apostrophizer takes the place of the inanimate apostrophized—might function as a warning:
memento mori, remember death. “[I]n spite of its positive and productive side,” as Hillis Miller
writes, the figure is “haunted by death,” providing “an obscure foretaste of the experience of
death.”
254
This vision of prosopopoeia arrests a speaker in the “here” of Lucrece’s tomb-like
Troy painting. Lucrece’s choice to speak for Hecuba then produces an image of poetic speech in
a heightened aesthetic moment that does not lay claim to some form of authorial immortality.
Rather, Lucrece’s figure finds in Hecuba a mirror of what she will soon be—an image or a figure
of speech. If Lucrece’s speech embodies a Shakespearean model for poetry, then it is a model by
which Shakespeare could also imagine his own dissolution into a figure no more animate than
Lucrece or Hecuba. It is a model in which poetry allows action to give way to mourning, where
one can, like Collatine, “counterfeit to die a space” with the subject of ekphrasis (1776).
Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures
For Shakespeare, exploring the uses of prosopopoeia alongside his heroine is a means to
reconstrue poetry’s role as monument. In the Elizabethan schoolroom, prosopopoeia was taught
as a rhetorical device with persuasive, self-interested ends, but early modern writers and
rhetoricians were also aware of another side to this trope. In lending breath and speech to figures
of art or history, a speaker also assumes a likeness with those figures. Later critics of
prosopopoeia and its sibling apostrophe would emphasize how, in poetry, this likeness could be
viewed as ontologically destabilizing. Poets hand over breath and face to the inanimate. In turn,
the prosopopoeic poem anticipates the poet’s future, a future in which they survive in the lines of
254
Hillis Miller, Pygmalion, 48.
121
their poem alone, an eternal monument, “frozen in their own death.”
255
Most histories of the
lyric, however, emphasize these aspects of the trope as relatively belated recognitions. In her
study of early modern lyric, Heather Dubrow argues that apostrophe and prosopopoeia became
signature figures in the study of lyric because of their centrality to Romantic poets, though they
were relatively rare among earlier works, while another critic goes so far as to assert that “no
commentator before the eighteenth century spoke of prosopopoeia” in this elegiac manner.
256
Lucrece, I suggest, anticipates this interpretation of the trope.
While the elegiac reading of prosopopoeia is primarily affiliated with Romantic poetry,
early modern rhetoricians also emphasize how the figure treads a line between presence and
absence, life and death. In Direccions for Speech and Style (1599) John Hoskyns describes
prosopopoeia as “feigning the presense or the discourse of some such persons, as either are not at
all, or if there be, yet speake not, but by imaginacion.”
257
Fictionality was pivotal to the early
modern understanding of prosopopoeia. Those figures animated in poetry are either emphatically
absent (they are “not at all”) or speak with borrowed breath.
258
In either case, the trope requires a
poet to speak for someone or something that lacks animation, presence, or being. Henry
Peacham’s writings about prospopoeia draw out the metaphorical tension between life and death
implicit in this dialogue with absence. He writes: "...hence it is that poets and orators do attribute
255
De Man, “Autobiography,” 928. De Man invokes Milton’s “On Shakespeare,” from the 1623 Folio. Milton
echoes the symmetrical structure of prosopopoeia, suggesting that contemplating Shakespeare’s monumental works
“dost make us Marble with too much conceiving.”
256
Andrew Escobedo, “Allegorical Agency and the Sins of Angels,” ELH 75 (2008): 787; Heather Dubrow, The
Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2008), 4.
257
“Direccions for Speech and Style,” in Louise Brown Osborn, The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns
1566-1638 (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1937), 162. On prosopopoeia in classical and renaissance rhetoric, see
Gavin Alexander “Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge U. Press,
2008), 95-112.
258
“Not at all” is the phrase Marlowe’s Aeneas used in imagining an exchange with the Troy mural’s Priam.
122
to things which are without life, not only life, but also reason and affection, and sometime
speech."
259
Peacham’s assumption is that the trope is primarily ameliorative. In James J.
Paxson’s terms, the figural transformation “moves ‘up’ the ontic scale” so that a thing “without
life” can figuratively become a speaking person.
260
Viewed from a different direction, however, the trope could appear as a way of engaging
with ghosts or shades. According to Paxson, at least one early modern writer, Richard Sherry,
imagines the transformation of prosopopoeia moving toward death. Though it lacks precision,
Sherry’s entry on prosopopoeia in A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550) includes attributing
“the affects of a beast to a dead man” or a “dumme thynge.”
261
Lucrece’s prosopopoeia would
seem to bear this out. The Hecuba she animates with her speech is certainly a “dumb” or mute
picture and is, both historically and in terms of the description, dead. What these rhetorical
handbooks reiterate is that the phenomenon of prosopopoeia is implicitly destabilizing. While it
is possible that Paxson makes too much of Sherry’s terse prose, I would argue that the
rhetorician’s chaotic list of examples does indeed point to an ontological no man’s land at the
heart of prosopopoeia. Even in the early modern understanding of this figure the poet cohabits a
verbal space with “a dumme thynge, or that hath no bodye, or a dead man.”
262
These early
modern writers anticipate what later critics such as Wordsworth and Paul de Man would
recognize: “Apostrophe is intimately linked to reification.”
263
For the space of an apostrophe,
259
Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577; repr., Gainsville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1954),
136.
260
James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge U. Press, 1994), 24.
261
Ibid.
262
Paxson, Personification, 23.
263
Ibid., 52. Paxson elaborates: “addressing speech toward that which is non-human presumes an imaginary,
ontically different state of affairs in which non-human things could have “language”… The move thus assimilates
123
both poet and apostrophized figure inhabit a space between life and death. Lucrece’s apostrophe
to Hecuba dramatizes how this ambivalent transformation could occur. As Lucrece lends a voice
to Hecuba’s image, Shakespeare writes that she “borrows” the “looks”—the “lifeless life”—of
the painting (1497, 1374). The painted image, like the inanimate figure in the prosopopoeic
trope, becomes a mirror that imagines Lucrece’s imminent inanimacy. This indeterminate and
enduring space is what Lucrece takes up as a space of mourning.
Depicting poetry as a space to confront and mourn mortality rather than a form in which
to posture as immortal would represent a distinct departure from the more familiar and positive
take on monumentality that appears in the classical tradition, and to which Shakespeare often
refers in his sonnets. While, as Lynn Enterline argues, Lucrece’s desire to bring Hecuba to life
through apostrophe reflects Shakespeare’s desire to master a truly performative and animating
language, the poem’s emphasis on the muteness and inanimacy of the depicted Hecuba suggests
that Shakespeare epyllion is envisioning a highly qualified version of monumentalization.
264
If
Shakespeare, like his Lucrece, employs prosopopoeia knowing that it reflects his mortality, then
his choice to dwell on the trope would invert the positivity of the sonnets’ claim that poetry’s
“black lines” will “live” to preserve a beloved “still green.”
265
Lucrece is punctuated by moments that highlight poetry’s ability to bring life and death
into dialogue: the straining between “life’s triumph” and “death’s dim look” in Lucrece’s
the apostrophizer to the apostrophized, engendering the reification of the human speaker as well as the
personification of the apostrophized thing.”
264
Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 170. Notably, while Shakespeare describes the effects of Lucrece’s prosopopoeia
on both Hecuba and Lucrece, he does not include the words she speaks. Shakespeare’s narrator speaks the
prosopopoeia in this epyllion.
265
Sonnet 63: 13-14. On the ethical limitations of this trope see Aaron Kunin, “Shakespeare’s Preservation
Fantasy,” PMLA 124.1 (2009), 92-106 and Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Playing Fields or Killing Fields:
Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003), 127-41.
124
sleeping, breathing body, and the “lifeless life” attributed to the painted figures apostrophized by
Lucrece (402-403, 1374). This is one way that the poem turns the dynamics of prosopopoeia into
a drama with high ethical stakes. If Lucrece and Shakespeare choose to animate poetic figures,
they might be doing so at their own expense, accepting the exchange of animacy between a
speaker and a poem as a way of arresting action and attending to loss.
In his Garden of Eloquence (1577), Henry Peacham describes prosopopoeia thus:
Prosopeia, the fayning of a person, that is, when a thing sencelesse or dumme, we fayne a
fit person, this figure Orators use as well as Poets, an Oratore by this figure maketh the
common welth to speake: lyfe and death: virtue and pleasure: honesty and profite: welth
and poverty: envy and charity: to pleade and contend one against another, and sometime
they rayse as it were the deade agayne, and cause them to complayne or to witnesse that
they knew.
266
Striking in this description is the suggestion that while prosopopoeia has the power to allow the
dead and the dumb to speak, it also thrusts life into conflict with its opposite. If death is
speaking, Peacham implies, it will “pleade and contend” against life. In a revised 1593 edition of
this text, Peacham adds the caution that the use of this figure “ought to be very rare,” a last resort
for the orator pleading a “fainting cause.”
267
Peacham’s warning underscores the foreboding
quality of this trope. Peacham’s accounts suggest that, even for poets writing in this period, the
trope of prosopopoeia had an Orphic quality. The speech of the feigned figure mourns even as it
pleads; it speaks, but the speech is already the speech of the dead or doomed. So both Hecuba’s
and Lucrece’s feigned speeches arouse sympathy even while reminding their hearers that death
266
Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577), Oiii r.
267
Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593), Ti v-Ui r.
125
has triumphed and will triumph. Shakespeare’s prosopopoeia animates Lucrece as another
death’s head who speaks of his own death. Rather than striving for a form in which to
approximate immortality, Shakespeare crafts his poem as a place in which to confront, manage,
and lament his own mortality.
As the poem reworks both its classical sources and its poetic tools, it offers mourning
with figures from the past as an act of resistance to the instrumentalizing aspects of literary
history. The prospect of achieving fame through epic narrative is a live one for Shakespeare, who
might craft Lucrece’s ekphrastic scene as an appeal for his own poetic valor. Instead,
Shakespeare presents the poem’s central aesthetic moment, a scene entirely of the poet’s
invention, as a moment of mourning. At the most original moment in Shakespeare’s epyllion,
the poet draws on the rhetorical form of prosopopoeia to immerse both his heroine and his reader
in a sympathetic exchange and deflect the ambition of his own epic ekphrasis. Shakespeare
strives to make his interaction with Lucrece as “non-instrumental” as Lucrece’s interaction with
Hecuba.
268
To join Lucrece as Lucrece joins Hecuba is, one the one hand, to refuse to use
Lucrece as a means of consolation—that is, as a tool to poetic fame or political gain. And yet, by
erecting a space in which to mourn for Lucrece, Shakespeare also builds a monument that points
to his own inevitable disappearance. Dwelling on the poet’s mortality, Shakespeare attempts to
mitigate the degree to which his authorial project makes Lucrece instrumental to his own
position in literary history. Shakespeare’s prosopopoeia performs the same self-cancelling act
that Lucrece’s did, arresting the poet at a moment of mourning, and acknowledging the limitation
of poetry to offer anything more.
268
“Non-instrumental” is how Eisendrath describes the Hecuba scene, which offers no material or practical benefit
to Lucrece. On Lucrece as instrumental within literary history, see Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body 196, 182.
126
Living and Dying in Poetry
Shakespeare’s hesitations over the consolations offered by poetry shape his reevaluation
of the aims of the verbal arts in this poem. What, Shakespeare asks, do even the highest immortal
promises of poetry have to offer in the face of losses as personal and irreparable as Lucrece’s?
Ekphrasis and prosopopoeia, tools of rhetoric and epic poetry, allow him to work through this
question both on the level of the figure and at the scale of literary history. One of the powers of
poetic discourse, Murray Krieger writes, is to achieve “a specially frozen sort of aesthetic time”
that is demonstrated by the trope of ekphrasis.
269
A poem, as a complete, self-enclosed form of
art, exists in its own unending temporality. For the most part recognizing this power has led
poets to ascribe poetry with immortal ambitions. Poetry’s appeal to stillness, often refracted
through references to concrete aesthetic objects, doubles as a claim of longevity. “Not marble nor
the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme,” Shakespeare declares in
Sonnet 55. Even when questioning the positivity of such a hope, writers seem to agree that
poetry, especially in the ekphrastic mode, has an ambiguous power to still time. What I have
been arguing is that Lucrece uses that power to reconceive what poetry has to offer to its
subjects. Ekphrasis, following Lucrece’s cue, becomes a space not of immortality but of
enduring mortality, a space in which the inevitability of loss has immanent presence. This
revision invents on aspects of ekphrastic poetry that would have been familiar to a pupil in an
English schoolroom and adds a crucial attention to the ethical cruxes implicit in poetry’s hope of
representing the past, including the danger that real human suffering might become collateral
damage in either an epic political agenda or an ambitious authorial one.
269
Murray Krieger, “The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited,” in The Play
and the Place of Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1967), 105.
127
The classical tradition, to which Lucrece applies her inventive speech, had its own
understanding of poetry’s ability to still time, one powerfully associated with questions of
mortality and immortality. One can find this mode on display at the end of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses when the poet ironically depicts Julius Caesar’s glorious transformation into a
star.
270
Caesar’s stellification makes him, in one sense, immortal, but it is, at the same time, a
kind of murder. Who, after all, could survive such a vaunt? He is eternally stilled—stelled—in
the heavens, and he is also killed.
There is, then, an ironic allusion implied by Lucrece’s determination, discussed earlier, to
find in the painting the face in which all distress is “stelled.” Shakespeare will later use the word
“stelled” to refer to the eternally-burning stars (Latin: stella).
271
Saturated as the Troy scene is
with Vergil’s ekphrastic poetry, it is possible that the distress stelled in Hecuba’s face parodies a
stellar apparition depicted on Aeneas’s shield. Describing Caesar Augustus leading the Roman
forces, Vergil writes, “from his glad forehead / Poured two flames. From his head his father’s
star rose” (8. 680-681). Scarred with grief, the face of Hecuba provides a grim counterpoint to
the starred visage of Augustus, gleaming with immortal longings. This is, perhaps, another
instance in which Shakespeare’s ekphrastic scene forges a critical palimpsest using fragments
from its source material. But more importantly, the allusion would focus a point of contrast
between Hecuba’s deathly face and the immortal hope written into Caesar’s rising star.
Here lies Shakespeare’s apprehension. If epic ekphrasis can offer the consolation of
immortal fame, it doesn’t offer it to anyone. With the same breath, Vergil’s shield endows
Caesar with celestial life and shows Cleopatra’s face “pale with the pallor of approaching death”
270
Metamorphoses, 15.941-995.
271
In King Lear, Gloucester refers to the stars as “stelled fires” (3.7.60).
128
(8.710). Why the difference? As scholars such as James Heffernan, WJT Mitchell, and Marion
Wells have discussed, there is an overdetermined sense in which ekphrasis organizes itself
around gender difference, with the male viewing poet regulating the female viewed object.
272
While it is undeniable that Lucrece is heavily invested in these concerns, the poem also addresses
another aspect in which ekphrasis enables asymmetry in the treatment of poetic subjects. Though
the ekphrastic image can serve as a place to confront death and mortality, this feature of the trope
is applied unevenly. For one subject, confronting the image of Troy forecasts immortal fame, for
another, inevitable fatality.
When Lucrece recasts the ekphrastic pause as a site of mourning and a place to delay
heroic ambitions, she offers Shakespeare one way out of this labyrinth. Mourning in the space of
the static image is a kind of alternately heroic, time-stilling act available to anyone. Recall that,
for the space of his mourning, Collatine has a face as pale as Cleopatra’s (1775). Pausing to
mourn this newer way takes the absence and mortality that haunt ekphrasis seriously, even puts
them to ethical work. Lucrece, then, demonstrates that mourning with the ekphrastic image and
speaking for poetic subjects allows a poet to delay the potential consolations that poetry might
offer and instead, like Collatine, “counterfeit to die a space” (1776).
In Lucrece’s Troy scene, Shakespeare also pauses to meditate on the ethical implications
of his own heroic and ambitious verse. Lucrece’s pause to mourn may interrupt the action of the
epyllion, but it does not prevent the inevitable: her suicide and transformation into a political
emblem and example. I wish to suggest that Shakespeare’s frieze-like, ekphrastic scene, layered
as it is with Lucrece’s mournful and self-cancelling prosopopoeia, encompasses the poet’s
longing for the time-stilling, near-immortal power of the epic ekphrastic poet even while it
272
Heffernan, Museum of Words, 1, 46-90; WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual
Representation (U. of Chicago Press, 1994), 151-81; Marion Wells, “Philomela’s Marks.”
129
recognizes the ethical demand to attend to the suffering that epic poetry threatens to overwrite.
To avoid surrendering either impulse, the poem posits a revised image of ekphrastic poetry as a
space in which to preserve and mourn loss. For both Lucrece and Shakespeare, attending to the
pitiful frieze of the Troy painting offers a vision of a life to come: a life in which they endure as
pitiable figures, unendingly mourning in the lines of poetry, and resist instrumentalizing loss.
Shakespeare uses Lucrece to construct a defense of descriptive poetry as a form of art that can
keep the losses of both poet and subject perpetually in view. In Lucrece’s model, the labor of
poetry is neither to provide consolation for losses (either past or imminent) or to use loss to
garner authority, but rather to use poetry to preserve loss. If epic ekphrasis encourages heroic
figures to move past loss in order to achieve immortal fame, then Shakespeare, and his heroine
Lucrece, give us pause.
130
Chapter Three
Hamlet’s Absent Images
Hamlet is a haunted play. The ghost that stalks the ramparts at Elsinore in the opening
scenes shades the entirety of the play with a simultaneous effect of presence and non-presence.
273
From the moment of the opening line, “Who’s there?” audience and actors alike inhabit an
aesthetic space that is summoned by what isn’t there, by King Hamlet, who is dead. This chapter
is about images that haunt Hamlet, spiraling out from the specter and image of a dead king and
father to other figures, ultimately more powerful even than the ghostly “image” of the late
king.
274
Hamlet is haunted by a series of images, invoked and carefully described, that inspire
significant responses on the part of the characters, and yet are visible only to the mind’s eye.
Some of Hamlet’s most memorable “images” are never seen onstage: among them, the Ghost’s
description of his own death, the Player’s speech describing the murder of Priam and Hecuba’s
lament, and Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s drowning. Repeatedly, Shakespeare’s play
reaches outside of its dramatic, presentational form to summon up powerful, affectively moving
images rendered as ekphrases so charged with enargeia, or descriptive force, that they compel
Shakespeare’s audiences as well as his characters to grapple with images that are, like the Ghost,
both absent and present, there and not there.
275
273
Hugh Grady uses similar language to explain Jacques Derrida’s description of Hamlet’s aesthetic as a
“hauntology.” What is not present has as strong an effect on the nature of the play than what is there. See
Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 161.
274
William Shakespeare, Hamlet ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006) 1.1.80.
All references to this play, hereafter parenthetical, are from this edition.
275
Definitions of enargeia vary widely in the early modern period, in part because the term is sometimes confused
with energeia. In general, the term refers to the force of descriptive language which is capable of making images
appear as if before the eyes of a listener. For early modern rhetoricians, Quintilian was the primary source of
explanation for this trope.
131
These images have a pivotal role to play in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Namely, they
dramatize the forms of response that are invited by eloquent rhetorical speech. As figures of
speech, Hamlet’s ekphrastic pictures are themselves spectral: they are made of words. They also
demand a response from their audience. What Hamlet is haunted by, I argue, is an antiquated
version of literary response; that is, by a humanist vision of what makes poetry and rhetoric
ethically productive. The Ghost’s command to Hamlet is a command to leverage the experience
of being moved by poetic speech toward useful, even heroic action.
276
It borrows from both
Senecan revenge tragedy and a more urbane Ciceronian principle (familiar to many readers from
Sidney) of imitating the actions of moral exemplars in order to attain virtue. This chapter will
argue that Shakespeare employs scenes of description and response in an attempt to exorcise this
ghost of action, clearing a path for poetry to serve other ends.
The stakes of dramatizing these responses to poetry’s descriptive force are high, for they
bring a reexamination of the ethical function of poetry directly into the play’s scope and require
the pictorial tropes of ekphrasis and enargeia to dramatize a new role for poetry. In Hamlet the
interruptive force of these visual tropes destabilizes and transforms what Brian Vickers has
called the Renaissance’s “perfectly coherent theory of literature, covering the whole sequence of
composition and consumption, which we might call ethical-rhetorical.”
277
Renaissance Humanist
defenses of poetry tended to justify poetry’s moral value by arguing that a poet’s vivid
representations—in Sidney’s terms, his “pictures”—aimed to show “human goodness as
276
The action the Ghost requires from Hamlet is, of course, questionably moral. While the Ghost is clearly aware
that Hamlet may not be eager to participate in his plot for moral reasons, his response is to leverage a rhetorical
performance in the hope that it will persuade Hamlet to imitate his own model of Senecan heroism. What I will
emphasize here is the Ghost’s rhetorical predicament rather than his moral predicament. For the means by which the
Ghost attempts to stir Hamlet toward revenge—namely, description—instead inspires pity.
277
Brian Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10.
132
admirable, evil as detestable” to the end of forming “the reader’s character, ‘inflaming’ him to
emulate virtue.”
278
This emphasis on the practical and civic uses of learning and eloquence was
central to the version of classical rhetoric that the Renaissance recovered from antiquity. Heavily
influenced by Cicero’s De Officiis, De Inventione, and the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica Ad
Herrenium, Renaissance rhetoricians argued that training in eloquence should be leveraged
toward an active life of service.
279
Elsewhere, Vickers quotes Poliziano on this point, who wrote
that oratory or eloquence “is the only means of penetrating men's minds and, without violence,
making them follow goals useful for all.”
280
Alongside this vision of moral purpose, however, even the most prescriptive of early
modern treatises on rhetoric and poetics lend remarkable attention to rhetorical detail, to the
effects of both “ornament” and “efficacy” that tropes and figures have upon their readers.
281
While, in Vickers’s view, the period builds an ethical theory of literature on active and imitative
response, what its instructive writings attend to in the greatest detail is the affective and aesthetic
response aroused by the use of rhetorical figures.
282
Consistently, Renaissance rhetoricians
278
Ibid., 9; Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’ in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance
Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 10.
279
On the influence of these texts in Hamlet, see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2017).
280
Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 275.
281
Ornament and efficacy are terms central to George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesy. For Puttenham, poetry
does aim to accomplish something efficacious, but that aim is not always as inflected by moral philosophy as
Vickers’s comment implies.
282
Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, attends to this emphasis in the explanation of figures when discussing what he
calls their “expressive function”—their ability to represent emotions that they also inspire in their audiences.
However, Vickers does not suggest an inherent conflict between the expressive function of rhetoric and the
Renaissance vision of rhetoric’s goal of persuading men to virtuous action. Rather, he sees the instances of conflict
between these two aims as instances of essentially bad art. I suggest that Shakespeare’s play is pointing to a real
conflict between these two ends, and further, that the play represents what Vickers might call “bad art”—the scenes
of mourning and delay in Hamlet—as a productive and positive end for poetry.
133
include rhetorical figures that appeal to the sense of sight—figures such as ekphrasis, enargeia,
and hypotyposis—among the most powerfully affective figures, guaranteed to move the
emotions of audiences.
283
Focusing on Hamlet’s close attention to the responses generated by
poetic images, this chapter will demonstrate how the play uses absent images to lay claim to
different ends for poetry and oratory, ends that are different than the humanist schoolboy’s
model, different than Cicero’s, and different than the Ghost’s.
284
These moments disrupt the
drive to vengeful action that has been a focus of much of the ethical criticism of this play.
Nevertheless, I argue that the play’s ekphrastic moments are profoundly focused on literary
ethics, albeit a disrupted version of ethics that is not driven by the question “what should I do?”
but “how should I feel?” The appeals to absent images in Hamlet tend to arrive at moments
when, as in Lucrece, action gives way to delays of ethical meditation and mourning and not, as
the protagonists of both the play and the poem worry, indecision and indolence.
Like the “images” in Sidney’s Defence discussed in Chapter One, the absent images in
Hamlet are not visible to the eye and are summoned from other forms—from rhetoric, from epic,
and from motifs in the visual arts. But while both Sidney and Shakespeare invoke images that are
in a concrete sense absent, Shakespeare makes absence and loss the subject and focus of his
pictorialism. In Hamlet, focusing on characters’ affective response to images of loss allows
poetry to arrest action and resolve into an aesthetic moment that questions the conclusiveness of
a heroic moral justification for poetry. The pauses in action brought about by the play’s
283
Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 284 and Heinrich Plett, Rhetorik der Affekte (Tubingen, 1975), 26.
284
Rhodri Lewis offers a different and more pessimistic version of this argument in Hamlet and the Vision of
Darkness, which argues that Hamlet shows extreme disgust for the falseness and seeming at the heart of Cicero’s
argument in De Oficiis. While I share Lewis’s belief that the play is, as it were, haunted by Cicero, I also see
Shakespeare offering a positive alternative vision of rhetorical effectiveness by way of the play’s scenes of
description.
134
ekphrases introduce another role for poetry. When focused on scenes of loss or absence, poetry’s
descriptive scenes can create aesthetic spaces that double as sites of mourning. Both enduring
and evanescent, these spoken images rearticulate poetry’s role as memorial.
285
Once Hamlet’s
images are rewritten as potential memorials—which I will argue is a pivotal result of the Player’s
scene—the play is able to explore new terms for understanding the relationship between poetry
and the moral heroism that was once viewed as its primary justification.
Hamlet dramatizes its interrogation of the humanist defense of poetry from the moment
the Ghost appears, employs his own vivid rhetoric, and then departs. The armored and
persuasive image of the former king calls to remembrance an argument in which the role of
poetry is to provide models of moral and heroic action. In his Apology for Actors, which draws
on this discourse, Thomas Heywood praises the brilliant tutelage of Aristotle, who “caused the
destruction of Troy to be acted before his pupil, in which the valour of Achilles was so naturally
expressed that it impressed the heart of Alexander in so much that all his succeeding actions
were merely shaped after that pattern.”
286
Indeed, Heywood argues, “it may be imagined that had
Achilles never lived Alexander had never conquered the whole world.” For Heywood, the aim of
poets and playwrights is to “draw the conquests” of worthies like Alexander, Achilles, Theseus,
and Hercules with the hope that by showing princes these “pictures drawn to the life” they will
be filled with a desire to imitate them.
287
Likewise, Sir Philip Sidney urges readers to “let Aeneas
285
A substantial literature explores the role of both poetry and drama as memorial. For some key texts, see Joseph
Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Catherine
Belsey; Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Playing Fields or Killing Fields: Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets” Shakespeare
Quarterly 52 (2003), 127-141; and Susan Stewart Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002).
286
Thomas Heywood, An apology for actors Containing three briefe treatises. 1 Their antiquity. 2 Their ancient
dignity. 3 The true vse of their quality (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612), B3i
r
.
287
Ibid.
135
be worn in the tablet of [their] memory” so that his actions might “inform [them] with counsel
how to be worthy.”
288
In Hamlet, however, these figures of heroic exemplarity are radically
transformed. For example, After the first encounter with his father’s ghost, Hamlet speaks of
inscribing the Ghost’s injunction in the tablet of his memory. One might imagine that the Ghost’s
command to revenge and remember might play a similar role to Sidney’s image of Aeneas: held
in the memory, the example of Aeneas and the epic, armored figure of the dead King will serve
as persistent reminders to act nobly.
289
But for Hamlet, pity and mourning for the Ghost of his
lost father—itself a result of the Ghost’s eloquent speech—transforms this moment. When
Hamlet turns to the table of his memory, he does so in order to erase the figures of heroic
exemplarity he has encountered in books and tales, replacing them with only one portion of his
father’s command, the command to remember:
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
288
Sidney, Defence, 29. It is striking that Hamlet’s response to the Ghost’s command to remember is also to write in
his tablets. The language might reframe Hamlet as a student of the Ghost, trying to learn his lesson.
289
Garrett Sullivan explores the idea that literature can provide examples of action to the memory under the category
of “monitory memory.” Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
136
Unmixed with baser matter.
(1.5.95-104)
Once Hamlet has eradicated the heroic memories from the book and volume of his brain, what he
replaces them with are court politics (“one may smile, and smile and be a villain”) and mourning
(“Adieu, adieu, remember me”) (1.5.115; 1.5.119). This unsettling erasure triggers the return of
more heroic examples in Hamlet’s mind as he struggles to reconcile what he has heard with his
education. Hercules, Pyrrhus, and myriad classical figures crowd Hamlet’s allusive speech, but
they do not offer models that can reconcile his loss, his pity for the “poor ghost,” and his belief
in the need to act. As Hamlet rejects the exemplarity of figures like Aeneas, he places them in
direct conflict with his desire to mourn and remember. One must be erased for the other to be
remembered.
Hamlet pauses over figures of heroic exemplarity in a way that recalls but transforms the
idealized models of action presented in defenses of poetry’s moral value. Early modern defenses
of poetry and drama, Sidney’s Defence and Heywood’s Apology among them, turn to the image
or picture as a way of explaining poetry’s ability to motivate moral action. The “speaking
picture” of poetry uses what Sidney continually refers to as “images” of virtue and heroism to the
end of motivating imitative action. Sidney’s “images” of heroes like Aeneas, Anchises, Cyrus,
and Ulysses alongside Heywood’s rhapsodic descriptions of Hercules erect a set of heroic (and
masculinist) expectations regarding the behavior that poetry ought to inspire and then makes
them synonymous with the humanist project.
290
If, these writers suggest, one is moved by the
figures of poetry, figures they invokes using the language of picture, painting, and image, then
290
See Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’ in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary
Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 10; and Haywood’s Apology for Actors, B3i
v
.
137
one will act like them. As a prefatory poem to Heywood’s Apology puts it: “Brave men, brave
acts, being bravely acted too, / Makes, as men see things done, desire to do”.
291
Hamlet’s
lingering images question this heroic response. The images that might motivate Hamlet to act—
the Ghost’s description and call for revenge, or the example of the revenging Pyrrhus in
Aeneas’s speech to Dido—instead move Hamlet to pity. It is as if Shakespeare’s response to the
Protestant heroic justification for poetry and drama is to redraw the boundary between action and
response, between movement and movere. But rather than offering a general critique of a heroic
humanist poetic, Shakespeare examines the heroic defense by amplifying and transforming the
visual metaphors that undergird a poetic defense like Sidney’s. In turn, Hamlet constructs poetic
images that reexplore the aims of poetry.
This conflict between mourning and heroic action—which is also a conflict between
different ambitions for poetry—is played out in Hamlet’s ekphrastic scenes. Hamlet, I suggest,
repeatedly summons the kind of poetic “images” that Sidney advocates—even incorporating the
speech of Aeneas himself—but the play does not find that heroic action is a straightforward
response to these visions. Hamlet himself is divided between the heroic response he feels is
required of him and a personal impulse to respond with mourning, pity, or reflection, itself a
response that poets and rhetoricians have long attributed to the descriptive trope in poetry.
292
Many critics are tempted to blame Hamlet for failing to respond to the image of his father or the
model of Aeneas (or Pyrrhus) with verve or action.
293
But the prince clearly experiences these
291
Ar. Hopton, “To them that are opposite to this worke,” prefatory material to Heywood, Apology for Actors, B2i
r
.
292
See Judith Dundas, Pencil’s Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting (Newark, DE: University of
Delaware Press, 1993) and Claire Preston, “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words” in Renaissance Figures of Speech. Ed.
Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
293
As other critics have pointed out, even the model example of Aeneas is a morally conflicted one for Hamlet,
given that imitating the Latin hero’s pietas might require him to commit a murder. See Robin Headlam Wells,
Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2.
138
images strongly. Rather, Hamlet breaks open the possibility that what looks like inaction might
also be a valid and moral response to poetry’s vivid images.
Calling the active response to poetry’s images into question further allows Hamlet to
explore what else poetry might be said to accomplish when it summons vivid images as if from
nowhere. One possible answer that this chapter will explore is that these moments of poetic
sprezzatura or artistic flexing are meant to lay claim to an immanent force of poetic art that can
be leveraged toward the end of memorializing loss. Just as enargeic poetry pretends to place
images before the eyes of its viewers, Hamlet’s descriptive scenes tease the boundary between
absence and presence through poetic description. Hamlet’s images are “there” for the play’s
viewers, if only fleetingly.
294
If this act of poetic and dramatic magic posed moral dilemmas for
early modern audiences, as other scholars have convincingly argued, its memorializing power
also offered a way for poetry’s makers to resist their own inevitable absence.
295
When poetry’s
images move audiences in centuries to come, poetry’s makers can lay claim to the form of
enduring life famously declared by Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. However, as if to underscore the
equivocal nature of this poetic memorialism, Hamlet addresses this possibility by crafting its
indelible poetic images out of commonplace reminders of absence and loss: a Ghost, a story from
Troy, a skull.
Hamlet’s images offer to act as aesthetic spaces, able to hold those parts of experience
that seem unrepresentable and contain that which “passes show,” even as they resist attempts to
294
See Peggy Phelan on the ontological and political implications of how images in the theatre are always subject to
disappearance. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). Shakespeare plays on the
disappearing nature of theatrical images by using descriptions that are simultaneously present and absent.
295
On the moral dilemmas posed by theatre’s power to summon absent things, see Ernest B. Gilman Iconoclams and
Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) and Adam
McKeown, “Enargeia and the English Literary Renaissance” (Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 2000).
139
be converted to moral lessons or examples.
296
Despite rhetoric that valorizes action, being moved
by these images, and responding to them with delay or lament, can be ethically productive.
297
Poetry’s images, as the Player will demonstrate, have the power to memorialize and respond to
experiences in a way that decisive action or revenge does not. They forge a space,
simultaneously epistemological and aesthetic, in which one could respond to events in the world
with appropriate mourning, pity, or lament.
298
Though characters in the play repeatedly dismiss
these forms of response, typically rejecting them as effeminate, lingering pity, mourning, and
even wonder are the clear responses that Hamlet’s images invite. And indeed, as the work of
Richard Halpern, Tanya Pollard, and Stephen Halliwell has variously suggested, such affective
responses to loss, including pity, attention, and mourning, might themselves have strong
precedents in the classical models to which Shakespeare’s humanist contemporaries appealed.
299
Through the repetition of ekphrastic images, the play offers mourning and aesthetic attention as a
possible alternative to the action that a dominant humanist self-defense would valorize as the
ground of ethical comportment. Put differently, Hamlet uses absent images to relocate its ethical
drama from deed to pause and from action to art.
296
On the notion of aesthetic spaces as useful for containing unrepresentable experiences, see Hugh Grady’s
Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, which draws on Adorno to argue that the aesthetic is able to bracket off eros
and loss.
297
Lynn Enterline introduces the idea that emotional response is pivotal to shaping ethical relationships in Hamlet’s
Player’s scene, which I discuss later. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2012), esp. 120-152.
298
On poetry as simultaneously epistemological and aesthetic, see Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s
Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969).
299
See Richard Halpern, “Collateral Damage and Tragic Form,” Critical Inquiry 45.1 (2018), 47-75; Tonya Pollard,
Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Stephen Halliwell,
The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
140
This process of relocation draws on models of religious meditation and mourning that
played a large role in shaping early modern responses to the arts. Yet Shakespeare repurposes
these reflective activities and even directs them toward lost heroic figures from pagan antiquity.
Religious iconography including images of the pieta and the crucifixion invited a culture of
meditation and mournful response, well demonstrated by the Stabat Mater convention in music
and poetry.
300
Portraiture in the early modern period had a distinct memorialist bent, and
miniature portraits such as the ones that Hamlet uses to harrow Gertrude were carried as icons of
loss. A robust emblem tradition, in which meditating on images offered theological or
commonplace lessons, flourished in both Catholic and Protestant religious circles. But
Shakespeare’s most striking repurposing of these art forms toward reflection on the role of poetic
images relies on the memento mori tradition in the visual arts. These images of mortality were
meant to arrest the attention of their viewers and allow space for mourning past losses and
anticipating future ones. As still images that reminded the viewer of loss, these pictures invite
self-reflection and sympathetic attention without necessarily demanding responsive action,
though they do share the humanist interest in improving the morality and virtue of their
viewers.
301
In Hamlet, these reflective images of loss are reanimated through poetic repurposing.
These patterns of repurposing religious and visual images famously coalesce in the
memento mori of Hamlet’s graveyard tableau. Contemplating the skull of Yorick, the prince uses
the image to remember what is lost and anticipate what will be lost. Though the clown has died,
300
The Protestant movement included both anti-Catholic and misogynist aspects, which would make this a
dangerous parallel for Shakespeare to invite. See Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval
and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (New York: Routledge, 2017).
301
On the move toward virtue education in early modern religious writing, see Sarah Beckwith, “Language Goes on
Holiday: English Allegorical Drama and the Virtue Tradition,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.1
(2012), 107-130.
141
and Hamlet, too, will die, this aesthetic moment defiantly lingers. Hamlet’s memento mori is one
of the only images that the audience witnesses with their own eyes in a play rife with description
and attention to the poetic image. As such it acts as an emblem of how this play thinks about and
employs images. Hamlet’s use of the skull—like Lucrece’s use of the Hecuba painting in my
previous chapter—offers the image as a space of reflection without demanding heroic or political
action in response.
302
On the contrary, this is one of the only moments in the play when Hamlet
does not voice frustration at his lack of heroic behavior. Considered in the context of this parallel
visual and reflective tradition in England, it is unsurprising that using the image as a metaphor
for poetry’s task might open the door to think of the value and purpose of poetry in terms other
than those that most humanists used to defend it. Shakespeare reinvents this familiar visual motif
to assert that, like an image or picture, poetry might be ethically valued for its aesthetic or
memorialist capabilities as much as for its ability to inspire action.
Ghostly Enargeia
Hamlet’s Ghost knows his audience and rises to the occasion of his first meeting with his
son as a master orator. Perhaps because he recalls the “saws of books” and “pressures past” from
Hamlet’s education, he arrives in armor like an epic hero or Kyd’s Senecan ghost. And because
he is also a father, he knows he will be longed for and pitied. The speech of the spirit highlights
both features of this rhetorical situation. King Hamlet’s Ghost offers ekphrastic descriptions that
bring their subjects vividly before Hamlet’s mind’s eye. Striking here is Shakespeare’s choice to
take rhetorical features that were praised for their “vitality” and “lifelikeness” (which were, in
302
To clarify, I do think that Lucrece’s action is both heroic and political, but not in the sense that most defenses of
poetry would have used.
142
Hoskins’ terms, “convenient…for the bringing in of life”) and place them in the mouth of a
ghost.
303
The energy and vitality of the Ghost’s descriptions has all the more power over the
grieving Hamlet because the speaker is dead. But it is important to recognize from the beginning
that the Ghost’s descriptions are leveraged toward a specific, active response—that is, revenge.
Much like classical forensic orators who would use quick, ekphrastic images to persuade a jury
to rule in their favor, the Ghost uses vivid description in the hope of coercing Hamlet to act. If, as
Claire Preston argues, ekphrasis is “a trope of enforcement,” which uses the form and placement
of a description in order to elicit a specific response, the Ghost is clear in the behavior he means
to enforce: “Revenge [my] foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.25).
304
As urgent as this command may be, the Ghost’s descriptions also take up a striking
amount of space. Just as an ekphrastic scene in a narrative poem is interruptive and brings action
to an apparent stand-still, the ghost’s description of the “leperous distilment” with which he was
poisoned “even in the blossoms” of his sin forge a still space in the midst of a call to action
(1.5.42-91). The near fifty-line image of the king’s death pangs sits like a leaden weight in the
play’s first act. The speech forges an aesthetic space within the drama that is capacious enough
to hold the pain of the father, the horror of his death, and the mourning of the son, but the action
the Ghost requests aims to enclose or break off the scene of suffering, turning it into a catalyst
for pitiless political action. In other words, the Ghost hopes to use his own powers of pictorial
poetry to produce a revenge drama and to cast himself as the key victim and Hamlet as revenging
agent.
303
John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1935), 47-48.
304
Preston, 119.
143
There is, however, a flaw in the Ghost’s rhetorical plan, which he acknowledges by
showing an emphatic concern with Hamlet’s pitying response. King Hamlet refuses to offer the
typical Senecan description of his sufferings in the (ambiguous) afterlife because he is sure that
Hamlet will be overwhelmed by it.
305
Or rather, he is concerned that Hamlet will respond in
exactly the manner one could expect him to respond to this figure: with powerful emotion.
306
The
Ghost claims to be wary of description—though perhaps not wary enough—because he suspects
that describing his pain will make Hamlet so full of pity and grief that he will be able to do
nothing. To hear the tale, he tells Hamlet, would ““harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, /
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres” and “each particular hair to stand on end /
Like quills upon the fearful porpentine” (1.5.16-20). What the Ghost wants is to perform
rhetoric that moves Hamlet to action but not to pity. One imagines that this might work were it
not that, as a ghost, his very presence before his son elicits a certain amount of pity. Moreover,
he produces a description of his murder that lavishes enargeic attention on every poetic detail,
much as Erasmus,following Quintilian, describes amplifying a description of the sack of a city in
order to arouse the response of an audience.
307
The Ghost’s vivid description of suffering and the
imperative to revenge then become clashing events that galvanize Hamlet’s interrogation of the
heroic aims of poetry. Hamlet’s famed “delay” is a perfectly reasonable response to the poetic
305
On Senecan descriptions of the afterlife, see E. Pearlman, “Shakespeare at Work: The Invention of the Ghost,”
rprt. in Hamlet: New Critical Essays Ed. Arthur Kinney, (New York: Routledge, 2013), 71-84.
306
Renaissance rhetoricians were particularly aware of the emotional content of rhetorical figures, and this
significantly shaped the way that they advocated using them. In a strong sense, the entire tradition of rhetorical
criticism is tied to the process of identifying how figures affect their audiences and employing them accordingly.
This is a key aspect of Brian Vickers’s argument about the “expressive function” of rhetoric (In Defence of Rhetoric,
294-339). But while Renaissance rhetoricians, following Cicero, were keen to direct these emotional experiences
toward the cultivation of an active, civic life, Shakespeare’s Ghost is constructed in a manner that questions that
priority, even if it is a priority both he and Hamlet claim to share.
307
Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and David H. Rix (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette
University Press, 2012). See Ch 1 on how and why I think Erasmus celebrates this description lifted from Quintilian.
144
pictures of loss and suffering that are put before his mind’s eye. Attending to the ekphrastic
speech of the Ghost demonstrates how the play’s inciting action is as much about the role of
poetry and rhetoric as it is about revenge or valor.
When the Ghost of King Hamlet interrupts a descriptive scene, he sets up a possible
narrative in which theatrical spectacle breaks in on, and triumphs over, poetic speech. But the
Ghost overturns this possibility; rather than performing a triumph of drama over speech, he
represents the dramatic power of enargeic speech. Appearing before the eyes of the audience as
if summoned by the descriptions of Barnardo and Marcellus (he arrives just as Barnardo
describes his last appearance “when yond same star” had arrived “where it now burns” and the
bell beat one), he seems ready to fulfill expectations about eerie spectacle in a narrative that,
everyone knows, is about revenge (1.1.34-38). As E. Pearlman has argued, what should strike a
viewer of Hamlet immediately is that Hamlet’s Ghost does not meet these expectations. Breaking
with classical traditions that had been adopted by other playwrights including Kyd,
Shakespeare’s ghost does not arrive amid flashes or light and winding sheets to “squeak and
gibber” about the horrors of hell. King Hamlet’s ghost is no Senecan spectacle. Though early
modern audiences may have “consciously or unconsciously awaited some sort of atonal falsetto,”
the Ghost instead addresses Hamlet as a “fellow creature” with something to say.
308
More, I
would add, he speaks eloquently. Pearlman notes that the ghost’s remarkable ordinariness is an
achievement of Shakespeare’s inventiveness, powerful because it allows Hamlet to “feel genuine
empathy” for him.
309
But Hamlet’s empathetic response is also a specific result of the Ghost’s
compelling rhetoric. A key feature of enargeia—the trope of vivid description—is that is
308
Pearlman, 80.
309
Pearlman, 82.
145
compels an emotional response in the hearer.
310
Shakespeare exploits the effects of the Ghost’s
use of eloquence to pose a question that the play will continue to rehearse; namely, what do
poetry’s images actually demand of their viewers and what can they claim to do themselves?
When King Hamlet’s ghost finally speaks to his son, his rhetoric exploits two aspects of
the figure of enargeia. On the one hand, enargeia has the effect of conjuring something out of
nothing and forging a ghostly presence in a space of absence. An enargeic description makes an
image appear as if before one’s eyes, though the substance of the description is, in fact, words.
311
By lending such compelling speech to a ghost, Shakespeare’s doubles the haunting effect of the
first “image” in the play. At the same time, rhetorical discussions of enargeia from the classical
period onward focus heavily on the experience of the hearer.
312
If enargeia conjures images it
also conjures a response to those images in its audience. The trope is forceful not just in what it
can create with words but also in what it can do to others. This is, as Adam McKeown has
argued, one reason the Ghost in Hamlet is actually quite threatening. He is conjured with rhetoric
that, for poets in the period, treads dangerously close to deception, illusion, or witchcraft, and
then uses poetry to attempt to conjure a response from Hamlet—that is, to force him to commit a
murder.
313
The ghost’s rhetoric is extremely effective in eliciting a response from the young
310
Recall Quintilian’s claim when illustrating enargeia through the story of the sacked city: “Emotions will ensue
just as if we were present at the event itself.” The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.2.31.
311
This is a feature shared with the sibling trope of ekphrasis, though enargeia does not in any definition claim to
describe an image that exists other than in the mind’s eye. See Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion
in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2016) on the phantasms of the mind that Aristotle
associates with enargeia.
312
See chapter one on how the hearer’s experience is central to the working of enargeia, especially for Aristotle and
Quintilian.
313
McKeown is, I think, right that the play wrestles with the dangerous power of poetry and performance to place a
“counterfeit” image before an audience. The skepticism of Hamlet and friends, who suspect that the ghost may be
either “a spirit of health or a goblin damned” registers a Protestant ambivalence toward images that runs throughout
146
prince.
314
The response, however, is different than the Ghost’s intent. The vivid description of
suffering that the Ghost offers instead fills Hamlet with pity that renders a violent or heroic
response impossible. Pity for the Ghost stirred by his description of suffering does not inspire
retributive action, but rather, a pause.
The tension between what the Ghost claims to desire (action) and what his rhetoric
inspires (empathy and inaction) forces reflection on what an ethical, humanist response to loss
would really look like. Moreover, it points to an opening fissure within rhetoric that is meant to
persuade, a fissure that is symbolized by the incongruity between the Ghost’s armored
appearance and his literary, even pitiful, speech. If, as Cicero argued, “the whole glory of virtue
is in activity,” then what activity is the virtuous prince called to enact when he encounters a
rhetorical representation of suffering?
315
Hamlet’s intuitive response is to linger in a space of
mourning—"to be” alongside the spirit who has suffered—despite the Ghost’s call to commit the
retributive action which would, in effect, be suicide.
316
Hamlet must choose then, between two
kinds of response to the Ghost’s suffering. One is to obey the coercive command that follows the
Ghost’s ekphrasis, to accept the Ghost’s interpretation of the image he offers and act as a heroic
revenger. But another response, also compelled by the Ghost’s powerful rhetoric, is to “lose the
the play (1.4.40). Images must be interpreted and the actions that they motivate must be morally sound if they are
not to be dismissed as idols. See also, Gilman.
314
I say this in contrast to Rhodri Lewis’s claim that Hamlet isn’t moved enough to act. On the contrary, I think
Hamlet does not act because he is moved. See Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2017).
315
Cicero, De Oratore, 1.6.19.
316
See Marion Trousdale on the rhetorical tricks of the “To be or not to be speech,” which equate obedience to the
Ghost’s call for action with death. Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 58
ff.
147
name of action” and pause to grieve.
317
The Ghost’s rhetorical situation, then, gives real stakes to
the tension between the expressive and persuasive aims of rhetorical figures and leaves open the
possibility that poetry might have an end other than persuasion.
If constructing the Ghost as a compelling orator bent on persuading Hamlet to revenge
captures the problem of moral response, it also encapsulates a second concern of this play.
Placing descriptive speech in the mouth of a Ghost forces evaluation of what the vivid image in
poetry can actually accomplish. Aristotle’s Rhetoric praises representations that “enliven
inanimate things” with vivid description that can “set things before the eye.”
318
It is unclear
whether the Ghost’s vivid representations cheapen or amplify the force this metaphor. As
rhetorically vivid and life-like as the play’s images may be, they do not, of course, summon the
real presence of Hamlet’s father, dead or alive. Classical rhetoricians used language to think
about description that is heavily inflected with metaphors of presence and metaphors of liveness.
But these descriptions remain tropes, and like all tropes, they are fictions. The effect of these
figures, when used to describe an absent and longed for person, is not necessarily
“resurrectionist,” in Valentine Cunningham’s term.
319
Rather, the trope amplifies longing for
what isn’t there, and is, as such, powerfully mournful. As Catherine Belsey has argued, these
vivid descriptions may set out to present a figure before us, but “pictures cannot restore the dead;
representation does not deliver presence.”
320
When rhetoricians talk about verbal images as
317
On a larger scale, Hamlet is also torn between two sides of humanist teaching—a heroic, action-oriented aspect
of humanism and a moral, Christian one, between Aeneas/Machiavelli and Erasmus. See Robin Headlam-Wells,
Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2-30.
318
Qtd. in Preston 115.
319
Valentine Cunningham, “Why Ekphrasis?” Classical Philology 102 (2007), 63.
320
Catherine Belsey, “Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond,” Shakespeare Quarterly
63 (2012), 175-198, esp. 179.
148
summoning the presence or “life” of something or someone, they reveal a longing for a mode of
signification or representation that is more like magic than like art. But turning to the analogy of
the image or picture allowed poets and rhetoricians in the Renaissance to claim a greater power
for poetry.
The metaphors emphasizing the liveliness of verbal images invite further comparison
between the arts. The language implies that a picture can deliver something more real than words
can. These metaphors rewrite the ut pictura poesis trope to appeal to the image as what Murray
Krieger has called a “natural sign,” that is, an act of signification that is not arbitrary, but gets
close to delivering a reality.
321
But as Krieger explains, the idea that images, verbal or otherwise,
can deliver anything other than representation is an “illusion.” If the visual image “promises to
come to the aid of language” it makes a promise it cannot keep.
322
For Hamlet, then, the vibrant
description of his father’s ghost delivers neither the father nor the ghost. What it does deliver,
however, is poetic description or verbal art, which, though it does not deliver the presence
Hamlet longs for, nevertheless forges a space within unfolding time, an aesthetic space in which
Hamlet can mourn for what he has lost.
To draw on Theodor Adorno, the play’s enargeic descriptions offer—as forms of art—to
create a space that has more immediate meaningfulness, more immanence than the world of
court politics or the world of heroic action.
323
What later aesthetic theorists would claim is that
the category of the aesthetic becomes a placeholder to contain the things that are unrepresentable
321
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins University Press,
1992), 9.
322
Belsey, 176.
323
See Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, 34 on how Shakespeare employs Adorno’s concept of
aesthetic space in order to explore unrepresentable aspects of life. See also Lewis on the “seeming” and unreality of
Hamlet’s court, 36.
149
or unassimilable in daily life, things like eros and loss. To be clear, even if the aesthetic offers a
space that is distinct from the world, this space is illusory. The “space” of the aesthetic in Hamlet
is reducible to Shakespeare’s art, to the lines of poetry placed in the mouth of the Ghost
(Shakespeare?) or the Player. All of the summoning power of enargeia and dramatic speech, all
of the lingering, mourning time carved out by poetic images is, in the end, leveraged toward the
question of what Shakespeare’s art can really offer in the face of loss. A preliminary answer
seems to be that poetry cannot offer animation or resurrection or replacement, but it can offer
itself as a memorial, and even a consolation, for the figures it fails to retrieve from death.
How, then, do these concerns over poetry’s central claims—the claim to moral behavioral
influence and the claim to memorialist power—play out in Shakespeare’s drama? Hamlet catches
a moment of transition in the literary and ethical understanding of response and it offers its own
take on what poetry and descriptive speech should aim to accomplish. To do so, the play offers,
first, a ghost, and later, other ekphrastic images as spaces to explore the ethical, aesthetic, and
memorialist aims of poetry. The Ghost’s rhetorical position straddles two articulations of the
aims of poetry. He offers both the call for epic, imitative action (even at the expense of pity) and
the arresting and plaintive force of one who speaks for the dead. In the face of this contradiction,
which the Ghost seems at pains to navigate, one wonders why Shakespeare would choose to
make his ghost a compelling enargeist who turns to poetic forms of persuasion to accomplish his
rhetorical goal. As inventive and compelling as this empathetic ghost may be, this scene seems
pointed toward a notion that the proverbial ghost roaring “Hamlet, Revenge!” would have been
quite a bit more efficient. Given the awkward position into which Shakespeare thrusts both his
Ghost and his protagonist, it seems that the Ghost’s presence is not meant merely to launch a
150
revenge tragedy, but to interrogate the poetic devices that both animate and complicate such a
tragedy.
If the Ghost’s aim is to deliver an urgent call for action, his medium seems to impede his
message. And yet the Ghost’s persuasive method is distinctly literary and poetic, relying on
description and allusion; that is, on the resources of poetry rather than epic or revenge. His final
speech to Hamlet in this scene is a nearly fifty-line description of his murder, rich with affecting
detail. His description of the effects of the “cursed hebona” on the body focuses on haptic
particulars, and is told in the present tense, amplifying the effect of the hearer’s shared image.
The poison courses through the body and “with a sudden vigor…doth possess /. And curd like
eager droppings into milk / The thin and wholesome blood” (1.5.68-70). Poured into the King’s
ears, the poison, and its violent effects, double as a metaphor for hearing this horrific, descriptive
story. Indeed, the Ghost’s emphasis on curdling blood in this description echoes the reference he
has already made to blood freezing when, moments before, he detailed the effects of hearing a
dreadful tale. As the Ghost pours this story into Hamlet’s ears, the prince responds with horror—
in some editions, and in many productions, the line “O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!” is
spoken by Hamlet rather than the Ghost. The lengthy description depicts the King’s death as
something like an Ovidian metamorphosis. He relates: “a most instant tetter barked about / Most
lazar-like with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body” (1.5.71-73). Harold Jenkins’
Arden edition of the play notes that the bark-like crust encasing the king’s body recalls a detail
from Ovid’s tale of Daphne, as she metamorphoses into a laurel tree.
324
The allusion here is
biblical too, recalling the leprous skin of Lazarus whom Luke’s gospel pictures resting in
324
And it is worth remembering how many of Ovid’s characters are transformed to trees, often in the context of loss:
Baucis, Myrrha, the Tracian women, Phaeton’s sisters, and Cyparissus whom Apollo transforms into a cypress tree
in order enable his endless mourning.
151
Abraham bosom after a life of suffering that was ignored by the rich man, Dives.
325
The Ghost’s
allusions enable the tale to linger. They provide a kind of interpretive regress, in which each
allusion allows another detour in understanding. The allusiveness and rhetorical flair of the
speech also intensifies the feeling that what Hamlet is responding to in this scene is something
literary. The poetic ghost summoned by description, pronouncing his ekphrastic lines, alluding to
influential texts, and then demanding a response becomes a stand in for poetry.
The Ghost’s rhetorical dilemma highlights a feature of Renaissance poetics that is under
review in Hamlet. There is little reason within descriptions such as the one the Ghost offers for
the active response to be the obvious one. To get to the point of acting, one must interpret the
image using an epistemology unique to what Preston refers to as a “difficult Protestant aesthetic”
in which the placement and content of images urges a particular response.
326
Hamlet’s
ambivalence between the active response and the emotional response is effectively ambivalence
about a dominant, humanist model of poetics—a model in which poetic images like Sidney’s
Aeneas inspire heroic, imitative response, and in which the aims of rhetoric are primarily
persuasive. When Hamlet’s inclination toward mourning is treated as delay or slowness, such
criticism reveals an ethically problematic aspect of this heroic aesthetic. Hamlet struggles to use
the poetic representation of the Ghost’s suffering and loss to justify a questionably moral action.
Just as Lucrece refused to allow her suffering to be instrumentalized by her Roman heroes,
Hamlet struggles with the impulse to instrumentalize either his own loss or the suffering of his
father. This is not a personal, psychological problem for Hamlet, it is an ethical problem written
in to English Protestant poetics. A theory of poetry that equates moral value with the ability to
325
Geneva Bible, Luke 6:19-31.
326
Preston 129.
152
inspire action overwrites the ethical force implicit in affective and contemplative response. In
turn, Shakespeare uses the absent images that appear in Hamlet to suggest that poetry might have
something else to offer. If poetry cannot bring back the dead or justify revenge it can create a
space in which to mourn and memorialize the absences that it makes present.
In Hamlet, I suggest, Shakespeare capitalizes on the inability of political and moral
reasoning to contain the aesthetic and affective force of art (whether images, poetry, or drama).
The images that interrupt the play and stymie the Prince’s attempts at heroic moral reasoning
instead make a claim for the immanent force of Shakespeare’s art. Hamlet’s absent images do
not altogether abandon the motives of moral philosophy that are at the heart of the humanist
project. Rather, they offer the witness of poetry and the lingering presence of the image as ethical
responses to human experiences of loss.
The Player’s Pity
A noble, educated Prince, Hamlet is clearly familiar with the moral and pragmatic aims
of humanist education. Indeed, he uses the sort of heroic rhetoric one might find in the moral
defenses of poetry to lambaste his own inaction and valorize the deeds of a martial leader like
Fortinbras (“I do not know / Why yet I live to say this thing’s to do” 4.4.41-42). But Hamlet also
encounters examples of poetic speech that make him revisit the assumptions he has made about
how to respond to the Ghost’s poetic speech. Hamlet’s most direct engagement with the force of
poetry unfolds just after a troupe of players arrives on the scene. The Player’s speech, with its
description of the death of Priam and Hecuba’s ensuing grief, summons out of the past an
153
infamous example of poetry’s moving power: Aeneas’s narrative of the Fall of Troy.
327
As my
previous chapter has demonstrated, the scene would have been incredibly familiar to young
gentlemen who were learning the art of crafting moving rhetoric. Including the scene here as a
turning point in Hamlet’s narrative underscores the play’s focus on the role of poetry and drama
in testing the humanist defense of the rhetorical project. Shakespeare’s play makes space for both
Hamlet and the Player to describe the imagined scene in vivid and moving detail and then
focuses on Hamlet’s response to this speaking picture of poetry. Previous criticism has been
inclined to focus most attention on how Hamlet’s choice of the scene is implicitly self-
flagellating.
328
He chooses a speech that “begins with Pyrrhus” as a heroic and pitiless image of
the revenge he has not yet taken or as a figure of the dramatic machismo he cannot live up to.
329
Read from this perspective, Hamlet is struck by the image and the player’s response because it
highlights how he has failed to be moved to action by the speech of the Ghost. He has, in his own
mind, been a bad reader and imitator of poetry and failed to leverage an experience of poetic
speech toward personal deed. But the scene, familiarly, does not revolve so much upon the action
of its revenging figure as on the mourning of its witnesses—on Hecuba and the Player who
weeps for her. Focusing here, it becomes clear that the speech and Hamlet’s meditation might be
less concerned with what Hamlet should do than with what poetry can do. The Player’s words
summon the image of a murdered king and a mourning wife and linger there, mourning with the
327
As I explore in the previous chapter speeches such as Aeneas’s description of the Fall of Troy would have been
profoundly familiar to students learning the art of moving rhetoric. Hamlet’s favored speech is essentially a
schoolroom exercise placed inside an epic drama.
328
Or to flagellate him: "Shakespeare suggests that the didactic effects of the actor's performance are actually quite
limited, for although Hamlet responds to the player's speech, he seems to miss the complex reflection of roles that
the image of Pyrrhus coordinates." W.B. Worthen, The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance
(Princeton University Press, 1984), 30.
329
Ian Smith argued in a recent talk that the “black Pyrrhus” is a racialized caricature of machismo that Hamlet
wishes, but fails, to emulate. Huntington Library, 6 April 2019.
154
figures they simultaneously memorialize. If Hamlet is moved by the speech, he is as much or
more moved by the Player’s art than by the legendary content. Hamlet’s subsequent soliloquy
and his decision to turn to drama, then, show Shakespeare’s play beginning to make a claim for
what poetry can achieve even in the stead of heroic action.
Hamlet invites the player to recite a speech he has heard before, a speech he “chiefly
loved” though it “pleased not the million” (2.2.384, 374). It begins with a description of
Pyrrhus—a quintessential agent of revenge—black with the blood of his victims as he seeks “Old
grandsire Priam” (2.2.402). As many a critic has observed of this scene, Hamlet is “divided
between being the witness and being the agent.”
330
Pyrrhus, who pursues Priam in order to
revenge the murder of his own father, Achilles, could stand as a model for Hamlet, a figure to
imitate as he pursues revenge for his own father.
331
But the “milky head” of Priam, which elicits
so much sympathy from those who witness the violence done to it, more readily evokes the head
of Hamlet’s murdered father. It would appear that Hamlet is drawn to the speech because the
frank injustice of the scene has the potential to galvanize action, to arouse the vindictive passions
of its witnesses even to the point of condoning regicide (the death of the other Pyrrhus figure,
Claudius). But more striking to me is the extent to which the speech and Hamlet’s ensuing
soliloquy raise the notion of retributive action only as a specter. In both the speech and Hamlet’s
response to it, pity seems to arrest action, and “conscience” not vengeance seems to be the end
addressed by the pitiful scene. Though Harry Levin has insightfully mapped Hamlet’s soliloquy
as a direct inversion of the Priam scene, a movement from pity to action that counterbalances the
330
Harry Levin, “An Explication of the Player’s Speech,” in The Question of Hamlet (Oxford University Press,
1959), 160. The division between acting and witnessing is itself a version of the division between rhetorical/poetic
aims that I am arguing that this play is invested in exploring.
331
So, too, could Aeneas, given that his heroic actions are motivated by pietas, or love and honor for his father.
155
speech’s movement from action to pity, it is worth noting that the “action” Hamlet is
immediately moved toward is itself essentially a re-presentation of his father’s suffering in the
form of a play.
332
Subsequently, the aim of the play is to elicit a response from king Claudius—
to force him into the position of witness—and only indirectly, if at all, to arouse action. Action as
a result of pity is only ever a future possibility in this scene, while pity itself invites delay.
None in the scene spoken by the Player seem exempt from the ravages of pity. Ilium
itself, as Heather James has noted, becomes an “allegorical personification of sympathy followed
by decisive action” when it “Stoops to his base with a hideous crash” at the sight of Priam
knocked down by the mere “whiff and wind” of Pyrrhus’s fell sword (2.2.411,15).
333
As a
“surrogate spectator” Ilium enacts a vehement response to pitiful sight that might invite
imitation.
334
But as decisive as Ilium’s “hideous crash” may be it is in fact a collapse, and though
the booming sound is agentic (it “Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear”), its primary triumph is to bring
about a pause (2.2.415). In response to the city’s lament, the sword which Pyrrhus was even
then:
declining on the milky head
Of reverend Priam seemed I’th’air to stick
So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood.
Like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.
(2.2.416-20)
332
Levin, 156.
333
Heather James, “Dido’s Ear: Shakespearean Tragedy and the Politics of Response,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.3
(2001), 360-382, esp. 379.
334
Ibid.
156
One wonders what happens in the space that follows Shakespeare’s abrupt half-line. How long is
the pause between the player’s period (so adamantly asserted by the words “Did nothing”) and
the “But” of the following line? The blankness of this space testifies to the unspeakable nature of
the impending crime. But the absence of speech also draws attention to the lingering temporality
of the pitiful scene: the stilled tableau of the “painted tyrant” hovering over his “reverend”
victim. His action suspended, Pyrrhus becomes explicitly image-like, a product of the Player’s
art. But it is not Pyrrhus the avenger who attracts the most attention in this display. Rather,
throughout “Pyrrhus’ pause” all eyes focus on Priam (2.2.425). James writes: “if viewed as a
painting the scene leads the spectator’s eye along an imaginary line from Pyrrhus to his sword
and finally to Priam’s milky head, which is the unbearably pitiful center of the composition.”
335
We should remember, of course, that this sympathetic tableau already has a spectator—
indeed, more than one. The figure describing the scene with such pity is likely Aeneas. After all
the speech is referred to as “Aeneas’s talk to Dido” (2.2.384). But the drama of the speech rests
on the grief of another spectator who bears witness from within the scene: Hecuba. One might
imagine the spectator’s eye lingering momentarily on the head of Priam before recognizing that
the sword coming down upon the old man points directly at his watching wife. Like Priam’s
milky head, the mourning Hecuba is a subject of visual contemplation in this scene. Indeed it is
Hecuba and not Priam who is three times referred to as an object of sight following the old
king’s murder:
“But who—ah woe—had seen the mobled queen--”
(2.2.440)
“Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steeped,
335
James, 380.
157
‘Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced.”
(2.2.448-9)
“But if the gods themselves did see her then…
The instant burst of clamour that she made
(Unless things mortal move them not at all)
Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven
And passion in the gods.”
(2.2.450-56)
The description of the suffering of Hecuba is refigured as an image that demands sympathy from
its viewers, whether they be the gods or the witnesses in battle or in the theatre. As both a subject
of visual and narrative attention, Hecuba doubles as a model of witness and a subject to witness.
Strikingly, Hecuba’s “instant burst of clamour” echoes the “hideous crash” of Ilium. If the city is
a model of sympathetic witness, Hecuba is its first imitator, and her grieving her primary action.
If Hecuba is a model of witness here, the content of her example seems oddly anticlimactic. The
speech is cut off before we hear more of Hecuba’s fate: her mourning, her capture, her
enslavement, the sacrifice and murder of her last two children, her revenge, her lamentations
transformed to snarls as she metamorphoses into a dog. We hear none of this.
336
As the speech
ends all eyes are turned to Hecuba’s grief, and with the possible exception of the Player, the
responses of her witnesses are very much in question. We might note that the imagined response
336
Tonya Pollard sees Hecuba as an exemplar of revenge, who enacts the violence that Hamlet delays. I take
Pollard’s point that this familiar narrative would have been in the background of audience’s experience. However,
Shakespeare’s play seems to intentionally cut the narrative short. What we do see Hecuba do is mourn. Pollard,
“What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?” Renaissance Quarterly 65.4 (2012), 1060-1093.
158
of the gods is itself stubbornly conditional: “if the gods did see”.
337
Still, the scene relentlessly
redoubles its witnesses: Hamlet witnesses the Player bearing witness to Aeneas’s description of
Hecuba witnessing her husband’s murder while watched by an abstract but potentially immense
audience that might even include the gods.
338
Within the narrative context of this speech, none of
these witnesses move beyond the state of grieving, sympathetic witness. Rather, like Pyrrhus
frozen in a tableau, they seem to do “nothing.” The Player’s scene interrupts Hamlet’s drive to
action by pausing an act of revenge (Pyrrhus’s) and refocusing attention on the grief of the
witness. As pity multiplies in the scene, increasing attention is drawn to the visual and narrative
action emphatically decelerates.
What is perhaps the most remarkable outcome of the speech is that Hamlet is driven to
imitate not Pyrrhus, but the Player—the Player who has been constructed as a better witness even
than the gods. What seems to gall Hamlet most about the entire scene is the degree to which
Hecuba’s grief becomes the Player’s (“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her/ That he should weep
for her?” 2.2.494-5). The prince is prone to comparison, and he sees in the Player’s mournful
poetry a more ready response to wrongdoing than he has been able to practice. Though Hamlet
“can say nothing” in response to the loss of his father (2.2.504), he imagines how the Player
would respond: “He would drown the stage with tears/ and cleave the general ear with horrid
speech” (2.2.497-8). That Hamlet would find this response enviable is remarkable indeed given
337
Notably, in Ovid’s description of Hecuba’s fate, the gods do indeed see Hecuba’s grief and do precisely nothing.
Ovid writes: “But Aurora had no time for being moved by the fall and ruin of Hecuba and Troy, though she had
aided in its defense” (Metamorphosis XIII). I note two important points here. 1) Even in Shakespeare’s Ovidian
source, being moved by a sight is perceived as something that takes up time, and 2) We are left with the sense that
the gods are pitiless viewers, which stands in remarkable contrast to the notion of the gods moved to passion that is
described by the Player as Aeneas. This begs the question of how Aeneas, the Player, and by extension Hamlet’s
audience can be better, more passionate or ethical viewers than even the gods.
338
Note Stephen Halliwell on the gods in classical literature: they experience pity for human characters primarily
when they are looking on as an audience. The Aesthetics of Mimesis, 213.
159
that by the end of the same soliloquy his self-accusation seems eerily similar: “I, the son of a
dear murdered….Must like a whore unpack my heart with words/ and fall a-cursing like a very
drab” (2.2.518-21). Somehow, Hamlet manages to see his own (feminized) words as distinct
from the words he would like to speak—words like the Player’s. What then is the difference?
One of the most concrete differences between Hamlet’s cursing and the Player’s speech
is the Player’s concentrated focus on a specific, imagined image of suffering and loss. The
speech is content to remove its focus from the murderous Pyrrhus and align itself with Hecuba’s
laments. Contrarily, even within the soliloquy that follows, Hamlet vacillates between
remembering his father (the “dear murdered” 2.2.518) and cursing his uncle (“bloody, bawdy
villain,/ Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain” 2.2.515-6). I am inclined to
suggest that meditating on Hecuba’s lamentations provides the Player with a resource for
response that Hamlet lacks or resists. As a time of dilation specifically focused on the
imaginative experience of loss, the Player’s tearful speech might represent something more like a
continuation of Lucrece’s “pause for means to mourn a newer way.” As I have argued in the
previous chapter, Lucrece employs the image of Hecuba as a site of mourning capacious enough
to incorporate grief for both herself and the subject she witnesses.
339
In meditating on an image
of Hecuba, Lucrece grafts her own grief into a familiar narrative. When concentrated on a still
image, this space for mourning is indefinitely extendable. Given these qualities, both Lucrece’s
meditation and the Player’s speech might rely on patterns of response more familiar from
religious visual traditions (icons of the crucifixion, or pieta) or even from memento mori. As still
images that remind the viewer of past or future loss, these pictures invite sympathetic attention
without necessarily demanding political action. If this comparison is apt, it also draws attention
339
Note Lynn Enterline’s take on this: Hamlet uses Hecuba to find his own voice. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom 131 ff.
160
to the degree to which the scene focuses on the status of the Player’s poetry as a kind of art. It
crafts an image of suffering and mournful response, forging an aesthetic space in which to reflect
on events that significantly echo Hamlet’s loss. If Hamlet is somewhat baffled by the
effectiveness of this moment which inspires affect but not action, his reaction reflects on an early
modern understanding of poetry that is in flux, as Shakespeare grafts a form of contemplation
and response familiar from forms of religious art into a scene that features the secular and pagan
figures of a prince, a player, and a tale from antiquity.
The presence of grieving witnesses in the depicted scene also duplicates a feature of
Renaissance visual art. Leon Battista Alberti’s writing suggested that narrative paintings (istoria)
would be more effective if they included a figure that demonstrated an affected response to what
the scene represented. So many early modern paintings offer figures who gesture to other
suffering figures and wear grief or pity prominently on their faces, as in Masaccio’s oft-cited
Trinity (Figure 3.1).
340
Focusing on Hecuba’s lament and imitating it in his own body, the Player
shows the moving force of art and its capacity to act as a space for mourning the past powerfully
at work at the same time as he draws again the implicit analogy between visual and poetic art.
Viewed through the parallel to religious art, the Player’s contemplative and mournful response
works to normalize inaction as both ethically productive and as a primary aim of eloquence.
Ghostly Poetry
Though I have been suggesting that Hamlet envies the Player’s ability to mourn with
Hecuba by way of his art, a long tradition of scholars have argued quite the opposite, suggesting
340
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), 60.
161
that he finds the Player’s response repulsive.
341
The cue for this reading is Hamlet’s choice of the
adjective “monstrous.” “Is it not monstrous,” Hamlet asks:
that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all the visage waned
--Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit—and all for nothing—
For Hecuba?
Rhodri Lewis and Lynn Enterline both gloss this term as a pejorative reference to the actor’s
art.
342
The actor’s ability to suit his appearance and affect to a fabricated conceit is a technical
feat that reiterates the degree to which performers trade in “seeming.” Lewis understands
Hamlet’s response as inflected with moral distaste: a man should be what he seems, not seem in
order to be. And indeed, Puritan tracts opposing the theatre used the term “monster” to lambast
actors for their dishonesty. William Rankins claims that he calls actors “Monsters” rather than
“comedians,” “Players,” or “Pleasers,” “Bicause under colour of humanitie, they present nothing
but prodigious vanitie.”
343
Players lie, and they do it by putting a fine and moving face on
nothing.
341
For a strong articulation of this position, see W.B. Worthen, The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of
Performance, 30.
342
Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, 15; Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 129-131.
343
Quoted in Lewis, 15.
162
Hamlet, however, does not call the actor a monster.
344
Rather, he describes as
“monstrous” the actor’s ability to generate and be moved by the “nothing” that is poetry. Here,
Sidney’s morally ambivalent awe at the poet’s ability to move audiences by making something
out of “nothing that is, was, or ever shall be” might come to mind.
345
Emphasizing Hecuba’s
status as a conceit or a figure, Hamlet marvels at poetry’s ability to move listeners with invented
material. The aspect of invention is key to this understanding of the word. As a descriptive term,
“monstrous” could refer to wild “products of human innovation and ingenuity” (as when
Bardolph blushes at Falstaff’s “monstrous devices,” or, as in Lewis’s example, a critic laments
the Elizabethan fashion for “great and monstrous ruffs”).
346
“Monstrous” also carried reference
to the supernatural, to things that were as much miraculous as horrible. In his own translation of
Aeneas’s Tale to Dido (Book II of the Aeneid), the Earl of Surrey describes the appearance of a
flaming portent: “a sodein monstrous maruel fell”.
347
What Surrey translates as “monstrous”
(Virgil’s “mirabile monstrum”) has also been translated as an “omen” an “amazing portent”
(Sarah Ruden) and a “great miracle” (David West). In this context, Hamlet’s description of the
Player’s art as “monstrous” can just as easily be read as wonder.
348
An inventive, eloquent, and even preternatural moment, the Player’s “monstrous” speech
should also bring to mind another similar vision in Shakespeare’s play: the Ghost. The Ghost is
344
Henry IV part 1 ed. David Scott Kastan, Arden Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 2.4.301. Hamlet does
use the term “monster” twice in the play, both while he is lambasting women (3.1.139 and 3.4.159); Lewis, 15.
345
Sidney, “Defence,” 11.
346
Lewis, 15.
347
Certain Bks Anaeis (London, 1557), Book II, sig.Di
r
.
348
In Spenser’s description of Acrasia’s compelling rhetorical and poetic power, “monstrous” is apparently
associated with those who have been moved or compelled by art. The passionate beasts that were Acrasia’s former
lovers are: “Now turned into figures hideous, / According to theur minds like monstruous,” Edmund Spenser, The
Faerie Queene ed. A.C. Hamilton (New York: Longman, 2001), Book II, 85.4–5.
163
an affecting orator, who appears under genuinely supernatural circumstances to persuade Hamlet
with his moving speech. Worth noting as well is that “monstrous” is a term that Shakespeare
uses in reference to specters of the dead in both Julius Caesar (when a “monstrous apparition”
appears to Brutus to accuse him of wrongdoing) and The Winter’s Tale (when Paulina describes
the idea that her dead husband could return as “monstrous”).
349
When Hamlet describes the
player’s performance as monstrous, then, he may very well be saying that it reminds him of his
Father’s Ghost. Of course, Hamlet does immediately allude to this earlier encounter. He recalls
that he has been “prompted to [] revenge by heaven and hell” and that he has a “motive” for
passion even greater than that of the Player (2.2.562). Hamlet’s prompt to action and cue for
passion is the vivid, enargeic speech of the Ghost—again, something made out of nothing.
350
Hearing the Player’s speech recapitulates the first instance in which he was haunted by a creative
poetic image, and so reiterates the tension he experiences between an active and a mournful or
reflective response.
351
Much as Sidney appeals to heroic action as a way of incorporating his
praise for the creative energy of poetry into a larger moral project, Hamlet demands an active
response of himself following his encounters with the Ghost and the Player in order to make
moral sense of his sympathetic response. The same internal conflict can be heard in Hamlet’s
plea to the Ghost when it returns in the next act:
Do not look upon me
349
Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell, Arden Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), 4.3.320; The Winter’s Tale,
ed. John Pitcher, Arden Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 5.3.115.
350
“cue for passion” is the Folio reading.
351
It is also possible that hearing the Player speak so eloquently about “nothing” calls into question the truthfulness
of the Ghost’s eloquent speech. It may have been invented in the same manner that the Player’s is. For this reason, I
am willing to give some credence to the idea that Hamlet’s refigures the play he has already decided to put on as a
kind of test of the Ghost’s speech, though many scholars compellingly argue that he is disingenuous in using the
play as an epistemological test.
164
Lest with piteous action you convert
My stern effects! Then what I have to do
Will want true colour, tears perchance for blood.
(3.4.123-6)
Hamlet worries that pity inspired by the image of his father, like the Player’s pity for Hecuba,
will convert his vengeful passion (“blood”) into a mourning passion (“tears”) that will keep him
from exacting revenge.
352
This is a belief that the Ghost, as a symbol of a heroic past who desires
action and not mourning, strongly reaffirms. When the spectre first tells Hamlet of his murder, he
is very clear on this point: “Pity me not,” he says, “but lend thy serious hearing to what I have to
unfold” (1.5.5-7).
The Player’s speech is most troubling to Hamlet, however, because the Prince is tempted
to think that the Player’s performance, combining inventive energy with appropriately
sympathetic response, was itself heroically eloquent. While Hamlet might ask to hear the speech
in order to motivate and justify his own action—his bringing down of justice against the
murderer Claudius—the scene as played actually stops at inaction, grief, and pity focused on the
bereaved Hecuba. Combining specific attention to the visual (the demand to look at Hecuba)
with delay (Pyrrhus’ pause, the length of the speech itself), the speech asserts the image of loss
as a site of aesthetic attention that demands a pitiful, sympathetic response. This is the response
that the Player, armed with his spoken art, is uniquely equipped to provide. It is also the response
that Hamlet is already giving, even if he, along with generations of critics, is inclined to question
it. If Hamlet is here offering an alternative ethic focused on the mourning and memorializing
made possible through poetic invention it also suggests that that ethic is less political and less
352
It is striking that while Hamlet sees his own tears as effeminate and undesirable, he does not use the same
feminizing language to vilify the Player’s tears.
165
“active” than the one Hamlet has been goading himself to perform.
353
For rather than inspiring a
vengeful murder, the speech inspires tears followed by a performance. One wonders what the
witness to suffering like Hecuba’s is invited to do. Perhaps unsettlingly, the answer seems to be:
what the Player does.
Both the Player and the Ghost represent the force of poetry. They demonstrate poetry’s
ability to make art that memorializes loss, either by making that loss vividly present as the Ghost
does, or mourning a loss in the past, as the Player does. Both do so by offering descriptive
speech that slows action and takes up time in the midst of performance. If Hamlet’s encounter
with the Player’s mourning recapitulates the question of how he should respond to the specter of
loss he encountered when he spoke with his father’s Ghost, it also reiterates the dilemma in
which the enargeic ghost found himself. Though his descriptions were meant to inspire action,
they also participated in poetry’s ability to generate pity that stills action. As much as Hamlet is
uncomfortable with his own apparently inactive mourning (“I do not know / Why yet I live to
say this thing’s to do”), his response is an equally predictable result of the Ghost’s vivid poetry
(4.4.42-43). These scenes indicate a preoccupying concern in Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet turns
to images like those of the Ghost and the Player to interrogate the relationship between
eloquence and the humanist vita activa. Indeed, as James explores in her reading of the Player’s
speech, the experience of “feeling with” the eloquent speaker tends to blur the distinction
between pity and consent, with all of its political implications.
354
By bearing witness to
Hecuba’s grief, a speech such as the Player’s generates both aesthetic pleasure and ethically
353
Katherine Goodland, in Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama, argues that
Shakespeare’s characters’ responses to female mourning are critical of the feminized, public, and Catholic mourning
rituals that were going out of fashion in England. If there is a refence to these rituals in Hamlet’s preference for
mourning, then it would involve a sort of politics.
354
James, 360.
166
productive mourning out of the material of poetic speech. The scene also suggests that poetry
and drama can, in and of themselves, contain the kind of moral force that humanist poets were
inclined to reach for by encouraging action in response to poetry. Poetry makes good on
Renaissance critics’ claims to efficacy when, as in Hamlet, the ekphrastic quality of poetry
emblematizes the very response it is designed to prompt.
Poetic Memorials
For many readers, the above discussion will likely raise the specter of another inactive
witness in Hamlet: Gertrude. Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death—another pause in
Hamlet that is constituted around an imagined image—is meant to produce a site of mourning
and memorial, but it seems to do so at the cost of action. One wonders why, if Gertrude
witnessed Ophelia drowning, she did nothing to intervene. A possible answer is that Gertrude’s
descriptive speech is her act, an act of witnessing that is governed by pity rather than some form
of heroism. Neither is Gertrude’s speech merely an expression of pity. Rather, it demonstrates an
act of mourning that emphasizes what poetry has to offer in the face of Ophelia’s pain. Just as
Hamlet’s impulse to revenge has been arrested by his pity for his father, Gertrude does not see
Ophelia’s suffering as a call to action but to productive mourning. If the speech describes a
kairotic moment, the opportunity it presents is an opportunity to grieve like the Player grieved,
which might itself be an ethical act. Moreover, in describing Ophelia suspended in song,
Gertrude’s speech tropically lends Ophelia a voice. Thus, following the model of witness in the
Player’s speech, Gertrude becomes a witness to Ophelia’s suffering who does not respond
through some form of heroic action, but through a mournful, descriptive pause. She crafts a
speaking picture that memorializes Ophelia’s suffering. Laertes’ response to Gertrude’s speech is
167
telling here. Ever heroic, Laertes would prefer to act than to mourn: “Too much of water hast
thou, poor Ophelia,/ And therefore I forbid my tears” (4.7.185-186) Like Hamlet cursing his own
cursing, Laertes sees his tears as womanish. But despite his heroic posture, Laertes, like Hamlet
before him, does not submit his tears to action. He weeps anyway: “I have a speech o’fire that
fain would blaze / But that this folly drowns it” (4.7.188-189). It is no small coincidence that the
“folly” of Laertes’ tears “drowns” his more gallant speech. Succumbing to the mournful
response that Laertes initially resents—the response of inaction—might be what best allows him
to empathize with his drowned sister. In the water of his tears, Laertes suspends action.
355
Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death highlights descriptive poetry’s ability to
express resistance to time and loss. Emphasizing this aspect of poetry is another way the play
expands the claims of poetry and drama. The water that bears Ophelia up might even serve as a
type for the role of description in this play. Gertrude describes the water in which Ophelia
drowns as a “weeping brook” (4.7.173). The water flows as insistently as time, and its weeping
not only testifies to the association of passing time with inevitable loss, but also echoes the
crashing towers of Ilium in the Player’s speech. Even the inanimate brook responds to the pitiful
image of Ophelia mad with grief.
356
But while the brook figures the passing of time, it also
produces sufficient tension for Ophelia’s clothes to bear her up during the ambiguous pause
indicated by Gertrude’s “awhile” (4.7.174). Hovering over her own grave, Ophelia sings. Her
lays might be songs of mourning that, Orpheus-like, grieve the death they both anticipate and
delay. Shakespeare refuses to clarify the length of Ophelia’s pause. Though it is charged with the
355
And Ophelia’s death by drowning may also be seen as a death caused by grief for her father and perhaps for
Hamlet.
356
On female mourning in this play, see Katherine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and
Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (New York: Routledge, 2017).
168
pathos of expiring time—“long it could not be”—it is also extended by Gertrude’s impulse to
describe, to make a verbal picture which, tropically, lingers. Despite the attempt of the picture to
slow down Ophelia’s demise, her “muddy death” arrives in an abrupt half line, cutting off the
queen’s mournful description (4.7.181). Gertrude’s speaking picture offers the absent image of a
suspended Ophelia as a memorial. By locating Ophelia’s memory in a described image, Gertrude
erects a memorial out of material so ephemeral that it cannot be said to decay. The poet’s art
remains indefinitely, insofar as audiences take up the charge to remember and repeat it as, for
instance, Gertrude does each time Hamlet is performed.
In a play distinctly aware of loss and time’s power of decay, Gertrude uses ephemeral
description to create a paradoxically enduring memorial.
357
It is not, I think, coincidental that the
description of Ophelia’s death has inspired so many extra-textual illustrations, paintings,
vignettes, and stage-tableaux.
358
Something about the scene begs to be lifted out of passing time
and suspended in a visual now. One way to frame this phenomenon is to acknowledge that
Ophelia is prone to endure in art because her death has already been reconstructed as art by
Gertrude’s descriptive speech. If the scene encapsulates the poet’s power to generate art in the
face of loss, it might also reiterate the ethical ambiguities of memorializing verse. It is possible
that Gertrude preserves Ophelia as another Laura, perpetually beautiful and perpetually lost.
357
Eric P. Levy has called Ophelia “the character most closely linked with vulnerability to the passage of time,”
“The Mimesis of Time in Hamlet,” Philological Quarterly 86.4 (2007), 374. Levy describes this weakness as
paradoxically linked to her obsessive attention to the past through grieving memory. Because Ophelia is consumed
with the past, he intimates, she cannot prepare herself for the future. But as much as Ophelia is preoccupied by
remembrance, her suffering seems also to add urgency to the endangered present. Her grief and her madness, for
“awhile,” demand attention from all witnesses (4.7.74). Strikingly, Ophelia seems to be a figure who collapses
hierarchies of past, present, and future into the single, charged image of pitiful distress.
358
The Arden editors note that “Some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century productions ended this scene with
a kind of tableau in which Ophelia’s dripping body was carried onstage on a litter” (406). Other works of visual art,
even before the famous Pre-Raphaelite Millais painting, used the scene for visual inspiration, as did later film
versions of the play. See also Young, Hamlet and the Visual Arts 1709-1900 (Delaware 2002).
169
Viewed in this direction, the endlessly reiterated images of Ophelia’s death could be seen as
opportunistic attempts to construct visual pleasure at the expense of a suffering woman. As
troubling as this dynamic could be, Gertrude’s memorial seems to take its cue as much from
traditions in the visual arts as from Petrarchan poetics. There is an iconographic element at play
in Ophelia’s depictions, for she is insistently affiliated with flowers. Her “crownet weeds,” the
florae she distributes in her madness, and those petals that are strewn at her grave could each
recall the significance of the floral in the memento mori and vanitas traditions (4.7.173). Though
the painted flowers attract attention for their present beauty, they are meant to remind us of their
impending decay (as well as that of the viewer). Lingering like the cut flowers in a vanitas
painting, Ophelia’s death is preserved in Gertrude’s aestheticizing verse, forging both verbal
beauty and a reminder of the inevitable destruction in which Gertrude, too, will participate.
Ophelia suspended above her own grave and surrounded by weedy trophies is, then, an
exemplary instance of the ironic memorializing power that Hamlet seems to attribute to
descriptive speech. Enargeic description summons an image of loss that is simultaneously
present and absent and inspires no clear moral response. If we are moved by the image, we are
moved to remember it (to make a memento of it or carry it in the tablet of our memory) and to
share in the pity that arrests the forward movement of the play. When Gertrude’s description
echoes the Player’s speech in condoning pity and memorializing lament as possible alternatives
to heroic action, it also offers poetry and performative speech as means for accomplishing them.
Dramatic Memorials
Hamlet’s investigation of the paradoxically memorializing power of poetic images comes
to a head in the Graveyard scene, which is of course also the source of the play’s most widely
170
remembered visual tableau. A now iconic stage prop, Yorick’s skull metamorphoses the absent
images that have punctuated the play into a performed image of absence. In doing so, the scene
also attributes to performance the same memorializing force that has been hovering behind the
play’s ekphrastic descriptions. Hamlet’s dialogue frames the graveyard scene in terms of a
conventional memento mori. The skulls littering the graveyard perform their own Dance of Death
through Hamlet’s speech, parading out of the grave as generic types: the politician, the courtier,
the lawyer, the buyer of land. (The deep irony of Hamlet’s moralizing, of course, is that he is
standing over the grave of a loss most particular to him. This is Ophelia’s grave.) But the
prince’s generic rhetoric is quickly brought up by the sudden recollection of a particular loss:
that of his erstwhile companion Yorick. Hamlet’s specific memories of Yorick make a pivot that
is central to the memento mori motif. It reminds him that death does not merely triumph over a
generic “all”, but also conquers each particular person: Alexander, Imperious Caesar, Yorick,
and Hamlet himself. As much as Hamlet is preoccupied by the inevitability of decay that the
skull emphatically asserts, something of this scene remains unintegrated by the memento mori
message. Yorick has not, in fact, been swallowed up by oblivion. Not only does his skull remain
intact twenty-three years after his death—defying the gravedigger’s statement that a body will
decay after eight or at most nine years—but his memory remains intact, both in Hamlet’s vivid
description and in the incredible fame of the performed speech (“Alas, poor Yorick”) that has
since become his uneroded epitaph.
Strikingly, Shakespeare has chosen an extremely ephemeral figure to represent the
enduring power of poetry and performance. Yorick was a jester, famed for his extemporaneous
wit. “I knew him,” Hamlet says “A fellow if infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…Where be
your jibes now—your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the
171
table on a roar?” (5.1.174-5, 179-180). Hamlet is moved as he remembers Yorick’s excellent
creativity, his ability to make things up, much as I argued in Chapter One that Sidney was moved
by the creative energy of poets. If Hamlet’s crisis begins with the enargeic speech of a Ghost—
summoning images out of nowhere—it moves toward conclusion by remembering the similarly
inventive speech of a clown. Choosing to memorialize a jester, on the one hand, undercuts a
certain pathos in the assertion that time will take away all. What’s lost when the jibes and jokes
are silenced other than vanity? But at the same time, the speech ironically declares that vanity—
or poetry—can endure. Hamlet’s performed lament, like Gertrude’s or the Player’s spoken
images, capitalizes on its own ephemerality to act as a technology of memorialization not subject
to the same decay as a skull or the body of a King. As Emily Hodgson Anderson writes, Hamlet
“challenges the idea that memorials must exist solely in fixed and static records.”
359
Rather, the
play constructs its epitaph, or that by which it is remembered, out of the ephemeral material that
is reanimated in each subsequent performance; that is, out of the speaking pictures of
Shakespeare’s poetry.
360
There is, of course, an incredible precariousness to this mode of memorialization. As
much as poetry’s speaking pictures avoid the kind of decay that erodes stone or eats away at
material books, their persistence is dependent upon the audience members and actors who will
remember and reanimate them. Hamlet’s poetic Ghost must ask to be remembered, and Hamlet
359
Emily Hodgson Anderson, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
2018), 57. Anderson adds that “the memorial capacities of either medium are flawed as…neither the material
embodiment of text nor its spoken enunciation can exist outside of time. The tablets, papers, stones containing
written tributes will, like the human body, erode and age, while the verbal tribute, read or repeated, exits only in the
moment of its articulation. And yet these processes may feed off each other in a constant cycle of remembrance, one
taking over as the other one fades.”
360
Of course, the endurance of performance will also be reliant on print (the written reproduction of the text) and the
memories of audiences as evidenced by the problems of Q1 Hamlet, or the “bad quarto,” which is a memorial
reconstruction.
172
too, asks Horatio to linger long enough to tell his story. As much as poets have laid claim to the
eternalizing, self-preserving capabilities of their form, they are always dependent on the
readers—and actors—who will lend them breath as their lines are spoken. Shakespeare
acknowledges this weakness by choosing to explore the memorializing ability of poetry by way
of tropes that are already embedded with absence, and further, by placing them in the mouth of a
ghost or speaking them at the scene of a burial. Ekphrastic description and enargeic speech
celebrate the power of poetry to create something out of nothing, but also acknowledge their own
evanescence. Building a play around these absent images, Shakespeare both makes and mourns.
Hamlet’s scenes of description and response corroborate Leonard Barkan’s claim that the
Shakespearean theatre is prone to “seize upon [rhetorical] tropes like prosopopoeia, enargeia,
and ekphrasis” and “take them apart and put them back together again as theater.”
361
But Hamlet
also turns to these poetic tropes to reframe the work of theater. Performance, like enargeiac
speech, summons something where there was nothing (recall Hamlet’s performative opening
line: “Who’s there?”) and revivifies the work of poets from the past, but, like an epitaph, it also
offers an opportunity to remember and mourn what is absent. The play’s focus on these tropes
underscores what I see as the central claim for the ethical role of poetry in this play: that such
acts of memorial and mourning are as important, if not more important than revenge or heroic
action.
Hamlet’s Turn to Poetry
Given Hamlet the character’s apparent preference for heroic action over mourning
speech, his behavior following the encounter with Yorick is strikingly attentive to the memorial
361
Quoted in McKeown, “Enargeia,” 161.
173
power of poetry and drama. In the graveyard, Hamlet arrives at a moment of unprecedented self-
identification at the same time as he chooses poetic, mourning speech over acts of revenge.
Hamlet has not yet finished his ruminations on Yorick’s skull when a procession of living kings,
queens, and courtiers makes its way into the graveyard. This, as Hamlet will soon learn, is
Ophelia’s funeral. Witnessing Laertes’ laments over Ophelia’s body, Hamlet does not hold his
tongue. Rather, he unfolds himself.
362
The grieving that hails Hamlet, that draws him out of
disguise, is grief for Ophelia, and notably a kind of grief that claims to slow time. Hamlet comes
forward declaring:
What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
(5.1.243-7)
Notable in this speech is the near conflation of Laertes and Hamlet. Though the prince begins by
describing Laertes’s “phrase of sorrow,” his culminating self-declaration—“This is I, Hamlet the
Dane”—seems almost to claim Laertes’ grieving as his own. And indeed, Hamlet goes on to
challenge Laertes, not to a duel, but to a contest of grief. Hamlet and Laertes are here at one
another’s throats because of a shared loss. “I loved Ophelia,” Hamlet proclaims, “forty thousand
brothers/ Could not with all their quantity of love/ Make up my sum” (5.1.48-9). Hamlet
describes Laertes’ grieving speech—a speech he seems to envy and perhaps even appropriate—
362
The prince’s behavior in this scene is rather baffling, and indeed, there is some contention among editors as to
what exactly Hamlet does and does not do (Does he leap into the grave or does Laertes leap out? Is Hamlet an
aggressor or merely a demonstrative orator?).
174
in terms that might recall the Player’s speech. The stars that “stand/ Like wonder-wounded
hearers” witness Laertes’/Hamlet’s grief much as the Player hoped the gods would acknowledge
Hecuba’s (5.1.245-6). But where the Player acknowledged the freedom of the gods’ response—
Hecuba’s grief might make “milch the burning eyes of heaven”—Hamlet asserts the
attentiveness of the stars (2.2.455). “Wonder-wounded,” the stars cease their passage, pausing
time to participate in this grief. Perhaps Hamlet is merely being rhetorical here. But perhaps he
has also learned to imitate the Player’s model. Whether the gods or the stars attend to the grief he
declares or not, his audience does, both in the graveyard and in the theatre. In this sense,
Hamlet’s declaration in the graveyard might place a final underscore on the play’s revaluation of
the ethical action that Hamlet, Sidney, and other humanist writers had assumed as the end of
poetry. The witnesses in the graveyard, the theatre, or the heavens are not invited to political or
heroic acts, but to “stand,” conjured into stillness by pity and grief.
Moreover, Hamlet’s assertive claim of identity here in the space of grieving for Ophelia
hints at a possible otherwise for this tragedy.
363
Perhaps Hamlet does not need to fight Laertes or
enact revenge against Claudius. Perhaps it is Laertes’ desire for revenge—and not Hamlet’s—
that demands the violent actions of the concluding scene. Even after the bloodbath of the duel
scene, Hamlet uses his dying breath to summon the stillness and attention that he has learned to
long for. Invoking the audience as witness to the tableau of his own destruction, Hamlet
articulates his desire that we might pause here:
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
363
This is a possible otherwise that stage history has tried to realize. In one of David Garrick’s revisions, the play
ended in the graveyard with Hamlet’s declaration of identity. Though Garrick had Hamlet kill Claudius in a burst of
action—something I am suggesting is unnecessary—his intuition that the play could have ended here merits
consideration.
175
Had I but time (as this fell sergeant Death
Is strict in his arrest)—O, I could tell you—
But let it be.
(5.2.318-22)
The lingering that Hamlet imagines here is Hamlet’s last articulation of the simultaneously
mourning and memorializing force of poetry and drama. Though the prince submits to the
expiration of his time, he also voices his longing to hesitate: “Had I but time…O, I could tell
you.” Death comes to “arrest” Hamlet, and here the prince hints at the wish that his speech might
also arrest Hamlet. When Hamlet turns to his audience at the end of the play, he reframes the
performance as a work of memorializing art that has been constructed around his own death and
invites the audience to remember him.
If Hamlet moves its viewers with its inventive speech, its poetic energy, and its creative
power to summon something out of nothing, it moves them with the same force that Sidney
attributed to poets. Recall that Sidney’s argument credited poets with the power to move
audiences through the speaking picture of poetry, engaging a metaphor that constructs a work of
art as a surrogate voice, a surrogate body for its author. When audiences are moved to wonder or
“look pale and tremble” at Hamlet, they are moved by the inventive choices of its maker. That is
to say, they are moved by the ghostly presence of the play’s poet, speaking vividly through the
lines of the Ghost or the Player. In this sense, Shakespeare’s vivid images construct Hamlet as a
memorial not only for the suffering of Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Hecuba, but also for the
memory of its maker. Like the Ghost, whom Shakespeare himself may indeed have performed,
Shakespeare produces poetic speech in the hope of being remembered. But Shakespeare’s speech
does not place its hope in the action or revenge that might follow. Rather, it is willing to hope
176
that as a living monument and a place of mourning, poetry’s art can offer its own form of
efficacy.
177
Figures
Figure 3.1. Mary acts as witness to Jesus’s suffering in Masaccio, Holy Trinity with the Virgin
and Saint John and Donors, Fresco (1427-1428), Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
178
Chapter Four
King Lear and the Art of Death
Within the 400-year history of responses to King Lear, a surprising number of critics
have attempted to account for the play by making references to other forms of art, with notable
emphasis on the visual and plastic arts. Charles Lamb, arguing that the play was nearly
impossible to produce, claimed that one might as well try to place one of Michelangelo’s figures
on stage.
364
Edward Dowden attributed to the play a grandeur akin to a Gothic cathedral.
365
A.C.
Bradley famously declares Lear Shakespeare’s “greatest work but not his greatest play,”
comparing it instead with works like “the Divine Comedy, and even with the greatest symphonies
of Beethoven and the statues in the Medici Chapel.”
366
Maynard Mack and Helen Gardner
invoke the concluding scene as a secular appropriation of Michelangelo’s Pietà, and R.A. Foakes
bestows on the play a marmoreal form when he claims that it “stands like a colossus at the center
of Shakespeare’s achievement.”
367
This habit demonstrates critics’ attempts to reach outside of
the theatrical medium for an explanation of the play’s aesthetic and affective force. It also
reflects on Shakespeare’s commitment to experimenting with the form and role of art in this
play. King Lear asks what the image in theater can do and its most meta-critical moments are
focused on scenes of visual display or description.
364
Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage
Representation” (1811), rpt. in Jonathan Bate, The Romantics on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992),
123-124. Also qtd. in Marvin Rosenberg, “Lear Enters,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s King Lear, ed. Jay L.
Halio (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996), 197-206, esp. 199.
365
Edward Dowden, “Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art” (1881), qtd. in R.A. Foakes, Hamlet
versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 48.
366
A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1957), 208-209.
367
R.A. Foakes, “Introduction” in William Shakespeare, King Lear ed. R.A. Foakes, Arden Third Series (London:
Thompson Learning, 1997), 1.
179
This chapter will explore what is at stake for the theatrical image in King Lear. The
concluding scene of Lear’s lamentation brings an explicit and striking image on stage and refuses
to offer a clear or satisfying interpretation in the terms that might have been familiar from either
classical or Christian narrative traditions .
368
While the play’s building action hails the resources
of classical rhetoric, sententiae, ancient tragedy, and biblical narrative, the pivot to borrow from
the visual arts at the final moment of tragedy signals Shakespeare’s investment in searching out a
fit medium for mourning. King Lear’s conclusion places verbal and visual art in a vexed
relationship as the forms of rhetoric and classical tragedy are overwritten or repurposed in a
series of baroque gestures.
369
Throughout the play, Shakespeare reworks moments of rhetorical
display and models from classical tragedy in order to achieve not judgment, meaning, or action,
but immanence and monumentality. So, while the play as a whole is often lauded for
demonstrating the height of Shakespeare’s poetic art, Lear’s final tableau becomes something
more like a sculpture. At the conclusion of Shakespeare’s most searching tragedy, verbal
understanding gives way to visual sense. For Shakespeare, this is a theatrical coup. Here, it offers
insight into how an early modern playwright explores the relationship between the verbal and
visual in his art form, and how, within this ambivalent paragone, or competition between art
368
Though Cordelia echoes the words of Jesus and the play’s final image is often compared to a Pietà, the
possibility of her resurrection is ultimately denied, and Shakespeare directly overwrites his narrative sources in
choosing to have Cordelia die in the first place. In the context of the Reformation, in which iconoclastic impulses
were driven precisely by anxiety over the uses of images in both religious and theatrical contexts, Lear’s arrival at
an image without either a clear use or moral purpose is particularly daring. See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical
Prejudice (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1981); Ernest P. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the
English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Michael O’Connell,
The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theatre in Early-Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
369
Roland Greene’s forthcoming work on the Baroque in literature describes baroque gestures as overwriting
classical forms and traditions.
180
forms, the visual tableau is particularly poised to amplify the force of a scene of death and
mourning in drama.
The tragic tableau of Lear and Cordelia in Act 5 borrows iconographic elements from the
visual arts. Lear calls for a mirror, an element of paintings in the vanitas tradition, and his
entrance bearing the body of Cordelia recalls scenes of lamentation over the crucified body of
Christ. Indeed, Shakespeare’ arrangement of figures in a vaguely religious scene redirects the
fundamental elements of what had, until very recently, constituted a “painting” toward new
dramatic ends. As Victor Stoichita demonstrates in The Self-Aware Image, the late sixteenth
century was marked by a transition in which painting moved from primarily representing figures
in religious arrangements and began to represent objects—such as are seen in still lives—in an
endeavor to reflect on the vanity of both the world and the representational task. In the space of a
painted image of a flower or a mirror, both the image and the world it reflects are deemed
mortal.
370
This moment in the visual arts is also the moment in which Shakespeare wrote King
Lear, and Shakespeare’s play too reflects on the power of the stage image to interrupt and even
cancel out the more familiar patterns of tragic dramatic narrative, including its reliance on
rhetorical interpretation or sententiae and its repetition of familiar narrative arcs. Words decline
to howls at the end of this play just as action arrives at pictorial stillness.
Pivotally, as Renaissance writings about sculpture and the visual arts will suggest, Lear’s
turn to the sculptural image hands the labor of mediating between meaning and meaninglessness,
life and death in an aesthetic space over to its audiences. Again, the aesthetic context of
Shakespeare’s art is helpful here. Leonard Barkan describes how the Renaissance rediscovery of
370
Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie
Glasheen, Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
181
pagan sculpture, often without contextual narrative clues, contributed to a shift in the interpretive
habits of viewers.
371
Art becomes a thing to be deciphered, a space of interpretive exploration.
As Barkan puts it, “the necessary practice of deciphering classical images helps to define the
activity of decipherment as central to all visual experience, even where the material is well
known and doctrinally fixed.”
372
Lear’s call to “look there”—while the play simultaneously
dismisses the available narratives of resurrection or the triumph of virtue over vice—indicates
Shakespeare’s willingness to surrender poetic authority and entrust the ethical labor of his art to
an audience confronted with a dramatic image (5.3.309). Renaissance writings about encounters
with art, and particularly the forms of art with which Lear is often compared, offer semantic
clues for thinking through the role of the image in this play. As early modern writing about the
workings of rhetoric and poetry to bring images “before the eyes” and animate figures from
history shaped my earlier chapters, this chapter will turn to Renaissance writings about
encounters with sculpture to explore the purpose of the image that haunts viewers of
Shakespeare’s tragedy.
373
Shakespeare’s turn to the visual image at the end of this play focuses attention on the
ethical nature of aesthetic response. For King Lear’s audiences from the early modern period to
the contemporary moment, the role of the theatrical image has carried moral and ethical
weight.
374
As a long history of criticism has acknowledged, the play shows an undeniable interest
371
See Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
372
Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 233.
373
Quintilian describes enargeia as the rhetorical figure by which described images appear “as if before the eyes” of
listeners. The Orator’s Education, ed. end trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), 6.2.33.
374
A primary anti-theatrical argument in the early modern period was that witnessing images of moral depravity in
theater would yield moral depravity in audiences. See Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice. As discussed in the
182
in connecting vision and sight to ethical themes. Lear’s awakening to the plight of the poor upon
seeing the naked Tom, Edgar’s assertion that one cannot claim to have seen the worst, and the
violent blinding of Gloucester just as he declares that he will see justice enacted against the
play’s villains are only the most familiar of the play’s invocations of sight as implicitly charged
with ethical weight. These scenes trade on early modern literary-critical assumptions about the
role of vision in soliciting ethical responses from an audience. As Thomas Wilson explains in his
Art of Rhetorique, “we may exhort men to take pity…if we set before their eyes” the sufferings
of the poor and wronged.
375
Lear, however, follows Hamlet in suggesting that the ethical demand
of a tragic image does not necessarily rest in a moral lesson, or even a call to action, but may rely
on the awakened responses of an audience in the moment of aesthetic encounter. As my last
chapter demonstrated through Hamlet’s response to the Ghost’s speech, pity may be an
appropriate response to a scene of suffering and grief, but it is not necessarily a response that
invites action.
Because the concluding scene does not provide a moral resolution or invite a course of
action, critical responses to King Lear have consistently puzzled over the tableau’s ethical
implications. Samuel Johnson’s tortured reading of the scene, and his refusal to witness it again
until he edited the play, is just one of many conflicted experiences of the image. Cordelia’s limp
young body in the arms of the frail king is, as John Joughin has argued, memorable because
previous chapter, defenders of poetry such as Sidney and Heywood answered these accusations by pointing to the
positive images of exemplary figures that were vividly represented in performance. Modern and contemporary
critics have also devoted energy to explaining performance as an ethically inflected endeavor, often arguing that
theatrical performance is a site of encountered otherness that demands a response from its viewers, whether active,
affective, or epistemological. See John Joughin, “Lear’s Afterlife,” Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002), 67-81; James A.
Knapp, Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Nicholas Ridout,
Theater and Ethics (New York: Red Globe Press, 2009).
375
Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorique for the vse of all suche as are studious of eloquence, sette forth in
English, by Thomas Wilson (London: 1553), Jiii
v
.
183
excessive.
376
Because the image can’t be understood, Joughin posits, it also can’t be forgotten. It
lingers unattached and this lingering carries with it a kind of ethical charge. To place an audience
in the unsettling context of “encountered otherness” is, in ethical terms, to ask how they will
respond.
377
This question underlies Stanley Cavell’s discomfort with the play’s emphasis on
spectatorship. For Cavell, there is something quietly unconscionable about the fact that audiences
experience the scene as detached or aesthetic viewers.
378
The play invites audiences to do
nothing. Considered especially in the context of modern warfare, the passivity of observing this
kind of violence without an impulse to act underscores a modern ethos of pervasive spectatorship
and moral impassivity. Such criticism poses the end of Lear as an unanswerable question or a
pointed finger. Who, it asks, is to take the blame for this inexplicable loss—a loss defined not by
the events of the play, but by the modern experiences it echoes and evokes: the slaughtering of
innocents, the impersonal nature of suffering in the context of war, the incapacity of the viewer
to do anything about it.
This strain of heightened questions—so patently loaded with present historical
memory—strikes me as an appropriation of Lear for present purposes, but one that Lear has
made possible, even anticipated, through its turn to a theatrical image which remains
uninterpreted, addressed to the sense and not the understanding. It is possible to read
Shakespeare’s tragedy as a play that posits the ethical challenge of witnessing a tragic scene.
However, one can do so not only by treating Shakespeare as “our contemporary” but also by
376
Joughin, “Lear’s Afterlife.” 71.
377
Ibid.
378
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, Updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 100-103. For an alternate approach that also links pity to spectatorship, see Stephen
Halliwell on pity in classical tragedy in The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 207-233.
184
addressing the questions of tragic response that he himself may have been engaging in the
context of early modern art and aesthetics. The otherness one encounters at the end of Lear is not
only that of unaccountable suffering, but also that of a different art form invading the space of
the play, complete with its own demand for response. In its final moments, Lear appropriates the
alternate form and iconography of visual and plastic art in order to interrogate the ethical and
affective nature of aesthetic response. How, it asks, can a response to an image that does not
invite action or clear moral reform be ethically effective?
One possible implication of turning to an artistic image at the end of the play is that the
aesthetic itself takes on a redemptive or consolatory role. This association between the aesthetic
and the consolatory underlies many of the comparisons between the concluding tableau and
pietà, images of Mary or other biblical figures mourning the dead Christ: the beauty of the scene
exerts a meditative force that redirects the horror of what has happened. Modern performances
would seem to affirm to this impulse, often presenting the final scene as a highly aestheticized
tableau. Ian McKellan’s 2008 Lear presented the scene to its audience with painterly precision
(Figure 4.1). A dark stage sets off the body of Cordelia—carefully stretched across Lear’s lap—
in its long white shift, matched in brightness only by Lear’s hair and his own dressing gown. At
a half recline, Lear gestures to Cordelia and her onlookers with a formal, cupped hand, his
gesture reminiscent of a baroque painting. Stage photographs of Lear 5.3 consistently arrange the
scene as an absorptive moment of formal mourning, cast in elegant shadows, and oddly
aesthetically captivating. Casting the final scene as an aesthetic image is a key critical and
performative tool for reframing its ethical demand on the viewer. This aesthetic impulse might at
first suggest an attempt to offer something redemptive or consolatory in the face of loss. It is
telling that a critic such as Marjorie Garber would end her introduction to the play by searching
185
for a proper visual term, implying (or is it wishing?) that the play’s last scene—as an image—
might be able to retain some redemptive power. “Is it,” she asks, “a vision so unbearable as to
hold out no hope for the future? Or is it, deliberately, an image: a copy, likeness, picture,
shadow, similitude—an imitation in the strong Aristotelian sense—a symbol, an emblem, a sign?
In essence, is there any redemption in this play?”
379
Strikingly, Garber poses the reading of the
scene as an image in opposition to the reading of the scene as “unbearable.” It is as if, as an
image, the scene would be one step removed from a truth-claim; not a statement about the
brutality of the universe, but of theatre’s inability to present an audience with a final reality.
Garber’s implication is that the final scene of the play is most properly recuperated as an image.
But as I hope to demonstrate, viewing the final scene as a turn to an image, even an image like a
pietà, does not necessarily offer unambiguous redemption or imply a kind of aesthetic distance
that lets the viewer off the hook. Rather, the language of Renaissance art, and especially its
intense focus on the tension between life and death, presence and absence in artistic works,
underscores the ambiguity of the scene’s claims. Even as a highly aestheticized image, Lear’s
concluding tableau might not offer redemption but rather a demand to look and reflect upon loss
and death. King Lear, I propose, uses its concluding scene to investigate the possibility that
encountering an aestheticized scene of suffering might invite a form of pity and stillness that is
itself a good and a positive end of art. At the end of Lear the pitiful sight calls for
transformation—for softening “men of stones”—rather than action or interpretation (5.3.255).
In the language of early modern art, sculpture and painting can draw viewers into a
highly charged exchange that has the ability to transform spectators and therefore has unique
ethical import. In this discourse, the language of stoniness, coldness, life, and death passes
379
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Routledge, 1987
rpt. 2010), 694.
186
between an aesthetic object and its viewer. Recall Leontes’ response to the sculpted image of
Hermione in The Winter’s Tale: "Does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than
it?”
380
This language simultaneously attests to the apparent liveliness of the aesthetic work and
demand for lively affective response in the viewer, without which they might appear as cold or
lifeless as stone. Reading Lear’s last scene as an image, then, places pressure on an audience to
respond to a tragic image in terms that do not necessarily resonate with the calls to virtuous
action or moral exemplarity that are more familiar in early modern defenses of poetry. Turning to
the image at the end of Lear casts the audience in the position of aesthetic viewer and leaves to
them the task of generating an appropriate ethical and affective response. As the long history of
its rejection indicates (the scene was not seen on stage between its earliest performances and
Macready’s restoration in 1831), audiences have wanted something from this image that
Shakespeare does not provide. Instead Lear sets the stakes of pictorialism and conscious
visuality in the theatre by posing vision and image-making as a transformative site of ethical
reflection that is not didactic but rather aesthetic and affective. Medusa-like, Lear’s final image
threatens to stun and silence its viewers at the same time that it commands audiences to “look
there” upon a scene that will animate their pity (5.3.309).
Verbal Arts at the Cliffs of Dover
Before Shakespeare’s tragedy turns to the visual tableau, it presses verbal art to offer a
fulfilling response to tragic events. In King Lear’s opening acts the art of rhetoric undergoes both
an accusation and a defense. Lear’s demand that each of his daughters pronounce how much they
love him announces the play’s interest in what the word can wield. Lear’s invitation is, on one
380
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher, Arden Third Series, (London: Bloomsbury, 2010),
5.3.37-38.
187
level, an attempt to discover if words can wield consolation for a man who is crawling towards
death. What becomes immediately evident is that words cannot wield love, despite the rhetorical
performances of Regan and Goneril. Cordelia speaks “nothing” in response to Lear’s demand not
only because she lacks the “glib and oily art” of her sisters’ rhetoric, but also because Lear has
demanded something that speech—which is no thing—cannot achieve (1.1.87-90).
381
The
opening scene’s use of speech for deception, solicitation, and disguising casts rhetoric in a garish
and unflattering light.
Edmund’s introduction in the second scene re-echoes this skepticism, but showcases
rhetorical invention shaded with even greater malevolence. Like a gifted playwright, he
manipulates visual evidence and verbal cunning such that neither Gloucester nor Edgar can
distinguish between honest nature and deceptive art. With one breath, he declares nature his
goddess, and with another he narrates his performativity, referring to Edgar as “the catastrophe
of the old comedy” and speaking on his own “cue” (1.2.134-135). As Edmund celebrates his own
inventiveness—“My practices ride easy…Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit”—he lays
claim not only to art, but to a will to power over nature (1.2.180-181). In short, Edmund
represents rhetorical power at its most demoniac.
What is at stake here, however, is not whether verbal art will be perceived as “good” or
“bad,” but whether rhetorical and sententious speech can lay claim to the ability to produce
meaning or edification. In Lear, challenging the efficacy of rhetoric also challenges a didactic
understanding of the role of literature and sets up the possibility of an alternate account of what
poetry and art can be said to accomplish. As my last chapter explored, early modern literary
381
As Stanley Cavell has demonstrated, what Lear in fact requires in this scene is to remain hidden and unseen,
something that is precisely within the power of performative speech, but not within the power of love. Disowning
Knowledge, 39-124.
188
critics defended poetry as a significantly didactic art. It delights in order to teach and to move
audiences toward ethical action. Early modern literature, then, is seeded with kernels of ethical
reflection, often borrowed from the classics or crafted to emulate them. William R. Elton and
Martha Andresen have both argued that Lear is built upon a fabric of sentences that draw on
favored Renaissance sources.
382
Familiar and formal sententia pepper the dialogue in this play:
“Ripeness is all;” “The gods are just;” “Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides” (5.2.11;
5.3.168; 1.1.282). In early modern rhetoric, as Andresen explains, such sentences act like the
collective decisions of public bodies. Quintilian calls them sententiae because they issue a
judgment or sentence.
383
Shakespeare’s readers would expect such formal rhetoric to help
interpret the experiences put forward in the play and to offer space for reflection on dramatic
events. This form of rhetoric was particularly familiar from Senecan tragedy which was said to
proceed by sentence.
384
Lear, however, places pressure on the sentences it offers. Many of these
judgements are immediately thrown into doubt by surrounding events. Just as Edgar declares
himself to be “blown unto the worst” by fortune, he comes upon the sight of his blind father and
must, as it were, take it back: “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’
(4.1.29-30). And Regan uses sententious speech not to offer a common moral judgment, but to
cover over a complete lack of pity. “O sir,” she says to Gloucester who worries about Lear
wandering in the storm, “to willful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be
their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors” (2.2.492-4). Meanwhile, sententious judgments seem to
Martha Andresen, “‘Ripeness is all’: Sententiae and Commonplaces in King Lear,” in Some Facets of King Lear:
Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto
Press, 1974), 145.
383
Ibid., 151.
384
On Senecan Tragedy in the early modern period, see Robert Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The
Influence of Seneca (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).
189
offer little to the abandoned figure of Lear on the heath. His rhetoric rages as the storm does, but
it does not transform nature’s buffets into meaningful events. As Sheldon P. Zitner has argued,
the animal and the artless utterances in Lear seem to have a greater claim to representing reality
than do sentence and judgment.
385
It is “the thing itself” embodied by the naked and babbling
Edgar that finally seems to outdo speech (3.4.104). This trajectory would seem to show a
Shakespeare turning away both from the formal figures of rhetoric and the didactic and
instructive values that dominated the literary criticism of his contemporaries.
Yet even while rhetoric and sententiae are systematically undercut, the play’s characters
cling to a belief in the inventiveness of the word and the efficacy of poetic speech. What changes
as the play progresses is what poetry is meant to do. Initially, Lear’s character’s—Lear and
Gloucester especially—imagine that poetry can help them to interpret a fundamentally ethical
universe. But as their imagination of poetic justice falls apart, tempting Lear to madness and
Gloucester to despair, Edgar acts as a poet within the play and offers a newer vision of what
poetry might be said to accomplish in a world of disorder and loss. Edgar’s poetic invention of
“Dover cliff” proves efficacious in helping Gloucester cling to life, though it is also a “trifle” that
threatens to kill him (4.6.33). It suspends despair and offers invention in its place. Most
importantly, it reframes poetry as an art that goes beyond “teaching” to mediate between life and
death by way of invented fiction.
Lear retains an ambivalent kind of hope for Gloucester. Achieving it, however, requires
him to abandon his faith in a natural order or justice and place himself in the hands of a newly
invented poetic. Gloucester’s encounter with poetry on “Dover cliff” is an instance in which art
claims authority over nature and undercuts the moral narrative one might expect in a dramatic
385
Sheldon P. Zitner, “King Lear and its Language,” in Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism,
ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F.T.Flahiff (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 3-22.
190
tragedy. On the one hand, the horrific scene of Gloucester’s blinding is immediately followed by
what might have been a powerful moment of redemptive recognition, and indeed, Gloucester
seems to self-articulate a way in which his suffering has led him, like Oedipus, to a new kind of
truth. “I stumbled when I saw,” he says, evoking a sense in which he can be said to have gained
new sight (4.1.21). As we might expect, that new sight is articulated as a recognition: that
Edmund deceived him, that Edgar, his more faithful son, has been “the food of [his] abused
father’s wrath,” and that he should seek reunion with the son he lost (4.1.24). To his absent (but
in fact present onstage) son he declares, “Might I but live to see thee in my touch, I’d say I had
eyes again” (4.1.26-7). Here, Gloucester articulates the outcome an audience might have come to
expect from tragic suffering. Though Gloucester has lost his sight, he has been rewarded with
insight; all that waits is a touching reunion with his son. However, Gloucester’s anticipation of a
meaningful reunion with his son proves difficult—perhaps impossible—to achieve. Though the
old man and his son are reunited in this very scene, there is no moment of touching recognition,
no absolution or forgiveness.
Edgar’s decision to leave his father in the dark remains ethically opaque here. Though he
claims to be motivated by reason and care—“I cannot daub it further…And yet I must. Bless thy
sweet eyes, they bleed.”—his actions are calculated to defer the recognition which he has just
heard his father articulate as a fundamental desire (4.1.57). Indeed, as Derek Peat suggests,
Edgar’s invention seems to come just as Gloucester is at the point of some discovery.
386
Though
father and son are structurally reunited, the emotional or redemptive reward of reunion is
aborted. The surprise of this deferral draws stark attention to the narrative desire for Gloucester’s
386
Derek Peat, “‘And That’s True Too’: King Lear and the Tension of Uncertainty,” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980),
49.
191
pain to lead to knowledge or redemption. Moreover, the fact that the redemptive recognition does
not occur turns a critical edge toward the thought that Gloucester’s performed suffering might
lead to some form of ethical regeneration in his audience. Without an image of recognition, there
is nothing in the scene to complete the expected conversion of Gloucester’s gruesome suffering
into the aesthetic or didactic. This is no speaking picture with an instructive aim.
It is in this context that Edgar becomes his father’s guide. Gloucester asks to be led to the
“very brim” of Dover cliff (4.1.78). His aim is to commit suicide, yes, but in the moment of his
“fall” his stated motive is not simple despair. Rather, it is an attempt to cling to his faith in the
gods. “If I could bear it longer, / and not fall to quarrel with your great opposeless wills,” he
prays, “My snuff and loathed part of nature should / Burn itself out” (4.6.37-40). Gloucester’s
choice to snuff out his own life is motivated by a desire not to oppose the gods who have already
afflicted him more than he can bear. Edgar, then, contrives a miraculous fall in order to offer his
father new gods. But Edgar’s gods are not those of nature; rather, they are the arts that claim to
top nature.
Edgar is the play’s great apologist for the verbal arts. To appropriate the work of Jenny C.
Mann, he is Shakespeare’s outlaw rhetorician, spinning astonishing tales as he reworks the forms
of classical rhetoric for his present purposes.
387
Edgar demonstrates a belief, or at least the hope,
that poetry and rhetoric can do good—indeed, can do greater good than nature. Edgar’s
ekphrastic description of the view from the cliff offers an image of nature that is in fact
invention. As is true of most ekphrases, Edgar describes something that he does not see. Yet his
descriptive speech generates sight where there is none. Indeed, it almost fulfills Gloucester’s
387
Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2012).
192
prophecy that if he should find his son, he’d say he “had eyes again” (4.1.26). As Edgar invents a
scene for his father to imagine (or remember), he makes the absent seem present.
388
His rhetoric
also arrests Gloucester’s—and the play’s—action. “Stand still,” he says, deferring his father’s
“death” while he practices his poetics:
how fearful
And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low.
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Half-way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade;
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring barque
Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on th'unnumbered idle pebble chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more,
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong. (4.6.11-24)
As Richard Meek has observed of this speech, none of Edgar’s images remain stable, mainly
because his similes and metaphors are constantly metamorphosing the image.
389
As soon as one
388
See Ruth Webb on the role of memory in constructing ekphrastic images, following Aristotle. Gloucester is the
first to describe the cliff in the play, two scenes earlier. Edgar merely amplifies his description and puts it to
different use. Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2009).
389
Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), 125.
193
calls to mind an image of crows, the crows become like beetles. As soon as we imagine the
sound of waves, we are told they cannot be heard. Samuel Johnson also famously critiqued the
ekphrasis, arguing that the details of the image made it a less powerful piece of poetry: “It should
be all precipice—all vacuum,” he complained to David Garrick, “the crows impede your fall.”
390
What both of these critiques seem to neglect, however, is the possibility that the image is not
meant to achieve either realism or a sublime Romantic response to nature. Rather, the image
might be meant to feel like eloquence. If, as Meek suggests, the description “threatens to expose
the workings of its own similes and metaphors,” perhaps this is because emphasizing the
rhetorical and shifting nature of the description helps in a positive way to point to its illusory and
imagined nature. This description is a highly crafted piece of rhetoric, an exercise in ekphrastic
description that resonates with the dozens of descriptions of sea shores and ocean wrecks that
English boys may have practiced in their schooldays.
391
As Joel Altman argues, the epideictic
nature of the speech “call[s] attention to itself as a linguistic feat while at the same time seducing
the listener from admirer to rapt believer.”
392
The very critique that Johnson levies against the
description—that it contains too much detail—underscores how the description follows the
guidelines one might find in Quintilian for how to produce a description marked by vividness or
enargeia, the kind of image, that is, that appears “as if” before the eyes of a listening audience
and has to power to move them affectively.
393
Perhaps the more productive question to ask is
390
Quoted in Harry Levin, “The Heights and the Depths: A Scene from King Lear,” in Shakespeare and the
Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 177.
391
See Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion on the common subjects of schoolroom ekphrases
which included descriptions of shipwrecks, 84-114.
392
Joel B. Altman, “Ekphrasis,” in Early Modern Theatricality ed. Henry Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), 286.
393
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education Ed. And trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), 8.3.66.
194
why Shakespeare might want to emphasize the rhetorical and poetic nature of this speech at such
a pivotal dramatic moment.
One possible answer is that Edgar’s rhetoric demonstrates his belief that poetry has
something to offer a man at the brink of absolute loss. Edgar might have reason to believe that
poetry can offer what Gloucester’s gods or Lear’s nature cannot. This is not rhetoric used to
account for the world or declare a sentence, but rhetoric and poetry used to act; that is, to make
something happen. Edgar’s rhetoric spins an absurd and astonishing tale about miracles, about
life and death. What is most remarkable is that it actually accomplishes something, suggesting
that if the gods are not just, and if the world’s meaning is at risk, what is needed to fill the void is
not redemption but invention.
Here, a literary precedent to Shakespeare’s scene is instructive. As other critics have
noted, Shakespeare borrows the framework of this scene from a passage in Sidney’s Arcadia. In
Sidney’s pastoral epic, Pyrocles and Musidorous overhear a man who has been blinded and
outcast by his bastard son as he asks his other son Leonatus to lead him to the top of a rock so
that he can commit suicide.
394
Leonatus refuses and Sidney winds up offering his actions as an
emblem of ‘filiall pietie.’
395
In Lear, Edgar’s invented fall intervenes between the request and the
emblematic refusal in Sidney’s story. Edgar could refuse Gloucester’s request and reveal himself
to his father as the faithful and wronged son, offering the story as a moral example. Instead, he
chooses to lead the blind man through a harrowing façade, one that relies on fiction and
invention to force Gloucester to imagine his end without achieving it. Where Sidney’s narrative
394
Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia (1590) Book 2, Chapter 10. See also R.A. Foakes, “Introduction” to King Lear, 100-
102.
395
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 7 (London, 1978), 406.
195
aimed at example, Shakespeare’s performance looks to achieve a poetic event. Invention is the
scene’s defense against despair and nothingness.
Edgar’s theatrical façade is powerful in its own right, enough so that it leaves Gloucester
dazed: “But have I fallen, or no?” (4.6.56). But the true labor of Edgar’s poetic rests in how he
goes on to interpret the fictional event. This, too, is consistent with the practices of rhetoric.
Ekphrasis, in its oratorical contexts, was a fundamentally persuasive trope. It was meant to
produce action or belief.
396
Edgar’s ekphrasis does both. Gloucester takes the leap and acquires a
new faith. The fundamental deception in Edgar’s poetic fiction, however, is that Gloucester
believes his faith in the gods has been renewed—that his life is a miracle and his call is to
endurance—when in fact his gods have been replaced. Edgar amplifies his fiction by describing
the horned and monstrous “fiend” that was on the “cliff” with Gloucester, inviting him to think
that “the clearest gods, who make them honours / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved” him
(4.6.73-4). Edgar speaks with a double tongue here. The language of “making” and of
generating honor out of “impossibility” is very much the epideictic language of the poets or
“makers” who achieve honor by crafting golden worlds. If Gloucester’s life is “a miracle,” then,
it is a miracle of art and this was an aesthetic event disguised as a spiritual one. Alan Dessen’s
claim that Edgar’s fiction offers Gloucester a clear “moralization drawn from the ‘miracle’ of
[his] survival,” then, comes under suspicion.
397
Edgar does not turn around to describe the
“fiend” who led Gloucester to the cliff in order to justify the ways of Gloucester’s gods. Rather,
396
See Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion and, Claire Preston, “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words,” in
Renaissance Figures of Speech ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115-132.
397
Alan C. Dessen, “Two Falls and a Trap: Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Realism,” English Literary
Renaissance 5.3 (1975), 303.
196
the fiend on the cliff and the gods that Edgar praises for this miracle are one and the same. Edgar
fulfills in a daring way Philip Sidney’s claim that poets are makers like God.
398
But where
Sidney might use his poetry to generate an emblem of virtue and piety, Shakespeare embraces
the demoniac power of rhetorical invention to achieve a “miracle” and extend Gloucester’s
hovering between life and death. Read this way, Edgar’s poetry is not simply the “emptied out
ritual” that Stephen Greenblatt finds in its replacement of performative exorcisms; it is its own
occult event.
399
Still, many of Lear’s readers see Edgar’s use of poetic force as an act of cruelty. Harry
Berger claims to have benefited from accounts that cast Edgar as “the most lethal character” in
Lear and Harry Levin declares that Edgar “rival[s] Shakespeare’s dynamic villains by assuming
a dangerous and colorful role.
400
R.A. Foakes doubts the generosity of Edgar’s plan to preserve
Gloucester from the death he clearly desires, writing that there is “an element of gratuitous
cruelty” in his actions.
401
There is indeed a sense in which Edgar shares with Edmund a
willingness to celebrate the forces of poetry over and above what nature provides. The subtle
difference here is that Edgar knows his craft is dangerous, reflects on the risk of flexing his
poetic muscles, and explores the authority and power of an aesthetic event anyway. If Edmund
and Edgar both present Shakespeare’s interrogation of his own art, then Edgar is both more
398
Sir Philip Sidney, “The Defence of Poesy,” in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance
Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin Classics, 2004), 8-9.
399
Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s King Lear, ed. Jay L.
Halio (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.), 88–121, esp. 108.
400
Harry Berger, quoted in R.A. Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear, 64; Levin, “The Heights and the Depths: A Scene
from King Lear,” in Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 169.
401
Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear, 202.
197
magus-like and more subtly ethically reflective. And if Edgar’s aim is, as R.A. Foakes suggests,
to have Gloucester “‘die’ in order to bring him to life again,” it is only because he believes
poetry is a force that can do that.
402
This is more, I suspect, than a comic theatrical conceit
reworked for a tragic context. It is a power move. But Edgar is also aware that his conceit may
go too far: “thus might he pass indeed” (4.6.47). Edgar is gambling with a fiction that has life
and death stakes. This is precisely the large-scale intervention that I suspect Shakespeare is
offering in this scene. Edgar’s conceit reframes the work of poetry in tragedy from a being a
form that primarily aims to teach or offer judgment to creating aesthetic experiences that have
the power to mediate between life and death. In this sense, Edgar’s lie constitutes a reimagined
and far more extreme defense of poesy.
Edgar’s choice to offer poetic invention-out-of-thin-air as redemptive and powerful
offers one defiant response to a prevailing early modern understanding that artistic creation is
accompanied by its own dangers. The threat that accompanies Edgar’s invention is the threat of
idolatry. Edgar’s poetry makes something out of nothing and uses it to wield life and death
power. It presents him as a Pygmalion-like figure, but one who submits to no god but the divinity
of his own making. As John Freccero has argued, the danger presented by love of one’s own
creation is a threat of being arrested at the surface of artifice, of celebrating aesthetic work in a
way that impedes one’s ability to penetrate to the heart of its meaning.
403
Edgar’s scene of poetic
invention comes to the brink of damning aesthetic self-celebration. Even if his aim is to “cure”
his father, he chooses to do so in a profoundly obscure fashion, one that allows him to celebrate
402
Foakes, Hamlet versus Lear, 204.
403
John Freccero, “Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 119–36, esp. 120.
198
his own power to work a miracle. Gloucester’s invented “fall” remains impenetrably puzzling—
and difficult to perform—in part because its meaning rests less in what it accomplishes for the
blind and despairing man than for the poet artist who works a miracle on him. But Edgar’s
potentially blasphemous behavior does not appear to result in his damnation, and Shakespeare’s
choice to employ the poetic farce remains ambivalent. Edgar defies idolatry to exemplify the
equivocal good of converting his father’s grief and despair into poetic gain, both for himself and
for the playwright.
The End of Rhetoric
Shakespeare, however, might also draw attention to the challenge of managing this kind
of poetic force by emphasizing the theatrical and imagined nature of this event. Gloucester’s
suspicious questioning—"methinks the ground is even”—runs up against Edgar’s descriptions of
laboring breath and chalky heights, descriptions which would usually offer a theatrical audience
cues as to what is actually happening within the fiction (4.6.3). This dramatic cross-signaling
calls attention to theatrical convention and makes Lear’s viewers patently aware of audiences’
paradoxical dependence on poetic invention to get to dramatic “truth” or meaning. Dramatic
efficacy, as we commonly understand it, relies on audiences’ ability to “believe” a fiction in
quotation marks and then translate it into an ethical experience—one that purges bad emotions or
educates the sentiments of a citizenry. Read more generously, Edgar’s behavior is motivated
precisely by the hope that theatre can be affectively efficacious—that leading his father through
the imitation of a suicide might be a kind of “trifling” with despair that has the power to “cure it”
(4.6.33-4). But Gloucester’s false “leap” from the Dover cliffs puts pressure on this assumption,
or at least draws attention to the fact that an experience of theatrical efficacy is neither simple
199
nor easily contained. Indeed, it might produce an effect that is far more intimately powerful and
far more dangerous. To wonder whether Edgar is or isn’t leading his father to suicide is also,
reflexively, to wonder whether this theatrical experience is or isn’t leading us to an “actual”
experience of danger or reform, death or redemption. The “ethical” viewer—the audience
member moved by the fiction—is left strangely at odds with the play’s anti-didactic message and
unsure what to make of what is “happening” here. And if a dominant model of theatrical
didacticism—picture plus affect equals moral reform—is exactly what Shakespeare seems to
have on the chopping block, then what is an audience member to make of what poetry is doing
here?
This ambiguity brings us to the heart of Shakespeare’s self-searching in this play, and it is
also central to the playwright’s choice to move toward using an unapologetic theatrical image at
the end of the play. As Shakespeare turns to the image, he makes a final attempt at finding an art
form that can claim aesthetic power without being muddled by an audience’s expectations about
what ethically informative art looks like. As Shakespeare surrenders the word to the image in the
play’s final scenes, he even more fully surrenders his poetic power over ethical meaning making
in order to explore the possibility of creating an aesthetic experience that can act in its own right.
The image at the end of Lear, like Edgar’s poetic image, has the power to suspend life and return
it, but it finally surrenders to its audience the responsibility to determine what effect theatrical art
will have. In the final scene of King Lear rhetoric gives way to the visual image. Both the
redemptive power of Edgar’s descriptive rhetoric and the consolatory force of sententiae are
dismissed as the tragic scene of Lear’s and Cordelia’s deaths unfolds. At the same time,
however, Shakespeare’s scene imagines a new end and purpose for the resources of classical
rhetoric. Lear’s lamenting declamations leverage a series of classical rhetorical tropes in order to
200
achieve not judgment or persuasion, but an immanent experience of mourning and even a
pictorial stillness. The transformation of rhetoric throughout Lear’s concluding scene, then,
foreshadows the work that Shakespeare will finally call upon the theatrical tableau to complete.
Rhetorical confidence marks the beginning of this scene (Act 5, scene 3). Lear’s
description of his imagined escape to prison with Cordelia erects a fantasy escape out of words
that is as generative and consolatory as Edmund’s description of Dover cliff. Edmund continues
his artful use of rhetoric as a deceptive force when telling Albany that “The question of Cordelia
and her father / Requires a fitter place,” despite having just ordered their murder (5.3.58-9). And
Edgar and Edmund later exchange sententiae that resonate like the declarative end of a Senecan
drama. “The gods are just,” Edgar declares, “and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to
plague us” (5.3.168-9) Edmund replies like a vanquished villain: “Thou’st spoken right, ‘tis true:
/ The wheel is come full circle, I am here” (5.3.171-2). Each of these speeches frames the scene
as a highly rhetorical denouement to a familiar kind of drama in which Fortune turns her wheel,
and we see the downfall of great men and the punishment of vice.
But as much as the scene exudes confidence in its rhetorical power, it hints at the
overconfidence of the familiar tragic plot it is in the process of overwriting. The last roughly 300
lines encompass a cumbersome amount of plot development, including Lear and Cordelia’s
dialogue before heading to prison, Edmund’s plan to have them murdered, Albany’s discovery of
Goneril’s plot to marry Edmund, Edgar and Edmund’s duel, Edgar’s relation of Gloucester’s
death, the deaths of Regan and Goneril, Kent’s return to the court, Albany’s plans to reinvigorate
the kingdom, Edmund’s change of heart and death, and the deaths of Lear and Cordelia. Edgar’s
narrative of his journey with Gloucester and description of the scene of his father’s death
(5.3.180-220) plays out in microcosm the danger of attempting to place too much order on such
201
events. As Richard Meek points out, Edgar offers an over-long and over-determined narrative of
his father’s death, which does not seem to resonate with the painfully similar scene of Lear’s
death that occurs onstage shortly thereafter.
404
Edgar wants his rhetoric to “do good,” as Edmund
declares it might, and he emphasizes this in the narrative he shares (5.3.199). He asserts that the
invented pilgrimage he took with Gloucester “saved him from despair” (5.3.190). And though
Edgar recognizes that it was a “fault” to only reveal himself to his father once he was “armed,”
one might also read the choice as an implicit declaration of his intent to defend his poetry and
rhetoric (5.3.191-192). Edgar speaks armed in self-defense. Still, Edgar’s defense of poesy takes
up a tragically lengthy amount of time, a time in which Lear is forgotten and Cordelia hanged.
If Edgar admits to crafting an over-amplified speech that would “top extremity,” he might
also be describing the shape of the entire scene (5.3.206). It goes beyond what “would have
seemed a period” (5.3.203). Indeed, this apparent excess reiterates Stephen Booth’s point that the
entry of Lear carrying Cordelia seems to occur after the play has reached a formal
denouement.
405
Albany has already brought the bodies of Regan and Goneril on stage to lie
beside Edmund as an emblem of the downfall of evil and uttered his chorus-like judgment of the
sight: “This judgment of the heavens that makes us tremble / Touches us not with pity” (5.3.230-
1). Albany’s sentence signals the end of a narrative arc and the completion of a dramatic form.
Lear’s entrance after this point announces a transformation of rhetoric and a failure of
classical tragic form:
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
404
Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare, 144.
405
Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 9.
202
That heaven’s vault should crack: she’s gone for ever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth. (5.3.255-259)
A far cry from the sentences of judgment offered by Albany and Edgar, Lear’s howls wield
deeply affective, poetic force. As Zitner has argued, the “monosyllabic flatness” that concludes
this scene, especially in the ambiguous responses of Lear’s witnesses, “rebukes the shallowness”
of what one might expect to hear here: “apostrophe, lament, sentence,” and “grand futurity.”
406
The rhetorical confidence that has defined the scene as a whole is brought up short by language
at what appears to be its most bare.
But if Lear’s speech interrupts the trajectory of sentence and tragic decorum, it does so
with cunning artfulness. While Lear’s mourning drains the scene of its rhetorical confidence, it
nevertheless relies on the resources of rhetoric to practice a more subtle eloquence. Lear’s
mourning rhetoric, I argue, functions to force attention at the point of loss. His laments grind the
scene to a rhetorical halt, forcing mediation on the pain of his bereavement, and reframe the aims
of speech at this moment in the drama. In rhetoric, the repetition of a word with no others in
between—as in “howl, howl, howl, howl”—is an example of the figure epizeuxis, used to convey
vehemence or emphasis. George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy dubs this figure the
“underlay” or “coocko-spel,” drawing a metaphorical connection to a bird who “repeats his lay,
which is but one manner of note.”
407
Underlying Puttenham’s metaphor is an assertion of the
song-like artifice of this utterance. Lear is like the birds that, in so much early modern and
406
Zitner, “King Lear and its Language,” 4.
407
George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie Contriued into three bookes: the first of poets and poesie, the
second of proportion, the third of ornament (London: Richard Field, 1589), Zii
r
, Zii
v
.
203
Ovidian poetry, strive to utter their laments in artful but inarticulate song. Another word for an
“underlay” is “burden,” as when Shakespeare’s Lucrece apostrophizes the lamenting Philomel
who has been transformed into a bird, saying, “burden-wise, I’ll hum on Tarquin still.”
408
Lucrece’s promise is that she will sing the underlay to Philomela’s song by repeating the story of
her loss. So, Lear repeats the song of his loss even as his speech devolves into an inarticulate
howl.
The term epizeuxis comes from the conjunction of the prefix epi, or “upon” with the
Greek word zeugnumi, “to yoke,” or to join and hold in restraint. The implication is that the
figure detains speech upon a certain point. Strikingly for this scene, the verb “to yoke” was
particularly associated with shackling or fitting something around the neck like a yoke.
409
The
OED cites Heywood’s 1559 translation of Seneca’s Troas, which declares “Pryame…never shall
sustayne his captiue neck, with Greekes to yoked be.”
410
If the reference to yoking is retained in
the use of this figure, then it might point directly to the captive neck of Cordelia which, in some
performances, is still fitted with the rope that has killed her. Lear’s epizeuxis thus halts the
rhetorical flow of the scene at the particular point of his unbearable loss: Cordelia’s yoked neck,
which cuts off all hope of hearing her speak of love.
Lear’s “Howl” is also in the imperative. It is a command, or a plea, repeated over and
again to the “men of stones” who are not responding as Lear feels they ought (5.3.255). As a
repetition of the same plea, the line might also be considered an epimone. In Puttenham,
epimone, which derives from epi, “upon” and meno,“to remain,” is renamed “the loveburden.”
408
William Shakespeare, Lucrece in The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
1179.
409
OED 1.3 and II.4.b.
410
Seneca, Troas trans. Thomas Heywood (London, 1559), 1.2 Bii.
204
411
Puttenham’s metaphor again refers to a refrain in a piece of music, and his example from
Sidney is a lyric that includes many iterations of the same plea in similar words. But the analogy
here is particularly to a song of love, or a song that pleads for love. At the end this particular
play, as Lear enters bearing the burden of Cordelia’s body, a “loveburden” carries its own
painfully punning meaning. As many readers of Lear have noted, Lear’s entry carrying Cordelia
thwarts his original desire, as stated in the Folio, to “shake all cares” and “Unburdened crawl
toward death” (1.1.38,40). But the term “loveburden” might also recall Cordelia’s complaint in
the same scene: “I am sure my love’s / More ponderous than my tongue” (1.1.77-78). Cordelia’s
love, like her tongue, is heavy and silent, both in the opening scene and in the concluding one as
Lear enters bearing the ponderous burden of Cordelia’s body, the weighty symbol of her love for
him. In keeping with the many slightly-off allusions between Cordelia and the figure of Christ in
this play, the buried rhetorical puns on “yoke” and “burden” make Cordelia a distortion of
Christ, whom Shakespeare’s readers would remember declaring “my yoke is easy, and my
burden light.”
412
Lear’s speech is then highly rhetorically artful, even as it hides its art beneath an
appearance of inarticulateness. The repetition of “howl,” and later “never, never, never, never,
never,” and “no, no, no life” signify a transformation of sententious rhetoric into rhetorically-
inflected poetry that declares a failure to fully articulate or move past loss, underscored by the
411
Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, Bbiv
v
. Epizeuxis and Epimone are both grouped among the sententious
figures in Puttenham. This does not mean that they are equivalent with classical sentences. Rather, Puttenham means
that the figures are useful both for poets and orators because they appeal both to the hearing and to the (mental)
sense. They are both sensable in appealing to the sense of hearing and efficacious in conveying and achieving the
purpose of the speech. Puttenham’s sententious figures thus parallel Ben Jonson’s preference for writing because it
can appeal both to the sense and the mind, as opposed to painting or drawing which he claims appeals only to the
senses.
412
Matthew 11:30, Geneva Bible.
205
use of two figures that emphasize the force of rhetoric to stay or remain (5.3.307, 304). Lear’s
poetic grieving grinds toward the stillness of an image. The speeches at the end of Lear thus
return to the puzzle that I have identified in Shakespeare’s narrative poem Lucrece, where the
heroine seeks to still the epic narrative at the site of an image that fails to fully articulate her loss.
In Lucrece, Shakespeare drew on the struggle to narrate loss as it was represented in Vergil’s
Aeneid, as when the artful Daedalus attempted to represent the death of his son, but, Vergil
writes, “twice his hands failed” to craft the image.
413
Here in King Lear the grieving father
strives to narrate the pain and absoluteness of his loss in figures that perform rhetoric’s struggle
to wield the matter of grief in words. Viewed in comparison with Edgar’s inventive trifling,
Lear’s grieving rhetoric is equally artful but does not offer the consolation of a poetic miracle.
For Lear, poetic invention at the moment of loss and despair ultimately arrives at arrest and
silence. Whether Lear’s grieving represents a rebuke of Edgar’s poetic optimism or simply a
counterpoint, it offers a profoundly different role for poetry in the context of loss. It does not
console, it lingers on and amplifies grief.
Ultimately, the scene allows this struggle to end in silence. In the Folio, this is
emphasized by Lear’s direction: “Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips, / Look there, look
there! (5.3.308-9). The command to look transfers the scene from the realm of rhetoric to the
realm of vision. It is now the task of image to bear the burden of representing loss. This handoff
from one act of representation to another, particularly at the point of attempting to represent
grief, was a motif that well-read Elizabethan audiences might recognize from history and the
visual arts. Pliny’s Natural History praises the Greek painter Timanthes for his picture depicting
the sacrifice of Iphigenia, in which he despaired of depicting the grief that would have been on
413
Vergil, The Aeneid, trans. Sarah Ruden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1.463.
206
Agamemnon’s face, and instead represented him with a veiled face (Figure 4.2).
414
Classical
rhetoricians, including Cicero and Quintilian, referred to this choice as an example of how, in
some instances, silence can be more rhetorically effective than speech.
415
Timanthes’s painting
passes the labor of representing Agamemnon’s horrible grief from his artful image to the
imagination of his viewers. In Lear, it is the image, and the performative art of the actor, that
must take up this representative load in the place of rhetoric. There might even be a shade of
theatrical triumphalism in this moment which hands to an actor and a theatrical image the task at
which a famous painter balked. At the end of Lear, the theatrical image is offered as an
alternative to pure silence or obscurity and tasked with the challenge of representing unbearable
grief. As this transformation occurs, the play’s language focuses on terms that signify a turn to a
different artform, in references to “image” and “stone” as well as the command to “look.”
Overwriting Tragedy
If rhetoric undergoes a transformation in this scene, so too do the familiar formulas of
classical tragedy. As Lear and Cordelia take up their tragic pose at the center of the audience’s
attention, Kent, Edgar, and Albany act as a chorus responding to the pitiful sight. This motif
might have been familiar and expected. At the end of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for example, the
corpses of Agamemnon and the prophetess Cassandra are revealed and the chorus engages in a
long exchange with Clytemnestra, in which they discuss her motivation for the act and foretell
her punishment at the hands of Zeus: “On him that wrought shall vengeance be outpoured.”
416
414
(Pliny HN 35.73). Judith Dundas draws a parallel between this anecdote and several [?] pictorial scenes from
Sidney which feature faces hidden in shadow as if in imitation of Timanthes’s choice to obscure a grieving face.
415
Leonard Barkan, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 66.
416
Aeschylus, Agamemnon in Aeschylus II trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1947), 21-81, line 1564. While Aeschylus was less popularly read in England in the early modern period than
207
But Lear’s chorus demonstrates far less certainty or interpretive control of the sight. The
audience sees a dying king who has been cruel to a daughter and a slain woman who has spoken
“true” (1.1.108), but the chorus replies in the interrogative:
KENT: Is this the promised end?
EDGAR: Or image of that horror?
ALBANY: Fall, and cease (5.3.61-62).
These chorus-like lines seem intentionally opaque. Kent’s “Is this the promised end?” works in
two directions. On the one hand, it is blatantly metatheatrical. Is this, he asks, the end of the story
we have been promised or come to expect given the events that have recently unfolded. In this
reading, the statement is in the interrogative because it is unclear whether the tragic force of the
great Lear’s hubristic mistakes demands his fall or whether the resolution achieved earlier in this
scene has satisfied the dramatic impulse to show the punishment of vice. But as other critics have
pointed out, Kent’s line also points toward apocalypse. Is this, he might also ask, the end of the
world? The double meaning of the line interweaves contemporary religious language and
allusion to classical dramatic form in a way that performs the play’s investment in challenging
the moral efficacy of both classical and religious narrative forms.
Edgar’s reply, “Or image of that horror?” redoubles the double action of Kent’s line. He
suggests that the scene may not be the apocalyptic end itself, but an emblem of it, a
representation meant to have didactic force like the emblematic representations of divine
Euripides, Seneca, and Sophocles, his Agamemnon was a source for dramatic adaptation and performance in the late
sixteenth century. The Productions Database of Oxford University’s Archive of Performance of Greek and Roman
Drama (APGRD) lists a 1584 adaptation of Agamemnon that was “Presented and enacted before her majestie by the
Earle of Oxenford his boyes on St. Johns daie at night at Grenewich” as well as two Rose Theater performances of
an adaptation written by Dekker and Chettle in 1599. Neither of these texts survive. This does indicate, however,
that in Shakespeare’s London on 1603, there would be recent theatrical memory of the performance of Greek
Tragedy. For more on the performance of Greek Tragedy in early modern England, see Tanya Pollard, Greek Tragic
Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
208
judgment familiar from religious texts. But Edgar also echoes his brother’s earlier line from Act
1, scene 2. Edmund used a description that was “nothing like the image and horror” of reality in
order to deceive both his brother and his father. Edgar has learned not to trust what he sees, but
this leaves him in interpretive suspense. If this is an image of horror, what is one to do in
response?
Albany’s concluding sentence parodies the imperative form of the sententious lines he
has uttered before but lacks their sense of conclusive judgment. He may be commanding the
witnesses of the scene to “fall” to their knees and “cease” talking. He may also be amplifying
Kent’s allusion to apocalypse. At the end of time, the heavens will fall, and all will cease.
Describing the end of earthly time, Mark’s gospel in the Geneva Bible declares that “in those
days…the sun shall wax dark, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars of heaven shall
fall: and the powers which are in heaven shall shake.
417
In either case, Albany indicates that the
chorus responding to this scene is not equipped to offer a final judgment—which would be
God’s task—or an interpretation. Instead, they peter into silence while focused on an image that
exceeds their judgment.
This chorus’s suspenseful response differs strongly from those that would have been most
familiar and resonant for Shakespeare’s audiences. At the end of Jocasta, George Gascoigne and
Francis Kinwelmersh’s popular 1566 translation of Euripides’ Phoenician Women, the chorus
asserts their traditional role as moral interpreters of the scene. "Example here, loe! take by
Oedipus,” they announce, offering Oedipus as a model of the fall of great men at the hands of
fortune.
418
This particular play was reprinted multiple times, often alongside Gascoigne’s
417
Mark 13:24-25, Geneva Bible.
418
George Gascoigne and Francis Kimwelmersh, Jocasta in A hundreth sundrie flowres bounde vp in one small
poesie Gathered partely (by translation) in the fyne outlandish gardins of Euripides, Ouid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and
209
Supposes, and includes many striking narrative and verbal parallels with Lear. The dethroned
and blind Oedipus, who combines the figures of Lear and Gloucester, utters sentences that
anticipate Lear’s potentially exemplary promise to be “the pattern of all patience” (3.2.37).
Gascoigne’s Jocasta, in a line which the printed text marks for quotation or extraction, declares
that “we must with pacient heartes abyde / What so from high the heavens doe provide.”
419
Oedipus later echoes her sentiment in another sententious line: “every man must beare with quiet
minde / The fate that heavens have earst to him assignde.”
420
The play also prominently features
Antigone’s self-sacrificial choice to accompany her father in his misery. “Yet will I beare a part
of your misshapes,” she insists as she prepares to enter banishment with him. But while
Gascoigne’s Antigone is mindful of the sacrifice she makes—“Lo! Where I come to live and die
with you”—Cordelia’s martyrdom is thrust upon her.
421
It is after she has uttered her last lines
that Lear unknowingly pronounces the extent of her loss: “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, /
The gods themselves throw incense” (5.3.20-21). This popular, vernacular iteration of classical
tragedy prominently displays features of the tradition that Lear systematically dismantles, and
Lear’s ambiguous chorus is only one example of this trend. Even in the concluding scene which
I have been analyzing, Lear uses terms that include direct semantic parallels with Jocasta but
turns them to focus on the audience’s response to more ambiguous events. Gascoigne’s
translation of Euripides twice refers to the “stony” hearts of those who lack pity or sympathy.
The Chorus describes Oedipus’s infighting children as “stony hearted” and near the end of the
others: and partly by inuention, out of our owne fruitefull orchardes in Englande: yelding sundrie svveete sauours of
tragical, comical, and morall discourses, (London: Abell Ieffes, 1573).
419
Gascoigne, “Jocasta,” Act 2, scene 2, Fol. 96, Pii
v
.
420
Ibid., Act 5, scene 5, Fol. 162, Xiii
v
.
421
Ibid., Act 5, scene 5, Fol.161, Xiii
r
.
210
play, they ask, “What stony heart could leave for to lament.”
422
King Lear seems to answer this
question when he enters cursing the “men of stones” who do not grieve the way he does as he
insists on remaining in his lament (5.3.255). My point in emphasizing these parallels is to
demonstrate that the popular understanding of classical tragedy, both in its use of sententious or
consolatory statements and its use of a chorus as ethical interpreter, are being overwritten in Lear
in ways that bear the marks of intention.
The role of Cordelia in particular involves a conscious rewriting of the role of tragic
women as it was recognized in this period. Tanya Pollard’s reading of Greek Tragic roles in
early modern theater emphasizes the period’s focus on female figures—namely grieving mothers
and sacrificial virgins—who focus the sympathy of audiences, use powerful rhetoric to attract
empathy and gain political force, and who find some recompense for their losses through fame or
vindictive action.
423
As Pollard demonstrates, the most popular Greek plays in England featured
Hecuba in her role as mourner and avenger and the eloquent virgin sacrifices Iphigenia and
Polyxena.
424
However, Cordelia’s role seems crafted to evoke and thwart parallels with these
iconic tragic figures. Cordelia is not a mother, nor is she a virgin, having been recently married
to the King of France. And Cordelia is silent, where both Polyxena and Iphigenia die (or seem to
die) willingly after offering eloquent speeches in which they lay claim to the fame and efficacy
that will be accomplished by their deaths. Iphigenia declares that her sacrifice will signify the
422
Ibid., Act 1, scene1, Miii
r
; Act 5, scene 3.18-21, Vii
v
.
423
Pollard, Greek Tragic Women, 1-43.
424
Euripides’s Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis were both popular Greek tragedies in early modern England. Erasmus
translated both plays into Latin and several editions of both plays appeared beginning in 1506. Manuscript
translations if Iphigenia into English were written by George Peele and Lady Jane Lumley. APGRD lists at least one
performance of Iphigenia by the Children of St. Paul’s, directed by Sebastian Wescott. Imagining the speech of
Hecuba was also a rhetorical exercise encouraged in Apthonius’s Progymnasmata.
211
end of her enemies in Troy and a will bring honor and fame to her. Her speech emphasizes the
monumentality of her act. “This is my enduring monument; marriage, motherhood, and fame,”
she says.
425
Polyxena’s sacrifice, too, is represented as a moment that transforms her into a
deified and heroic speaking image:
When she hears the rulers’ words she grasped her robes
and ripped them open from the shoulder down
as far as the waist, exposing her naked breasts,
bare and lovely like a sculptured goddess.
Then she sank, kneeling on the ground, and gave
this most heroic speech:
‘Strike, captain.
Here is my breast. Will you stab me there?
Or in the neck? Here is my throat, ready
for your blow.”
426
The scene of Cordelia’s death is not depicted or described in Lear. Shakespeare’s audiences do
not know whether she offered her throat to the hangman or struck a heroic pose. She is denied
the chance to speak eloquently about the meaning of her death or to hope that it will be in some
sense efficacious.
Yet Lear might imply a parallel to Hecuba and Iphigenia at Aulis by offering Cordelia’s
sacrificed body as a monumental and demanding image. Polyxena is pictured “like a sculptured
425
Iphigenia at Aulis in Euripides V, trans. Charles R. Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1396-
1399.
426
Hecuba in Euripides II, trans. William Arrowsmith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 557-567.
212
goddess,” and Cordelia, too, evokes the stillness and silence of sculpture as she is carried onto
the stage—enough so that the tableau is often compared to sculptures like Michelangelo’s Pietà
in modern criticism. The Greek Anthology, a collection of classical epigrams that was influential
in rhetorical training, includes epigrammatic celebrations of sculptures of heroes like
Polyxena.
427
In one example, Pollianus praises the Polyxena of Polycleitus: “The unhappy
maiden is supplicating for her life, and in her eyes lies all the Trojan war.”
428
Polycleitus (whom
Renaissance artists came to identify as the paradigmatic visual artist) is praised for creating a
silent image that seems to speak (she is described as pleading) even while crafting a monument
to the political losses that lie behind her sacrifice. This Polyxena represents all of the griefs of
Troy. In the context of these examples, there is pressure for Shakespeare’s choice to present
Cordelia’s body to have monumental meaning. But Lear’s command to look on her and on her
lips does not offer the consolation of heroic or redemptive significance; rather, it emphasizes the
finality of her silence and the ambiguous meaning of her death. The possible allusion to
Iphigenia only underscores that ambiguity. At the end of Iphigenia at Aulis, a messenger returns
to Clytemnestra to narrate the story of her miraculous disappearance at the point of sacrifice.
“This day hath seen thy daughter dead and brought to life again,” he triumphs.
429
King Lear
holds on to its audience’s hopes of seeing Cordelia brought to life again. As A.C. Bradley
famously asserted, the play might end with Lear’s “unbearable joy” as he believes he sees
427
On the influence of the Greek Anthology in Shakespeare’s poetry, see Judith Dundas, Pencil’s Rheorique:
Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 57-60 and Frederika
H. Jacobs Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
428
Greek Anthology, trans. W.R. Paton, Volume V, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press), 16.151.
429
Euripides, Iphigenia, 953.
213
Cordelia resurrected.
430
This, however, is a dream that Shakespeare defers until the romantic
reanimations of Innogen and Hermione in the later plays. Instead, the scene focuses on the image
of the slain Cordelia and denies the consolations of meaningful sacrifice or miraculous
resurrection that even classical tragedy might have afforded. Lear’s last moments, then, act as a
baroque rewriting of the classical tragic inheritance, and one that concentrates its ambivalence in
a visual scene that almost systematically resists coming together to form a coherent single
meaning or offer a monumental moment of reflection.
Yet, Lear’s turn to the visual in these final moments affords its own set of resources for
reflecting on loss and mourning. In the context of a shifting English visual culture, turning to the
image offers this playwright a chance to draw on multiple conflicting discourses at once, and in
the process emphasizes the force of art to offer less didactic and more ambivalent representations
to an audience than were expected in English literary culture. In doing so, the play forces
attention to the responses of audience members who are urged to react to the image with ethical
affect but are not instructed in what that might look like. They are, in other words, pressed to
“speak what [they] feel” as opposed to what they “ought to say” (5.3.323). This scene draws on a
culture that was simultaneously flooded with religious iconography, suspicious of images used in
religious contexts, and increasingly intrigued by the lively and communicative forces of art as
they were represented by both the famous artists of antiquity and the more recent artists of the
Italian Renaissance.
431
While English audiences were attracted to the ancient forms of classical
tragedy inherited from both Greece and Rome, they also had increased access to descriptions and
430
Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 261.
431
The appendix to Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560-1620 (Leamington Spa: Manchester University Press,
1981) identifies Doni and Varchi as texts that were available in early modern England. Lomazzo’s treatise on
painting was translated by Richard Haydocke in 1589.
214
engravings of the art made by continental artists who claimed to be reviving the spirit of the
ancients.
432
The aesthetic world in which Shakespeare was writing, then, involved a confluence
of pagan classical forms, high contemporary art, and a reformation religious culture that was
highly ambivalent about the power of images. Each of these forces is at play as Shakespeare
turns to the visual image at the end of King Lear.
The Art of Death
Lear’s mourning over the body of Cordelia turns quickly to iconographic elements from
the visual arts. These elements are concentrated on highlighting the ambiguity between life and
death in Cordelia’s limp body and constitute a space for reflection on the role of Shakespeare’s
art in mediating between these states. Lear continues from the howling grief quoted above:
She’s dead as earth.
Lend me a looking-glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why then she lives.
…
This feather stirs, she lives: if it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt (5.3.258-264).
When Lear calls for a looking glass, he brings on stage a highly iconic element from the visual
arts, and an item with particular significance in religious visual culture. For a viewer aware of
early modern visual culture, this moment should be as striking in its referentiality as when
432
Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568 edition) includes a
frontispiece in which sculptural figures are seen rising out of the ground as if being resurrected. See Unearthing the
Past on the weight of this metaphor in the Renaissance. It is unclear whether or not Vasari’s work was known to
Shakespeare, though it would have been possible for the playwright to read Vasari in Italian.
215
Shakespeare brings copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses onstage in Titus Andronicus and
Cymbeline. Mirrors frequently appear in early modern and Renaissance art in association with
the memento mori and vanitas traditions. In these images, the mirror is often a site for
confronting mortality and acknowledging the ephemerality of earthly glory. As the example of
De Gheyn’s Vanitas illustrated in my Introduction, a reflective surface in a painting established a
dialogue between the illusory image and the world it faces, emphasizing the ultimate
ephemerality of both.
A familiar example can be found in the painting commonly known as Death and the
Maiden, which is now owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and was likely painted by a
Flemish or Dutch artist living in England around 1570 (Figure 4.3). The painting depicts a
young, elegantly dressed woman who plays a lute and stares out of the picture frame toward the
viewer. An aged man holds a convex mirror in front of her and a skull behind her. The mirror
thus reflects both her face and the symbolic death’s head, both of which the young woman
ignores. Near the top of the image is an inscription from Horace’s Epistles that reads Mors
Ultima Linea Rerum Est, a line which Thomas Creech translated, “of Things Death is the utmost
line”
433
Within images of this sort, the mirror is often taken to be a symbol of vanity, in the sense
of excessive self-love, which is criticized by the appearance of death alongside a beautiful young
face. The contrast between youthful beauty and the death’s head is meant to remind even the
youngest and most attractive faces that they will ultimately face the decay of death. But this is
not a message directed only at the young and beautiful. The overall emphasis of these images is
that all should remember death and prepare for it. The motif, then, turns toward a different kind
of vanity—not the “sin of self-love” Shakespeare berates in Sonnet 62, but the recognition that
433
Thomas Creech, trans. The Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles of Horace (London: Jacob Tonson, 1684), 218
v
.
216
all earthly pleasures and glories will not last.
434
As Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of
vanities, all is vanity”
435
Horace’s Latin tag names death as the ultimate end of all things. In this
painting, and others like it, the artistic image becomes a self-aware space to reflect on that end.
436
This more general judgment is reflected in the frontispiece to Jean Puget de la Serre’s
The Mirrour Which Flatters Not, which appeared in an English translation in 1639 (Figure 4.4).
The book contains a handful of anecdotal narratives of kings and rulers who are reminded of the
fleeting nature of their power and glory. The first chapter, for example, tells the story of Philip of
Macedon, who commended his servant to wake him every morning with the reminder that he
was but a man, and as a man, would die.
437
This example also points to a pivotal aspect of the
memento mori tradition in works of art: it is often highly reflexive, performing an artist’s
awareness of their own mutability. The frontispiece shows Death seated on a throne of skulls
and decked in an ermine robe. He holds up a large rectangular object which reflects light like a
mirror but is engraved with the title of the book. A text explicating the image indicates that
Death’s hand “holds our Mirrour.”
438
The object then doubles as mirror and book and thus
indicates the author’s recognition of the mutability of his own work along with that of those who
look into it. This reflexive quality might also be seen in a printers’ device used by John Windet
in a 1600 edition of St. Augustine’s The Glasse of Vaine-glorie (Figure 4.5). The device shows a
434
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 62 in The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
435
Ecclesiastes 1:2, Geneva Bible.
436
On visual art as self-reflexive and focused on vanity, see Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image.
437
Jean Puget de la Serre, The Mirrour Which Flatters Not, trans. Thomas Creech (London: Elizabeth Purslowe,
1639), Fol.15.
438
Ibid., Ai
v
.
217
bearded man holding up a mirror as he walks. Behind him, a deathly skeleton reaches out to
touch his shoulder. In the mirror, the death’s head and not the man’s face is reflected. Around the
image runs the text “BEHOVLDE YOUR GLORY.” This is not the device Windet used for most
of his printings and may have been chosen because of its thematic connection to the text. Used as
a printer’s device, however, and therefore a symbol of the printer’s labor and ownership, the
image reflects on the “vainglory” of even this printer’s work. In the texts and images that
circulated in England at this period, then, the mirror is a general image of death’s triumph (and
therefore the need to think on the eternal state of one’s soul) but it is also a particular reflection
of the artist’s or author’s ability to recognize the temporal nature of whatever glory their labors
may incur. The appearance of a mirror at this pivotal moment in Shakespeare’s play, then, both
offers a serious parody of a religious discourse which invites reflection on mortality and shades
the scene with a reflexive quality. The work the audience is witnessing is itself fleeting.
If we press through yet one more layer of allusion and reflexivity, the Renaissance mirror
becomes a symbol for the work of art. Hamlet borrows a commonplace when he says that it is
the task of the player—and hence the playwright—to hold “a mirror up to nature.”
439
Hamlet’s
statement about drama echoes the claims of artists and art theorists. Alberti, Brunelleschi,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Carravaggio each identify painting as a “mirror of reality.”
440
The
metaphor underlying each of these claims identifies mirror and work of art, whether to the
artist’s praise or rebuke. Hamlet’s passing comment teases the surface of a whole host of ethical
and mimetic questions ranging from Plato’s critique of art as a reflection of a reflection to
439
William Shakespeare, Hamlet ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden 3 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006) 3.2.20-
21.
440
Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 185.
218
Aristotle’s defense of mimesis as natural and edifying. Hamlet skims past this complex humanist
debate in a manner that allows Shakespeare to make no commitments. When the mirror
resurfaces in King Lear, Shakespeare again registers ambivalence about the ethical nature of his
art. What exactly do Shakespeare’s images reflect and what can Shakespeare’s dramatic art claim
to offer as a either a representation of reality or a didactic “speaking” image?
Here in King Lear, the appearance of the mirror works to bring the visual aspect of
Shakespeare’s dramatic art into the same reflexive moment. Indeed, the reflecting mirror which
might produce a superfluous image on stage re-enacts the work of the visual arts. Alberti’s
famous treatise On Painting includes the artist’s claim that the inventor of painting was
Narcissus, who saw and loved his image in the reflecting surface of a pool. “What is painting”
Alberti asks, “but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool.”
441
While I cannot
do justice to the complexity of this allegory here, it is important that Alberti depicts a painted
image as a reflection of the artist’s projected and beloved self. If a painting is a mirror, it reflects
not only the beauties of the world, but also the labor and the glory of the painter who depicts
them.
When a mirror appears in a work of Renaissance art, then, it often carries the reflexive
burden of referring to the artist’s own labor. Witness the famed reflections of artists in
Velasquez’s Las Meninas, Parmigianino’s Self Portrait, or Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. And as
Michael Fried has argued, tracing a compelling connection between the pose of many figures in
paintings by Caravaggio and the position of an artist’s hands as they painted using a mirror,
many painted images from the Renaissance are embedded with a gestural allusion to the act of
441
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (New York: Penguin Classics, 1972), 2:26.
219
making art.
442
If the appearance of the looking glass in Lear is self-reflexive, then, it shows
Shakespeare thinking about his labor not only in poetic terms but also in explicitly visual ones.
As a dramatist, Shakespeare claims ownership of both sides of this paragone. But if the verbal
and the visual are both laboring to produce meaningful art in this moment, Shakespeare does not
seem to claim ownership of how audiences will respond. In the absence of a didactic
interpretation and with the confluence of multiple symbolic registers with different meanings, the
scene hands over to its audience the task of forming a response to what they are witnessing.
When the grieving Lear calls for a mirror on stage, the play invokes a clear visual
reference to mortality as well as to the labor of Shakespeare’s theatrical art to capture and reflect
on this moment of loss. Lear summons a “looking-glass” in part to draw attention to the
“looking” that is happening in the theatre in this moment (5.3.259). If there is a reference to the
motif of death appearing in a mirror here, it is also an invitation for the audience to recognize the
reflection of their own mutability in the fragile body of Cordelia and in the fleeting theatrical
image. In this sense, the scene’s visual allusions hail the responses of an audience that was used
to reacting to these symbols with self-reflection.
At the same time, Shakespeare allows the mirror to draw specific attention to his poetic
art. Despite its iconographic implications, this mirror is not called upon to reflect an image, but
rather to capture breath. “If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,” Lear says, “Why then she
lives” (5.3.259-60). Lear’s line asserts that Cordelia would be alive if she were breathing and
capable of speech. But here he locates the evidence of her liveliness not in her body’s lips or
mouth, but in the mirror that might reveal her ability to speak by registering breath. One art that
captures breath and is animated by breath is poetry. If Lear’s looking glass acts as a reflexive
442
Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
220
symbol of art, then the art it is referencing might indeed include the speaking picture of poetry.
Shakespeare’s sonnets likewise employ a metaphor in which mirror and poem compete to
achieve the same goal. He writes in sonnet 103, “Look in your glass, and there appears a face /
That over-goes my blunt invention quite” (103.6-7). And again, “more, much more than in my
verse can sit, / Your own glass shows you when you look in it” (103.13-14). The poem strives to
represent the beauty of the beloved but cannot achieve the reality of a simple reflected image.
Image and verse exist in a tense paragone, concentrated in the space of a poem that strives to act
like a mirror. In Lear, however, the mirror of poetry does not strive to offer an image of the
figure of Cordelia; rather, it strives to demonstrate her animacy, to capture the breath that would
represent her life and liveliness. The question in this moment of intense artistic self-awareness is
whether the drama can animate Cordelia. Yet throughout the play, Cordelia has struggled to
represent herself in words. Lear remembers that “her voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low”
(5.3.270-271). This reminder, along with the failure of the mirror to be marked with her breath,
amounts to a recognition of poetry’s weakness to capture and retain life. Though Edgar could use
poetic invention to extend his father’s life, Lear’s mirror registers the limit point of poetry.
Though it can invent worlds or capture breath, it cannot bring back the dead. This failure renders
the mirror—like the mirrors in vanitas paintings—as a negation, an assertion of the vanity of
artistic labor as well as a reflection of the mortality of those who behold it.
Shakespeare chooses language for this moment that simultaneously inhabits the realm of
the visual arts. The word “stain” refers primarily to paint and color, and stone is an artist’s
material. The task of striving to animate Cordelia, then—or, alternately, of representing her
loss—is shared by both poetry and image. The symbolic mirror concentrates a conflict between
death and animacy in a moment that also performs the scene’s appeal to the resources of both
221
verbal and visual art. While the anticipation of breath might point to the hope that art of either
kind could animate Cordelia, the visual association with the memento mori tradition renders a
proleptic judgment: this is not a picture that will redeem itself by beginning to speak in the
manner that Lear hopes. The fact that the stone will not reflect Cordelia’s breath might, at the
same time, point to Shakespeare’s willingness to surrender his primary form of art in this scene.
In Sonnet 103, the speaker declares the failure of his art form at the point that he turns to the
mirror. “O! blame me not, if I no more can write!” he exclaims.
443
Similarly, Cordelia can no
more speak to indicate either her liveliness or her meaning, and Lear’s poetry is on a swift
trajectory to silence. Summoning the mirror onto the stage in Lear then marks a pivot point in the
play’s mode of representation and places an emphasis on the struggle of any art form to generate
a lively representation of this moment of loss.
The feather which Lear holds to Cordelia’s lips might also have a relationship to these
verbal and visual allusions, albeit a more tenuous one. Feathers began to appear more regularly
in vanitas and still life paintings later in the seventeenth century. Though they sometimes appear
on slain birds, especially in Dutch still lives, they more often appear in the form of a quill or
writing implement. Most likely, the feather Lear has at hand is a piece of down, but the image
the stirring feather might also call to mind the idea of a quill that stirs as it writes. As Brian
Cummings argues in his recent monograph Mortal Thoughts, Montaigne’s essays dramatize the
act of writing as a reflection of the self (“It is myself I write”) even while they depict a writer’s
thoughts as “bound up with mortality” as they appear and disappear in the attempt to render the
ineffable.
444
Cummings associates Montaigne’s attempt to represent the mortal self with Albrecht
443
Shakespeare, Sonnets, 103.5.
444
Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013) 21; 47.
222
Durer’s drawings, which focus on the act of representing the self in time and in the process of
decay. As Montaigne or Durer wields his pen or pencil, they represent their own attempts to
place a form on that which is subject to loss and decay. Contrary to the poetic motif that the pen
can erect eternal monuments to an author’s fame, Montaigne focuses on the phenomenological
act of writing in time. This sense of writing as a futile gesture against time and decay inflects the
appearance of quill pens and paper in vanitas images. Pieter Claesz’s 1628 Vanitas with Violin
and Glass Ball, for instance, includes a quill pen in the foreground resting on top of an
overturned ink well. (Figure 4.6). The stilled feather pen performs writing’s failure to resist
death. Within the same image, Claesz depicts a mirrored ball in which the artist can be seen
painting. Here mirror and feather both reflect an artist’s attempt to construct a form that
simultaneously acknowledges the inevitability of death and preserves a record of his labor.
Though this particular example postdates Lear, it is possible that Lear’s stirring feather points to
a similar longing for an art form that can be a lively record of representative labor even in the
face of death.
The Quick and the Dead
Despite the common acknowledgement that art fails to ultimately animate its subjects,
most early modern visual references to death do not consider death to be the absolute end. The
memento mori tradition reminds viewers of the end of their earthly glory in order to concentrate
their attention on a life to come. Underlying the assertion of death is an allusion to resurrection.
This is perhaps why the scene in Lear maintains such a powerful ambivalence between life and
death despite the audience’s likely belief that Cordelia is “gone forever” (5.3.257). Lear declares
with certainty that Cordelia is “dead as earth” moments before asserting “This feather stirs, she
223
lives” (5.3.259, 263). But this is not necessarily evidence, as some critics have claimed, that Lear
is delusional when he claims to “know when one is dead and when one lives” (5.3.258).
445
Instead, the ambiguity in the scene might amplify the tension between life and death that was
already implicit in the visual culture on which the scene is calling. Lear’s violent fluctuating
between despair and hope seems more familiar in light of a tradition that indicates the certainty
of death and the anticipation of reanimation in a single visual moment. The symbolism of
memento mori simultaneously asserts that death is inevitable and that it need not be ultimately
victorious. For example, in a sixteenth-century engraving after Phillipe de Champagne, a skull
and a timepiece sit on a ledge alongside a rose with two blooms, one past its peak and beginning
to drop petals and another just beginning to bud (Figure 4.7). Two items declare emphatically
that death will have its day, but another suggests that it will not have the victory: there is another
life to come. In the religious discourse that inflects the memento mori, death is a necessary
passage to the new life made possible by Christ’s reanimation.
446
Lear’s assertion that if the
feather stirs, “it is a chance that does redeem all sorrows,” acknowledges this commonplace
association between death, resurrection, and redemption (5.3.264). But Lear’s declaration is
decidedly in the conditional and suspends the assertion of redeemed sorrow until after the
promise of resurrection is fulfilled: “if it be so,” he says (5.3.263). This is a key melancholic
feature of images in this vein. Though they imply a hope of better things to come, they do not
dismiss the mourning that is demanded in the face of certain loss now. As Lear flits between the
hope of life and the certainty of death, and indeed hovers between these two states in his own
445
See, for example, Peat, “‘And that’s true too,’” 52.
446
On this aspect of the memento mori tradition, see William Engel, Death and Drama in Renaissance England:
Shades of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
224
body, he also dramatizes the affective ambiguity that is closely associated with the religious
tradition this scene quotes visually.
The possibility of reanimation that lingers over this scene is strongly inflected by the
visual allusion between the tableau and the familiar image of a pietà which many critics have
been quick to point out, whether optimistically or dismissively. R.A. Foakes accuses Maynard
Mack of sentimentality because his allegorized reading of the play links the deaths of Lear and
Cordelia to the “survival of our moral and religious systems” while invoking the concluding
tableau as “the image of Mary bending over another broken child.”
447
For Foakes, the image is
ultimately not a religious, but rather, as Helen Gardner has called it, “a secular Pietà.”
448
Foakes
joins a series of critics, John Joughin and Nicholas Brooke among them, who see this allusion in
criticism as a projection; that is, as primary evidence of audiences’ need to find redemption at the
end of this play even if it is not clearly offered. Viewed in light of Renaissance writing about art
and contemporary uses of the pietà motif, however, this allusion is neither as sentimental nor as
determinate as one might expect. Lear’s pietà does draw on the consolatory associations offered
by a reflective religious visual culture, but I suggest that it also resonates with descriptions of
sculpture and responses to Michelangelo’s famous Roman Pietà that emerged from the high art
scene of the Italian Renaissance. As writings recorded in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most
Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) as well as Doni’s I Marmi and Lomazzo’s
Trattato della arte della pittura demonstrate, the Rome Pietà and other sculptures by
Michelangelo were the site of a discussion about both the animating power of art and the potent,
even stilling, power of aesthetic response. Focusing on these records of aesthetic and meditative
447
R.A. Foakes, Hamlet Verses Lear, 56.
448
Helen Gardner, King Lear, The John Coffin Memorial Lecture, 1966 (University of London: The Althone Press,
1967), 28.
225
response to a similar image, I suggest that the lingering hope of reanimation in this concluding
scene does show the artist reflecting on the power of his art to mediate between life and death.
Even more clearly, the allusion turns attention to the responses of viewers. If Renaissance
responses to Michelangelo’s Pietà offer any aesthetic precedent, then this image acknowledges
the simultaneous power of art to animate and to still its viewers.
While some critics dismiss the allusion to the religious iconography of the pietà as
overtly consolatory or even sentimental, the image as performed here is ultimately intensely
ambivalent. On the one hand, the scene does invoke familiar topoi that lend themselves toward
consolatory hope. The stage image, for example, absorbs a form of religious art that invited
meditation and ethical reflection. As Stuart Sillars has explained, reading the scene as a pietà
links it to Catholic meditative practices that were “almost consolatory” and carried a specific
message.
449
Sillars points to a woodcut engraving in a popular early 16
th
century edition of
Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. In this image, the figure of the dead Christ is
surrounded by smaller icons of the instruments with which he was tortured and killed: nails, a
scourge, a crown of thorns, etc. The images invite the viewer to join Mary in mourning the
bodily sufferings of Christ. Sillars argues that the engraving has the double effect of heightening
the agony of the scene as the viewer dwells on each detail (much, I might add, as a rhetorician
adds detail to a verbal image in order to heighten affective response), while also placing that
mourning “within a formalized ritual.”
450
As the scene, either on the page or the stage, arrests the
attention of the viewer, it brings them into “the stillness of religious meditation.”
451
449
Stuart Sillars, Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 232.
450
Sillars, 232.
451
Ibid.
226
Within the religious tradition that Sillars cites, however, the stillness of the image is not
the promised end. The image of Christ’s death anticipates his resurrection and that of those who
follow him. Agostino Carracci’s 1579 engraving of Michelangelo’s Pietà supplements the image
of Mary grieving with a reference, in Latin, to the first epistle of St. Peter: Christus semel pro
peccatis nostris mortuus est, “Christ died for our sins once.” The verse, as translated in the
Geneva Bible, goes on to include a direct reference to Christ’s resurrection: “For Christ also hath
once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, and was put to death
concerning the flesh, but was quickened by the spirit.”
452
The textual addition to Carracci’s
engraving underscores how the mourning invited by this image was often overlaid with a call to
repentance (it is human injustice for which Christ died) and an anticipation of greater hope to
come (just as Christ was quickened from the dead by the Spirit, so too are his followers). As an
explicitly religious form, the iconography of the pietà bears a message that is dependent on a
complicated relationship between narrative and image. While all of the evidence within in the
scene points to despair, the interpretive framework of its viewers included a narrative that
continued on to resurrection and that had life and death consequences for the person who
responded to it. One could either join Christ’s suffering through repentance or anticipate a never-
ending death in the world to come. But the central didactic message invoked by this image is
supplied primarily by the reader or the commentator who adds to the evidence before them. As
Willmar Sauter has demonstrated of theatrical audiences, viewers of art perceive and interpret
images through the contexts that they bring to the encounter, whether cultural, conceptual, or
structural.
453
Viewers of the scene of lamentation who come to the conclusion that it offers
452
1 Peter 3:18, Geneva Bible.
453
Willmar Sauter, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception, (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2000), 10.
227
consolation read the image like the figure of Aeneas before Dido’s murals as explored in my
earlier chapter. Though Aeneas witnesses an image that depicts the utter destruction of Troy, he
is “lured to hope of better things” because he places that scene of loss within an epic narrative of
triumph.
454
If Lear’s concluding scene invokes a pietà, it pauses the Christian narrative at the point of
crucifixion and lamentation. The epic narrative of resurrection and ultimate triumph is cut short,
and the apocalypse that the scene’s internal chorus anticipates is not fulfilled. Instead,
Shakespeare arrests Lear’s tale at the point of mourning and declines to narrate the restoration of
the kingdom. As much as the scene relies on motifs from a redemptive narrative, it chooses to
focus its representative labor on a moment of loss that is not going to be replaced by “better
things.” But if the Christian narrative is not fulfilled here, neither are the possible narratives
provided by classical literature. The scene does not anticipate a resurrected kingdom as did
Aeneas’s mural, nor does it lend itself easily to a didactic message encouraging submission to the
gods or displaying the punishment of vice as would a drama that followed the early modern
prescriptions derived from classical tragedy. This refusal to fulfill narrative expectations is
anticipated by Shakespeare’s choice to set this play in a pre-Christian, pagan world that is also
not the vaguely classical world of Sidney’s Arcadia or the later romances. Erasing the narrative
contexts that might have framed this moment, Shakespeare forces his audience to rely on the
resources that are present, namely image and response.
A recent and highly acclaimed production of King Lear at the RSC starring Antony Sher
demonstrated this act of overwriting both pagan and Christian traditions in the space of an image
454
Vergil, The Aeneid, trans. Sarah Ruden (New Have: Yale University Press, 2008), 1.451-452.
228
quite neatly. Lear and Cordelia were brought out from the back of the stage on a cart piled with
fabric and sacks (Figure 4.8). The image recreated the triangular shape and draping fabric
familiar from Michelangelo’s sculpture (Figure 4.9). Cordelia lay across Lear’s knees, while he
supported her weight in one hand, with fingers outstretched in a manner that mirrors those of
Mary in Michelangelo’s sculpture (Figure 4.10). Bringing the posed figures onstage in the
manner of a tableau vivant allowed the scene to be focused on the image rather than the action of
Lear’s grief. But the appearance of the figures from the discovery space at the back of the stage
also paralleled the Greek tragic tradition of bringing in the bodies of deceased characters on an
ekkyklema, a wheeled platform brought in through the skene at the back of the scene and
designed to display slain figures for visual meditation and response. The result in this production
was a theatrical moment that invoked both classical and Christian imagery at the same time that
it dismissed their modes of governing or guiding affective response. These resources were not
clearly available to help an audience member react to Lear’s tragic questioning—“Why should a
dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no breath at all?” (5.3.305-6). Overwriting these
traditions of response might demonstrate Lear’s skepticism toward poetic defenses, like those of
Philip Sidney or Thomas Heywood, that leveraged literary and theatrical images toward didactic
and edifying messages and instead demand that audiences bring their own responses to the visual
scene. At the same time, arresting the Christian narrative at the point of lamentation demands
that audiences abandon the resources they would usually have to read the image as redemptive.
Shakespeare’s stage image demands to be viewed on its own aesthetic terms.
229
Sculptural Shakespeare
Lear’s tragic tableau strips away the resources for response that were available either in
literary tradition or a dominant Christian tradition. But as the scene narrows to a point of visual
and aesthetic response, it also draws nearer to an existing Renaissance discourse about reactions
to the visual arts, and especially sculpture. This conversation described aesthetic responses to
sculpture in which viewers were stunned into stillness and awe by the lifelikeness of sculpture’s
representation, and, in some stories, reanimated by way of their affective response to the image.
At the heart of this motif is a reflection on the tension between life and death, animacy and
inanimacy, in sculptures that seem to freeze lifelike representations in a deathlike stillness. This
rhetoric was directed at the viewers of sculpture. As the life-size figure of a sculpture mirrored
the presence and liveliness of its viewer, so too the awed and stunned viewer mirrored the
stillness of the inanimate representative figure. This Renaissance rhetoric about sculpture focuses
on the statue as a site of tension between life and death, stillness and animation, so that scenes of
encounter between viewers and sculptures come to be represented, in Kenneth Gross’s terms, as
“a complex series of deaths and reanimations.”
455
If Lear’s final scene is viewed as an almost
sculptural display, as a surprising number of critics have suggested, then it might also invoke this
Renaissance imagination of sculpture as “a holding of life against death, a moment of balanced
pause or dynamic repose, a gathering of potential energy.”
456
As a context for the tableau at the
end of King Lear, this rhetoric inflects the statuesque scene as a site of potential metamorphosis
for the viewer, who may be both stunned and moved to pity by the vivid presentation of death in
455
Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2006), 168.
456
Ibid.
230
Cordelia’s inert body. The final scene of Shakespeare’s play, then, presses audiences to reflect
on their experience of tragic response.
Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, along
with other Italian treatises on art that were more widely accessible in early modern England such
as Doni’s I Marmi and Lomazzo’s treatise on painting and sculpture, model the motif of
imagining sculpture as a site of tension between life and death. As Frederika H. Jacobs has
demonstrated, the great modern artists that Vasari celebrates are those who lend vivezza or
liveliness to classical paradigms, and in doing so present their “living pictures” as “life
preserving agents,” both ensuring their own fame and reinvigorating the artistic models of the
past.
457
The life- and death-dealing power Vasari attributes to these works, however, is pivotally
demonstrated by the responses of viewers who are awed or animated by what they witness.
Strikingly, one of Vasari’s most prominent examples of this dynamic featured responses to
Michelangelo’s Pietà. The stories Vasari tells about this sculpture riff on the disorientation of
viewers who encounter a vivid representation of death. Vasari writes that during Michelangelo’s
time in Rome, his work achieved such excellence that it “frightened those were not accustomed
to see such things.”
458
The Rome Pietà is described as displaying “the utmost limits of
sculpture” and Vasari claims that the shapeless stone with which the artist began has achieved a
form that outdoes “Nature.”
459
For Vasari, Michelangelo’s achievement of life-like artistic
power is best demonstrated by his ability to depict not only life but also death, and this artistic
power is described as frightening and overwhelming to viewers. Vasari dwells particularly on the
457
Jacobs, The Living Image, 42.
458
Ibid., 44.
459
Ibid., 45.
231
inert but life-like form of Christ’s dead body, declaring that “no better presentation of a corpse
was ever made.”
460
The attention Vasari lends to the “muscles, veins, and sinews” of Christ’s
body point to an aesthetic paradox in which the artistic presentation of death is central to the
discussion of artful vivacity. Jacobs cites Vasari’s contemporaries Benedetto Varchi, Francesco
Bocchi, and Gian Paolo Lomazzo who claimed that the sculpture “exemplified the skillful
animation of stone” and praised Michelangelo for his depiction of the “motions of death” which
make the body “immobile like the earth.”
461
Michelangelo’s sculpture is also celebrated for the vividness with which it represents
affect. In the context of the scene of death, affective response is coded as a kind of liveliness.
Vasari’s description of the Rome Pietà incorporates a poem in which the speaker addresses the
grieving Mary of Michelangelo’s sculpture as her “whose beauty, chastity, grief and pity live in
the dead marble.”
462
What these contemporary responses emphasize is that Michelangelo’s
presentation of the dead Christ and the grieving Mary, focused as they are on the depiction of
death and grief, are key evidence of his animating power as an artist. Their references to the
inanimate material of stone and marble only amplify the vividness of the affect which is
described as “living.”
This focus on the inanimacy of artistic material which is brought to life by an artist’s skill
is central to a Renaissance discourse about aesthetic response. As these writers draw attention to
the stone which seems to be transformed into flesh, they also describe the affective responses of
460
Ibid.
461
Jacobs, Living Image, 168; King Lear picks up this comparison between death and earth: “She’s dead as earth”
(5.3.259).
462
Poem by Giovanni Battista Strozzi il Vecchio. Translation by Anthony Hughes in “Authority, Authenticity, and
Aura: Walter Benjamin and the Case of Michelangelo,” in Sculpture and its Reproductions, ed. Anthony Hughes
and Erich Ranfft (London, Reaktion Books: 1997).
232
viewers, whose hearts are softened by pity when they contemplate the tragic scene. But this
transformation can also work in the opposite direction. In other narratives about Michelangelo’s
sculptures, the lively aesthetic force of the artwork is described as so powerful that it stupefies its
viewer. The transitive effect then turns the viewer who beholds the work into stone. Jacobs cites
two examples that make the transformative effect of aesthetic witnessing explicit. Doni’s I
Marmi (1552) includes a fictional dialogue in which a Michelangelo sculpture in the Medici
Chapel strikes a viewer so profoundly that they are left in a silent trance. The bewildered visitor
is only brought back to life when the sculpture awakes and speaks to him. “If the divine figure
had not spoken,” he says, “I would have been stone forever.”
463
A later poem about the Pietà
similarly turns on the motif in which it is the viewer and not the sculpture that is described as
stony:
This woman is not stone
who supports in her arms
her dead son cold as ice;
rather you are stone
who do not weep at her pity..."
464
As Jacobs underscores, these narratives of meditative and transformative response to religious
images are strongly inflected with the promise that a faithful and responsive reader can hope for
resurrection.
465
By virtue of their content—depicting a scene of inanimate coldness that is not
final but only paused—they anticipate a resurrection. In this sense, the awakening that takes
463
Jacobs, Living Image, 45-46.
464
Quoted in Jacobs, Living Image, 170.
465
Ibid.
233
place in these aesthetic scenes is partly that of religious sentiment. But these narratives also
invoke a response that is more clearly aesthetic and affective. The artful rendering of the scene of
mourning is so vivid that the woman is imagined to be alive—she is “not stone.” And
contemplating the scene ought to arouse a powerful sense of pity in the viewer which would
itself be a testament to life. Those who do not weep in response reveal their own dullness; they
are stone. The promise of this aesthetic is twofold. It suggests that an artist can render a scene of
death and mourning that is so potent that it has life and vivacity. It also suggests that
contemplating the scene can reveal the relative inanimacy of a viewer who is not moved to pity
by the sight. Those who are not enlivened by affect when witnessing the mournful scene are, like
the dead man in the sculpture, “cold as ice.” In Shakespeare’s play, Lear himself attests to the
danger of failing to respond to a grievous sight: “No, I’ll not weep…I shall go mad”
(2.2.471,475). To fail as a witness to mourning or dire sights, this aesthetic discourse might
suggest, is to be less alive than a vivid piece of art. These discourses emphasize that the stakes
of response to an aesthetic scene in this period are high, as they draw the viewer into a complex
exchange between death and animation. The sculpted image is figured as a site of fluid
metamorphosis not only for the artistic material, but also for the responding viewer, who may
also experience a series of transformations between hardness and softness.
With the prominent threat of a spectator becoming stone, the aesthetic encounter
described in these Renaissance accounts might recall the mythic threat of visual encounter
embodied in the ancient figure of Medusa. Medusa, as W.J.T. Mitchell has summarized, is the
foundational image that “turns the tables on the spectator and turns the spectator into an
image.”
466
But the Renaissance discourse around sculpture, and particularly Shakespeare’s
466
W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1995), 172.
234
appropriation of that discourse in Lear, seem to reemploy the premises of this myth. These
dynamics help expose the work to which Shakespeare puts the visual and sculptural image at the
end of Lear. As Mitchell goes on to explain, the Medusa is often seen as a figure for powerful
otherness that must be controlled or neutralized. This otherness is centrally that of the feminized
image. In literature, Mitchell writes, Medusa is “the perfect prototype for the image as a
dangerous female other who threatens to silence the poet’s voice and fixate his observing
eye.”
467
The image threatens the dominance of the controlling word. In Lear, the appearance of
Cordelia’s corpse does unravel the certainty of rhetorical sentences and transform the nature of
eloquence. But the appearance of the image is not meant only to threaten the word but to focus
attention on the responses of audiences. In the narratives that I have been recounting,
encountering the sculpted image has the power to silence, fixate, or awaken a viewer, but the
shocking image is not presented as a threatening other so much as a mirror. No attempt to
control, dismantle, or silence the image of a grieving Mary or a dead Christ can prevent what the
poem above declares to have already happened. Those who do not weep “are stone” they do not
become stone. This is also a premise of Lear’s concluding scene. Rather than wielding the image
of the dead Cordelia like Athena’s aegis that threatens to petrify its viewers, Lear enters already
declaring “O, you are men of stones!” (5.3.255).
The life and death ambiguity that so many have observed in this scene, then, is directed at
the viewer. The question that hangs over the scene is not whether Cordelia is alive or not (as
Stephen Greenblatt argues, the scene actually depends on the fact that the audience is fully in on
the fiction that the living actor playing Cordelia represents a dead body).
468
The question instead
467
Ibid.
468
Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” 112.
235
is whether the viewer will prove to be alive to pity or remain stony hearted. Inviting the audience
to reflect on their own status, Lear’s tableau mimics the direct address of a mirror in vanitas
image. But, given that Lear enters declaring the failure of his witnesses to prove the liveliness of
their affect, any vivid response to the stunning theatrical image must be figured not as a death but
as a resurrection. In other words, it is Lear’s audiences, and not Cordelia or Lear, who might be
reanimated at the end of this scene. Viewed through the Renaissance scenes of art appreciation I
have narrated, the encounter between audience and image in this scene goes beyond presenting a
vivid image for metaphorical interpretation or affirmative response. It alters, too, the standard
timeline of literary response espoused by many early modern humanists. The viewers of Lear’s
final scene do not experience a moving image and then go on to be morally reformed or stirred to
action as a reader like Stanley Cavell might notionally wish. Rather, the scene is its own
(miraculous if profoundly secularized) event.
The otherness that Mitchell finds at the heart of the Medusa myth is, however, central to
what is happening in this scene. Cordelia, “dead as earth” does perform a powerful kind of
otherness. She is as inanimate as the stone or clay out of which an artist forms an image. And her
figure is a silent and imagistic other to Shakespeare’s poetry. The daring nature of this scene
rests in Shakespeare’s decision to submit his art to the otherness of this mortal and silent
image.
469
If this Medusa “threatens to silence the poet’s voice and fixate his observing eye,” then
Shakespeare lets her.
470
At the end of Lear, in stark contrast to Edgar’s life-clinging ekphrasis,
the word does not attempt to produce, leverage, and control the image. Instead, the image which
469
In choosing to submit to the silent image rather than master it, Shakespeare would invert the pattern of
dismembering the dangerous image that Nancy Vickers identifies in Petrarchan poetry. “Diana Described: Scattered
Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 265–79.
470
Mitchell, Picture Theory, 172.
236
has triumphed over the word leaves its audience fluctuating between experiences of stupefied
and death-like awe and powerfully awakened affect. This secular resurrection or metamorphosis
of the shocked viewer, transforming them from “men of stones,” happens not in an apocalypse to
come, but now, when they “look there” and grieve with Lear. Shakespeare’s submission to the
image in this scene, then, amounts to a death that might yet achieve a resurrection.
471
Shakespeare wields the bifold power of the image to still and to enliven against both his audience
and his own poetic art through the use of the stage tableau. The image silences poetry and stuns
its spectators, but it also has the power to enliven and reanimate them. The otherness of the
artistic image threatens to undo poetry. Instead, it awakens it as theatre.
The appeal to sculpture in this scene, evidenced by parallels with Renaissance responses
to statues, ironically supports Colin Burrow’s argument that Shakespeare’s aesthetic is
“profoundly un-sculptural”
472
Burrow’s comment comes in an essay about Shakespeare’s
sonnets, and in response to an argument that Shakespeare’s poetry, like Michelangelo’s, strives
to achieve monumental or marmoreal form. Burrow’s point, cheekily put, is that Shakespeare is
not Michelangelo. His poems do not want to become statuesque aesthetic objects, even if they do
claim to be monuments to their author’s fame. Rather, Shakespeare strives to generate a mobile
aesthetic experience within his poems through a “rapid succession of forms and varying
stories.”
473
These poems want to be changeable and to reflect the changeability of life, and like
471
One might say that the image acts like Achilles’ spear in this play, wielding the power both to injure and to heal.
Patrick Cheney has argued that in Shakespeare’s early poem, Lucrece, the figure of the spear acts as a self-signature
which acknowledges “the bifold powers of his own authorship, to hurt and to mend. Shakespeare’s Literary
Authorship (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 44. On a link between Shakespeare’s
name and Achilles’ Spear see Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen, eds. Shakespeare’s Poems, Arden
Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
472
Colin Burrow, “Why Shakespeare is not Michelangelo,” in Thinking with Shakespeare: Comparative and
Interdisciplinary Essays for A.D. Nuttall (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2007), 16.
473
Ibid., 17.
237
the metamorphoses of Ovid’s poetry, they do not claim to fix themselves or their subjects in a
material form, but to exist in perpetual mobility. What I have been arguing is that Shakespeare’s
turn to a sculptural and heavily iconographic scene at the end of Lear likewise does not fix the
meaning of the play. Rather, turning to sculpture reveals the vital and animating force of
theatrical representation and response. The still image in which Lear invites spectators to become
absorbed is precisely the site of a possible reanimation, a reanimation that happens outside the
control of poetry and outside the narrative constraints of the play. The sculptural form of Lear
and Cordelia invites mobility on the part of its viewers. The aesthetic experience of this tragic
scene does not merely petrify its viewers. Instead, the vivid presentation of mortality, and the
willingness of poetry to suspend interpretation, allows the image to maintain a labile and fluid
form as it awakens the responses of its viewers. This dynamic and highly aesthetic scene
suggests that the lingering hope of animation—which is apparent in Lear’s response to
Cordelia’s body and latent in poets’ and artists’ attempts to construct enduring objects—can only
be fulfilled by an animated audience. Though readers of Shakespeare’s plays have been used to
deferring this hope until the romantic resurrections of the later plays, King Lear’s tragic scene
also hopes that spectators will be able to recognize, like the imagined viewer of Michelangelo’s
sculpture, that if the image had not addressed them, they “would have been stone forever.”
238
Figures
Figure 4.1. Photographic still of Ian McKellan and Romola Garai in the 2007 RSC production of
King Lear.
239
Figure 4.2. Pompeiian Fresco thought to be modeled on Timanthes’ Immolation of Iphigenia, as
described by Pliny. 1
st
C. A.D.
240
Figure 4.3. Anon., Death and the Maiden (c. 1570). Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
241
Figure 4.4. Frontispiece to The Mirrour Which Flatters Not by Jean Puget de la Serre, trans.
Thomas Creech (1639). British Museum.
242
Figure 4.5. Printer’s Device in The Glasse of Vaine-glorie (1600), London: John Windet.
Huntington Library.
243
Figure 4.6. Pieter Claesz, Vanitas with Violin and Glass Ball (1628).
Figure 4.7. Jean Morin after Champaigne, Memento Mori (1625). British Museum.
244
Figure 4.8. Antony Sher as Lear in King Lear (2016), Royal Shakespeare Company. Photo by
Richard Termine.
245
Figure 4.9. Michelangelo, Pietà (1498-1499), Rome.
Figure 4.10. Detail of mirrored hands in Michelangelo’s Pietà and Sher’s performance.
246
Chapter Five
Art, Apostrophe and Animation in The Winter’s Tale
In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s art lays claim to the miraculous, even performing a
reanimation. However, in achieving this romantic feat, the dramatist relied on the same resources
he already had when crafting his earlier poems and tragedies; namely, the resources of speech.
This chapter focuses on a single rhetorical and poetic figure that plays an outsized role in
Shakespeare’s scene of animation: the figure of apostrophe. In The Winter’s Tale, I argue, the
uses of apostrophe dramatize the poet-playwright’s wrestling over the question of whether or not
the poetic art can be said to give life. On the most fundamental level, this chapter—like this
project as a whole—addresses a single question: what can rhetorical tropes accomplish in the
hands of an inventive playwright, especially with respect to loss and death? In early modern
poetry and drama, rhetoric and poetics find themselves engaged in a complex dialectic, wielding
the identical resources of tropes and figures to different, if simultaneous, ends. In turn, the study
of rhetorical poetics has involved a series of attempts to sort out and disentangle the active
purposes of rhetoric—purposes like persuasion, instruction, and control—from the contemplative
and reflective purposes of poetry, such as producing interiority or distancing or, as I have shown,
mourning. As Rachel Eisendrath has written, summarizing Harry Berger Jr., one of the key
discoveries of Renaissance literature is that “the written text can deploy the tropological aspects
of rhetoric to distance its readers from the transactional ends of rhetoric.”
474
In other words, as
474
Rachel Eisendrath, “Poetry at the Limits of Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece” in Elizabethan
Narrative Poems: The State of Play, ed. Lynn Enterline (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019), 45-68,
esp. 56-57. See also, Harry Berger Jr. “Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene,” reprinted in Situated
Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 177.
247
early modern poetry borrowed from the means of rhetoric, it also questioned and transformed its
ends. In The Winter’s Tale, this chapter argues, Shakespeare leverages the rhetorical trope of
apostrophe to reflect on the animating ambitions of poetry in a moment when the power of
rhetoric was itself in question.
Shakespeare, as my previous chapters have variously explored, clarifies the ambitions of
his own poetry by intertwining the figures of rhetoric with elements and aims borrowed from the
visual arts. The Winter’s Tale models this dynamic again: by inventing a scene in which a statue
is awakened after it is apostrophized, Shakespeare depicts a fantasy of animation as a central
ambition of his own eloquence. Hermione’s statue awakens and speaks in response to a spoken
apostrophe. The exchange of speech between speaker and statue in this scene portrays voice as
one of art’s most mystical achievements. Voice both summons the presence of the dead or absent
and serves as a proof or revenant of life.
But while Shakespeare’s scene of apostrophe might clarify the animating ambition of
poetry, it also shows how attenuated, or fictional, that hope was inclined to be for a Renaissance
poet. Shakespeare’s play registers this ambivalence by working to maintain an intense ambiguity
around whether Hermione has actually died and been memorialized in stone or whether she has
lived for sixteen years in Paulina’s keeping.
475
More importantly, however, by building the
scene of reanimation around a sculpture, Shakespeare alludes to ancient formulas for imagining
and celebrating the lifelike power of art that focused on the imagination of a speaking sculpture,
even while asserting the impossibility, the fictionality, of such an animation. As Kenneth Gross
475
Hermione’s explanation—that she has “preserved herself” to see if her daughter is returned—uses language that
is profoundly vague. After all, the most commonly “preserved” things are things that are dead. And, as Scott Crider
has demonstrated, the play includes equivalent amounts of evidence that Hermione has actually died as evidence that
it was a ‘trick’. See Scott F. Crider, “Weeping in the Upper World: The Orphic Frame in 5.3 of The Winter’s Tale
and the Archive of Poetry,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (1999), 153–72.
248
has explored at length in The Dream of the Moving Statue, Renaissance writers were enchanted
by an ancient fantasy that works of art might move from silence to speech, stillness to
movement, but were equally invested in “troubling or thickening” that movement.
476
The ancient
formula for praising lifelike art, which often took the form of an apostrophe, insistently returned
to the fantasy that a sculpture might breathe or speak in return. But, as I demonstrate, as intensely
as these epideictic works praised art’s lifelikeness, they were, at the same time, resolute in
maintaining a final boundary between life and its likeness. Even the most successful art, in this
literature, produces a longing for animation and not animation itself. And so, in this formula,
addressing a lifelike work of art was also a way of mourning for the life that art could not finally
wield. Shakespeare’s statue scene uses the rhetorical form of apostrophe to juxtapose these two
ambitions for poetry: both its power to produce an illusion of life and its ability to mourn life’s
absence.
The religious and miraculous tone that emerges at the end of The Winter’s Tale, however,
gives a final nod to the more optimistic of these hopes. The apostrophes in Shakespeare’s statue
scene also draw on and transform the terms of multiple contemporary religious debates. While
these debates centered on the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the power of prayer to
address the dead, a key feature of these debates was argument over the force, or emptiness, of the
rhetorical figure of apostrophe. Shakespeare’s apostrophes play out what I take to be the central
tension in these debates, a tension between effective and ineffective rhetoric, in which effective
speech—the speech of prayer—wields the power to transcend absence and death. Shakespeare, I
argue, appeals to belief and prayer in the statue scene in order to demonstrate the presencing
power of a poetic trope. When Shakespeare wrote his romance, apostrophe (like both rhetoric
476
Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992), 99.
249
and religion more broadly) was a figure in flux. On the one hand, early modern rhetoricians and
theologians alike associate this figure with the power to make the absent present and perhaps
even animate the inanimate. On the other hand, as a “mere” figure of speech, it drew attention to
the fictionality of that power. Shakespeare draws on this ambivalence to reflect on the most
ambitious hopes of his poetics. Apostrophe, in Shakespeare’s statue scene, performs the secular
miracle of producing a form of living presence, but it does so in the form of Hermione’s still-
mourning voice.
Legends of Voice
Shakespeare’s play wields conflicting legends and fantasies about voice and animation
against one another. The figure of apostrophe would eventually become a key trope for
imagining the animating power of poetry, especially in lyric, and, in early modern rhetorical
handbooks, was already attributed with the power to make the absent present and give voice to
the dead. Apostrophe, in later lyric theory came to be read as the central trope of the voice,
giving a form of living presence to both speaker and addressee. But Shakespeare also inherited
an ancient tradition in which the fantasy of voice—especially when associated with monumental
art—was closely associated with mourning. One particularly telling iteration of the ancient
associations between animate art, voice, and mourning, is the tale of Memnon’s monument, and
it is with that tale that I wish to begin this chapter in earnest.
More familiar to Shakespeare’s contemporaries than to us, the story shared generic
associations with the kind of tale told in winter. It focused on a mother’s grief for her child, on
the relationship between art and death, and on a statue that speaks. Francis Bacon referred to the
legend of Memnon’s monument as a “fable.” To his contemporary, Abraham Ortelius, the tale
250
was marked by “mere fooleries,” and “strange wonder,” though others had called it a “miracle,”
and some thought it was “witchcraft.”
477
The story went that in Ethiopia (during the
Renaissance, a generic term for a region in Africa), there stood a damaged statue of Memnon that
spoke each morning as the sun rose. Memnon, the son of Eos (Dawn), was slain by Achilles in
the Trojan war. Eos grieved the loss of her son profoundly. Ovid writes in the Metamorphoses
that while all the other gods “did lament” for Hecuba’s fate as the queen’s speech gave way to
barks, “Aurora’s owne greef busyed her” so completely “that smally shee it markt.”
478
While the
Trojan narrative moved forward through war, devastation, and new Imperial ambition, Aurora
focused on her own tragedy on the Trojan plain.
In the African desert, Memnon’s “speaking” sculpture was said to act as surrogate for his
mother’s mourning. Though different histories attribute varying kinds of voice to the sculpture
(Tacitus refers to “a sound like a man’s voice” while Philostratus suggests a sound much like a
harp or a lyre), the central mythic strain of the legend is one of lament.
479
As Callistratus would
have it, the statue’s voice would “utter[] piteous and mournful groans in grief” at the parting of
his mother’s light each day.
480
The statue was a phenomenon that attracted auspicious visitors
and hordes of tourists. Tacitus writes that Memnon’s monument was “the chiefest miracle” that
477
Francis Bacon, The vvisedome of the ancients, written in Latine by the Right Honourable Sir Francis Bacon Knight,
Baron of Verulam, and Lord Chancelor or England. Done into English by Sir Arthur Gorges Knight (London: John Bill,
1619), Cxii
r
; Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum Abrahami OrtelI Antuerp. geographi regii. = The theatre of the
vvhole world: set forth by that excellent geographer Abraham Ortelius (London: John Norton, 1606); xxxii
v
.
478
Ovid, Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul
Dry Books, 2000), 13.685-744.
479
Tacitus, The annales of Cornelius Tacitus. The description of Germanie (London: Ar. Hatfield, 1598), E3i
v
;
Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1931), 29-32.
480
Callistratus, Descriptions, trans. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1931), 407-9.
251
attracted Germanicus in Africa.
481
The story of Memnon’s statue represents an ancient fantasy
about art that is attributed with animation but simultaneously acts as a site of mourning.
Pivotally, the fantasies that spring up around the statue’s strange sounds are fantasies about
voice. The ancients pointed to the speaking voice of Memnon as a miracle of both art and nature,
and as the primary evidence of a remarkable grief. For some ancient writers, the speech (or
music, or murmuring) of the sculpture was also read as a kind of life or animacy. A moaning
speaker, Memnon’s statue was imagined to have life because it felt loss. The voice of the stone
made loss present even while it lent the statue the illusion of presence.
Both the story of Aurora’s grief for Memnon and the legend of Memnon’s speaking
sculpture had become commonplaces by the time Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale. A
reference to Memnon’s loss appears just beneath a selection from Shakespeare in Robert Allot’s
1600 miscellany, England’s Parnassus, tellingly, in a section of memorable passages about
“Words.”
482
In Shakespeare’s play, the transformation of tragedy culminates in a scene in which
a statue of a bereaved mother is invited to speak and, at the moment one child is returned, does
speak, transforming the illusion of presence in the lifelike sculpture into true animation. As
triumphant as that narrative may be, Hermione’s animation and her appearance as a masterpiece
of art are—like the miracle of Memnon—predicated upon loss. As in the other Shakespearean
narratives I have examined, Shakespeare turns to the resources of art at a moment of grieving
and asks what art can do with respect to loss.
481
Tacitus, Annales, E3i
v
.
482
Robert Allot, Englands Parnassus: or the choysest flowers of our moderne poets, with their poeticall
comparisons Descriptions of bewties, personages, castles, pallaces, mountaines, groues, seas, springs, riuers, &c.
Whereunto are annexed other various discourses, both pleasaunt and profitable (London: N.L., C.B., and T.H.,
1600), X3
r
.
252
If the Memnon tale represents an ancient fantasy about the entanglements between art,
animation, and mourning, Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale, represents an early “modern”
exploration of that fantasy. In The Winter’s Tale a statue of a bereaved mother is imagined to
speak only after it is apostrophized, addressed by a lost child. When, in the last act of The
Winter’s Tale, Leontes and Perdita apostrophize the memorial statue of Hermione and invite it to
speak, Hermione’s animated response seems to make good on the “speaking picture” metaphor,
and to imagine the capacity of language to animate; that is, to be truly performative. At the same
time, the characters who apostrophize Hermione’s sculpture do so as an act of mourning. Leontes
and Perdita borrow an animating form of speech in order to console themselves for the
(perceived) loss of Hermione’s life. Shakespeare’s apostrophes in The Winter’s Tale then
accomplish something similar to the sound of the voice in Memnon’s legend: they juxtapose
animation and mourning as two possible roles for the art of language.
The sculpture in Shakespeare’s play, “newly performed by that rare Italian master Giulio
Romano,” is celebrated specifically in terms of an imagined and longed-for voice.
483
The steward
declares that Romano has so perfectly imitated Hermione that “they say one would speak to her
and stand in hope of an answer” (5.2.99). Viewed primarily through the myth of Pygmalion, the
fulfillment of this hope in Hermione’s reanimation and speech is often understood as a triumph
of (Shakespeare’s) art—a reward for faith and a redemption of loss.
484
A closer reading of how
the scene imagines, solicits, and stages Hermione’s speech, however, complicates this view. The
483
William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher, Arden Third Series, (London: Bloomsbury, 2010),
5.2.94-95. References to this text are hereafter parenthetical.
484
On Hermione’s reanimation as a triumph of Shakespeare’s dramatic art, see Leonard Barkan, “Making Pictures
Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship,” Renaissance Quarterly 48.2 (1995), 326–51
and Leonard Barkan,“‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and the Winter’s Tale,” ELH 48.4 (1981): 639–67;
On reanimation as a reward for faith, see Crider, “Weeping in the Upper World.”
253
possibility that Hermione might speak or breathe (itself a figure for speech) is the central
reiterated trope of the statue scene. In a strong sense, Hermione’s speech is imagined as
equivalent with her miraculous animation. The imagination of voice in this scene tropes on the
illusion of presence in art and the role of art as surrogate and consolation for loss. It also raises
the question of how the early modern period imagined the work of figures of speech like
apostrophe. On the one hand, apostrophe, as it appeared in ancient poetry and aesthetics,
repeatedly points to art’s longing for animation and its limits in achieving it. On the other,
contemporary religious debates turned on the question of whether apostrophe was an empty
figure of speech or a form of faithful speech that could transcend absence. Shakespeare’s use of
apostrophe in the concluding scene of The Winter’s Tale, I argue, offers a secular and self-
reflexive take on this religious conversation in order to express a hope that poetic address might
be capable of transforming loss. The ancient imagination of apostrophe confronts a modern
religious one in the hope of achieving a new poetic.
Absence and loss shape the imagination of voice in the statue scene, but voice in the
statue scene also anticipates the animating power that a later poetics would, in a more
contemporary legend, attribute to apostrophe. For twentieth century critics, and especially
readers of Romantic lyric, apostrophe is a central figure of personification. Tropologically, it
gives life. In an argument prominently articulated by Jonathan Culler, apostrophic address
accomplishes more than turning from one audience to another as the ancient rhetoricians
emphasized; rather, apostrophe engages in a fiction of animation—reimagining the addressee as
one part of an I-thou relationship.
485
In turn, the poet takes on a vatic role, performing her or his
485
Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, Augmented
Edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981) 135–154. See also, William Waters, “Apostrophe” in The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition ed. Roland Greene et. al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2012), 61-62.
254
vocation as one who employs language to navigate between the animate and inanimate, the
living and the dead. Anticipating Culler’s imagination of apostrophe in lyric, Shakespeare
awakens the ancient rhetorical figure of apostrophe in this scene and borrows from religious
debates in order to imagine a language able to mediate between the living and the dead. By
staging this speech in response to a memorial sculpture, however, Shakespeare emphasizes the
absence and loss upon which animating speech is predicated. There is, in other words, no
resurrection without death. Shakespeare stages apostrophe in response to Romano’s statue to
explore how the art of language responds to absence.
486
In this highly reflexive scene, the speech
circulating around Romano’s sculpture and the event of Hermione’s reanimation reflect on the
role that is carved out for art and language in the context of tragedy.
On another level, Shakespeare is able to bring together an ancient imagination of art,
voice, and loss with contemporary early modern concerns about the power of language precisely
because he turns to the intersection between poetics and religion. Scholarly conversation about
animation and the figure of apostrophe has focused predominantly on lyric poetry.
487
Within the
study of lyric, apostrophe has acquired an outsized importance as “the trope of tropes.” Culler
has argued that “one might be justified in…seeking to identify apostrophe with lyric itself.”
488
486
In many ways, my argument runs parallel to several influential deconstructive readings of the play. And yet I do
not wish to argue, with Howard Felperin, that the play offers a fundamental deconstruction of presence or performs
the unending deferral of language. Nor do I have anything of note to qualify in Stanley Cavell’s elegant reading of
the play’s charge to set aside epistemology as our primary mode of access to others. Howard Felperin, “‘Tongue-
Tied Our Queen?’: The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and the Question of
Theory, ed. by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New Haven and London: Routledge, 1985), 3–18; Stanley
Cavell, “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The Winter’s Tale,” in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays
of Shakespeare , 2
nd
edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 193-222.
487
For criticism on the figure of apostrophe and the idea of animation, see Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-
Facement” MLN (1979): 919-30; Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” in A World of
Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 184-200; J.D. Kneale, “Romantic
Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered” ELH 58 (1991); William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 2003).
488
Culler, “Apostrophe,” 137.
255
Culler is attracted to lyric because it is a form that champions poetry’s ability to make something
happen. His central contribution has been to identify “the moment of apostrophe” as “an event”
contra Auden’s maxim that poetry “makes nothing happen.”
489
Within the space of a lyric,
apostrophe can exert and display its powerful potential to animate the inanimate, create the
illusion of personhood, and then draw attention to its own fictionality. But of course, lyric is not
the only form within which apostrophe can be said to act. Indeed, the early modern period
already imagined apostrophe as attending to relationships between the animate and inanimate,
the present and the absent, and did so outside of the bounds of lyric form. The figure of
apostrophe played a pivotal role within two religious controversies in Shakespeare’s lifetime—
debates over the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and over whether Christians should pray
to deceased saints. While other scholars have read this scene as an almost defiant response to
iconoclasm and even a condoning of Catholic aesthetics, I will show how Shakespeare employs
apostrophe around the image of the (presumed) deceased Hermione in order to think about what
a truly performative language can accomplish in the context of loss.
490
The apostrophes in the
religiously inflected statue scene are invested in both the ancient fantasy of art’s ability to
animate and an emergent conviction about the efficacy of artistic language, but they equivocate
over whether that language seeks to lend life or mourn its loss. The question for Shakespeare in
489
Culler, “Apostrophe,” 140; W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” in Another Time (New York: Random
House, 1940).
490
On the statue scene and iconoclasm, see Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm andTheatre in
Early-Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); B.J. Sokol, Art and Illusion in ‘The
Winter’s Tale’ (New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Ruth Vanita, “Mariological
Memory in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Henry VIII,’” SEL 40.2 (2000), 311–37; and Phebe Jensen, “Singing Hymns to
Horn-Pipes’: Festivity, Iconoclasm, and Catholicism in ‘The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.3 (2004),
279–306.
256
this scene, then, is what power apostrophe—and the rhetorical imagination of voice more
broadly—can finally exert.
Getting a Stone to Talk
Shakespeare’s contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, described Giulio Romano’s style as
"anciently modern and modernly ancient (anticamente moderna e modernamente antica).”
491
Romano, as Fredrika H. Jacobs explains, joined the best features of antiquity with a new and
“modern” liveliness, garnering praise for an act of “godlike creativity” akin to resurrection.
492
Jacobs’s study of the trope of animation in Renaissance art emphasizes an early modern aesthetic
that honored lifelike representation. “Increasingly,” she writes, “Renaissance critical texts,
poems, and epigrams detailed portraits and statues so natural that they assumed a vivid
immanence.”
493
Renaissance art criticism drew an ever-firmer connection between the idea of
virtuosity and the language of lifelikeness in art. Vasari’s Lives, which chronicles a progressive
liveliness in the work of Renaissance artists is evidence of this trend. Though one could construct
a similar progressive argument out of Pliny’s ancient Natural History (it, too, acknowledges the
mimetic interventions of each successive artist it chronicles), the emphasis on animation and
lifelikeness as the central accomplishment of mimesis was, in a sense, modern.
494
More precisely, the “modern” aesthetic Jacobs describes through Vasari’s text celebrated
the artist’s ability to achieve an illusion of presence. Vasari and others reserve the highest praise
491
Frederika H. Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 38.
492
Ibid., 40.
493
Ibid., 187.
494
Pliny, Natural History, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, Vol. 9, Loeb Classical Library 394 (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 1952).
257
for works of art that overwrite the marmoreal rigidity of ancient sculpture with “the immediacy
of a psychological presence.”
495
In turn, a whole strain of artistic criticism and academic study in
this period focused on “penetrating the secret behind the countenance” and “disclosing the
motivation that prompts a gesture and provokes an expression.”
496
For example, a single
sculpture of a reclining nymph recovered from antiquity invited a long series of interpretations
and written responses.
497
The identities attributed to the sculpture variously account for her
pose—reclined in rest with slightly parted lips and eyes closed in sleep—as Ariadne asleep while
she is abandoned by Theseus, or Cleopatra, poised between sleep and death as history lays claim
to her story.
498
Leonard Barkan quotes a series of poems and epigrams addressed to the reclining
statue, emphasizing how, through speech addressed to ruined antiques—that is, through the act
of apostrophe—, “the early moderns reconstructed these objects as places of discourse,” and
strove to recuperate an ancient and lost past.
499
Jacobs articulates this phenomenon another way: as the immanence of sculptural
representation became more and more celebrated, “the active role of the viewer became more
critically crucial.”
500
The illusion of presence in these lifelike figures generated interaction.
That interaction, in turn, figures the images as one step further along in a process of
495
Jacobs, Living Image, 187.
496
Ibid.
497
Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 241-247.
498
It strikes me that the Renaissance obsession with interpreting the poses of ancient sculptures sets up a massive
interpretive opportunity for the staging of The Winter’s Tale. Hermione’s pose could go a long way toward
disclosing a director’s interpretation of her relationship to Leontes, Mamillius, and Perdita.
499
Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 210.
500
Jacobs, Living Image, 187.
258
metamorphosis.
501
I would add that that interaction is fundamentally supplemental: it emphasizes
that—however perfectly the sculpture mimics life—it lacks the fullness of presence for which it
inspires longing. In other words, the image maintains power precisely because it doesn’t have a
voice. The longing for voice—performed by the viewer’s apostrophe—is ultimately what the
image has the power to make present. Put yet another way, the “lifelike” aesthetic that these
scholars identify emerging in the early modern period turns on the fact that these celebrated
sculptures are not indeed alive. Rather, they inspire a response that points to speech, breath, as
the central trope for life.
502
The sculpture scene in Shakespeare’s play conforms to this Renaissance aesthetic in
which lifelikeness in art is linked to the trope of speech. Indeed, Camillo articulates this aesthetic
quite plainly: “If she pertain to life, let her speak too!” (5.3.113). Many readings of the play
emphasize the fulfillment of this fantasy when Hermione does indeed address Perdita. Like the
figure of Galatea in the Pygmalion myth, this work of art transcends the trope of speech and the
fiction of presence by becoming truly animate. As second, third, or twenty-third time readers of
the scene, anticipating the ending we know is imminent, we can forget how much the language
of the scene emphasizes the impossibility of this fantasy. Yet, in the language of the scene,
Romano’s sculpture is impressive because it makes the viewers long for Hermione’s speech, not
because it delivers it. Thus, the scene repeatedly demands and then forecloses the possibility of
speech. For example, when the existence of the statue is first indicated in Act 5, scene 2, the
steward says that the image has recently been completed by Giulio Romano:
501
Ibid.
502
Others have emphasized movement or softness as the trope of liveliness—notably Barkan—but my intervention
is to point to how important the voice is. See esp. Barkan, “Living Sculptures.”
259
who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of
her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. He so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that
they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer (5.2.92-99).
Gramatically, the possibility of the statue speaking is first introduced in the subjunctive. If only
Romano were a god (one who has eternity) he could give his sculpture breath, that is, the power
to speak. But, this being the domain of nature and not art, the artist must be content to imitate the
giving of breath. Romano’s status as an excellent artist is illustrated by another subjunctive
scene: “they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of an answer.” As the speaker here
imagines the scene, one would hope for an answer from the sculpture, but not get one. The terms
in which the steward celebrates the statue’s lifelikeness describe the shape of an apostrophe: a
speaker addresses an inanimate or absent object, and in doing so imagines the possibility of its
reply. This gesture, the pivotal gesture of personification, remains a compelling fiction. It is
something we ask for knowing it won’t happen. We imagine that the person who speaks to
Hermione’s sculpture would be standing and hoping for a rather long time.
Leontes’s apostrophe to the sculpture perversely, if subtly, reinforces the fictionality, the
impossibility of Hermione’s animation:
Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed
Thou art Hermione--or, rather, thou art she
In thy not chiding; for she was as tender
As infancy and grace. But yet, Paulina,
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems. (5.3.24-29)
260
Leontes’s opening apostrophe, which is also a command, might initially read as a
paradigmatically animating speech. Taking the position of vatic or pleading orator, Leontes tells
the stone to speak. In speaking, the stone would cease to be stone, but would become Hermione.
(Or rather, it would allow Leontes to claim that the stone is Hermione. In Leontes’s construction
it is his own speech that is the focus of the fantasy: “that I might say thou art Hermione”). But
Leontes immediately alters the figure. In his rearticulation, Leontes claims that Hermione’s
sculpture is most effective in its imitation of life because Hermione does not speak. Framing the
sculpture’s silence as evidence of virtue (tenderness and “grace”), Leontes covers over the fiction
of the trope of animation and cuts off the notion that his animating speech has failed. In other
words, the evidence of the failed animation (Hermione’s silence) is discounted.
And yet, by reframing the figure of apostrophe and withdrawing the invitation to speak,
Leontes accomplishes what is effectively a silencing. As Lynn Enterline has demonstrated, the
Hermione of the opening acts is not so tender and quiet but possesses a threateningly compelling
rhetorical voice.
503
Read back against the earlier scenes, Leontes’s reframing of the trope is
almost damning: it recapitulates the acts by which he petrified Hermione in the first place. The
same Leontes who demanded speech from Hermione in the opening scene (“tongue-tied our
queen?”) and then overinterpreted the queen’s actions, leading to tragedy, here demands speech,
but then precipitously offers his own interpretation of the figure (1.2.28). Leontes’s pivot at the
end of the speech, in which he points out Hermione’s wrinkles, is also notable. Leontes
effectively points out what he sees to be a failure of mimesis. Paulina offers an explanation for
the difference (the artist has represented Hermione as she would look after sixteen years), but
503
Lynn Enterline, “‘You Speak a Language That I Understand Not’: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter’s
Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.1 (1997), 17–44.
261
this moment also underscores how the statue’s aesthetic success is not dependent on mimesis.
The artwork succeeds to the degree that it inspires a longing for Hermione’s speech and a
longing for Hermione, and not to the degree that it replaces her.
These moments in which speech is summoned and denied, and the statue scene’s
preoccupation with breath and speech in general, point toward what I take to be a common
misapplication of the Pygmalion myth to Shakespeare’s play. One interpretation of Pygmalion’s
story focuses on a fantasy of verisimilitude. The premise of this reading is that Pygmalion is able
to make a sculpture that is so lifelike that he comes to desire it despite, and in place of, his hatred
of real women.
504
When he prays to Venus expressing desire for a woman like the sculpture he
has made and she gives life to his sculpture instead, she is rewarding both his faith and his skill
as an artist. This reading focuses on the ingenium of the artist and attributes “life” to a sculpture
based on verisimilitude.
505
The key evidence of success in the aesthetic championed by this
interpretation of the myth is often erotic. Hence the many stories of men, Pygmalion and
Tiberius among them, engaging in sexual acts with sculptures.
506
The reiterated flux between life
and stoniness, the imagination of stone softening into flesh, in Ovid’s poem affiliates life with
erotic softness. There is, of course, merit to this reading of ancient aesthetics. As Barkan points
out, “there is a whole genre of Alexandrian literature devoted to descriptions of works, usually
sculpture, that are praised for their accuracy by having life attributed to them.”
507
And yet, in my
504
Enterline, “You speak a language,” 23-24.
505
On meanings of the term ingenium in Renaissance discourse about art, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the
Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1971).
506
On erotic desire for statues, see Leonard Barkan, “Praxiteles’ Aphrodite and the Love of Art,” in The Forms of
Renaissance Thought: New Essays in Literature and Culture, ed. Leonard Barkan, Bradin Cormack, and Sean
Keilen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
507
Barkan, “Making Pictures Speak,” 649.
262
reading, accuracy of mimesis isn’t the center of the aesthetic fantasy that Shakespeare’s play
draws from antiquity, voice is.
Read as a primary intertext for Shakespeare’s play, the Pygmalion myth can be seen as
fundamentally, and misleadingly, triumphalist: Hermione’s statue comes to life and announces
the triumph of art over death. Moreover, it announces the triumph of Shakespeare’s art (drama)
over and against the other arts. In this reading, Shakespeare the dramatist is the artist who has
achieved maximum verisimilitude, and hence, gained a power to animate. Barkan articulates this
triumphalist reading quite openly: "All of Shakespeare's art consists of statues coming to life, for
compared to it all other media are dead.”
508
As attractive as it is to read this late play of
Shakespeare as celebratory and metatheatrical, the Pygmalion myth does not seem to fully
authorize such a reading. Most centrally, any reading of the play through the Pygmalion story
must attend carefully to the complex erotics of the statue scene. The key evidence of Galatea’s
animation—her softening to Pygmalion’s touch—is hard to map on to this scene. Hermione does
not necessarily transform from a stony lady to a softened erotic lover.
509
Indeed, Leontes is at
one point expressly forbidden from touching her. Rather, Hermione awakens for Perdita, as she
directly states. Though she embraces Leontes, he does not receive her speech. Here I would echo
Sarah Beckwith, who reads this scene as “a conscious rejection rather than an enaction of Ovid's
Pygmalion” precisely because Shakespeare refuses to cast Hermione as Leontes’s creation or
fantasy.
510
Leontes is not an artist. He is not free to construct Hermione based on his
508
Ibid., 662.
509
On Hermione as a Petrarchan stony lady, see Enterline, “You speak a language,” 42-43.
510
Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2011), 141.
263
imagination—though, as we have seen, he still might be inclined to try—and Hermione’s
agency, and her freedom to choose Perdita but not necessarily Leontes, are far too pivotal to the
scene.
A chief danger of overemphasizing the Pygmalion intertext in Shakespeare’s play is that
the triumphalist reading, especially when associated with a mimetic aesthetic, too easily glosses
over another ancient aesthetic that deeply informs The Winter’s Tale, an aesthetic that uses the
fantasy of voice to emphasize what art cannot do. There is no question that Shakespeare’s play is
profoundly shaped by an Ovidian imagination. Perdita’s loss and recuperation, for example,
replays the Ovidian narrative of Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres who is borne away to Hades
each year and then returned, bringing the end of winter.
511
The Pygmalion myth itself shades the
play differently when it is viewed in context: as a song of Orpheus and a fantasy of reanimation
created in mourning for the double loss of Eurydice, as Scott Crider has argued.
512
And, as
Enterline’s cautionary reading has shown, both the Pygmalion story and the Orpheus story
structure the fantasy of male poetic authority on the misogynist silencing of women, a problem
that the female voices in The Winter’s Tale obliquely, if powerfully, point out.
513
But the ancient
and Ovidian aesthetic that informs this play does not finally center on accuracy of mimesis or the
triumph of verisimilitude. Rather, I suggest that what the play draws from ancient texts is a
fascination with artistic works that show the ultimate failure and limitation of mimesis.
Representation, no matter how vivid, cannot bring back the dead. What it can do, however, is
dramatize the longing for what is not believed to be present.
511
On the myth of Proserpina in The Winter’s Tale, see Enterline, “You speak a language,” 42-43.
512
Scott Crider, “Weeping in the Upper World,” 154.
513
Enterline, “You speak a language,” 44.
264
The failure of mimesis to make the absent present can, in turn, open up a space for
mourning, a space that can itself be aesthetically productive. In the ancient texts that perform this
aesthetic, that mourning is pivotally linked to the fantasy of voice. If, as I argue, voice is an
important element of how The Winter’s Tale imagines the task of its own art, then it is worth
exploring the sources—both “ancient” and “modern”—through which the play imagines voice.
In the Alexandrian literature that Barkan cites, for example, verisimilitude repeatedly achieves an
illusion of presence, movement, and psychological engagement, but it always falls short of voice,
even while voice remains the central indication of life for which it longs. That failure is what
opens up the space for apostrophe. For example, Callistratus (5
th
c. BC), who followed the Elder
and Younger Philostratuses in writing highly rhetorical celebrations of ancient works of art,
offers this description of a statue of a satyr:
You could have seen the veins standing out as though they were filled with a sort of
breath, the Satyr drawing the air from his lungs to bring notes from the flute, the statue
eager to be in action, and the stone entering upon strenuous activity--for it persuaded you
that the power to blow the flute was actually inherent in it, and that the indication of
breathing was the result of its own inner powers--finding a way to accomplish the
impossible.
514
Callistratus, like Leontes in the statue scene, participates in a fantasy of animation focused on the
statue’s ability to speak (here, figured as breath), even as he repeatedly cancels that fantasy. He
draws attention to the Satyr’s neck, which looks as though it might be breathing into the flute,
but his language simultaneously emphasizes the metaphorical nature of his claims: it is “as
though” the veins were filled, and the breath is only “a sort of breath.” Leontes’s echoes of this
514
Callistratus, Descriptions, 379.
265
language in The Winter’s Tale, thus take on similar shades of ambiguity: “Would you not deem it
breathed, and that those veins / Did verily bear blood?” (5.3.64-65). Callistratus claims that the
satyr statue “indicates” breathing, pointing directly at the part of the fantasy that is finally unreal.
In the end, he obliquely acknowledges that the fantasy is impossible, even while he claims that
the statue might have made one think that the impossible had been accomplished. Callistratus’s
elaborate celebration of the lifelike statue focuses its attention precisely on the wish that the
sculpture is least likely to fulfill. The speech of this orator, responding to the statue, is what fills
in the gap of speech that might have lent the sculpture animation. Callistratus draws attention to
this exchange in another passage in which he performs the response that the compelling, but
inanimate, statue of Paean inspires: “And so we, O Paean, have offered you the first fruits of
discourse” (413). The speech of the orator—the present work of art—is conditioned on the
silence of the sculpture and acts as a surrogate for the longed-for speech of the sculpture.
This intense focus on the inability of art to finally animate the inanimate, centered on the
fantasy of voice or breath, appears in other texts that inform Shakespeare’s play as well. In the
Deucalion myth, which Barkan argues is central to a softening Ovidian aesthetic informing The
Winter’s Tale, Deucalion compares himself with his father, Prometheus, the exemplary sculptor
of statues that come to life. Barkan quotes Deucalion’s speech: “O, would that by my father's
arts I might restore the nations and breathe, as did he, the breath of life into the moulded clay.”
515
While Deucalion’s speech assumes the premise that sculptures could become animate, his
exclamation laments that breath is precisely what he cannot lend to hardened stone. And yet,
Deucalion’s “O” draws attention to his own breath, his own speaking voice, which is itself an
illusion crafted by Ovid. The scene presses forward even as it cancels the fantasy that one’s art
515
Metamorphoses 1.363-64, quoted in Barkan, “Living Sculptures,” 642.
266
(artibus) could lend breath and life (animus). Similarly, when Petrarch apostrophizes Pygmalion,
his poetic strains consist of a lament that he cannot get his own stony lady to speak to him. “If
only she could reply to my words!” he cries, “Pygmalion how much you must praise yourself for
your image if you received a thousand times what I yearn to have just once!”
516
For Petrarch, the
animation of Galetea is evidence of Pygmalion’s ingenium—it is by virtue of the artist’s skill
that the statue spoke. But it is also a sly way of winking at his own skill. His poetic lament
produces the illusion of his own voice. Enterline’s intervention is essential here. We must
acknowledge the insidious side of this Petrarchan motif: that the woman’s silence is “the
necessary condition for this all-male conversation about aesthetic merit."
517
And yet, the silence
of the lady or the statue or the stone still remains a fact. The artist’s speech does not animate her.
It is at best a surrogate, which leaves room for, and perhaps demands, mourning for the lost
original or failed fantasy.
518
In each of these examples, the speech of the poet or viewer attempts
to recuperate a loss: the loss of the longed-for speech of the work of art, which is, in this fantasy,
the loss of a dream about the artistic power to animate. Whether or not the artist’s apostrophe
garners the consolation of fame, it is nevertheless a speech of mourning.
This re-slanting of the myth of artistic animation corresponds with one way of reading of
the Orpheus myth. Orpheus descends to the underworld in an attempt to release Eurydice from
death. In the underworld, his singing succeeds in charming the gods, who release Eurydice on the
condition that he does not turn back to look at her until he has returned to earth. Of course,
516
Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling, RS
78.11-14.
517
Enterline, “You speak a language,” 30.
518
On surrogates and surrogation, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York:
Columbia Uniersity Press, 1996), 2.
267
Orpheus fails in this part of his mission, and the songs he sings in Book 10 of the
Metamorphoses, tales of loss and recovery and animation, are sung in the context of his
mourning. They are a form of consolation, a retelling of the fantasy in which art can have real
effects in the world, and even bring back the dead. However, Orpheus himself represents a limit
of art.
519
Even at the height of his powers—when his songs bring everything to stillness in
underworld—it is the grace of the gods and not his art that temporarily releases Eurydice. There
is much art can do, but raising the dead is not one of those things. This is why Crider argues that
The Winter’s Tale is not so much a retelling of the Pygmalion myth as it is a reimagination of the
Pygmalion “myth as told by Orpheus.”
520
For Crider, Orpheus’s tale of Pygmalion expresses his
“desire to transform the real by means of mimesis,” a desire that failed because of his doubt, as
exemplified by his looking back.
521
Crider reads The Winter’s Tale as a narrative in which
Leontes’s own doubt—doubt about Hermione’s faithfulness—must be corrected through a
mimetic recapitulation in the sculpture that requires his faith. Viewing The Winter’s Tale through
the Orphic frame clarifies the failures of Leontes, as Crider has shown, but it also invites a
further exploration of how Shakespeare might be imagining his own art in this play. If Leontes is
not a Pygmalion, neither, it seems, is Shakespeare. The famed but absent Giulio Romano, who
might be read as a cipher for the dramatist, is credited with the statue’s craftsmanship, but he is
not credited with its awakening.
The responses of the statue’s audience provide significant clues about the fantasy of art
that is initially displayed in this scene. When Leontes and Perdita encounter the “statue” of
519
See Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
520
Crider, “Weeping in the Upper World,” 154.
521
Ibid., 157.
268
Hermione, they encounter a stand-in, a surrogate representation of sixteen years of grieving and
waiting. Viewed in this way, their responses to the statue take on a different shade. Leontes and
Perdita each respond to the sculpture by imagining themselves as participants in the temporality
of a still work of art. Like Heironimo, Lucrece, and even at some moments Hamlet, they
fantasize about suspending action and becoming absorbed in their encounter with an image.
522
They are moved by the image, and being moved, long to participate in the image’s suspended
animation. When Paulina offers to draw the curtain, they respond:
LEONTES: No, not these twenty years.
PERDITA: So long could I
Stand by, a looker-on. (5.3.85-85)
Leontes and Perdita imagine themselves observing the image for twenty years. In doing so, they
imagine themselves as image-like, and more like this “image” of Hermione than they even know.
What the artist has brought about is a real performance of sympathy. If this is indeed a still but
living Hermione posing before them, then their twenty years of still living would mean twenty
years of participating in her experience. The statue’s viewers imagine themselves recapitulating
the sixteen years of waiting that have passed and more. As a scene of art appreciation, this
moment represents a vision of artistic success that is quite different than the miraculous
animation of a sculptor’s masterpiece. Rather, it imagines the artwork as a site of suspended
longing, absorption, and reflection. Indeed, Leontes suggests that the statue invites him to reflect
on and mourn the wrongs he committed against Hermione: “O royal piece! / There’s magic in
thy majesty, which has / My evils conjured to remembrance” (5.3.37-39). If this artwork
522
On absorption, and its tension with a theatrical and outward-facing aesthetic in 18
th
century French art, see
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
and London: University of California Press, 1980).
269
represents aesthetic success, it does not imagine reanimation as its reward and aim, but rather
imagines the artwork as a site of contemplation, that is, as a site of mourning. Though Camillo
suggests that Leontes has grieved too long, Leontes’s extended contrition in fact allows him to
participate in Hermione’s experience of the time between her loss and her consolation.
One of the suggestions of this scene is that this ambiguous time between loss and
consolation is a privileged time for art. Leontes’s response to Hermione’s sculpture repeats a
gesture of flickering between what has been lost and what is now present. “O thus she stood,” he
says, “Even with such life of majesty—warm life, / As now it coldly stands—when first I wooed
her” (5.3.31-33). The speech imagines the statue as a site that recalls Hermione’s warm life—the
life that is lost—and as the site of her absence, figured by her coldness. The statue’s great
virtue—which is indeed amplified if this Hermione is still living—is its ability to contain the
living Hermione and the lost Hermione in one aesthetic space. For as long as Hermione stands in
stillness, she is both alive and dead. The temporality Leontes ascribes to the statue in this
moment bears a striking similarity to the kind of temporality Culler ascribes to the lyric, and
especially to apostrophe:
something once present has been lost or attenuated; this loss can be narrated but the
temporal sequence is irreversible, like time itself. Apostrophes displaces this irreversible
structure by removing the opposition between presence and absence from empirical time
and locating it in a discursive time. The temporal movement from A to B, internalized by
apostrophe, becomes a reversible alternation between A' and B': a play of presence and
absence governed not by time but by poetic power. The clearest example of this structure
is of course the elegy, which replaces an irreversible temporal disjunction, the move from
270
life to death, with a dialectical alternation between attitudes of mourning and consolation,
evocations of absence and presence.
523
Much as an elegy generates a dialectic between the absence and presence of a beloved, the statue
offers the consolation of a warmly present Hermione even as it attenuates that offering.
Leontes’s speech imagines his encounter with the statue as a return to the past. He is brought
back to the moment at which he first wooed Hermione, when she was present in warmth and
majesty. But Leontes’s somewhat tortured speech also clusters his memory of wooing with the
image of the statue that “coldly stands.” In effect, it rewinds the history of his sexual relationship
with Hermione and arrives at the moment before his wooing succeeded, when she stood cold to
his advances (as their banter in the opening scenes suggests she did). Both the sculpture and
Leontes’s elegiac response to it dramatize a special temporality that is possible in art. In
Leontes’s apostrophe to the statue, art (both his speech and the statue) is imagined as capable of
calling back what time has taken away and reversing a temporal sequence. The opposition
between the present Hermione and the past Hermione, which is indelible in narrative time, is
blurred in the time of the statue. This hint at consolation is, of course, only temporary in the
narrative space of drama, which is perhaps one part of why Leontes and Perdita express a wish to
join in on the statue’s time. Perdita stands “like stone” with the sculpture, and Leontes exclaims
that “No settled senses of the world” could “match / The pleasure of [the] madness” of believing
Hermione lived (5.3.67-68). Before any talk of a miracle, Hermione can both “live” and be lost
only in the temporal disjunctions of art.
The temporality of the statue, then, is not so terribly distinct from the temporality of
poetry, and as such it might offer a clearer vision of the meta-criticism in this scene than does the
523
Culler, “Apostrophe,” 149.
271
triumphalist Pygmalion reading. Indeed, it echoes one vision of poetry that Ovid had previously
imagined in the Metamorphoses. When Orpheus journeys to the underworld in an attempt to
recoup his own lost love, the sign that his art is succeeding—if only temporarily—is the
interruption of narrative time. Golding’s 1567 translation emphasizes Orpheus’s power to still
action as he sings in the underworld:
…As he this tale did tell,
And played on his instrument, the bloodlesse ghostes shed teares:
To tyre on Titius growing hart the greedy Grype forbears:
The shunning watter Tantalus endeavereth not to drink:
And Danaus daughters ceast to fill theyr tubes that have no brink.
Ixions wheele stood still: and downe sate Sisyphus upon
His rolling stone. The first of all (so fame for truth had gone)
The Furies being striken there with pitie at his song
Did weepe.
524
Orpheus’s art renders the underworld statue-like. Ixion’s wheel stands as still as Hermione’s
sculpture and Sisyphus poses on his stone. His song, which is equally a song of mourning for the
lost Eurydice and an attempt to recoup her, succeeds in prolonging this pause, but it does not aid
him in finally bringing his beloved to life. To put a turn on Auden’s dictum, the triumph of
Orpheus’s poetry in the underworld is that it “makes nothing happen.” For the duration of
Orpheus’s song, he briefly breaks away from the temporal urgency and irrevocability of narrative
and succeeds in his attempt to win back Eurydice. Until the moment that Hermione moves and
speaks, this breaking away from narrative time to produce art as mourning for failed animation—
524
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Golding, 10.42-50.
272
and not the divine animation of the Pygmalion myth—is the best that art seems to have to offer
to the bereaved court.
In Hope of an Answer
The role of art in the particular ancient aesthetic outlined above is to produce
voice/poetry as a surrogate for mourning. That this mourning produces an illusion of life and
lifelikeness is precisely what Callistratus, in his telling of the Memon story, calls “a miracle.”
525
But that is its limit. We are mocked with art. And while this self-cancelling imagination of the
trope of speech is productive, it ultimately imagines poetic speech as purely self-referential. If
speech is efficacious here, what it yields is consolation for the animation it does not ultimately
provide. It is clear that this imagination significantly shapes the responses of Hermione’s
audience in the statue scene. However, as I will go on to show, the imagination of voice in early
modern England was in significant flux. Early modern writing maintains a question about
whether artistic language produced a mere illusion of speech or longing for speech or could be
seen as slightly more powerful, more ambiguously animating. What is more, as my last section
will demonstrate, the stakes of that question were ultimately tied to religious controversies that
motivated deep political divides. The early modern imagination of voice and address, like its
wider imagination of the uses of rhetorical figures, was undergoing a significant change. Tropes
that would later become fundamental elements of poetic theories were at this moment the shared
resources of multiple discourses with differing stakes, including rhetoric, lyric, drama, and even
devotion.
525
Callistratus, Descriptions, 407.
273
Lyric poetry holds a privileged place in the history of the trope of voice in part because it
can so freely manipulate the terms by which a fictional voice is made to appear.
526
It can shift
speakers or address absent auditors without excuse or explanation, and it can capitalize on the
fantasy of vocal presence to imagine speech as the source of a kind of animacy. It is within the
space of a lyric event, for example, that Barbara Johnson describes apostrophe’s ability to
“throw[] voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute
responsiveness.”
527
In turn, poetry is allowed the privilege of engaging with a boundary between
life and death, presence and absence. And yet the work of the trope of voice in the Renaissance
was by no means restricted to the lyric. Heather Dubrow’s study of lyric tropes in early modern
England has observed how the “juxtaposition of effects of presence and distance,” and frequent
shifts in positionality, which are key elements of the trope of the voice in lyric theory, were
common features of early modern lyric poetry, but also appear in devotional verse, pastoral
literature, polyphonic music, drama, rhetorical argument, and the literature of patronage.
528
Lyric, in other words, claims more power over the fiction of voice than it should. I would add
that the imagination of voice in early modern England also engaged with the visual arts. Tombs
and gravestones are often figured as speaking in this period, as Scott Newstok has explicated,
526
Most scholarship on the trope of the voice has emphasized its role as an effect of poetry. E. Richards’s entry on
“voice” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes that while voice is prevalent in some narrative
theories, “poetry is regularly imagined to be the privileged site of vocal presence,” and metaphors of orality—which
are linked to the notion of speakerly presence—“cleave far closer to poetry than to fiction, non-fiction, or perhaps
even drama,” 1525.
527
Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, Abortion,” 30.
528
Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008), 113, 83-85.
274
and the relation between word and image in emblem books often represents images as
“speaking” in their own voice.
529
The notion of a speaker in this period is, then, incredibly plastic. As Paul Alpers has
demonstrated as part of his own exploration of apostrophe in Renaissance lyric, early modern
writers frequently address objects or concepts in roles similar to that of another speaker even
without the optative performatics that are so important to Culler’s reading of apostrophe as an
animating form.
530
One does not need to animate a lute or a transcendental concept like, say,
“Time” because they are already imagined as semi-animate or at least proximate to an animated
speaker. As Alpers puts it, “in the economy of Renaissance apostrophe…personification
preceded, rather than is a consequence of, an address to what is inanimate.”
531
I suspect that
Alpers might slightly overstate his case here in his attempt to emphasize the need for a period-
based study of the lyric.
532
Indeed, it might be easy to mistake the early modern poetic landscape
Alpers describes as completely animist. Even if the boundaries between animacy and inanimacy
are more porous in this period, this is simply not the case. Early modern rhetorical handbooks, in
fact, frequently rely on the categorical distinction between animate and inanimate things when
they are attempting to enumerate the various different ways of employing a trope.
533
And indeed,
some early modern readers are very interested in protecting the boundaries between animacy and
529
See Scott L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
530
Paul Alpers, “Apostrophe and the Rhetoric of Renaissance Lyric.” Representations 122.1 (2013), 1–22.
531
Alpers, 18.
532
Alpers is particularly interested in drawing a distinction between Renaissance lyric and the lyric structures of the
Romantics, whose poetry has been the focus of most criticism about apostrophe.
533
For example, see Henry Peacham’s list of types of metaphor in The Garden of Eloquence, Conteining the Most
Excellent Ornaments, etc. (London: R.F. for H Jackson, 1593), D
r
.
275
inanimacy so as to avoid raising the specter of idolatry.
534
Even in the Renaissance, sometimes a
rock is just a rock. And yet, Alpers’s qualification of Culler’s theory of apostrophe underscores
just how important it is to attend to what is and isn’t imagined an animate in this period. Where
is inanimacy enforced and why? And what role does poetic speech or rhetoric have to play in
navigating that boundary?
Sculptures, as my previous section has demonstrated, are an interesting case here. In a
world in which many things can be imagined as personified, sculpted figures, which already bear
the face of a person, attract a kind of speech that emphasizes the ultimate fictionality of
personification. The speeches addressed to sculptures or about sculptures quoted above all
dramatize the longing for a kind of mimesis that can truly animate, but they do so with the
certainty that art can be animated only in fiction. Alpers ends his essay with a call to “identify
and explore various rhetorics of lyric as they manifest themselves in the literary cultures of
different times and places.”
535
But if sculptures increasingly attract apostrophes in this period, as
Barkan has demonstrated, then perhaps one opportunity for literary-historical scholarship is even
more granular: to identify and explore various rhetorics of lyric’s “master tropes” as they are
manifested outside the lyric in different times and places. In the Renaissance, as Shakespeare’s
statue scene demonstrates, apostrophe is not purely a trope of animation. Rather, and more
subtly, the trope acts as a space for wrestling with the claim that language can animate.
By the time the Romantic poets that form the center of Culler’s argument were writing,
the boundaries between animacy and inanimacy were far less fluid than in the early modern
period. A post-enlightenment world—absent of either the ancient gods or the early modern
534
On idolatry, see Ernest P. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
535
Alpers, 22.
276
personifications that were their relics—is perhaps a prerequisite for a newly powerful
imagination of certain poetic tropes. Culler can find Blake and Shelley and Keats using
apostrophe to animate the inanimate because they are writing after a mass extinction. When
critics such as Dubrow and Marjorie Perloff emphasize the historical difference between the
poetry of the Romantic poets favored by lyric theorists and the poetry of other periods, they
place an even greater pressure on our understanding of the earlier uses of tropes that would
become central to modern lyric theory.
536
Why is it, we should ask, that the Renaissance is
attracted to the kind of speech that plays with the boundary between animacy and inanimacy,
presence and absence? Why are the self-cancelling aspects of that speech—the moments in
which the fantasies of voice and animacy are undercut—aspects of the trope that Shakespeare
chooses to employ in the statue scene? And do these aspects inform why Shakespeare might
choose to construct the statue scene (a scene which is so unnecessary to the narrative closure of
the play) in the first place? One answer is that rhetoric itself was undergoing a significant
challenge in this period. In religious dialogue in particular, the benefits of dismissing rhetoric as
mere rhetoric or figurative speaking far outweighed the benefits of an artistic and animating
imagination of voice, because they helped to resist certain Catholic beliefs. By dismissing
rhetorical speech as frivolous, these religious conversations contribute to a transformation of the
work rhetorical tropes are imagined accomplishing.
Prior to the moment that rhetorical apostrophe becomes leverage in a theological debate,
however, the stakes of apostrophe were already in flux. Recall that apostrophe, for the most part,
had previously been a tool of classical rhetoric. As J. Douglas Kneale has emphasized, the
“explicit directing of voice” to an audience was the baseline of rhetorical speech, and so the
536
See Dubrow, 4.
277
immediacy of a speaker—if not their addressee—could generally be assumed.
537
In rhetoric,
apostrophe allowed a speaker to redirect his speech, and, in the words of Quintilian, “divert the
attention of the hearer.”
538
Because rhetorical apostrophe assumes an original speaker addressing
an original audience, Kneale argues, not all directed speech (for example, “O west wind!”) can
be considered apostrophe, though all directed speech is assumed to signify the presence of the
speaker.
539
Part of Kneale’s point is that, in the Renaissance, apostrophe’s presencing power
should not be overstated.
However, as Culler demonstrates, apostrophe also brings with it an imagination of speech
on the part of the addressee (that is to say, it calls for its companion, prosopopoeia) and can
produce the effect of a certain enforcement of animicity.
540
For Culler, apostrophe’s most
important effect is its dramatization of speech, producing the illusion of a speaker’s voice and the
impression that one might be able, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare’s play, to “stand in hope
of an answer” from the person or object addressed (5.2.102). The apostrophes in Shakespeare’s
scene, draw on the tension between these two visions of apostrophe when they variously imagine
Hermione’s ability to speak back to those who address her sculpture. For Kneale, the definitive
537
Kneale, 148.
538
Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), 9.2.38-39.
539
It seems important to me to note, however, how much the loss of the orator’s rhetorical situation complicates this
sense of speakerly immediacy. Indeed, lyric and poetic theory’s obsession with locating the subject of speech—
questioning whether poetic speech is pure fiction or an extension of the poet’s speech, whether speakers are heard or
overheard or echoed—might be said to arise specifically in the absence of the orator’s rhetorical, persuasive
purpose. Of course, anyone who has read an early modern love poem will know that poetic speech, however
fictional, does not always abandon its suasive purpose. But the ambiguity of the identity of the speaker and
addressee, which, as Dubrow notes, is part of what allows apostrophizing love poets to get away with certain
scandalous speeches, is evidence of early modern poetry’s slow drift from assumptions common to classical
rhetoric.
540
Culler, “Apostrophe,” 141.
278
aspect of apostrophe in the Renaissance, as in classical rhetoric, is its movement, its redirection
from one audience to another. The version of apostrophe that is at stake in Shakespeare’s scene,
however, seems less concerned with the movements and redirections of speech as movements
than with what it means to be in voice, to be imagined as capable of speech in the first place. In
other words, apostrophe in Shakespeare’s scene is concerned with animation because it is
concerned with Hermione’s speech.
In the early modern rhetorical handbooks that I have examined, these two aspects of
apostrophe (apostrophe as redirection and apostrophe as directed and animating speech) are less
distinct than Kneale might seem to suggest. Early modern writing about apostrophe seems very
clearly to be interested in what Culler has described as the troping on a “circuit of
communication” that is generated by acts of apostrophe. That is, it is interested in who speaks,
who is spoken to, and what (other than personification writ large) happens between them. For
John Hoskins in Direccions for Speech and Style, for example, imagining the circulation of
speech between a speaker and something absent or non-human, leading to animation, is very
much what is at stake in apostrophe. Hoskins writes:
It is most convenient sometimes for the bringing in of life and lustre to represent some
unexpected strains beside the tenor of your tale, and act, as it were, your meaning; which
is done either by feigning the presence or the discourse of some such person as either are
not at all or, if there be, yet speak not but by imagination. The first is by apostrophe or
prosopopoeia.
541
Hoskins significantly blurs the distinctions between apostrophe and prosopopoeia here, but if one
follows the parallel “or”s at the end of the sentence, we might reasonably hear him saying that
541
John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style (1599), ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1935), 47-48.
279
apostrophe is the trope that imagines a figure as present—that summons presence—while
prosopopoeia is what lends a figure speech. The two tropes accompany one another in Hoskins’s
mind. Hoskins’s claim that apostrophe is a way to “act as it were, your meaning” is also opaque,
but can, I think, be associated with what later critics describe as the dramatization of speech and
speaking that takes place in apostrophe. The notion that apostrophe might bring in “life and
lustre” also gestures to the idea that apostrophe implies animacy. Notably, the classical
description of apostrophe as the turning aside of speech from one audience to another is not
essential to Hoskins’s description of the trope at all. Instead, this early modern rhetor is
concerned with apostrophe as a mediator between presence and absence.
The rhetorical emphasis on the movement of apostrophe is more discernable in Peacham,
although he, too, is primarily interested in apostrophe’s ability to make the absent present. For
Peacham, the movement from speaking of a thing to speaking to a thing is apostrophe. Peacham
writes that an orator uses apostrophe:
when he hath long spoken of some person or thing, he leaveth speaking of it, and
speaketh unto it, which is no other thing then a sudden removing from the third person to
the second. Cicero in his Orations, hath plentie of examples of this figure, where
sometimes he speaketh to Dolobella, Antony, and others being absent as if they were
present.
542
Peacham calls attention to the movement from third person to second person (from “it” to “you”)
in apostrophe and describes it as a form of speaking to the absent as if they were present.
Peacham’s emphasis on this shift points to what Culler will describe as the I/thou relationship of
apostrophe. In Peacham’s example, however, the “thou”s of apostrophe are not rocks and trees
542
Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, Riii
v
.
280
but absent and/or dead historical persons. Even if Peacham imagines apostrophe as a redirection
of speech, he stresses the fictionality of the new address. The orator addresses figures “being
absent as if they were present.” For Kneale, there is no apostrophe without a movement of
address. For Culler (and Hoskins and to some degree Peacham) apostrophe is equally
distinguishable by the absence and/or inanimacy of whomever/whatever the speaker addresses
and possibly also imagines being able to speak back.
In the early modern period, some concept of voice and speech is already migrating from
the domain of rhetoric, where its aims are “real” and active, to the realms of art, where its aims
are more contemplative and fictive. In the realm of art, the powers of the voice are imagined as
distinct from the gravity and persuasive power of speech in classical rhetoric. In rhetoric, the
speaker was real, and their speech had real effects in the world (in the form of persuasion, legal
decisions, etc.). Art (that is, poetry and other forms of imagined speech such as song or epitaph
and maybe drama) metaphorizes that speaker, drawing attention to the voice as an illusion. So,
when Leontes addresses the statue of Hermione and invites her to speak in the middle of his
conversation with Paulina and the other members of the court, he is calling attention to the
presence he wishes were there but “knows” is not in part because this is art. That she might
speak back in reality can only be imagined as a miracle—unless art and language can be said to
have a real effect on absence. Apostrophe, as it reverberates between the mourning speaker and
the mourned-for beloved acts as a secular aesthetic miracle. The real effects of speech, however,
are very much a matter of interest and concern in this period. It is worthwhile, then, to trace the
imagination of speech as it shifts throughout the period, and even through one scene in one play.
When is apostrophic speech imagined as effective and when is it not? In what sense is it
imagined as effective? What influences contribute to these changes?
281
Another area of early modern discourse in which discussion of apostrophe frequently
appears clarifies the stakes of imagining a figure of speech like apostrophe as truly efficacious.
When apostrophe is imagined as efficacious, this discourse suggests, it has the power to
transcend absence, to make the dead and absent—and even God himself—present. In the period
prior to Shakespeare’s writing of The Winter’s Tale, the figure of apostrophe bore a surprising
role in certain debates between Catholic and Anti-Catholic writers. Because apostrophe appeared
in some early Christian writings, early modern debaters, trained to identify the figures of
rhetoric, offered accounts of the trope that justified their beliefs about religious ceremonies and
doctrines. One of the key features of this debate is that Protestant writers employ a rhetoric that
undercuts rhetoric—emphasizing the emptiness and fictionality of tropes like apostrophe. The
closing scene of The Winter’s Tale, which many critics have argued is attentive to contemporary
religious sentiments, borrows from this religious controversy in order to perform a dialectic
between poetry that does nothing and poetry that does something. In the statue scene,
Shakespeare auditions religious speech in order to imagine a form of artistic speech, of
apostrophe, that is not empty and ineffective but is instead truly performative.
Runne you to the Rhetoritians?
Victor Stoichita has written that the concluding scene of The Winter’s Tale moves
through two different levels of animation: that of the gallery and that of the chapel.
543
In the
gallery, Leontes apostrophizes a sculpture. As much as his speech performs his desire for the
sculpture’s life, the ultimate limit of the gallery is that “we are mocked with art” (5.3.68). The
drama of the chapel is different. At the end of the scene, Paulina apostrophizes the deceased,
543
Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 103.
282
Perdita kneels and prays, and Hermione awakes. The scene juxtaposes two modes of expressing
a similar desire. One apostrophe mourns for the animation it considers impossible—hence
Leontes’s repeated withdrawals and doubts. Another apostrophe prays. To everyone’s wonder
(except, in some readings, Paulina’s), this prayer is efficacious. Juxtaposing these two forms of
speech dramatizes what others have also recognized in this play: a desire for a truly performative
language. What has not been previously recognized, however, is the degree to which the scene
borrows its specific linguistic terms from contemporary religious debates, both about prayer to
saints and about real presence in the Eucharist. In borrowing these terms, Shakespeare draws
attention to the question of whether rhetoric does nothing or something. To imagine apostrophe
as efficacious is to imagine speech as performative and art as a mediator between absence and
presence, loss and recuperation.
In defending their doctrines on these points, Catholic writers pointed to several moments
in the writings of the Church Fathers in which the ancient doctors and saints employed
apostrophes. For the Catholic writers, these apostrophes to dead saints and to the elements of the
Eucharist justified their current practices. Protestants countered that these speeches were merely
rhetoric—that they expressed a wish but fell far short of establishing doctrine. The Protestant
approach to this debate placed two forms of speech in a dialectic. They drew a distinction
between, on the one hand, a rhetorical speech, which is a speech of desire or fantasy or wish, and
on the other hand, a speech of prayer, which is backed by faith in the capacity of the addressee to
perform the speaker’s wish. In the Protestant approach, it is only the faithful speech of prayer
that can be imagined as truly efficacious. When Shakespeare appropriates both sides of this
dialectic into the sculpture scene, he stages the question of what his art of language can be
imagined to achieve.
283
The religious atmosphere that overtakes the statue scene is unmistakable. When Perdita
kneels to implore the “blessing” of the “Lady” and “Dear queen” that is Hermione’s sculpture,
she echoes the language and ritual of the Roman Catholic cult of Mary.
544
The gathering of
penitents and mourners around the statue of the absent queen, and Paulina’s priest-like
ministration of the events, distinctly recalls scenes of image worship, devotion to saints, and
eucharistic celebration. Some readers, observing Shakespeare’s representation of Roman
Catholic habits at the moment the play transforms its last remaining tragedy to a comedy, argue
that the play stages a longing for England’s Roman Catholic past (Vanita) or condones a
Catholic aesthetic (Jensen).
545
Michael O’Connell suggests that the scene draws its audience into
complicity with a scene of image worship, pressing the audience “into idolatry” and confirming
“the worst fears of the anti-theatricalists” even while it licenses the spectacle of theater.
546
Walter
Lim takes a more qualified approach, arguing that the theological structures that the play invokes
do not amount to any endorsement, but rather facilitates a comparison between the capacities of
faith and the powers of art to aid in the apprehension of reality.
547
My reading echoes some
aspects of Lim’s conclusion—though I am less interested in the play’s epistemology than I am
invested in its poetic. The play employs both poles of a dialectic between rhetorical speech and
the speech of faith. By performing the achievement of the desire for animation through a
rhetorical act addressed to a work of art, the play borrows a kind of faith in speech from religion.
544
Vanita, 311-315.
545
Ibid.; Jensen, 281.
546
O’Connell, 141.
547
Walter S. H. Lim, “Knowledge and Belief in The Winter’s Tale,” SEL 41.2 (2001), 330-331.
284
That is to say, it secularizes a miracle of language. If this scene is a scene of idolatry, its idol is
speech as much as it is image.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Puritan writer and Cambridge divine William
Fulke exchanged a series of texts engaging in theological debates with Catholic writers including
Richard Bristow and Nicholas Sander. One of their central disagreements was over the doctrine
of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The Catholic writers believed they had a smoking
gun attesting to the ancient church Fathers’ belief in real presence, while the Protestants were
adamant in reading the evidence differently. In his Ecclesiastical Heirarchy, Dionysius the
Pseudo-Aeropagite addresses an apostrophe to the eucharistic feast. Here it is as translated by the
anonymous Catholic author of The Christian’s Manna in 1613:
O Diuinissimum, & Sacrosanctum Sacramentu~ obducta titbi significantium signorum
operimenta dignanter aperi; & perspicue nobis fac appareas; nostros{que} spirituals
oculos sigulari, & aperto tuae lucis fulgore imple. O most Divine, and most holy
Sacrament, vouchsafe to remooue from thee the veyles, or couerings of those signifying
signes, & appeare to vs perspicuously, and fill our spirituall Eyes with a singular, and
cleare resplendency of thy Light.
548
For Catholic readers, this passage, with its address and its request, appeared to amount to a
prayer. Dionysius, they argued, would not have prayed to the sacrament if it did not contain the
presence of a God who could answer that prayer. According to the Puritan readers, the Catholics
were mistaking a sign for its signified and missing the fundamentally rhetorical nature of the
548
R.N., The Christians manna. Or A treatise of the most blessed and reuerend sacrament of the Eucharist Deuided
into tvvo tracts. Written by a Catholike deuine, through occasion of Monsieur Casaubon his epistle to Cardinal
Peron, expressing therin the graue and approued iudgment of the Kings Maiesty, touching the doctrine of the reall
presence in the Eucharist (the English College Press, 1613), T2
v
.
285
speech. Fulke writes in 1579: “Now touching his supposed prayer, it is but an exclamation`
rhetoricall, named apostrophe, not vnto the bread & wine, but to him, that in that mysterie is
represented, which is Christ.”
549
The Catholics took up the argument from rhetoric, suggesting that if Dionysius had meant
to address Christ and not the Sacrament itself, he would have done so using another apostrophe,
a change in speech from one audience to another. Employing one apostrophe alone, Dionysius
must be addressing the Sacrament. The Christian’s Manna lays out this point of view and states
the conclusions to which, by the early 17
th
century, it led:
Heere it cannot be said, that he did so inuoke the bread, because such Inuocation were
most ridiculous. Neither can it be said, that Dionysius did make an Apostrope, or Chang
of speech, from the Symboles of the Eucharist to Christ signified thereby, inuoking Christ
before the Symboles; for here Dionysius doth not inuoke Christ, as he is in Heauen, but
inuokes the Sacrament it selfe, and demandeth of it such things as are to be obtained of
God alone. Add hereto that the ground of this Answere doth warrant the Catholikes
praying before Images, for if a man may pray to Christ before the Symboles of his Body,
by the same reason may he pray to him before his Image.
550
Two very different approaches to a rhetorical argument are here entangled. On one level, the
argument seems to come down to who or what is addressed in Dionysius’s speech. Does he
address Christ, who is symbolized in the Sacrament, or the Sacrament itself? The assumption
549
William Fulke, D. Heskins, D. Sanders, and M. Rastel, accounted (among their faction) three pillers and
archpatriarches of the popish synagogue (vtter enemies to the truth of Christes Gospell, and all that syncerely
professe the same) ouerthrowne, and detected of their seuerall blasphemous heresies. By D. Fulke, Maister of
Pembrooke Hall in Cambridge. Done and directed to the Church of England, and all those which loue the trueth
(London: Henrie Middleton, 1579), Qi
r
, 271.
550
R.N., The Christian’s Manna, T3
r
.
286
here is that Dionysius’s apostrophe asserts the divinity (the animacy and power) of his addressee.
On another level, the argument is not only about who is addressed but how. With this second
question, the argument about apostrophe slips into a different register. Apostrophe is no longer a
device within rhetoric, but a stand-in for rhetoric itself. On this level, the question at hand is
whether Dionysius’s apostrophe is a piece of rhetoric or a prayer. Fulke is clear about his take:
“Now touching his supposed prayer, it is but an exclamation` rhetoricall, named apostrophe”
551
As a rhetorical speech, Dionysius’s apostrophe is merely an exclamation or a statement of desire.
The Catholic text counters that when Dionysius addresses the Sacrament, he “demandeth of it
such things as are to be obtained of God alone”
552
In making this demand, Dionysius’s speech
becomes a prayer, a supplication made in faith, and an assertion of a promise to be performed.
The words are not empty but spoken in faith.
This is the ground on which the anonymous Catholic author extends his argument to
justify prayer before images. The author’s argument rests in the fact that the speeches uttered
before the “Symboles” of Christ’s body and the speeches uttered before “Images” are both
prayers. Through a sleight of hand, the author does not equate image with sacrament or describe
a relationship between Christ and the image; rather, he equates prayer with prayer. It is speech,
grounded in faith, that the Catholics claim as justification for their practices. One can imagine a
Protestant reply—you can make speeches in front of images as much as you want, but they are
nothing more than speeches. Reducing Dionysius’s apostrophe to an exclamation, or mere
rhetoric, spares his Protestant readers from believing things they don’t want to believe.
551
Fulke, Qi
r
, 271.
552
R.N., The Christian’s Manna, T3
r
.
287
Protestant writers kept up a similar strain of argument to defend against multiple Catholic
doctrines—including prayer to the saints, the belief that the dead can intercede for the living, and
doctrines about the Eucharist. This line of argument—that rhetoric expresses a wish and does not
constitute a promise or provide grounds for belief—shows up in dozens of texts that span the
time of Shakespeare’s writing. What emerges is a consistent pattern of contrasting rhetorical
speech with a kind of speech that is imagined to be more efficacious. Thomas Bilson’s dialogue
The True Difference Between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (a truly
remarkable tome at over 800 pages of densely-packed dialogue in English, Latin, and Greek)
does a particularly fine job of articulating both sides of this dialectic. Here, Bilson’s characters
(Theophilus, the Protestant, and Philander, the Jesuit) are debating how best to translate
Dionysius’s prayer:
THEO: Or if any man like rather haue it an Apostrophe, to a thing lacking life, such as
the learned are well acquainted with, and the Scriptures often vse: he may interprete it
nearer to the right signification of the word […]
PHI: Runne you for refuge to the Rhetoritians?
THEO: As though the scriptures were not full of the like speaches? Ioshua sayd, Thou
sunne stand stil in Gibeon, and thou moone in the valley of Aialon. And so the man of
Iudah, O Altar, Altar, thus sayth the Lord, behold. And Esai him-selfe beganne his
prophesie with, Heare O heauens, and hearken O earth.
PHI: Those were speaches, not prayers; as this is.
THEOPH: They bee all imperatiue moodes, as well as this, and so is that saying of
Dauid, Lyft vp your heads, ye gates, and bee yee lift up, you euerlasting doors, and the
king fo glory shall come in; which yet is no prayer to the doors. The moode of it selfe is
288
not precative except the person bee such, as wee must not commaunde but onely intreate:
and being used to things without life it sheweth the desire of our heart touching them, not
any supplication unto them.
553
Bilson’s Theophilus (the Protestant) is quite clear. No matter how assertively a speech makes a
demand, if it is spoken to things without sense, it is a statement of desire and not a prayer or
supplication. One can give a speech to a rock or a gate or a picture, but one can only pray to God.
One of the upshots of the Protestant argument is that it renders rhetoric quite impotent. Culler’s
suggestion that apostrophe enforces the animation of its audience would be outright rejected by
these writers. Bilson would think the person who spoke to a sculpture and stood “in hope of an
answer” was being absurd. Viewed from the perspective of poetics, in order to fend off what
were perceived as dangerous Catholic beliefs, the Protestant argument forecloses any
imagination of rhetorical speech being taken literally. It is safest, this approach implies, to
assume that apostrophe does nothing—does not make the absent present or animate its
addressee—because such an assumption also eliminates prayers to saints or sacramental
elements.
In the early 17
th
century, the more pressing controversy was over whether or not one
should pray to saints and/or the souls of the dead in the hope of receiving their blessing. Again,
the writings of the ancient church Fathers provided source texts which each faction interpreted
differently. And again, the warring divines relied on an opposition between mere rhetoric,
marked by doubts and guesses, and true invocations made in faith. For these writers, dismissing
553
Thomas Bilson, The true difference betweene Christian subiection and unchristian rebellion wherein the princes
lawfull power to commaund for trueth, and indepriuable right to beare the sword are defended against the Popes
censures and the Iesuits sophismes vttered in their apologie and defence of English Catholikes: with a
demonstration that the thinges refourmed in the Church of England by the lawes of this realme are truely Catholike,
notwithstanding the vaine shew made to the contrary in their late Rhemish Testament (Oxford: Joseph Barnes,
1585), 716.
289
Roman Catholic doctrines was often a matter of recasting their origins as superstitions or tales.
Philippe de Mornay’s 1600 treatise on the doctrines of the ancient church offers a striking origin
story for the Roman Catholic belief that deceased saints can pray for the living.
554
In de
Mornay’s telling, the belief began through a hunch or a hope of the early Fathers, and though the
desire was never made certain, the notion was passed through the expanding early church like an
old wives’ tale:
The praiers of the Saintes deceased for the liuing, were the particular opinions of Origen
and Cyprian, founded vpon a likelihood, and fostered in the solitarie celles and closters of
Monkes, vntil such time as they brought forht the offering vp of praiers from the liuing
vnto those that were dead. And breaking out of the canins of the Monasteries, they
beganne to preach in the pulpit, vppon that great increase of the Church that followed the
empire of Constatntine, and his successors; and yet all this while carried more like vnto a
Rhetoricall figure or flourish, then anie article or graue pointe of Diuinitie, and deliuered
in their Panegyrickes. And Saint Basill and Nazianzene, who brought the Monkes out of
Egypt and Syria into Greece, were the promoters and furtherers thereof, being the most
famous Orators of that age.
555
This belief began as a “particular opinion” “founded upon a likelihood.” As such, it lacks the
certainty of doctrine. And while it might be acceptable as a hunch or a tale told in winter, the
Fathers have fallen out of line in spreading the belief. Strikingly, it is oratory that de Mornay
554
Phillipe de Mornay, Fovvre bookes, of the institution, vse and doctrine of the holy sacrament of the Eucharist in
the old Church As likevvise, hovv, vvhen, and by what degrees the masse is brought in, in place thereof (London:
John Windet, 1600), Ee2
v
-3
r
.
555
Ibid., Ee5
v
.
290
accuses of spreading falsehoods. Oratory being the realm of panegyric and flourish, it is apt to
lead the minds of less discerning audiences into false belief.
Relying on a distinction between words spoken in hope and words spoken in faith,
however, set up a significant pitfall for the Protestant argument. Protestant writers find
themselves arguing that these passages in the early church fathers do not establish doctrine
because the speakers are in doubt. For example, resisting the claim that Gregory of Nazianzus
asked for the prayers of Constantine, de Mornay writes, “And as for the dead, would he haue
prayed unto them in such vncertaine and wauering sort, and with so little faith?”
556
De Mornay
resists believing that Gregory prayed to Constantine because his speech included a caution:
“heare likewise O thou soule of the great Constantine, if thou haue any sence in thee, and you O
ye soules of the rest of the Christian Emperors.”
557
Because Gregory hedges with an “if,” de
Mornay can interpret it as “the verie same which the Rhetoricians call Apostrophe”
558
The
implication is that if the speakers were to assert their belief more firmly, to pray in faith, then the
Protestants wouldn’t hold them in as much doubt.
We can see this dynamic play out, for example, in two Protestant texts addressing the
question of whether St. Jerome believed that the dead can pray for the living. St. Jerome had
dedicated a letter to a deceased friend named Paula. In 1610, Henry Hexam translated an
argument about the letter from Johannes Polyander a Kerchoven. Polyander writes that Jerome
spoke to Paula, “who was absent and in heauen, as if she had been present, and that by a figure,
556
Ibid., Ee6
r
.
557
Ibid.
558
Ibid.
291
and certaine manner of speech called in Schooles Apostrophe.”
559
But Polyander only offers this
figurative interpretation of the letter because Jerome spoke with a certain doubt. The case would
be quite different if Jerome had spoken with certainty. He writes:
If then you will take these words to the very letter, to conclude from thence that hee hath
called upon Paula with a full assurance that she heard him, and could perswade the
diuine Maiestie to heare her request, you must likewise grant me, that he discoursed with
her mouth to mouth, and that in praying to God to preserue her in health, he beleued that
she, and all the Saints in Paradise, desire that after their departure, we should recommend
them to God in our prayers.
560
“Full assurance” and belief are, apparently, all it would take for Jerome to speak “mouth to
mouth” with the dead and absent. Francis White, in 1617, follows up on this argument: “S.
Heirom at no time by way of doctrine, maintained inuocation of the Saints: and he doubted
whether Saints departed could heare our praiers”
561
Jerome’s doubt is sufficient to transform the
nature of his speech. It would be one thing, White thinks, to ask the dead to speak or pray, and it
would be another to invocate them. But one cannot hedge an invocation. White goes on to
lambaste the Catholics in no uncertain terms:
But they onely corrade a few broken and vncertaine speeches, whereof some are
figuratiue: other, wishes and requests, limited by ifs & ands; as, heare Oh Constantines
559
Johannes Polyander à Kerckhoven, The refutation of an epistle, written by a certain doctor of the Augustins
order within the citie of Leige together with the arguments, which he hath borrowed from Robert Bellarmine, to
proue the inuocation of Saints, trans. Henry Hexam (London: F.Kingston for Thomas Man, 1610),Oi
r
.
560
Ibid.
561
Francis White, The orthodox faith and vvay to the Church explaned and iustified in answer to a popish treatise,
entituled, White died blacke; wherein T.W. p. in his triple accusation of D. White for impostures, vntruths, and
absurd illations, is proued a trifler: and the present controuersies betweene vs and the Romanists are more fully
deliuered and cleared (London: Richard Field, 1617), E3
v
.
292
soule, if thou haue sence, or notion of these things; or priuae devotions& conceipts of
some particular persons; or bastard sentences foisted into the writings of Fathers by
Hucksters of their owne fellowship: and from hence inferre a Catholike doctrine and
article of Faith, according to their modern fashion concerning inuocation of Saints.
562
The great failure of the Catholic practice is that they have taken fragments of doubtful, figurative
rhetoric and interpreted them as the ground from modern practices. That is, they have taken
rhetoric literally.
Perhaps the most striking twist in this ongoing exchange was a Catholic rebuttal that
follows this argument to a certain logical conclusion. Their argument was simple: if lack of faith
is evidence against efficacy, then those who do not believe can read these apostrophes as
ineffective rhetoric, while those who do believe may account them prayers. On the face of it, this
argument registers a profound ambivalence, but in some devotional literature, it is presented
specifically as a way of preserving one’s conscience. The English translator of a Jesuit collection
of prayers to Saints, The Interior Occupation of the Soul, offered just such an argument in his
1618 preface:
I have thought good, to set thee downe two ways; how thou mayst both read, and vse the
foresaid prayers: not onely without scruple and offence of conscience, according to the
opinion of thine owne Masters, which is the first way: but also according to the
profession of Ours, with great delight, & true spirituall comfort; which is the other.
The first is (supposing thou canst not thinke better) to Imagine, all the Prayers of this
Booke to the Saints of heauen to be but a figure of Rethorick called Apostrophe; or which
562
Ibid., E4
r
.
293
is all one, a fayned speech whereby to excite affectio~ made unto those things wt cannot
heare vs; as to a Rocke, to a Riuer; to Birds or Beasts. For in such figuratiue senses, the
most learned Doctors of thine owne religion, do understand those innumerable prayers to
Saints, which euery where they reade in the holy Fathers […]
Wherefore, if thou canst frame thy conscience to beleeve, that all these payers and the
like, are nothing else but fayned speeches; this will be one way according to the doctrine
of thine own masters, not onely to serve thy selfe, but also to satsifie others, that shall
objecte the reading of this Booke, or the practice thereof vnto thee. But if according to
truth and reason, thou be so perswaded, that neither wee nor the holy Fathers, either doe,
or may use such figurative or fayned prayers; it will import thee, to followe the other
way, and to believe with vs, that they are really spoken vnto the Saints; not as vnto walles
and woods, but as vnto those, that verily heare us, and are able to help vs.
563
While the scenario the translator imagines seems somewhat unlikely (why would a Protestant
reader who didn’t believe in the efficacy of prayers to saints be reading a volume of prayers to
saints?) his advice is nevertheless revealing. On the one hand, it perpetuates the Protestants’
empty notion of rhetoric. Rhetoric is feigned speech that literally falls on deaf ears. As such it
cannot possibly be harmful. One can lawfully read as many rhetorical speeches to dead and
unhearing saints as one wants. Though the advice appears “pastoral” it also places a cunning
twist on the Protestants’ central argument, a jab the writer acknowledges by casting shade on the
563
The interiour occupation of the soule Treating of the important businesse of our saluation with God, and his
saints, by way of prayer. Composed in French for the exercise of that court, by the R. Father, Pater Cotton of the
Societie of Iesus, and translated into English by C.A. for the benefit of all our nation. Whereunto is prefixed a
preface by the translator, in defence of the prayers of this booke, to the saints in heauen, trans. C.A. (Doway, UK:
the English Secret Press, 1618), *5
r-v
.
294
“most learned Doctors” of the Protestant religion. On the other hand, the preface also casts a
positive vision. It imagines a kind of speech—the apostrophic speech of prayer—that has real
effects in the (spiritual) world. If, the writer seems to promise, we were to take language literally,
then we would see the work it can do. Taken literally and not figuratively an apostrophe
transforms the relationship between speaker and addressee; it moves past “walles and woodes” to
address real, hearing persons who have the ability to respond. This metamorphosis is a miracle of
language spoken in faith.
With this context in mind, what do we see when we return to the scene before the statue
in Shakespeare’s chapel? Shakespeare’s Paulina manages the scene of Hermione’s animation in
terms that echo those of the ongoing debate about the invocation of saints and the prayers of the
dead: “It is required / you do awake your faith” (5.3.94). Paulina’s assertion is strikingly vague.
What kind of faith will these events require? Faith in what? Paulina likewise projects the feigned
ambivalence that appears in some Catholic texts. “Or those that think this is unlawful business / I
am about,” she says, “let them depart” (5.3.96-97). Just as one could set aside a book of prayers
about which they have doubts, or read them as a series of figurative speeches, one can walk away
from the “business” in the chapel. But Paulina goes on to address speech to the “sculpture” that
is in no sense figurative. Underwritten by her own faith, and perhaps that of her audience, it
animates its hearer:
[To Hermione] ‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach.
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I’ll fill your grave up. Stir—nay, come away;
Bequeath to death your dumbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs.
295
Start not. Her actions shall be holy as
You hear my spell is lawful. (5.3.98-105)
The faith that is at stake here, I wish to suggest, is faith in a kind of performative speech. It is
faith that Paulina’s invocations—directed at a work of art, which is also a stand-in for a lost
queen—will do some work. Choosing “Paulina” as the name of a woman whose prayers can
transcend death and absence may also include a subtle reference to the Catholic/Protestant
debates about the prayers of the dead. Recall that it was a woman named “Paula” whom Jerome
addressed, hoping specifically that the dead saints might be able to pray for the living. Other
scholars have suggested a reference to the apostle Paul and his Pauline epistles. The allusion to
Paula, however, would incorporate what I take to be one of the central concerns of this scene: the
interest in speech that transcends death, absence, and inanimacy.
Paulina invites Perdita to take part in this efficacious pleading.
PAULINA: That she is living,
Were it but told you, should be hooted at
Like an old tale. But it appears she lives. Mark a little while.
Please you to interpose, fair madam. Kneel,
And pray your mother’s blessing. Turn, good lady,
Our Perdita is found.
HERMIONE: “You gods, look down,
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter’s head! (5.3.115-122)
Perdita’s kneeling and interposing, along with Paulina’s address, result in Hermione’s awakening
and bring about her blessing. On one level, the events that transpire in this moment amount to the
296
fulfilment of the wishes implied by the early Fathers’ rhetoric. Not only do those who are
thought to be dead hear the address of the living, but they respond with blessing. It is, moreover,
a transformation of the trope of apostrophe as Leontes had employed it. Leontes, convinced of
the figurative nature of his speech, compulsively foreclosed the possibility that his speech could
have an effect on Hermione (“It is easy to make her speak as to make her move”) (5.3.91). In
effect, Paulina trumps both the ancient imagination of voice as mourning and the Protestant
imagination of rhetoric as empty and figurative with a modern imagination of an apostrophe that
enlivens its absent audience.
As much as the scene participates in a Catholic aesthetic, I do not see the play as
condoning any particular exercise of religious faith. Rather, The Winter’s Tale borrows faith and
the accoutrements of Catholic prayer from the world of religion in order to achieve what it sees
as a more powerful poetic. The desire for performative language expressed in this play is also a
desire for an art that can mediate between the living and the dead and speak to the dead and
absent—that can address a rock or a tomb or a tree and “stand in hope of an answer.” If, as many
have imagined, this scene performs a paragone, it is between the kind of art that imagines its
own transformations as mere fantasies, and the kind of art that imagines those transformations as
having real effects in the world, whether aesthetic, political, ethical, or otherwise. Put differently,
the scene juxtaposes two versions of efficacious speech—speech that mourns and speech that
mediates between the living and dead—and in doing so, juxtaposes two different roles for art in
the context of loss. While these projects might appear contradictory, Shakespeare claims both as
ends of his art. One of the implications of this juxtaposition is that the playwright is able to
appropriate and secularize the ambition and the hope of religion’s central miracle (the miracle of
resurrection), even while offering his own art as a compensation while that miracle is delayed.
297
O’Connell argues that this self-reflexive scene affirms spectacle in order to legitimate a
way of knowing that was distinct from humanist claims for an exclusive, or near exclusive, truth
in language.”
564
But Hermione’s role as image is not all that matters in this scene. If the
Reformation interrogated the image, it also saw images as sites for interrogating language and
rhetoric. Here, rhetoric does not persuade or tell or claim to know, it claims to act. The
imagination of poetic speech as speech that makes something happen is nascent in Shakespeare’s
writing and beginning to take root in early modern language. By 1639, Daniel Featley, in a
funeral sermon, will describe apostrophe as that which, “by a kind of miracle of art giveth life to
dead things, and ears to the deaf.”
565
The animating miracle of the statue scene is not, then, an
achievement of verisimilitude in art. Rather, it is a performance of a kind of efficacious speech
that transforms—of the rhetoric that transcends absence, if you believe it. The miracle of
animation in art is a miracle of voice, of rhetoric.
564
O’Connell, 144.
565
Daniel Featley, “A Funeral Sermon Preached at Lambeth, 1639,” in Threnoikos the house of mourning furnished
with directions for the hour of death ... delivered in LIII sermons preached at the funerals of divers faithfull servants
of Christ (London, 1660), Sii
r
.
298
Bibliography
Aeschylus. “Agamemnon.” In Aeschylus II, translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1947.
Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Translated by Cecil Grayson. New York: Penguin Classics,
1972.
Alexander, Gavin. “Prosopopoeia: The Speaking Figure.” In Renaissance Figures of Speech, 95–
112. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Allot, Robert. Englands Parnassus: Or the Choysest Flowers of Our Moderne Poets, with Their
Poeticall Comparisons Descriptions of Bewties, Personages, Castles, Pallaces, Mountaines,
Groues, Seas, Springs, Riuers, &c. Whereunto Are Annexed Other Various Discourses, Both
Pleasaunt and Profitable. London, 1600.
Alpers, Paul. “Apostrophe and the Rhetoric of Renaissance Lyric.” Representations 122, no. 1
(2013): 1–22.
Altman, Joel B. “Ekphrasis.” In Early Modern Theatricality, 270–90. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013.
———. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan
Drama. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978.
Anderson, Emily Hodgson. Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2018.
Andresen, Martha. “‘Ripeness Is All’: Sententiae and Commonplaces in King Lear.” In Some
Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, edited by Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff.
Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974.
Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S.H. Butcher. Accessed May 5, 2015.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.2.2.html.
Armstrong, Philip. Shakespeare’s Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis, and the Gaze. New
York and London: Palgrave, 2000.
Ascham, Roger. The Schoolemaster. Or, Playne and Perfte Way of Teaching Children, to
Understande, Write, and Speake the Latin Toong, but Specially Purposed Fot He Private
Bringing up of Youth in Jentlemen and Noblemens Houses: And Commodious Also for All Such
as Have Forgot the Latin Toong, and Would, by Themselves, without a Schoolmaister, in Short
Time, and with Small Pained, Recover a Sufficient Habilities, to Understand, Write, and Speake
Latine. London: Abell Jeffes, 1589.
299
Astington, John H. Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror Up to Nature.
Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Auden, W.H. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” In Another Time. New York: Random House, 1940.
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London and New York:
Routledge, 2008.
Bacon, Francis. The Vvisedome of the Ancients, Written in Latine by the Right Honourable Sir
Francis Bacon Knight, Baron of Verulam, and Lord Chancelor or England. Done into English
by Sir Arthur Gorges Knight. London: John Bill, 1619.
Baldwin, T.W. Willam Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1944.
Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1981.
Barkan, Leonard. “‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale.” ELH 48,
no. 4 (1981): 639–67.
———. “Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern
Scholarship.” Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1995): 326–51.
———. Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2013.
———. “Praxiteles’ Aphrodite and the Love of Art.” In The Forms of Renaissance Thought:
New Essays in Literature and Culture, edited by Leonard Barkan, Bradin Cormack, and Sean
Keilen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
———. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Barnfield, Richard, The Complete Poems. Edited by George Klawitter. London and Toronto:
Susquehanna University Press, 1990.
Barrett, J.K. Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2016.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang,
1980.
Bate, Jonathan. How the Classics Made Shakespeare. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2019.
300
Bates, Catherine. Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric. Cambridge
and London: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the
Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450. Oxford-Warburg Series. Oxford: Clarendon,
1971.
———. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of
Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Beckwith, Sarah. “Language Goes on Holiday: English Allegorical Drama and the Virtue
Tradition.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 1 (2012): 107–30.
———. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2011.
Belsey, Catherine. “Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2012): 175–98.
———. “Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in ‘The Rape of Lucrece.’”
Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2001): 315–35.
Berger, Harry Jr. Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2005.
Bilson, Thomas. The True Difference Betweene Christian Subiection and Unchristian Rebellion
Wherein the Princes Lawfull Power to Commaund for Trueth, and Indepriuable Right to Beare
the Sword Are Defended against the Popes Censures and the Iesuits Sophismes Vttered in Their
Apologie and Defence of English Catholikes: With a Demonstration That the Thinges Refourmed
in the Church of England by the Lawes of This Realme Are Truely Catholike, notwithstanding the
Vaine Shew Made to the Contrary in Their Late Rhemish Testament. Oxford: Joseph Barnes,
1585.
Booth, Stephen. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1983.
Bowers, A. Robin. “Iconography and Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Shakespeare Studies
14 (1981): 1–21.
Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. Third Edition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1957.
Brinsley, John. Ludus Literarius. Menston: Scholar P. Facsimiles, 1612.
Brooke, Nicholas. “The Ending of King Lear.” In Shakespeare, 1564-1964: A Collection of
Modern Essays by Various Hands, edited by Edward A. Bloom, 71–87. Providence, RI: Brown
University Press, 1964.
301
Brown, Georgia. Redefining Elizabethan Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004.
Bruster, Douglas. “Shakespearean Spellings and Handwriting in the Additional Passages Printed
in the 1602 Spanish Tragedy.” Notes and Queries 60, no. 3 (2013).
Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 7. London, 1978.
Burrow, Colin. Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
———. “Virgil in English Translation.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, 109-127.
Edited by Charles Martindale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
———. “Why Shakespeare Is Not Michelangelo.” In Thinking with Shakespeare: Comparative
and Interdisciplinary Essays for A.D.Nuttall, 9–22. London: Routledge, 2007.
C.A., trans. The Interiour Occupation of the Soule Treating of the Important Businesse of Our
Saluation with God, and His Saints, by Way of Prayer. Composed in French for the Exercise of
That Court, by the R. Father, Pater Cotton of the Societie of Iesus, and Translated into English
by C.A. for the Benefit of All Our Nation. Whereunto Is Prefixed a Preface by the Translator, in
Defence of the Prayers of This Booke, to the Saints in Heauen. Doway: the English Secret Press,
1618.
Carlson, Marvin A. The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2003.
Cavell, Stanley. “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The Winter’s Tale.” In
Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
———. “The Avoidance of Love.” In Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, n.d.
Chapman, Alison. “Lucrece’s Time.” Shakespeare Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2013): 165–87.
Cheney, Patrick. Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Cambridge and London: Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
Cicero. Cicero: On Oratory and Orators. Translated by J.S. Watson. Landmarks in Rhetoric and
Public Address. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970.
Callistratus. Philotratus Imagines Callistratus Descriptions. Translated by Arthur Fairbanks.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931.
Clody, Michael C. “Orpheus Unseen: Lucrece’s Cancellation Fantasy.” Philological Quarterly
92, no. 4 (2013): 449–69.
302
Crider, Scott F. “Rhetorical Poetics and Shakespeare Studies.” Ben Jonson Journal 14, no. 2
(2007): 268-284.
———. “Weeping in the Upper World: The Orphic Frame in 5.3 of The Winter’s Tale and the
Archive of Poetry.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 1 (1999): 153–72.
Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” In The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction,
Augmented Edition., 135–54. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.
———. “Changes in the Study of the Lyric.” In Lyric Poetry Beyond New Criticism, edited by
Chaviva Hosek and Patrick Parker, 38–54. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985.
———. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Cummings, Brian. Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Shakespeare and Early
Modern Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Cunningham, Valentine. “Why Ekphrasis?” Classical Philology 102, no. 1 (2007): 57–71.
Dackerman, Susan. Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2011.
Dawson, Anthony B. “Priamus Is Dead: Memorial Repetition in Marlowe and Shakespeare.” In
Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, 63–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
De Gratzia, Margreta. “Weeping for Hecuba.” In Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early
Modern Culture, 350–75, 2000.
De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” MLN 94, no. 5 (1979): 919–30.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Dessen, Alan C. “Two Falls and a Trap: Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Realism.” English
Literary Renaissance 5, no. 3 (1975): 291–307.
Dewar-Watson, Sarah. “The Alcestis and the Statue Scene in the Wnter’s Tale.” Shakespeare
Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2009): 73–80.
Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship,
1660-1769. Clarendon Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Doebler, John. Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures: Studies in Iconic Imagery. University of New
Mexico Press, 1974.
303
Dubrow, Heather. “Mourning Becomes Electric: The Politics of Grief in Shakespeare’s
Lucrece.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 30, no. 1 (2011): 23–30.
———. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
———. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore, MD:
John’s Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “"Playing Fields or Killing Fields: Shakespeare’s Poems and
‘Sonnets.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2003): 127–41.
———, ed. Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
———. “Two Elizabethan Versions of Giovo’s Treatise on Imprese.” English Studies 52 (1971):
120–21.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine, and H.R. Woudhuysen, eds. Shakespeare’s Poems. Arden Third.
London: Bloomsbury, 2007.
Dundas, Judith. “Mocking the Mind: The Role of Art in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece.” The
Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 1 (1983): 13–22.
———. Pencil’s Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting. Newark, DE:
University of Delaware Press, 1993.
Durling, Robert M., trans. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.
Eisendrath, Rachel. Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance
Ekphrasis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
———. “Poetry at the Limits of Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece.” In Elizabethan
Narrative Poems: The State of Play, 45-68. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019.
Elam, Keir. Shakespeare’s Pictures: Visual Objects in the Drama. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Engel, William E. Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
———. Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern
England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
———, ed. The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016.
304
Enterline, Lynn. Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
———. The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare. Vol. 35. Cambridge Studies in
Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
———. “‘You Speak a Language That I Understand Not’: The Rhetoric of Animation in The
Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1997): 17–44.
Erasmus, Desiderus. On Copia of Words and Ideas. Translated by Donald B. King and H. David
Rix. Medieval Philosophical Texts in Translation 12. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University
Press, 2012.
Es, Bart van. “Shakespeare’s Late Style.” In Shakespeare in Company. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013.
Escobedo, Andrew. “Allegorical Agency and the Sins of Angels.” ELH 75 (2008).
Euripides. “Hecuba.” In Euripides II, translated by William Arrowsmith. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013.
———. “Iphigenia at Aulis.” In Euripides V, translated by Charles R. Walker. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Everett, Barbara. “Hamlet: A Time to Die.” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 117–23.
Evett, David. Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England. Athens and London: University
of Georgia Press, 1990.
Featley, Daniel. “A Funeral Sermon Preached at Lambeth, 1639.” In Threnoikos the House of
Mourning Furnished with Directions for the Hour of Death ... Delivered in LIII Sermons
Preached at the Funerals of Divers Faithfull Servants of Christ. London, 1660.
Felperin, Howard. “‘Tongue-Tied Our Queen?’: The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter’s
Tale.” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey
Hartman, 3–18. New York: Routledge, 1985.
Ferguson, Margaret W. “Hamlet: Letters and Spirits.” In Shakespeare and the Question of
Theory, 292–309. London and New York: Routledge, 1985.
Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986.
———. “Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape.” Representations 20 (1987): 25–76.
305
Foakes, R.A. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
———. “Introduction.” In King Lear. Arden 3. New York: Bloomsbury, 1997.
Foister, Susan. Holbein in England. London: Tate Publishing, 2006.
Fowler, Elizabeth. “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser.”
Representations 51 (1995): 47–76.
Fox, Cora. “Spenser’s Grieving Adicia and the Gender Politics of Renaissance Ovidianism.”
ELH 69 (2002).
Freccero, John. “Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit.” In Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 119–
36, 1986.
———. “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics.” Diacritics 5, no. 1 (1975): 34–40.
Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, 14:243–58. London: The
Hogarth Press, 1953.
Fried, Michael. Absorbtion and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1980.
———. “Art and Objecthood.” Red, 1967.
———. The Moment of Caravaggio. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Frye, Roland Mushat. “Ladies, Gentlemen, and Skulls: Hamlet and the Iconographic Traditions.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 30, no. 1 (1979): 15–28.
Fulke, William. D. Heskins, D. Sanders, and M. Rastel, Accounted (among Their Faction) Three
Pillers and Archpatriarches of the Popish Synagogue (Vtter Enemies to the Truth of Christes
Gospell, and All That Syncerely Professe the Same) Ouerthrowne, and Detected of Their
Seuerall Blasphemous Heresies. By D. Fulke, Maister of Pembrooke Hall in Cambridge. Done
and Directed to the Church of England, and All Those Which Loue the Trueth. London: Henrie
Middleton, 1579.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York:
Routledge, 1987.
306
Gardner, Helen. King Lear, The John Coffin Memorial Lecture, 1966. University of London: The
Althone Press, 1967.
Gascoigne, George, and Francis Kinwelmersh. “Jocasta.” In A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres
Bounde vp in One Small Poesie Gathered Partely (by Translation) in the Fyne Outlandish
Gardins of Euripides, Ouid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and Others: And Partly by Inuention, out of Our
Owne Fruitefull Orchardes in Englande: Yelding Sundrie Svveete Sauours of Tragical, Comical,
and Morall Discourses. London: Abell Jeffes, 1573.
Gent, Lucy. Picture and Poetry 1560-1620. Leamington Spa: James Hall, 1981.
Gilman, Ernest P. Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Gombrich, Ernst Hans. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation.
Vol. 5. London: Phaidon, 1977.
Goodland, Katharine. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English
Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics. Cambridge and London: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the
Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986.
Green, Henry. Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers: An Exposition of Their Similarities of
Thought and Expression. Internet Archive, 1801.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
———. “Shakespeare and the Exorcists.” In Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s King Lear, edited
by Jay L. Halio, 88–121. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.
Greene, Roland. “Baroque Inceptions: Thinking about 17th C. Art in the 21st C.” University of
Southern California, April 12, 2019.
———. Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2013.
———, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP,
2012.
Greenstadt, Amy. “‘Read It in Me’: The Author’s Will in Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly 57,
no. 1 (2006): 45–70.
307
Grootenboer, Hanneke. The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth
Century Dutch Still-Life Painting. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Gross, Kenneth. The Dream of the Moving Statue. University Park, PA: Penn State University
Press, 1992.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1999.
Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry
from Dryden to Gray. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Hale, John. England and the Italian Renaissance: The Growth of Interest in its History and Art.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1954.
Halliwell, Stephen. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Halpern, Richard. “Collateral Damage and Tragic Form.” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 1 (2018): 47–
75.
Hartman, Geoffrey. Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1970.
Haydocke, Richard, Translator. A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge &
Buildinge. Oxford, 1598.
Hearn, Karen, ed. Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530-1630. New York:
Rizzoli, 1995.
Heffernan, James A.W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Heywood, Thomas. An Apology for Actors Containing Three Briefe Treatises. 1 Their Antiquity.
2 Their Ancient Dignity. 3 The True vse of Their Quality. London: Nicholas Okes, 1612.
Hodgdon, Barbara. “Photography, Theater, Mnemonics; or, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Still.”
In Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History, edited by W.B. Worthen and Peter Holland.
Redefining British Theatre History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Holly, Michael Ann. The Melancholy Art. Essays in the Arts. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2013.
Hoskins, John. Directions for Speech and Style. Edited by Hoyt H. Hudson. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1935.
308
Howard, Henry. Certain Bks Anaeis. London, 1557.
Hughes, Anthony. “Authority, Authenticity, and Aura: Walter Benjamin and the Case of
Michelangelo.” In Sculpture and Its Reproductions, edited by Anthony Hughes and Erich
Rannft. London: Reaktion Books, 1997.
Hulse, Clark. The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Hunt, Maurice. “‘Bearing Hence’ Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.” SEL Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900 44, no. 2 (2004): 333–46.
Jacobs, Fredrika. The Living Image in Renaissance Art. Cambridge and London: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
James, Heather. “Dido’s Ear: Shakespearean Tragedy and the Politics of Response.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2001): 360–82.
———. “Shakespeare and Classicism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry,
202-220. Edited by Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
———. Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire. Vol. 22.
Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
———. “The Politics of Display and the Anamorphic Subjects of Antony and Cleopatra.” In
Shakespeare’s Late Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Suzanne L. Wofford,
208–34. New Century Views. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994.
Jensen, Phebe. “Singing Hymns to Horn-Pipes: Festivity, Iconoclasm, and Catholicism in ‘The
Winter’s Tale.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2004): 279–306.
Johnson, Barbara. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 29–47.
———. “Muteness Envy.” In The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and
Gender, 129–54. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Jonson, Ben. “Timber: Or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter; as They Have Flowed out of
His Daily Readings, or Had Their Reflux to His Peculiar Notion of the Times.” In The Workes of
Beniamin Ionson. London: John Beale, Bernard Alsop, and Thomas Fawcet, 1640.
Joughin, John J. “Lear’s Afterlife.” Shakespeare Survey 55 (2002): 67–81.
309
———. “Shakespeare’s Memorial Aesthetics.” In Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance, 43–
62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Kahn, Coppelia. “The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45–72.
Kahn, Victoria. Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985.
Kennedy, Dennis. Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance.
Second. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Kernodle, George R. From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1943.
Kiefer, Frederick. Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters. Cambridge
and London: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Knapp, James A. Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011.
———. “Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 3
(2004): 253–78.
Kneale, J.D. “Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered.” ELH 58 (1991).
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins
University Press, 1992.
———. “The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoon Revisited.” In
The Play and the Place of Criticism, 105–28. Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press, 1967.
Kunin, Aaron. “Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy.” PMLA 124, no. 1 (2009): 92–106.
Kyd, Thomas. The Spanish Tragedy. Edited by Clara Calvo and Jesus Tronch. Arden Early
Modern Drama. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Lamb, Charles. “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to Their Fitness
for Stage Representation (1811).” In The Romantics on Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
Levin, Harry. “An Explication of the Player’s Speech.” In The Question of Hamlet, 141–64. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
———. “The Heights and the Depths: A Scene from King Lear.” In Shakespeare and the
Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries, 162–86. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
310
Levy, Eric P. “The Mimesis of Time in Hamlet.” Philological Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2007): 365–
92.
———. “‘The Time Is Out of Joint’: The Resetting of Time in Hamlet.” Critical Review 40
(2000): 32–46.
Lewalski, Barbara. “How Poetry Moves Readers: Sidney, Spenser, and Donne.” University of
Toronto Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2011): 756–68.
———. Protestant Poetics and the Sixteenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1979.
Lewis, C.S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. The Oxford History
of English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954.
Lewis, Rhodri. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Lim, Walter S. H. “"Knowledge and Belief in ‘The Winter’s Tale.’” SEL Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900 41, no. 2 (2001): 317–34.
Llewellyn, Nigel. The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c. 1500-1800.
London: Reaktion Books, 1991.
Lupton, Julia Reinhard. “Judging Forgiveness: Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, and The Winter’s
Tale.” New Literary History 45 (2014): 641–63.
MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Speech, Silence, and History in The Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare
Studies 22 (1994): 77–103.
Mack, Peter. Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
Mann, Jenny C. Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.
———. “Reckning with Shakespeare’s Orpheus in The Rape of Lucrece.” In Elizabethan Narrative
Poems: The State of Play. Edited by Lynn Enterline. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2019.
Marlowe, Christopher. “Dido Queen of Carthage.” In The Complete Plays, edited by Frank
Romany and Robert Lindsey. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Marsden, Jean. The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century
Literary Theory. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
Maus, Katherine Eisman. “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare’s
Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1986): 66–82.
311
McKeown, Adam. “Enargeia and the English Literary Renaissance.” ProQuest Dissertations
Publishing, 2000.
Meek, Richard. “Ekphrasis in ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale.’” Studies in
English Literature. 1500-1900 46, no. 2 (2006): 389–414.
———. Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009.
Miller, J. Hillis. Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Miola, Robert. Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: The Influence of Seneca. Oxford: Clarendon,
1992.
Mitchell, WTJ. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Mornay, Phillipe de. Fovvre Bookes, of the Institution, vse and Doctrine of the Holy Sacrament
of the Eucharist in the Old Church As Likevvise, Hovv, Vvhen, and by What Degrees the Masse
Is Brought in, in Place Thereof. London: John Windet, 1600.
Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1997.
Nelson, Robert S., and Richard Shiff, eds. Critical Terms for Art History. Second. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Newman, Jane O. “'And Let Mild Women to Him Lose Their Mildness’: Philomela, Female
Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 304–26.
Newstok, Scott L. Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the
Tomb. Early Modern Literature in History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Nicholson, Catherine. Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English
Renaissance. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
O’Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Ortelius, Abraham. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Abrahami OrtelI Antuerp. Geographi Regii. =
The Theatre of the Vvhole World: Set Forth by That Excellent Geographer Abraham Ortelius.
London: John Norton, 1606.
Ovid. Heroides. Translated by Harold Isbell. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
312
———. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567. Edited by John
Frederick Nims. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Painter, William. The Palace of Pleasure Beautified. London, 1566.
Panofsky, Erwin. “‘Et in Arcadia Ego’: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition.” In The Art of Art
History: A Critical Anthology, 257–62. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1998.
———. “Father Time.” In Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance, 69–93. New York: Harper & Row, 1939.
———. Studies in Iconography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Parker, Patricia. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. New York and London:
Routledge, 1987.
———. “Suspended Instruments: Lyric and Power in the Bower of Bliss.” In Literary Fat
Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. New York and London: Routledge, 1987.
Partner, Jane. Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England. Cham: Springer International
Publishing, 2018.
Paton, W.R., trans. Greek Anthology. Vol. V. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2014.
Paxson, James J. The Poetics of Personification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Peacham, Henry. The compleat gentleman fashioning him absolute in the most necessary &
commendable qualities concerning minde or bodie that may be required in a noble gentleman.
London: John Legat, 1622.
Peacham, Henry. The Garden of Eloquence, Conteining the Most Excellent Ornaments,
Exornations, Lightes, Flowers, and Formes of Speech, Commonly Called the Figures of
Rhewtorike. By Which the Singular Partes of Mans Mind, Are Most Aptly Expressed, and the
Sundrie Affections of His Heart Most Effectuallie Uttered. Manifested, and Furnished with
Varietie of Fit Examples, Gathered out of the Most Eloquent Orators, and Best Approved
Authors, and Chieflie out of the Holie Scriptures. Profitable and Necessarie, as Well for Private
Speech, as for Publicke Orations. Corrected and Augmented by the First Author. London: R.F.
for H Jackson, 1593.
Pearlman, E. “Shakespeare at Work: The Invention of the Ghost.” In Hamlet: New Critical
Essays, 71-84. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Peat, Derek. “‘And That’s True Too’: King Lear and the Tension of Uncertainty.” Shakespeare
Survey 33 (1980): 43–53.
313
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge,
1993.
Pliny. Natural History. Edited by Jeffrey Henderson. Vol. 9. Loeb Classical Library 394.
Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1952.
Pollard, Tanya. Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2018.
———. “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?” Renaissance Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2012): 1060–93.
Polyander à Kerckhoven, Johannes. The Refutation of an Epistle, Written by a Certain Doctor of
the Augustins Order within the Citie of Leige Together with the Arguments, Which He Hath
Borrowed from Robert Bellarmine, to Proue the Inuocation of Saints. Translated by Henry
Hexam. London: F. Kingston for Thomas Man, 1610.
Porter, Chloe. Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama: Spectators, Aesthetics, and
Incompletion. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.
Preston, Claire. “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words.” In Renaissance Figures of Speech, edited by
Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Puttenham, George. “The Art of English Poesy.” In Sidney’s “Defense of Poesy” and Selected
Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander, 55–203. London: Penguin Classics,
2004.
———. The Arte of English Poesie Contriued into Three Bookes: The First of Poets and Poesie,
the Second of Proportion, the Third of Ornament. London: Richard Field, 1589.
Quintilian. The Orator’s Education. Edited and translated by Donald A. Russell. Loeb Classical
Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Rainolde, Richard. A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike, 1563.
Rebhorn, Wayne. The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of
Rhetoric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Reibetanz, John. “Theatrical Emblems in King Lear.” In Some Facets of King Lear, 39–57, n.d.
Richards, E. “Voice.” In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 3rd ed., 1525–27.
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Riffaterre, Michael. “Prosopopoeia.” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 107–23.
R.N. The Christians Manna. Or A Treatise of the Most Blessed and Reuerend Sacrament of the
Eucharist Deuided into Tvvo Tracts. Written by a Catholike Deuine, through Occasion of
314
Monsieur Casaubon His Epistle to Cardinal Peron, Expressing Therin the Graue and Approued
Iudgment of the Kings Maiesty, Touching the Doctrine of the Reall Presence in the Eucharist.
The English College Press, 1613.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996.
———. “Performance: The Blunders of Orpheus.” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 1078–86.
———. “‘Unpath’d Waters, Undreamed Shores’: Herbert Blau, Performing Doubles, and the
Makeup of Memory in The Winter’s Tale.” MLQ 70, no. 1 (2009): 117–31.
Rosenberg, Marvin. “Lear Enters.” In Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s King Lear, edited by Jay
L. Halio, 197–206. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1996.
Rosenfeld, Colleen Ruth. Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Rutter, Carol Chillington. “Learning Thisby’s Part--or, What’s Hecuba to Him.” Shakespeare
Survey, 2004.
Sabatier, Armelle. Shakespeare and Visual Culture: A Dictionary. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Sacs, Peter. “The Face of the Sonnet: Wyatt and Some Early Features of the Tradition.” In Green
Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on Early Modern Lyric, edited by
Jonathan F.S. Post, 17–40. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
Sauter, Willmar. The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception. Studies in
Theater History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.
Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment.
London and New York: Routledge, 2011.
Segal, Charles. Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet. Baltimore: John’s Hopkins University Press,
1988.
Seneca. Troas. Translated by Thomas Heywood. London, 1559.
Serre, Jean Puget de la. The Mirrour Which Flatters Not. Translated by Thomas Creech. London:
Elizabeth Purslowe, 1639.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri,. Arden
Third. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
315
———. Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by John Wilders. Arden Third. London: Bloomsbury,
1995.
———. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Third. London: Bloomsbury,
2006.
———. Henry IV, Part I. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Arden Third. London: Bloomsbury,
2002.
———. Henry IV,Part II. Edited by James C. Bulman. Arden Third. London: Bloomsbury,
2016.
———. Julius Caesar. Edited by David Daniell. Arden Third. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
———. King Lear. Edited by J.S. Bratton. Plays in Performance. Bristol: Bristol Classics Press,
1987.
———. King Lear. Edited by R.A. Foakes. Arden Third. London: Thompson Learning, 1997.
———. Othello. Edited by E.A.J. Honigmann. Arden Third. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997.
———. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Arden Third. London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2007.
———. The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Edited by Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
———. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughn and Alden T. Vaughn. Arden Third.
London: Thomson Learning, 1999.
———. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by John Pitcher. Arden Third. London: Methuen, 2010.
———. Timon of Athens. Edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton. Arden Third.
London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Sherry, Richard. A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes. London, 1550.
Showerman, Earl. “Look down and See What Death Is Doing: Gods and Greeks in The Winter’s
Tale.” The Oxfordian 10 (2007): 55-75.
Sidney, Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” In Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and Selected
Renaissance Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander. New York and London: Penguin Classics,
2004.
316
———. “The Defence of Poesy.” In The Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, 212–
51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Sillars, Stuart. Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720-1820. Cambridge and London:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
———. Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge and London: Cambridge
University Press, 2015.
———. Shakespeare Seen: Image, Performance, and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2019.
Smith, Bruce R. “Speaking What We Feel About King Lear.” In Shakespeare, Memory, and
Performance, 23–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Sokol, B.J. Art and Illusion in ‘The Winter’s Tale.’ New York and Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1994.
———. Shakespeare’s Artists: The Painters, Sculptors, Poets, and Musicians in his Plays and
Poems. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Macmillan, 1977.
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Longman Publishing Group, 2001.
Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2002.
Stoichita, Victor I. The Pygmalion Effect. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2008.
———. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. Translated by
Anne-Marie Glasheen. Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Sullivan Jr., Garrett A. Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Webster. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Sypher, Wylie. The Ethic of Time: Structures of Experience in Shakespeare. New York:
Continuum, 1976.
Tacitus. The Annales of Cornelius Tacitus. The Description of Germanie. London: Ar. Hatfield,
1598.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.
317
The Dance of Death: 41 Woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger. New York: Dover, 1971.
Thomas Creech, trans. The Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles of Horace. London: Jacob Tonson, 1684.
Thorne, Alison. Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language. New York:
Macmillan, 2000.
Triggs, Jeffrey Alan. “A Mirror for Mankind: The Pose of Hamlet with the Skull of Yorick.” The
New Orleans Review 17, no. 3 (1990): 71–79.
Trousdale, Marion. Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 1982.
Tuve, Rosemund. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-
Cantury Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947.
Vanita, Ruth. “Mariological Memory n ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Henry VIII.’” SEL Studies in
English Literature 1500-1900 40, no. 2 (2000): 311–37.
Varney, Denise, and Rachel Fensham. “More-and-Less-Than: Liveness, Video Recording, and
the Future of Performance.” New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 1 (2000): 88–96.
Vergil. The Aeneid. Translated by Sarah Ruden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Vickers, Brian. English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
———. English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
———. In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.
Vickers, Nancy. “‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” In Shakespeare
and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, 95–115. New York
and London: Routledge, 1993.
Vickers, Nancy J. “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme.” Critical Inquiry
8, no. 2 (1981): 265–79.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by David West. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Warburg, Aby. “Durer and Italian Antiquity.” In The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions
to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Edited by Kurt W. Forster. Los Angeles:
Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999.
Waters, William. “Apostrophe.” In The Princetone Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited
by Roland Greene, 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
318
———. Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Weaver, William P. “‘O Teach Me How to Make Mine Own Excuse’: Forensic Performance in
Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2008): 421–49.
———. Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2012.
Webb, Ruth. Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice.
New York: Routledge, 2016.
Wells, Marion. “Philomela’s Marks: Ekphrasis and Gender in Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays.”
In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, 204–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013.
———. “‘To Find a Face Where All Distress Is Stell’d’: ‘Enargeia’, ‘Ekphrasis’, and Mourning
in ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and the ‘Aeneid.’” Comparative Literature 54, no. 2 (2002): 97–126.
Wells, Robin Headlam. Shakespeare on Masculinity. Cambridge and London: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
White, Francis. The Orthodox Faith and Vvay to the Church Explaned and Iustified in Answer to
a Popish Treatise, Entituled, White Died Blacke; Wherein T.W. p. in His Triple Accusation of D.
White for Impostures, Vntruths, and Absurd Illations, Is Proued a Trifler: And the Present
Controuersies Betweene vs and the Romanists Are More Fully Deliuered and Cleared. London:
Richard Field, 1617.
Whitney, Charles. “Ante-Aesthetics: Towards a Theory of Early Modern Audience Response.”
In Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Milennium, edited by Hugh Grady, 40–60.
London and New York: Routledge, 2013.
Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetorique for the vse of All Suche as Are Studious of Eloquence,
Sette Forth in English. London, 1553.
Worthen, W.B. The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1984.
Young, Alan R. Hamlet and the Visual Arts:1709-1900. Newark: U of Delaware Press, 2002.
Zitner, Sheldon P. “King Lear and Its Language.” In Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in
Prismatic Criticism, 3–22. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974.
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, both the visual arts and the verbal arts were praised using a metaphor of liveliness. Writers celebrated paintings that were “brought forth in living color” and described sculptures that engaged their viewers “as if alive.” Meanwhile, rhetorical handbooks encouraged rhetors and poets to employ “lively” figures of speech such as ekphrasis, enargeia, apostrophe, and prosopopoeia—figures that were said to summon absent scenes and persons “as if before the eyes” of hearers and endow them with an ability to speak. However, Shakespeare consistently employs these “lively” figures of speech at moments of extreme grief, when characters are faced with an experience of mortality. In these scenes, Shakespeare inverts the confidence of rhetorical claims that art can animate and instead envisions verbal art as a space between life and death that is also an ideal space for mourning. This dissertation traces allusions to life and liveliness in the examples and explanations of rhetorical figures of speech found in Elizabethan handbooks and then studies the ways in which these figures are employed in several Shakespearean scenes. Each of these scenes is focused on a moment of visual engagement or description: when characters look at, describe, or respond to visual images. Shakespeare borrows forms of rhetorical speech and vivid description that had been used to persuade in classrooms and courtrooms and reemploys them as a means for reflecting on the inability of art to animate
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
The anatomy of cognition: thinking moments in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton
PDF
Slow reading in Shakespeare's England
PDF
Exorcising Shakespeare: intertextual hauntings, lethal inheritance, and lost traditions
PDF
Stage, cathedral, wagon, street: the grounds of belief in Shakespeare and Renaissance performance
PDF
'This object kills me': the intersection of gender and violence in performance of Shakespearean tragedy
PDF
As she fled: women and movement in early modern English poetry and drama
PDF
The politics of eros: writing under the auspices of Ovid's Cupid in early modern English literature
PDF
From the hellmouth to the witch's cauldron: cooking and feeding evil on the early modern stage
PDF
The desire for presence: developments in theatrical biography during the long Eighteenth Century
PDF
Fictions of reference: character and language in nineteenth-century British literature
PDF
Poetic science: evoking wonder through transmedia discovery of science
PDF
Suppositional thinking in eighteenth-century literature: authorship, originality, & the female imagination
PDF
Inventing immersive journalism: embodiment, realism and presence in nonfiction
PDF
Immersive Shakespeare: locating early modern immersion in contemporary adaptations
PDF
Scripted voices: persona and speech in Senecan philosophy
PDF
Productive misogyny in medieval and early modern literature: Women, justice, and social order
PDF
Kinesthesia: a multi-sensory gesture driven playground of the future
PDF
Sexuality and signification: episodes of General Idea's subcultural politics
PDF
Let us fake out a frontier: dissent and the settler colonial imaginary in U.S. literature after 1945
PDF
Toward counteralgorithms: the contestation of interpretability in machine learning
Asset Metadata
Creator
Ruud, Amanda K.
(author)
Core Title
Shakespeare's speaking pictures
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Publication Date
08/02/2020
Defense Date
04/22/2020
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
animation,apostrophe,description,Drama,ekphrasis,enargeia,literary ethics,liveliness,Loss,Memento Mori,Mourning,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,prosopopoeia,rhetoric,Shakespeare,ut pictura poesis,visual culture
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
James, Heather (
committee chair
), Anderson, Emily (
committee member
), Berger, Susanna (
committee member
), Lemon, Rebecca (
committee member
), Smith, Bruce R. (
committee member
)
Creator Email
amanda.kay.gross@gmail.com,ruud@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-351496
Unique identifier
UC11666201
Identifier
etd-RuudAmanda-8866.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-351496 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-RuudAmanda-8866.pdf
Dmrecord
351496
Document Type
Dissertation
Rights
Ruud, Amanda K.
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
apostrophe
description
ekphrasis
enargeia
literary ethics
liveliness
Memento Mori
poetics
prosopopoeia
rhetoric
ut pictura poesis
visual culture