SOURCE: Acheson, Katherine Osler. “The Modernity of the Early Modern: The Example of Anne Clifford.” In Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, edited by Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens, pp. 27-51. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Acheson discusses Clifford's writing as an example of the paradoxical nature of modernity. Clifford, Acheson argues, anticipates modernity in her alienation from the present and by using the past to refigure the future.]

Imaginary time is indistinguishable from directions in space. If one can go north, one can turn around and head south; equally, if one can go forward in imaginary time, one ought to be able to turn round and go backward. This means there can be no important difference between the forward and the backward directions of imaginary time. On the other hand, when one looks at ‘real’ time, there's a very big difference between the forward and the backward directions, as we all know. Where does this difference between the past and the future come from? Why do we remember the past but not the future?

Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time 143-4

La modernité est un combat. Sans cesse recommençant. Parce qu'elle est un état naissant, indéfiniment naissant, du sujet, de son histoire, de son sens.

Henri Meschonnic, Modernité, Modernité 9

The modernity of the early modern is a hallmark of new historical and cultural materialist work of the past fifteen years, and a commonplace of feminist studies of the English literary Renaissance during this century.¹ Stephen Greenblatt's personal excursion, at the conclusion of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, in which ‘our culture’ (257) signifies both then and now,² and his desire to ‘speak with the dead,’ which prefaces his essay collection published in 1988 (Shakespearean Negotiations), are paradigmatic of the conflation of the present and the past in these works. Leah S. Marcus sees the identification between the early modern and the postmodern as one of the key factors distinguishing the new historicism from the old: ‘we are moving away from interpreting the period as a time of re-naissance, cultural rebirth, the reawakening of an earlier era conceived of as … classic; we are coming to view the period more in terms of elements repeated thereafter, those features of the age that appear to us precursors of our own twentieth century, the modern, the postmodern’ (41). In feminist criticism, the identity between the early modern and the modern, or postmodern, female subject was first articulated in Virginia Woolf's invocation of Judith Shakespeare, who ‘lives in you and in me … she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences … the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down’ (198-9).³ Mary G. Mason reflected the predominant critical paradigm in feminist criticism of the 1980s when she wrote of women's autobiography from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries that ‘we recognize them each and all as distinctively, radically, the story of a woman’ (235). A more recent example reflecting Woolf's body-snatching trope is Sara Jayne Steen's statement of her desire for the laughing, writing body of the woman of the past, in this case Arbella Stuart, a statement that takes on necrophilic tones: ‘Like most women's scholars, I feel a responsibility to a woman … who once existed in bodily form, walked on rush mats, laughed, and put her pen to paper. I want her to speak as directly as possible across the cultural and linguistic barriers that separate us’ (n. pag.).

Objections have, of course, been raised against the transparent identification of protomodern and postmodern identities that pervades these critical texts. Calls have been made, by feminists and new historicists, prompting attention to discontinuity and difference based upon Foucault's notion of genealogy (‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ 139-40 and passim).⁴ Carolyn Porter's words are representative in this respect: the new historicism, she writes, ‘has generated forms of critical practice that continue to exhibit the force of a formalist legacy whose subtle denials of history—as the scene of heterogeneity, difference, contradiction, at least—persist’ (253). Jonathan Dollimore writes simply that ‘in English studies especially the modern and the early modern have been erroneously conflated’ (Sexual Dissidence 279); Marilyn Butler's formulation could stand as a motto for these critiques: ‘the past … is different from the present’ (25). It has recently become customary to preface collections, editions, and analyses with statements respecting the diversity, multivocality, and even fragmentation of the past, and to pay salutary tribute to what Foucault calls the ‘disparity’ and ‘dissension’ that lie at the origins of things (142). Susan Zimmerman's introduction to Erotic Politics, in which she lauds the ways in which cultural materialism ‘eschews all totalizing narratives’ and ‘displace[s] the concept of history as a linear, diachronic continuum with the concept of culture-specific, synchronic, histories’ (1) is typical; similarly, in the introduction to a volume of essays in the newer field of queer theory, Queering the Renaissance, Jonathan Goldberg writes that the essays try ‘to locate a center without a center’ (14).

Statements calling for decentred centres, disparate histories, and attention to fundamental difference, although easy to utter, are fraught with difficulties in practice, and the identification between the early modern and the postmodern has a tendency to reassert itself. Jonathan Dollimore is careful to acknowledge the problems of conflation, but at the same time draws upon identification between the early modern, the modern, and the postmodern (Sexual Dissidence 279-83 and passim). The first essay in the Goldberg collection suggests the same sort of strategic identification, beginning as follows: ‘Historians queering the Renaissance occupy a particularly auspicious vantage point for probing the social fictions spun by the United States Supreme Court's notorious decision in Bowers v. Hardwick’ (Halley 15). Susan Zimmerman's essay in Erotic Politics, which concerns the erotics of transvestism on the Jacobean stage, concludes with the following statement: ‘Perhaps it is suitably ironic that in attempting to understand the sexual production of the Jacobean transvestite stage, we are caught in an historical trajectory that anticipates the repressions of our own future’ (‘Disruptive Desire’ 56). Commentators on the recurrence of identification in these criticisms, when they do not call for attention to ‘disparity,’ and so on, tend to resign us to the inevitability of such identification, on the basis that our critical activity requires it. ‘Interpretation,’ writes Kathy E. Ferguson, ‘is all there is’ (335), and as such requires the operations of analogy, similitude, and other versions of identification; as Alan Liu writes specifically of the new historicism, ‘though we would understand the historical them in all their strangeness, the forms of our understanding are fated at last to reveal that they are a remembrance or a prophecy of us’ (733).

These approaches to the question of the modernity of the early modern focus on the extent to which particular forms of subjectivity are shared across time and cultures, and are therefore open to interminable, cyclical argument. If we consider the modern to mark, not a subjectivity but a rhetorical positioning of the writing subject in relation to the past and the future, we come closer to the denotative meaning of modernity. The Oxford English Dictionary defines modernity as a shifting marker of the present, ‘characterized by a departure from or repudiation of accepted or traditional styles and values.’ Henri Meschonnic captures the indeterminacy of the term when he states that modernity is ‘un combat,’ ‘sans cesse recommençant,’ ‘indéfiniment naissant’ (9). Modernity, therefore, is a marker of change or resistance within the present, which depends upon the positioning of the subject's relation to the past; it is, in other words, a mark of radicalism, as J. G. A. Pocock writes: ‘the radical reconstructs the past in order to authorise the future; he historicises the present in order to deprive it of authority’ (261). Modernity may be inscribed, in these terms, in states of subjectivity, or in material relations within the world, but it is most specifically inscribed in the rhetorical structures of historical forms of writing, including literary texts.

There are two main rhetorical structures in which the identification between the early modern and the modern is proposed in the critical writings discussed above. The first of these, in which the writing subject is conceived of as existing outside of history, is characterized by a metonymic relationship to the past. The second, in which the writing subject is conceived of as existing within history, is characterized by a metaphoric relationship with the past. These techniques of marking the modern are also to be found in Renaissance writing. This structural similarity suggests that the basis for our identification with the early modern lies in our common forms of positing ourselves in relation to the past, the present, and the future. In Renaissance writing, as in our own, the relationship between these two forms of historiographic rhetoric is uneasy, combative, and effacing, suggesting further that our shared modernity is constituted by the dialectic between the desire to produce history, and the desire to be produced by it. Shifting the identification debate towards the rhetorical forms of historiography is intended, in this essay, to shift attention from the competition between glib conflations of then and now, and anxious disavowals of similarity, towards a consideration of how the discourses of modernity function to establish difference within the present, both then and now.

I begin by discussing the two main rhetorical forms by means of which continuous identity between the early modern and the postmodern is construed, and the ways in which these tropes generally function in Renaissance writing. I then turn to my principal example, the writings of Anne Clifford, diarist, family biographer, and historian, whose ambivalent relationships to the past, present, and future sparked my consideration of the historical and critical issues addressed in this paper. At first glance, conditioned as we are to seek particular markers of modernity, Clifford seems a paradoxical and conflictual figure selection: ultramodern in her choice of genre, of fashion, of reading, and of subjectivities, she is at the same time ultra-premodern in her reference to and reverence for her family's and the aristocratic past, her re-instatement of feudal land management systems and cultural practices on her estates, and her desire, ultimately fulfilled, to become not a new woman but an old queen, or, barring that, a wise patriarch. Yet if viewed with an eye to her construction of herself and her narrative as capable of both producing and being produced by history, however, Clifford can be seen to represent the necessarily paradoxical nature of modernity. In particular, Clifford exemplifies how radical our sense of individual discontinuity—between, for example, a middle-class academic feminist such as myself and a dowager queen of an aristocrat, who would call the steward to have me evicted should I show up in her chamber, step on her rush mats, and take her pen in my hand—can be within a rhetorical and instrumental sense of modernity.

II

The first form of identification I should like to discuss, as employed by Greenblatt, Dollimore, and feminist ‘gynocritics’ of the 1980s, situates modernity in the subject or consciousness. The emblem of the relation between the early modern and the postmodern in the works of these critics is the conversation, an exchange of voices and the transcendence of history that are made possible by the similarity between the subjectivities involved. The quotation from Steen above is an allusion to Greenblatt's formulation of his critical desires and practice: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead … If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could re-create a conversation with them … It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead …’ (Shakespearean Negotiations 1). Similarly, Elizabeth Harvey writes that ‘historical reconstructions are always a kind of ventriloquization, … a matter of making the past seem to speak in the voice that the present gives it’ (6). The privileging of voice and presence and the assumption of transhistorical conversation construct what Jacques Derrida describes as a ‘philosophy of presence’ (2-26); but because it does so within a nominally historiographic discourse, our attention is further drawn to this conversation's relationship to the representation of history. In all of these works, history, as the sum of social, economic, discursive, and other practices, is said to produce subjectivities, both then and now. During the conversation, however, history as such is set aside, only to be discovered to have been created anew by the conversation itself. This return to history reveals the nature of the shared modernity of the two subjects, for within the history constructed by the conversation a hierarchy exists between the remembering, encompassing, knowing subject, which is the critic, and the other, which is the early modern writer or individual. Within this metonymic relationship the postmodern critic, despite gestures towards his or her own fragmentary, dispersed identity, is represented as the whole, from which the part, the early modern identity, takes its signification. This whole is constituted by its ability to function outside of history, by its ability to take both sides in the conversation and master the tropes of subjectivity then and now, and to create history in the process of undertaking the conversation; in brief, it is characterized by its metahistorical and philosophical disposition.⁵ Modernity is asserted in this discourse by the fact that the present is effectively all that exists, and it exists as the beginning of meaningful history. The making of history therefore marks a radical break with the past.

Much attention has been paid within new historical, cultural materialist, feminist, and queer criticisms to the conflictual nature of the imagined ‘unitary’ subject in Renaissance literature and culture. This figure is usually viewed psychoanalytically, or in a psycho-cultural fashion. Viewed as a trope, rather than as a condition of consciousness, the speaking subject, able to step aside from, or above, the matter of the past in order to create the very history of which it speaks, is more clearly a figure of self-conscious modernity, marking a locus of difference from the present. This ‘convenient fiction,’ to cite Gayatri Spivak's description of Derrida's commentary upon the proper name (Spivak liv), enables the construction of a metahistorical relationship with the audience. Through this relationship the subject—which is more often he than she—can, according to the first half of Pocock's definition of the seventeenth-century radical, ‘reconstruct the past in order to authorise the future’ (261). The in situ modernity of the speaking subject is often established in this way in Renaissance literature. One thinks of the ability of tragic protagonists in Renaissance drama to set themselves apart from the present action, constructing a metahistorical relationship with the audience through the soliloquy. One thinks also of the authority to create history and story established by the speaker of the epic poem in particular, but also the lyric and other shorter genres. In the genres in which I am most interested in this paper, namely, autobiography, biography, and historiography, the ability of the speaking subject to construct himself or herself as an authority over a history that has previously existed only as the past is necessary to establish the authority of the narrative. Considered as a rhetorical technique, rather than as a psychoanalytic or psycho-cultural condition, the instrumentality of constructing a position for the speaking voice within the imaginary time of the differential present (to refer to Hawking's statement cited at the beginning of this essay), from which real time is made legible in the form of history, is clear.

The second trope of modernity I should like to address is that in which the identification with ‘history’ itself takes precedence over the identification with the individual subject. Whereas the favoured figure of the representation of history in the criticism of modernity discussed above is the conversation, invoking as that does the privileging of voice over writing, the preferred figure of representation of this second kind of historical criticism is the materiality, profusion, and indeterminacy of the written and printed word. These works are often conceived of in opposition to the privileging of the ahistorical subject by historical and feminist critics of the 1980s. Historical criticism takes its cues from Foucault, who writes that ‘genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times’ (139), and from Derrida, for whom ‘historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing’ (27). These discourses attempt to situate themselves in the historical, textual matter that precedes the establishment of the unitary self with its speaking voice, and other ‘hegemonic’ categories of identity. Wendy Wall's The Imprint of Gender and Mark Rose's Authors and Owners, for example, are concerned with the diverse positions of writerly authority that precede the invention of the ‘author’; Jeff Masten's essay on Beaumont and Fletcher in Queering the Renaissance discusses homoeroticism and collaboration before the ‘invention’ of both the ‘author’ and ‘homosexuality’ as categories of identity; Valerie Traub's essay on lesbian desire in the same volume, which also appears in the Zimmerman volume, similarly discusses female-female desire preceding the ‘lesbian’ as a subject of social discourse; Jonathan Dollimore's work on the masculine subject of early modern tragedy, in Radical Tragedy and parts of Sexual Dissidence, also locates itself within a material and textual history preceding the invention of the modern, unitary subject. Gary Taylor's and Margreta de Grazia's works on the editing of Shakespeare similarly historicize the invention of the playwright as a ‘genius,’ and their arguments rely much upon the multiplicity of the dramatic text preceding the unification constructed by eighteenth-century editors. By privileging the multiplicity of history and textuality over the unity of the subject and the coherence of the transhistorical conversation, these critics reverse the process of the earlier critical practices outlined above, by using what Hawking refers to as ‘real time’ to describe ‘imaginary time.’ In these cases, imaginary time is both the time after the events discussed, in which the categories of author, homosexual, and so on were consolidated, and the unfulfilled possibility that these histories offer of a time in which these categories were refused. Rather than a metonymic relationship with the past, these critics construct a metaphoric relationship between the present and the past. The similarity between the two terms in the metaphor, terms that are materially different things, is the position they occupy (or desire to occupy) from which will emerge change—the position, that is, of modernity. In these writings modernity is established by the imaginary presents made possible by real histories. These imaginary presents, including the time in which the writer now exists, resemble metaphorically the ‘real’ presents, both then and now.

The establishment of a metaphoric relationship between the past and the present, the return to the documentation of the past, and the identification with that which precedes, rather than that which is, are also characteristic of Renaissance or early modern writing. In literary texts, one of the conventional markers of the Renaissance is the ‘return,’ strategically mediated, to classical sources and forms, a technique that disperses origins, disrupts continuity with the present, and seeks to locate a point within real time that might legitimately and differentially precede the imagined future. Thus the modernity of Spenser's and Milton's epics lies in part in the revision of the field of origins, of that which precedes and constitutes the speaking voice and its implied subject. The authority of the poems is thus partly gained through a metaphoric, rather than a metonymic, relationship with the classical sources. Similarly, the modernity and radical discontinuity of Reformation Christianity are figured as a return to texts that precede their hegemonic interpretations by church authorities, interpretations through which a metaphoric, rather than a metonymic, relationship between interpretation and Scripture is asserted. Autobiography, biography, and historical writing also reclaim the documentation of history in order to establish the emergence within the present of the differentiated subject of the narrative. Modernity is established through a paradox mediated by the figure of metaphor, for within the overriding historical framework, to be the same as they were in the past is to be different within the present. In this sense, this discourse correlates with the second half of Pocock's definition of the seventeenth-century radical, as one who ‘historicises the present in order to deprive it of authority’ (261).

These techniques exist together uneasily in both postmodern critical texts and early modern literary and non-literary texts. Together, they produce a complex, dialectical image of the relationships between the writing subjects, the narratives and the texts on the one hand, and the matter of the past and the idea of history on the other. What they do not produce is grounds for identification, in the sense of fundamental similarity, for both figures of speech cast continuity within the framing tropes of discontinuity. The early modern is not, to cite and disagree with Marcus, ‘postmodernism in embryo’ (43); neither is our basis for identification genetic. We may, however, identify with the competing use of these tropes in our writings about history, and we may further identify with the fact that these tropes offer at least the illusion of instrumentality, of intervention in a history that is, and is not, our own.

III

Anne Clifford (1590-1676),⁶ subject of and subject to this historical narrative, is most remembered, in literary and historical circles, for the documentation of her own life, probably the most extensive such record of the seventeenth century. Surviving are her memoir of the year 1603, a diary of the years 1616, 1617, and 1619, an autobiography written between 1652 and 1653, annual accounts of the years 1650 to 1675, and a diary of the final year of her life, 1676.⁷ In addition to these autobiographical works, Clifford dictated brief histories of members of her family dating back to William the Conqueror on one side and Edward II on the other, for inclusion in The Great Books of the Clifford Family. Although her autobiography begins with her conception, perhaps the single most important event in Clifford's long life was the death of her father, which brought into effect his will, in which he bequeathed to his brother Francis the titles and properties attached to the Clifford, Vesci, and Veteripont baronies (extensive estates in the north of England). Anne Clifford and her mother, Elizabeth Russell Clifford (until her death in 1616), spent much of the next dozen years trying to reclaim the Clifford patrimony on the basis that baronies were entailed upon the heir of the body, regardless of gender.⁸ In 1617 the case was heard by the king, who decided against her, even though, as she writes, ‘I beseeched His Majesty to pardon me for that I wou'd never part with Westmorland while I lived upon any Condition Whatsoever. sometimes he used fair means & perswasions, & sometimes fowle means but I was resolved so as nothing would move me’ (Diary of Anne Clifford, ed. Acheson 66). Clifford's last hope was the right of reversion established by her father's will; she set herself to surviving the male heirs, a goal that, upon the death of her cousin Henry, she accomplished. In 1643 Anne Clifford inherited the estates and became (in addition to her existing titles of Dowager Countess of Dorset and Countesses Pembroke and Montgomery) Baroness Clifford, Vesci, and Veteripont, Hereditary High Sheriffess of Westmoreland, and Lady of the Honour of Skipton Castle. When the wars cooled, she went north to ride her boundaries, repair her castles, reorganize her estates, meddle in politics, boss about her grandchildren, go on progresses between castles with hundreds of retainers and all her bedroom furniture in tow, shave her head and smoke a pipe, and set down her histories.

Clifford's texts, her self-representation, as well as her activities—reading, fashions, and friendships—certainly bear some of the conventional markers of the modernity of the early modern subject: for example, her accounts of her legal struggles show, as Barbara Lewalski argues, that she ‘contested Jacobean patriarchal ideology’ (125), suggesting her prototypical identity with modern women. Her ‘self-fashioning’ also conforms to Greenblatt's paradigm as it is construed in relation to a ‘threatening Other,’ in this case nominally patriarchy (and especially her evil male relatives), and manifested ‘in language’ through her self-documentation and legal arguments (Renaissance Self-Fashioning 9). On more mundane matters—her arguments with her husband, her care for her child, her isolation in the country, her relationship with her mother, the fact that she kept diaries and personal memoirs—her Diary of 1616-19 (henceforth referred to as The Diary) reveals some affinities with contemporary women's lives. At the same time, other aspects and, more pointedly, texts other than The Diary, reveal Clifford's resolute refusal of what we might call nascent feminism,⁹ as is evidenced by her abiding attachment to her noble family's history and the sense of aristocratic entitlement that history represented, as well as by her construction of herself in later years as a feudal patriarch, coding rack-renting, legal harassment,¹⁰ and the bestowal of alms and kisses as ‘the contentments and innocent pleasures of a country life’ (Lives 59). These aspects of her conduct, together with her texts and her self-representation, bestow on Clifford an inalienable strangeness, an ineradicable resistance to who we are, which disrupts the identification of the modernity of the early modern subject that her works sometimes encourage. Read in terms of the rhetorical figurations of her ambivalent, conflictual desire to have been preceded, at the same time as she desired to be made anew, Clifford's texts respond more fully and more coherently to the analysis of modernity as an oscillation between a metonymic and a metaphoric relation to history than they do to conventional modes of identification.

Clifford's metonymic relationship with the past is best represented in the two of her works that are most self-monumentalizing, both of which were commissioned soon after her inheritance of the baronial lands. In both texts, the ‘Life of Me’ and The Great Picture of the Clifford Family, Clifford is pre-eminently concerned with establishing herself as the legitimate heir to and head of the Clifford family, representing herself as the distillation of the essence of Clifforddom and the sum of its significant parts. ‘I was very happy,’ she writes at the beginning of the autobiography, ‘in my first constitution both in mind and body, both for internal and external endowments, for never was there child more equally resembling both father and mother than myself. The color of mine eyes were black like my father, and the form and aspect of them was quick and lively like my mother's; the hair of my head was brown and very thick, and so long that it reached to the calf of my legs when I stood upright, with a peak of hair on my forehead, and a dimple in my chin, like my father, full cheeks and round face like my mother, and an exquisite shape of body resembling my father’ (Lives 34-5).

The Great Picture similarly represents Clifford as the sum of her parents' parts. The painting is a triptych, and the two panels flanking the centre depict Clifford first at the age at which she abstractly inherited the property (15), at least in her own mind, and, on the right, at the age of 56, when she physically inherited the property. The younger Lady Anne resembles her mother in the attitude of her head, her hairstyle, and her dress; the older resembles her father: her black hood looks like his hair, her sombre clothes echo his dark outfit, and her stance is almost identical to his. In the later portrait she wears her mother's pearls, but she does so in a fashion resembling her father's sword belt, rather than draped at the neck as Margaret Russell wears them. The past is therefore represented in metonymic parts that form the whole of the body of the head and heir of the Clifford family.

Clifford's self-representation in the painting also subordinates ‘real time,’ the time when she struggled for and was kept from the property, and when her legitimacy as the head of and heir to the family was questioned, to ‘imaginary time,’ the time when she was always the head and heir and when her legitimacy was never questioned. For example, Anne Clifford was the youngest child of the Cliffords; she is shown, however, in the left-hand portrait to be older than either of her brothers, suggesting her pre-eminence as heir to the patrimony. She is furthermore depicted, in the right-hand panel, as older than either of her parents, suggesting that she is not only the heir, but also the wise and elder progenitor of the Clifford family. The line of inheritance is figured directly in the painting as continuing from the father, through the body of the mother, to the bodies of the little boys; the line is disrupted, however, by the flanking portraits of the actual heir in both her dispossessed and possessed states. Between the two portraits of herself, time has obviously passed, as is illustrated by the disarray of the library in the later portrait. The intention, however, is to show that despite time, Anne Clifford now physically occupies the place that she abstractly occupied at the time of her father's death. The metonymic relationship of the parts of the past to the body of the present, and the subordination of real time to imaginary, non-linear time, signify her position as the creator of history whose authority derives from her ability both to embody the otherwise unformed or deformed past, and exceed the material present.¹¹ According to the terms developed earlier in this essay, Anne Clifford is distinctively modern because she constructed herself, within a historiographic discourse, as separate from the present in which she lived.

Clifford also constructed herself in terms of a metaphoric relationship to the past. This is apparent in the ways in which she selects certain figures—all of them exceptional women taken from her panoply of ancestors—with whom she identifies in a metaphoric, rather than metonymic, fashion. Her Russell aunts, for example, are memorialized in The Great Books, depicted in the painting, and written of many times in her other works, always inasmuch as they represent the possibilities that once existed (that is, at the court of Elizabeth) for the dignified, pious, learned conduct of power by women, possibilities lost in the frivolous courts of James and Anne. Clifford's more distant ancestresses, Idonea de Vipont and Isabella de Veteripont, also figure metaphorically in Clifford's accounts as representing the legitimacy of Clifford women inheriting property. Margaret Russell is depicted, in her biographical portrait in The Great Books, as a paragon of piety, intelligence, kindness, and perseverance, whose sufferings, like Clifford's, were at the hands of powerful, philandering, profligate men. Margaret Russell provides a model, therefore, both for what Clifford is, and for what she might have become. In a more complex manner, however, Clifford's metaphoric relationship with the histories that precede her own is reflected in her attitude toward textuality. Clifford recognized, even enjoyed, the multiplicity of the textual past, and the possible, imaginary presents that those texts portended. Even her most staunchly metonymic works are marked by the profusion of texts that are only nominally, and imperfectly, controlled. The Great Books, which concludes with the autobiography, contains dozens of biographers as well as direct copies of legal documents, deeds, gifts, letters from royalty, and the like. The Great Picture similarly represents something of an excess of documentation: several scrolls, on which the writing is legible, are depicted, as are dozens of books, their titles clearly legible and their editions identifiable by their size. Surrounding the central panel are thirty-five coats of arms, each accompanied by a biography of the holder; and each escutcheon portrait, of which there are eight, is explained with a textual biography. Clifford's investment in textuality is described by Bishop Edward Rainbow in his funeral sermon: ‘She would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her Memory, things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors and with these her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make discants with them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Library’ (40). Most interesting in this respect, however, is Clifford's relationship with her own, rather than others', texts. The extent to which she reread, rather than rewrote, her past indicates that she maintained a metaphorical relationship with her past selves. Her textual remains, although fragmentary and sometimes ambiguous, also suggest that she intended to pass on her multiple, metaphorical selves, even as she constructed her transcendental, immortal form.

In her lifetime, Clifford wrote three kinds of autobiographical document. The first is the day-to-day book, from which she seems to have later written up the second kind, namely, annual summaries; the third is the autobiography, of which there is only one. There is some evidence that the later versions of the autobiography supplanted the earlier ones in an orderly fashion, erasing conflicts as they grew in span of years. For example, in the earlier Diary, Clifford's relationship with Richard Sackville, who ambivalently opposed her suits, is depicted as volatile, argumentative, affectionate, and almost passionate; similarly, letters surviving from her second marriage to the choleric Philip Herbert suggest that their relationship, although not as affectionate as her first marriage, was equally tempestuous. In the autobiography, Clifford separates herself from both husbands and her strife-ridden relationships in a striking demonstration of how the metonymic approach to the past constructs an isolated speaking subject: ‘the marble pillars of Knowle in Kent and Wilton in Wiltshire were to me often times but the gay arbour of anguish. Insomuch as a wise man that knew the insides of my fortune would often say that I lived in both these my lords' great familys as the river of Roan or Rodamus runs through the lake of Geneva, without mingling any part of its streams with that lake; for I gave myself wholly to retiredness, as much as I could, in both those great families, and made good books and virtuous thoughts my companions …’ (Lives 40).¹² At the same time, one must look to the survival of The Diary as revealing Clifford's desire to preserve multiple versions of herself. In this respect, The Diary is indeed anomalous, as it survives neither in her hand nor in a secretarial hand; nor is it included in The Great Books, nor is a copy of it to be found in the main collections of her papers. The Diary survives only in two posthumous copies (see above, n6). Clifford's biographer, George C. Williamson, suggests that the original was destroyed because it was too embarrassing (366-7); Bishop Edward Rainbow, in his funeral sermon, cryptically refers to the ‘censures others may pass on this exactness of Diary as too minute and trivial a Diligence,’ and he later states: ‘I confess, I have been informed, that after some reviews, these [the diaries] were laid aside’ (51). As these accounts make clear, the diar[ies] were not destroyed, or set aside, by Clifford herself, but by her descendants. Although it is apparent that she did not want The Diaries to survive in her formal documentation of herself, namely, The Great Books, it is also clear that she did intend that they survive, at least until she was through with them. Whatever function she may have imagined these documents would have for her descendants, they were of daily importance to Clifford herself. Throughout the Diary of her final year, Clifford appears to have read over the earlier documents, ‘remembering’ things that happened in the past: ‘I remembered how this day was 59 years I went with my first Lord to the Court at Whitehall, where in the inner withdrawing chamber King James desired & urged mee to submitt to the Award which hee would make concerning my Lands of Inheritance, but I absolutely denyed to do so, wherein I was guided by a great Providence of Good for the good of mee & mine. And that day also have my first & then only childe a dangerous fit of her long Ague in Knowl house in Kent, where shee then lay’ (240). Similarly, she recalls the hotel in which she stayed sixty years previously on her way to visit her mother, the christening of her nephew, the death of her second husband's first wife, all with dates, places, and full names and titles in place. Clifford's late rereading of her past recalls instances of rereading that she recorded in the Diary: ‘My Soul was much troubled,’ she writes upon the receipt of the King's Award, ‘^& afflicted^ to see how things go, but my trust is still in God & compare things past with things present & reade over the Chronicles’ (Diary of Anne Clifford, ed. Acheson 72). Her diaries are fragmentary, multiple, and intertextual, supplementing, but not superseding, the other selves she left for the enjoyment of her posterity. Her identification, through written records, with her past, ‘metaphoric’ selves (‘compare things past …’), fulfils the other condition of ‘early’ modernity of which I have been writing, namely, the situation of introspection at that point that precedes the construction of the unitary self, subordinating the imaginary time in which the transcendental subject is constructed to ‘real’ time, in which the many possibilities of the historical self have been manifest. In the same instant as she self-consciously constructs her unitary, authoritative, speaking self, Clifford retains and rereads the records of her multiplicity, the textual evidence of herself within history. She regards the past not metonymically, but metaphorically, giving herself authority by the precedent of others.

IV

Anne Clifford's sense of herself as both subject to and subject of the matter of history, her oscillation between her conception of herself as at once unitary and fragmentary, and her ambivalent reliance on both the figures of metonymy and metaphor identify modernity as a rhetoric that inscribes a differential relationship with the present. Key to Clifford's modernity, and key to ours, is the sense of alienation from the present, figured as a problematical set of relationships with history. For Clifford, the present was variously the time when her claims and rights went unrecognized, her enemies conspired against her, her profligate and neglectful father and husbands injured her cause and reputation, and the morals of the aristocracy were tainted by injustices towards her and the wilful disregard of her version of history. Her historical discourses, in all of their forms, were ways in which she intervened in the present, refiguring herself in relation to her surroundings. Crucial, therefore, to our understanding of the discourses and rhetorical forms of modernity, in the case of Anne Clifford and of Renaissance and postmodern historiographic and literary writing, is the instrumentality of that discourse and those forms of rhetoric, that is, the ways in which we position ourselves differentially within the present through our uses of the past in order to refigure the future.

Despite their opposition on other issues of substance, the metonymic and metaphoric forms of literary historiography, if considered as instrumental rhetorical forms, reveal their common ground. The metonymic ‘identity’ politics of the 1970s and 1980s served to move the agendas of feminism and cultural materialism to the centre of early modern criticism, as is evidenced by their dominance in accounts given of the Renaissance (enthusiastically) by Marcus, and of seventeenth-century literary criticism (grudgingly) by William Kerrigan in a survey volume recently published by the Modern Language Association of America. The metaphoric identity politics of the 1990s, by which, in the words of Margaret Hunt, we ‘attempt to claim a usable history in the face of an all too easily abusable past’ (359), is further serving to entrench the discourses of newer feminist, queer, and materialist forms of criticism, by returning the site of inspection and introspection to the documentation and ‘evidence’ of history. Jonathan Dollimore wrote in 1989 that he was using the term ‘early modern England’ because it was ‘a description of the period with less assumptions than “Renaissance”’ (Radical Tragedy xxxi). As this essay has shown, the contrary is now true, both inasmuch as ‘early modern’ conventionally suggests the ‘erroneous’ conflation of which Dollimore also writes, and inasmuch as it suggests the rhetorical relationships with the past, the present, and history. According to the argument of this essay, the use of the term ‘early modern’ signifies, ironically, our attempts to construct ourselves differently from our post-modern present, either through claiming the authority of the speaking subject, and creating history anew, or by situating ourselves as subjects of a previously unknown history. Both early and post-modernity, although they may indeed be both producing of and produced by particular states of subjectivity or particular cultural formations, may best be viewed as ‘convenient fictions’ by which we grant ourselves, however much we are denied it elsewhere, and however much we know it to be an illusion, the authority, even the power, to enact difference in the present.

Notes

1. I should like to express my gratitude to the marquess of Bath, Longleat House, for permission to cite from the Portland Papers, XXIII ff 80-119, and to the Abbot Hall Art Gallery for permission to reproduce The Great Picture of the Clifford Family. I should also like to thank Germaine Warkentin for her abiding assistance with my work on Anne Clifford; further thanks go to Marcie Frank, both for the books on the shelf behind her desk, and for her helpful comments on the paper.

2. ‘Epilogue’ (255-7); see especially the closing statements: ‘For the Renaissance figures we have considered that in our culture to abandon self-fashioning is to abandon the craving for freedom, and to let go of one's stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as a fiction, is to die. As for myself, I have related this brief story of my encounter with the distraught father on the plane because I want to bear witness at the close to my overwhelming need to sustain the illusion that I am the principal maker of my own identity’ (257, emphasis added).

3. Obviously, as time passes, there are more and more dead people for the living to identify with; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar called the 1979 collection of essays on female poets that they edited Shakespeare's Sisters, paying tribute to Judith Shakespeare; in their preface to the Norton Anthology of Writing by Women they begin with a quotation from A Room of One's Own, thus invoking both Woolf and Judith Shakespeare as female voices made present in the anthology.

4. The following list is representative rather than comprehensive: for critiques of the new historicism's tendencies to homogenize history, usually by reifying the individual subject and denying the complexity and diversity of the past, see Carol T. Neely, Carolyn Porter, Lee Patterson, as well as Marilyn Butler, Alan Liu, and more generally Kathy E. Ferguson. Neely's and Porter's concerns are indicative of the criticisms produced by feminists of the new historicism, which were simultaneous with criticisms produced within feminism of the ahistorical female subject that is the organizing principle of works by Betty S. Travitsky, Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar, Elaine Beilin, and, on women's autobiography, Mary G. Mason and Domna Stanton; these criticisms begin with works such as Linda Gordon's article and Denise Riley's book, and are represented in works by Catharine R. Stimpson, and in the introductions to Elizabeth D. Harvey's book, and to collections of essays edited by Diane Purkiss and Clare Brant, and Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub. The most influential work in recent feminist studies in this respect (as in others) is undoubtedly Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Interest in the diversity of the textual past is illustrated in recent editions, including Hans Gabler's Ulysses, and particularly, for Renaissance or early modern scholars, of Shakespeare (Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Stephen Urkowitz) and theoretically articulated in historically inflected critiques of editing, beginning with Jerome McGann's Critique.

5. On the opposition between ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’ established by the dialogue form, see Arthur C. Danto, passim.

6. Biographical accounts are available in George C. Williamson, Martin Holmes, and the Dictionary of National Biography, as well as in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections of lives of noble worthies and exceptional women. See also chap. 5 of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's Writing Women in Jacobean England both for biographical information and for a cogent reading of the relationships between Clifford's biography (particularly her struggles over her patrimony) and her autobiographies.

7. The 1603 memoir survives in two manuscript copies, each appended to the manuscripts of the 1616-19 diary; they are the Portland Papers XXIII ff 74-9, and Knole/Sackville Papers U269 F48/1 I leaves 1-17. The memoir is included in both Sackville-West's and D.J.H. Clifford's editions of the diary and was first published in 1795 in William Seward's Anecdotes of Some Distinguished Persons. Although it has been considered (by Sackville-West and D.J.H. Clifford) to be part of the diary of 1616-19, it is clearly retrospective, a feature that, together with the differences in the editorial history, suggests that the two manuscripts should be considered separately.

   The diary of the years 1616, 1617, and 1619 survives in two manuscript copies. One is written in the hand of Elizabeth Cavendish Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (and granddaughter of Robert Harley), Portland Papers XXIII ff 80-117 (Longleat House, property of the marquess of Bath), committed sometime in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The other is in the hand of Elizabeth Sackville, Countess de la Warr, descendant of Clifford's brother-in-law Edward Sackville, dated 1826, now in the collection from Knole House at the Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone (U269 F48/1-3). The latter copy, as I argue in a forthcoming edition of the diary, was made from and only from the Portland copy, and was used to prepare the two editions of the diary prior to mine (Sackville-West 1923; D.J.H. Clifford 1990). In this essay I am citing from my PhD thesis edition of the Portland version (in which the dates, scribes, and relationships of the manuscripts are argued in detail); I also give references to D.J.H. Clifford.

   The Great Books of the Clifford Family, which contains the genealogies of Clifford's family, the autobiography (1652-3) and the annual accounts (1650-76), and which was dictated by Clifford (with corrections and additions made in her hand), is preserved in three copies. These are in the Hothfield Papers at the Cumbria Records Office in Kendal (WD/Hoth/Great Books). There were, according to a note at the end of one copy by Thomas Tufton, sixth earl of Thanet, Anne Clifford's heir, ‘four setts of these Books, one at Skipton, another sett at Applebey Castle and another sett at Hothfield’ and a fourth at London (Clifford 1916, xxxiv). The autobiography and parts of the genealogy were abridged and copied by interested parties and members of her family. I do not know how many of these were made or how many survive, but I have seen the Fisher copy dated 1737 (Harley 6177), the Portland copy of the autobiography and parts of the text of the annual summaries (Portland Papers XXIII ff 49-72), which was apparently made from the Fisher copy, and an ‘Abridgement’ made in 1914 (CRO-Carlisle, DX/227/5) for descendants of Clifford. The Fisher manuscript containing the Lives of the Clifford Family … and the Life of Me … (as the autobiography is called) was published by the Roxburghe Club, ed. J.P. Gilson, in 1916; this edition is the source of the citations from the autobiography in this paper.

   All citations from the diary of 1676 are from The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D.J.H. Clifford.

8. Williamson writes that this claim was based on a ‘unique deed’ (1) by which the baronial lands were entailed upon the heir of the body, rather than the ‘heir male’; Lewalski cites this deed (127) as the basis for Clifford's ‘exceptional legal circumstances’ (126). My understanding is that the deed was quite conventional, but that although female inheritance had occurred according to such deeds during the Middle Ages, the practice in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and most of the seventeenth centuries was to pass the titles and lands to the nearest male relative, or to hold the title extinct and pass the lands to the nearest male. In the sixteenth century, there were a couple of instances of female inheritance, or inheritance of a barony through the female line, but these were exceptional in that they depended upon monarchical whim; an example was the case of William Cecil, who was permitted to inherit the title of Baron Ros through his mother in 1591, in a show of favour by Queen Elizabeth. The law concerning this matter was not actually settled until 1674; Clifford was posthumously recognized as baroness since her father's death upon her grandson's petition to be permitted to take a seat in the House of Lords in 1691 (Cokayne, ‘Limitations’ 295 and 295n). (The House of Lords had recognized Clifford's right since 1628, but this had no effect other than to keep Henry Clifford from taking a place there.)

   Part of what was at stake in the legal argument was the inheritability of two different kinds of barony: those established by writ of summons to the Parliament of 1299, and those held by right of tenure. The differences were important to Clifford because some of the baronial properties had passed by female inheritance prior to 1299, through Isabella de Veteripont. Tenure did not in itself constitute the possession of an inheritable right (Doubleday 689); however, as the oldest basis for the title of baron, tenure was held to contribute to that right, particularly in cases in which the tenure was at some later date qualified by writ. The perceived significance of tenure can be seen in the diary in the actions of both Clifford and her uncle Francis, concerning in particular the death of her mother, when the actual physical possession of the estates and the loyalty of the tenants are contested between them. Similarly, in 1607, Clifford writes: ‘by reason of those great suits in law my mother and I were in a manner forced for our own good to go together from London down into Westmoreland’ (Lives 38); on the same trip, she notes, ‘my mother and I would have gone into the Castle of Skypton to have seen it, but were not permitted so to do, the doors thereof being shut against us by my uncle of Cumberland's officers in an uncivil and disdainfull manner’ (Lives 39). Another principle at stake in peerage law was the ‘doctrine of attraction,’ by which it was held that an earldom, or some other such honour, magnetically attracted all other attached honours. Francis Clifford's lawyers argued that since the earldom unquestionably descended to him, so too did the associated baronies; this argument was the foundation of the king's decision. The matter, which is somewhat more complex than a single ‘unique deed’ would have it be, helps us to understand not only how protracted and complicated the legal proceedings were, but also some of the otherwise inexplicable activity recounted in the diary. Moreover, although Clifford never states her cause as pertaining to that of women in general, success in this matter would have set important precedents for noblewomen.

9. Clifford's attitude toward the ‘modern’ woman may be inferred from an extraordinary action she undertook when, in 1611, Anthony Stafford dedicated part 2 of his Niobe to her. The dedication is effusive in its praise, the locus of which is the identity of the new Eve as found in the body and being of Lady Anne Clifford: ‘I am astonisht Madame I am astonisht; and could finde in my heart, to pray you, and such as you are (if there be anie such) to desist from doing well: for, I am afraide, that (ere longe) you will disable my sex, falsifie the Scriptures and make Woman the stronger vessel. But it is not I alone, whom you hauve troubled and amazed: you grow cruell, and disquiet the first of your owne Sex, Eve whose grieved Ghost methinks I see rising out of her lowe-built bedde, looking upoun you with an envious blush … For whereas she was created in perfection, and made her selfe imperfect; you beeing created in imperfection, have almost made your selfe perfect …’ (Williamson 516). Although Clifford left no direct record of her feelings regarding the dedication, the fact that the gathering in which it appeared was torn from the binding of almost every copy suggests that she, or perhaps her husband, took great offence.

10. According to an unsubstantiated story about Clifford, a tenant who owed her a boon hen each year refused to pay, in protest over larger matters; she took him to court, spending hundreds of pounds, finally got her hen, and invited him to dinner, at which the bird in question was served. Both Sackville-West and Williamson cite the story, and its apocryphal nature; although the story is probably untrue, it none the less indicates Clifford's reputation for the rigorous, even ruthless, management of her estates.

11. Clifford's success in creating a transhistorical image of herself is evident in the accounts of her since her death. As recently as 1990, in the edition of the 1616-19 diary by D.J.H. Clifford, the editor notes ‘the impress of her character and her actions [which] can still be felt in the rural areas of Westmorland and Craven as if she had been alive just a few years ago’ (x). Clifford closes his text with an anecdote attesting to her continuing presence in the localities in which she once reigned:

    I cannot end without recounting a delightful story which so well illustrates how much the spirit and the memory of Lady Anne still lingers in the minds of Westmorland folk to this day.

    Not long after the Second World War Lord Hothfield offered to install electricity for the first time in the almshouses in Appleby which Lady Anne had founded some three hundred years before. His proposal was politely declined, the reason being given that, ‘Lady Anne would not have liked it’ (270).

    The ability of the commentator in 1990 to commune and converse with the long-dead subject is partly, obviously, a function of Clifford's aristocracy and her material wealth, through which she was able to insist that she be remembered. Equally obvious, however, is the extent to which this identification is made possible by her self-construction, her situation of herself at the beginning of a meaningful history, her positioning of herself as authority over, rather than subject to, the past and the present in which her works were written.

12. Lewalski identifies the ‘gay arbour’ as an allusion to The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (372).

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