SOURCE: Jardine, Lisa. “Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect: Erasmus's Familiar Letters and Shakespeare's King Lear.” In The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, edited by James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor, pp. 77-101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

[In this essay, Jardine begins with a study of Erasmus's letters as an example of a technical method of expressing and producing feeling. Erasmus's epistolary methods then provide a context for a reading of King Lear, in which the methodical expression of feeling consistently proves to be false. Jardine concludes that a Renaissance audience schooled in Erasmian ideals of rhetoric would thus experience the drama of Lear as strongly pessimistic about the possibility for honest communication.]

A letter or epistle, is the thyng alone y^t maketh men present which are absent. For among those that are absent, what is so presente, as to heare and talke with those whom thou louest?

(Myles Coverdale)¹

They were trained together in their childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now. Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters, though not personal, have been royally attorneyed with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies, that they have seemed to be together though absent.

(The Winter's Tale)²

This paper is an attempt at historicizing reading in order to reveal the textual construction of feeling in the early modern period.³ Historical approaches to Shakespeare's plays (including my own) have so far tended to concentrate on contextualizing social and cultural practices. So, for example, we may revive the significance of a key plot point in a play, like Othello's naming Desdemona ‘whore’ in front of Emilia, by retrieving the sixteenth-century social historical evidence on ‘defamation’.⁴ We have not, to date, tried in any systematic way to contextualize the pivotal affective moments: the point at which emotion is intensified so as to structure the audience's and the reader's allegiance, and gain our assent to the unravelling or resolving of the action.⁵

The body of writing chosen here to begin this historicizing process is Desiderius Erasmus's Epistolae. At first sight such a choice appears perverse. Nothing could, apparently, be less contrived emotionally than Erasmus's Letters. Erasmus studies, indeed, are premised on the ‘authenticity’ and transparent truthfulness of those letters as the source of Erasmian biographical information.⁶ It will be argued here, however, that Erasmus's letters are crucially affective, and that they are major contributions to the Renaissance's construction of letter writing and reading as emotionally charged events. Moreover they were centrally influential in the pedagogic construction of a certain kind of reading: a version of emotionally compelling communication in the second half of the sixteenth century. So influential was this pedagogical model of reading that the exchange of familiar letters could come to stand for the efficiency with which humanistic text-skills could be used to alter an individual's social position and prospects. As discussed in Erasmian handbooks on letter-writing, the familiar letter structures and organizes feeling so as to manipulate its intensity at a distance and, in the absence of the persons involved, enabling persuasion to a desired outcome.

The project of the present piece is to set King Lear within this contextualized version of the controlled production of feeling.⁷King Lear elicits our revulsion towards such efficiency by presenting us with the prospect of a world in which real affection is deprived of instrumentality (the ability to influence the outcome of actions and events) precisely to the extent that a cynically operated technology of affect—of warmth and intimacy generated by letters—debases the heart's expressive resources, leaving ‘nothing’ to be said.

Three key concepts structure early sixteenth-century, Erasmian thinking about familiar letters. These are, friendship, effective transmission of feeling and absence made present. All three are incorporated in the definition of the epistola which Erasmus gives in his De conscribendis epistolis. Letters should be ‘intimate conversations between friends' (‘amicorum inter ipsos confabulationes’):

As the comedian Turpilius aptly wrote, the epistola is a kind of mutual exchange of speech between absent friends.

[Est enim (quod scite scriptum est Turpilio comico) epistola absentium amicorum quasi mutuus sermo.]⁸

This idea of a form of written work which crucially makes vivid the voice of the friend from whom one is separated, so as affectively to render that friend present, is a fascinating one, particularly since I do not think it tallies closely with our own understanding of the ‘personal letter’ (in other words, we have lost touch with this historicized version of letter writing).⁹ It has its roots in pseudo-Libanius (a source in whom Erasmus had a considerable emotional investment, as I have discussed elsewhere). And it immediately notifies us of the importance for Erasmus of the affective dimension in epistolary writing—shared feeling, textually transmitted, substitutes for the individual who cannot be present, whose absence is a cause for regret and longing on the part of both parties in the textual transaction.

But the first thing to note, as we set about reconstructing a context for the pedagogic importance of ‘familiar letters’, is that Erasmus's clear indication of his source takes us not to Turpilius (for whom there are no surviving works), but rather to Saint Jerome. For the attribution of that precise definition of the function of the familiar letter is to be found in a key letter of Jerome's, included with a commentary in Erasmus's collected edition of Jerome's Epistolae. The letter opens as follows:

Jerome to Nitias—In his treatment of the exchange of letters, Turpilius the comedian said: ‘It is the unique way of making absent persons present.’

The familiar letter, in other words, constructs a fiction of the affective presence of an absent individual. Jerome indicates that in this case the deception of fiction is legitimate, because it achieves a morally laudable outcome:

Nor, in so doing, does it deceive, although it achieves its purpose by means of what is not true. For what, if I may speak truly, is more present between those absent from one another, than to address and hear what you value by means of letters.

The feigned element in letter-writing is legitimate, because it is needed to elicit the right degree of intensity of feeling in the recipient (by its simulation of over-wrought feeling in the sender).¹⁰ And he goes on to add historical and etymological material to support the fact that familiar letters have traditionally been the purveyors of humane understanding amongst men:

Even before the use of paper and parchment, those primitive Italians, who Ennius calls ‘Casci’, who (according to Cicero, in Rhetorica) wished to gain understanding of themselves almost as a way of life, repeatedly sent one another mutual epistolary exhortations, either on writing tablets of smoothed and polished wood, or on the bark of trees. Whence those who carry letters are called ‘tabellarii’ [tablet carriers], and copyists are called ‘librarii’ from the bark [liber] of trees. How much the more, then, must we avoid overlooking what they themselves excelled in—whose milieu was raw and rustic, and who were ignorant of all ‘humanitas’ whatsoever?

Jerome now moves to exemplify the features of familiar letter-writing which he has just identified. Notice how the tone changes:

See how Chromatius, sacred Eusebius's brother by equality of morals as much as by nature, roused me to the task of letters. But you having departed from us, rend asunder our recently formed friendship rather than dissolving it, which Laelius most prudently prevented in Cicero. Unless perhaps the east is so hateful to you that you are afraid of your letters coming here also. Awake! Awake! wake from your sleep, produce a scrap of paper, for goodness' sake. Between the delights of your native land and the journeys abroad we shared, breathe at least a word. If you love me, write I beseech you. If you have been angered, you are entitled to write angrily. I will have great solace, and that which I long for, if I receive my friend's letters, even if my friend is displeased.¹¹

So Erasmus's definition of the familiar letter has already taken us to a fascinating source: a letter of Jerome's which bears all the marks of being itself ‘exemplary’—illustrating the very features of letter-writing which the writer identifies as those formally associated with the effective textual transmission of ‘humanitas’. The letter is a text-book example of the genre, and indeed, following Erasmus's interest in it, it seems to have been used in northern classrooms on a regular basis to introduce students to letter-writing.¹²

Actually in Jerome's letter to Nitias, ‘Turpilius’ does not say precisely what Erasmus attributes to him. For ‘Turpilius’ (or should we say, Jerome?) the familiar letter ‘is the unique way of making absent persons present’. Here, the familiar letter renders absence present, its written text substituting for the affective presence of a physical speaker, without the extra component of amicitia. The letter in its entirety, however, adds the crucial dimension of ‘friendship’ and intimacy performatively—the absence for which the letter itself seeks to compensate is that of a beloved friend: ‘you having departed from us, rend asunder our recently formed friendship’. As Erasmus explicitly adds amicitia to ‘Turpilius's’ definition, he apparently regards the friendship aspect of epistolary communication as particularly important.

Since Erasmus himself chooses to direct us to Jerome for an understanding of the fundamental features of the familiar letter, it is appropriate to turn for further insight to the commented edition of Jerome's letters which Erasmus contributed to the Froben complete Jerome of 1516. There he summarizes Jerome's ‘Letter to Heliodorus’ (the opening letter in his collection) as follows:

When St. Jerome had gone to the desert he tried to keep with him his dearest friend Heliodorus, who out of a sense of duty had accompanied him, as he testifies elsewhere. Failing in this endeavour he wrote him a letter urging him to join him in the solitary life. He refutes several considerations which could either keep him from the desert or detain him in a city. And he shows him how it is not safe to undertake the office of bishop and how it is not easy to keep that office once undertaken. Then as a peroration he sings over and over the joys of the hermit life, and he portrays for him the terror of the Last Judgment. He mentions this letter by name in the catalogue of his works and calls it a hortatory letter. He wrote this when quite young, little more than a boy, as he testifies in the next letter, adding that in this letter he had played with the flowery language of the schools, still fired with enthusiasm for rhetorical studies, youth that he was. Accordingly it abounds with metaphors, allegories, even fictitious in origin, and with the oratorical ornaments of exclamation, dilemma, and other figures of that sort. His efforts show the kind of artistry in which one can recognize a beginner, but a beginner of the highest promise. The subject-matter belongs to the hortatory genre, which we will discuss a little later.¹³

The letter itself begins as follows:

So conscious are you of the affection that exists between us that you cannot but recognize the love and passion with which I strove to prolong our common sojourn in the desert. This very letter—blotted with tears—gives evidence of the lamentation and weeping with which I accompanied your departure. With the pretty ways of a child you then softened your refusal by soothing words, and I, being off my guard, knew not what to do. Was I to hold my peace? I could not conceal my eagerness by a show of indifference. Or was I to entreat you yet more earnestly? You would have refused to listen, for your love was not like mine. Despised affection has taken the one course open to it. Unable to keep you when present, it goes in search of you when absent. You asked me yourself, when you were going away, to invite you to the desert when I took up my quarters there, and I for my part promised to do so. Accordingly I invite you now; come, and come quickly … But what is this, and why do I foolishly importune you again? Away with entreaties, an end to coaxing words. Offended love does well to be angry. You have spurned my petition; perhaps you will listen to my remonstrance.¹⁴

What is striking is the intensely affective tone of the Jerome letter which Erasmus (unlike other editors) selects to put first in his collection, and to which, exceptionally, he attaches two separate commentaries—a more or less standard commentary on unusual words, allusions and doctrinal points, and an annotatio artis, which explicates the structural and rhetorical devices which produce the letter's emotional impact. This annotatio artis is remarkable in a sixteenth-century scholarly commentary on a leading Father of the Church, and, in particular, one whose vita contained a well-known episode in which (in a dream) he was summoned before God's tribunal to answer the charge of paying too much attention to secular literary excellence, in particular to Cicero. Here, at the very beginning of his renovatio of Jerome's oeuvre and reputation, Erasmus foregrounds the rhetorical and affective in Jerome's letter-writing.¹⁵

In fact the annotatio artis confirms what is already thematically clear in Erasmus's first commentary (as in commentaries to subsequent letters in the volume)—that the key criterion according to which Erasmus judges the effectiveness of Jerome's epistolary writing is its emotional intensity. As Chomarat puts it:

L'émotion est le critère esthétique décisif.¹⁶

[Emotion is the decisive measure of aesthetic success.]

Erasmus justifies the provision of the annotatio artis itself on the grounds that ‘St Jerome … confesses that in this [letter] he played with an ornate rhetoric’.¹⁷ The following are typical passages from the ‘rhetorical annotation’:

When [Jerome] tells how Heliodorus had accompanied him on his journey into the desert and how in vain he had asked him to remain with him there is a narration, so to speak. Then when he says that it was the object of his letter to have Heliodorus leave the cities and come to the desert there is the proposition. And yet St Jerome does not give us a lifeless account of these details, but he is always on fire, a man, it appears, of a vigorous disposition and vehement in both praise and blame. For he ardently praises those he loves, and he vigorously attacks those who have aroused his hostility.¹⁸

What keeps you in your father's house? Such rhetorical figures as questions, repetitions, and short clauses make the discourse more impassioned. Metaphor or rather allegory elevates it to an even loftier and more pleasing level. Indeed he uses a well-nigh continuous metaphor. It is almost the constant practice of Jerome, however, to place at the beginning passages that are especially attractive and delightful by which to entice the reader through pleasure and induce him to read on more eagerly. For no one is inattentive to what gives him delight.¹⁹

This commentary is of a kind with Erasmus's discussion of the rhetorical structure of the familiar letter in his textbook, De conscribendis epistolis. There, too, Erasmus cites this very letter as a model example of an emphatically persuasive letter (exhortatio):

Amongst Jerome's letters there is an exhortatio addressed to Heliodorus, which is an absolute classic of this genre.

[Est et inter Hieronymianas epistolas, exhortatoria ad Heliodorum, quae vniversum eius generis artificium vna complectitur.]²⁰

Note that this letter conforms fully to Erasmus's preferred definition: it is an ‘intimate conversation’ between separated friends, which vividly produces the one to the other. Notice something else. The classic of the form is a piece of highly specific writing from the vita of St Jerome—a letter in which he implores his close friend to join him in a life of asceticism and study. And (according to the commentary which Erasmus provides for his edition) the affective power of the letter impinges with equal force on the reader who is neither the original recipient of the letter nor its author. Erasmus has something further to say on this score in his annotatio artis:

Writings of this kind are nothing else than Christian declamations. For when Christians saw that eloquence was something at the same time most beautiful and most useful and did not think it fitting to be occupied as the profane rhetoricians were with trifling subjects … they made the whole theory of declamation subservient to moral instruction.²¹

The intimate conversation between separated friends makes any suggested (closely argued) proposal vividly compelling by its emotional ‘presence’. The patristic familiar letter is therefore the preferred genre for exhortation to moral rectitude, which makes church teaching on behaviour vividly present to the sixteenth-century Christian reader.²²

For the second stage in this historical contextualizing of the way Erasmian epistolary instruction develops a technology of affect to ‘fabricate intimacy’ I turn to the pedagogic context—not to the De conscribendis epistolis (Erasmus's manual on letter-writing), but to the De copia (his general textbook on Latin textual production). There are a number of indications in the De copia that Erasmus has in mind familiar letter-writing as the generalized model for textual production which deploys ornament and amplification persuasively in order to have some desired compelling emotional impact on the reader. The most obvious signal is Erasmus's choices of phrase for virtuoso variation in Book One (De copia verborum)—one hundred and fifty alternative ways of expressing the sentiment:

Your letter pleased me mightily

[tuae litterae me magnopere delectarunt]

Two hundred versions of:

As long as I live, I shall preserve the memory of you

[semper dum vivam tui meminero]²³

The first of these is obviously epistolary. The second is an intense expression of friendship, and of presence evoked affectively, and as Erasmus specifies his own and Thomas More's names in the course of the variations (‘as long as Erasmus lives, the name of More will never perish’) the phrase involves absence across geographical distance (Erasmus in the Low Countries, More in England).²⁴

The compelling reason for choosing the De copia to contextualize the pedagogy of affective epistolary writing is, however, a more local and specific one. It has to do (as elsewhere in my recent work on Erasmus) with a particular published volume, and one which was not a first edition. The volume in question, I shall argue, in its capacity as friendship gift in a particular geographical location, for a particular occasion, offers us the chance to respond to the texts it contains in something like the spirit in which Erasmus offered them, and (I believe) contemporary readers in northern Europe—for our purposes, in England—received them.

In 1514 Erasmus gave the second, emended edition of the De copia to the printer Matthias Schürer at Strasbourg, to publish together with the first edition of his Parabolae, or book of comparisons. Between the two pedagogic texts are printed two letters, exchanged between Erasmus and Jakob Wimpfeling—spokesman for the sodalitas literaria (literary society) at Strasbourg, and a collection of verses. In addition, the De copia carries a prefatory letter to Schürer, the printer, the Parabolae carries a prefatory letter to Erasmus's close friend in Antwerp, Pieter Gilles. These four letters frame the pedagogic contents of the two treatises in a particularly interesting way. In essence, they construct a quite elaborate affective scenario—a sequence of epistolae which do two different jobs simultaneously. They specify the ‘occasion’ for the volume (providing it with a vivid biographical Erasmian setting); and they carefully exemplify and animate the pedagogic precepts in the De copia and the Parabolae manuals.²⁵

P. S. Allen includes Wimpfeling's brief letter to Erasmus, and Erasmus's lengthy reply in their chronological place, in his Opus epistolarum Erasmi, as a genuine exchange of letters. The internal evidence of the letters, however, makes it quite clear that the second is a highly contrived, virtuoso rhetorical exercise, elicited at the request of Wimpfeling's sodalitas literaria following a visit to the literary society by Erasmus as he was passing through Strasbourg on his way to Basle. The presence of the Wimpfeling letter, unlike the prefatory letters, is announced on the title-page of the volume itself. The Erasmus letter should, therefore, I think, be treated as a worked example of a familiar letter, clearly offered to the reader of the volume as such.²⁶

The rhetorical techniques used in Erasmus's letter to Wimpfeling consistently follow closely the rhetorical methods of amplification inventoried in the De copia (and metaphors from the Parabolae).²⁷ The letter, in other words, is a full exemplum of the kind provided throughout the De conscribendis epistolis. It has the added advantage, however, over those compressed, generalized examples, of being clearly addressed to specified, known individuals, at a specified, known location. Given that the invitation to write, and Erasmus's reply itself, specify that the ‘familiarity’ of those addressed is more courtesy than reality the tone of the affect can be very precisely placed as warm but not intimate.²⁸

Beyond the detail of its rhetorical structure—the technology of its affect—the Wimpfeling letter does something further. It stages the entire volume as a textual gift, an amicitia—or friendship—transaction, with the intellectual community at Strasbourg. It comes complete with verse-offerings to individual members of the group, one of whom (Thomas Vogler) has previously sent laudatory verses to Erasmus:

Johann Witz, since I saw that he could hardly be torn away from me, I have consoled with a quatrain; and to make the keepsake of more value to my admirer, or more truly to one who is head over heals in love with me, I have written it out in my own hand. Here it is. I send you also what I had written on the journey to that incomparable man Sebastian Brant; for I have changed a few words in it of no importance. I have added the nonsense I scribbled rather than wrote to Vogler.²⁹

All these items are printed in the physical volume, following the Wimpfeling letter, so that the material gift is as nearly as possible present to the reader.³⁰ The device of the ‘keepsake’ which Erasmus has ‘written out in [his] own hand’ (‘meis digitis scripsi’) is a favourite one of his, which teases the reader with the discrepancy between the original, and its print ‘copy’, deceptively ‘the same’. And just as these poems are friendship offerings, so the texts themselves—the De copia and the Parabolae—are gifts to the Strasbourg printer, Schürer.

Matthias Schürer is named as a worthy member of the Strasbourg sodalitas literaria in the letter to Wimpfeling:

Besides, there is Matthias Schürer, a man to whom I am much attached on many other grounds, but still more as a son of Sélestat, that town so fertile in learned and gifted men to which I owe also Beatus Rhenanus and Johann Witz and Wimpfeling himself. And so, were I not deeply attached to Matthias, I should rightly be accused of having iron and adamant where my heart should be, such was his initiative in offering by acts of kindness to become my friend. Nor will I so act as to fall short in spirit at least and in readiness, although it was he who began it; one day I will repay what he has done for me, if only my spirit is matched by my capacity.³¹

The ‘acts of kindness’ Schürer has performed are editions of Erasmus's works; the suggestion is that they were no less acts of friendship for the fact that Schürer's relationship is a professional one. Erasmus's prefatory letter to the De copia text specifies that text and the text of the Parabolae as gift-offerings to a printer personally worthy of Erasmus's admiration, a man of humane learning, as emanating from a circle with whom he has (in the Wimpfeling letter) publicly associated himself in amicitia.

The prefatory letter to Schürer effectively refers us back to the letter to Wimpfeling. For there Erasmus offers a narratio in which he gives a vivid account of his movements since he left Strasbourg (‘And now, since you want to know how the rest of my journey went, here is the story in few words’). That narratio establishes Basle—Erasmus's settled location, and the publishing centre for his major works of the next three years, the Seneca, the expanded Adagia, the Novum Instrumentum, the Jerome—as crucially situated both geographically and intellectually in relation to neighbouring Sélestat and Strasbourg (Wimpfeling's native town, and the place where he now resides). The intellectual centrality of Basle is skilfully conveyed through Erasmus's vivid account of the physical convergence of scholars from these locations upon Basle (Witz accompanying Erasmus on his journey; Beatus Rhenanus, native of Sélestat, meeting him there to take on the job as trusted editor), coupled with his equally vivid picture of a constant exchange of letters and verses between those physically separated and remaining at the three locations. All of this finally allows Erasmus to lay claim to Basle as ‘his’ native town—Germany as his intellectual motherland (mea Germania).

If we turn, finally, to the prefatory letter to the Parabolae, addressed to Pieter Gilles, it makes compellingly explicit the scenario I have been teasing out of the volume's structure and physical presentation. The letter opens on the theme of true amicitia (intimate friendship), and with a series of parabolae or emotionally stimulating comparisons, fully worthy of the textbook it proffers:

Friends of the commonplace and homespun sort, my open-hearted Pieter, have their idea of relationship, like their whole lives, attached to material things; and if ever they have to face a separation, they favour a frequent exchange of rings, knives, caps, and other tokens of the kind, for fear that their affection may cool when intercourse is interrupted or actually die away through the interposition of long tracts of time and space. But you and I, whose idea of friendship rests wholly in a meeting of minds and the enjoyment of studies in common, might well greet one another from time to time with presents for the mind and keepsakes of a literary description. Not that there is any risk that when our life together is interrupted we may slowly grow cold, or that the great distance which separates our bodies may loosen the close tie between our minds. Minds can develop an even closer link, the greater the space that comes between them. Our aim would be that any loss due to separation in the actual enjoyment of our friendship should be made good, not without interest, by tokens of this literary kind. And so I send a present—no common present, for you are no common friend, but many jewels in one small book.³²

Here the Parabolae is offered as a gift (a jewel, a token) to an intimate friend, and the tone of the letter is equivalently more intense and affectively compelling.³³ Following the opening contrast between commonplace friendship, and friendship of minds, Erasmus produces a variant on a favourite topos—truly intellectual friendship is not cooled by separation, minds sustain their ardour even when apart.³⁴ Written texts are the ideal friendship-tokens for such enduring friendships.

Erasmus produces a worked example of personalized and intimate letter-writing, in which parabolae heighten the affective force of the (otherwise formulaic) sentiments, and in which he once again foregrounds the exemplary nature of the writing by self-consciously alluding to the effectiveness of the devices he incorporates in the very act of employing them. (‘Deprive the orators of their arsenal of metaphor, and all will be thin and dull’; ‘this man has a pretty knack of making his work sound important’; ‘Would this win no credit as an ingenious application of the parallel?’³⁵)

I think that it is absolutely essential that we register the ‘staging’ of Erasmus's epistolary technology of affect in the Schürer volume if we are to historicize appropriately the ways in which feeling is textually provoked and manipulated in writing of the period.³⁶ The Schürer De copia/Parabolae volume does much more than provide an inventory of techniques of rhetorical amplification, and itemize comparisons drawn from classical works of literature. Yet we have the greatest difficulty in seeing beyond the apparently unstructured compilation of textual material, because we tend to ignore all the physical apparatus of the book itself which provides the instructions for its reading. It is the self-conscious framing in terms of geographical place of publication (prominent on the book's title-page), the prefatory material to the publisher (selected on grounds of friendship and past gift-exchanges), the letters from and to Wimpfeling, locating the publishing ‘event’ in relation to Erasmus's pedagogic and publishing activities as a whole, the letter of friendship to Gilles, transforming the Parabolae from textbook into intellectual gift cementing amicitia, which together provide the school reader (teacher or student) with instructions on how to read. They frame instruction so as to convey the efficacy of the precepts compellingly by producing them in a vivid scenario of ‘real life’ textual transaction.

I have been arguing that Erasmus's is an extremely sophisticated version of the ability of the familiar letter to capture and communicate highly wrought emotion from absent friend to reader. At the heart of Erasmus's thinking lies some idea of authenticity. Whereas a textual version of a Cicero oration lacks the gesture and intonation which made it compelling in its original form, a letter of Jerome's survives in precisely its original state—every element in it preserved and available to the sixteenth-century reader. And I have been arguing that we miss the care with which, in his pedagogic treatises, Erasmus reconstructs a textual milieu within which the richness of possibility for letter-writing is ‘staged’ for the novice reader. Renaissance readers of the De copia, I am suggesting, composed their own ‘occasional’ letters in the engaged and rhetorically stringent way exemplified by Erasmus in the letter to Wimpfeling. It remains to show that such possibilities were recognized by Shakespeare's contemporaries in England, in particular—that those who passed through early modern English classrooms expected ‘familiar letters’ to convey passionate feeling, to create bonds of friendship, and to make the absent loved one (or intellectual kindred spirit) vividly present. That they, like their continental contemporaries regarded the familiar letter as a highly crafted form of communication, which could act as intermediary between separated individuals linked by bonds of shared feeling and an emerging trans-European intellectual ideal of humanitas.

We know that Erasmian works like the De copia were the staple of European schoolteaching throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, and that the persuasive potential of the Erasmian familiar letter was well understood. Erasmus's ‘epistle to perswade a young gentleman to marriage’ was included in Thomas Wilson's popular Arte of Rhetorique, as a model of the kind of discourse which could combine the affective transmission of warmth of feeling, friendship and emotional sincerity with conventional techniques of logical persuasion to produce a compelling case for a particular course of action.³⁷ To reassure ourselves further that such continental subtleties may realistically be associated with an English setting, a 1564 publication of Myles Coverdale provides us with a vivid context for such feelingful epistolary communication. Coverdale's Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable letters of such true Saintes and holy Martyrs of God, as in the late bloodye persecution here within this Realme, gaue their lyues for the defence of Christes holy gospel is a compilation of letters ‘written in the tyme of theyr affliction and cruell imprysonment’ by Protestant Englishmen persecuted under Mary.³⁸ Coverdale recommends to the devout reader the careful reading of the letters of those who suffered punishment and death for their faith. And he draws directly upon Erasmus to make a double case for letters as the primary resource for spiritual truth, and Christian feeling:

[I]t doth vs good to read and heare, not the lying legendes of fayned, false, counterfayted, and popish canonized saincts, neither y^e triflyng toyes & forged fables of corrupt writers: but such true, holy, & approued histories, monuments, orations, epistles & letters, as do set forth vnto vs y^e blessed behauiour of gods deare seruauntes. It doth vs good (I say) by such comfortable remembraunce, conceaued by their notable writinges, to be conuersaunt with them, at the least in spirite.

S. Hierome, writing to one Nitia, and hauyng occasion to speake of letters or epystles, maketh mention of a certain Authour named Turpilius, whose woordes (sayeth he) are these: a letter or epistle, is the thyng alone y^t maketh men present which are absent. For among those that are absent, what is so presente, as to heare and talke with those whom thou louest? Also, that noble Clarke Erasmus Roterodame, commendyng the booke of the Epistles or lettters which S. Augustine dyd write, sayeth thus: by some of Augustines bokes we may perceaue, what maner of man he was being an infant in Christ. By other some, we may knowe what maner a one he was being a young man, and what he was being an olde man. But by thys onely booke (meaning the booke of the Epistles or letters) thou shalt knowe whole Augustyne altogether. And why doth S. Hierome or Erasmus saye thus? No doubt, euen because that in such writynges, as in a cleare glasse, we maye see and beholde, not onely what plentifull furniture and store of heauenly grace, wisedome, knowledge, vnderstanding, fayth, loue, hope, zeale, pacience, mekenes, obedience, with the worthy fruites thereof, almighty god hath bestowed vpon the same his most deare children: but also what a fatherlye care he euer hadde vnto them.³⁹

The first idea here—that saints' letters are a more valuable source of spirituality and insight into sanctity than legend and fiction—is taken from Erasmus's Vita Hieronymi, which prefaces his edition of Jerome's letters.⁴⁰ The second, that letters provide the affective presence of the absent loved one, complete with its reference to Turpilius and Nitias, comes, as we saw, from the beginning of Erasmus's De conscribendis epistolis, referenced to the first Jerome letter in Erasmus's collection of the saint's letters.

Erasmus's subtle, and doctrinally complex version of affective Christian feeling, transmitted through the familiar letter, is here invoked as definitive, at the pulse-point of Elizabethan protestantism. And the easy way in which Coverdale makes the assumption that the reader will take the Erasmian point allows us, I think, to infer that the familiar letter, for the Christian Englishman, carried a freight of Erasmianism concerning its capacity to transmit feeling—to make the absent friend present, and to make the effects of intimacy and friendship work at the level of persuasion.

In Act 4, scene 3 of King Lear, a gentleman describes to Kent the effect upon Cordelia of letters he brought her:

KENT
Did your letters pierce the queen to any demonstration of
grief?
GENT.
Ay, sir; she took them, read them in my presence;
And now and then an ample tear trill'd down
Her delicate cheek; it seem'd she was a queen
Over her passion; who, most rebel-like,
Sought to be king o'er her.
KENT
                                                            O! then it mov'd her.(41)

The gentleman goes on, prompted by Kent, to specify the intense way in which Cordelia responded:

KENT
                                                            Made she no verbal question?
GENT.
Faith, once or twice she heav'd the name of ‘father’
Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart;
Cried ‘Sisters! sisters! Shame of ladies! sisters!
Kent! father! sisters! What? i' th' storm! i' th' night?
Let pity not be believ'd!’ There she shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes,
And clamour moisten'd, then away she started
To deal with grief alone.(42)

This passage is often used as the most intensely affective presentation of Cordelia in the play. Indeed, I have argued myself that this portrayal of Cordelia, iconically grieving, passively suffering on behalf of her father, provides the moral justification for her active participation in warfare, a scene later. It now strikes me somewhat differently. The gentleman recounts an exemplary response to a familiar letter—a textbook example of the production at a distance of intense emotion and passionate feeling. The letters in question are, surely, from Kent: in Act 2, scene 2, Kent, in the stocks, comforted himself with a letter from Cordelia;⁴³ in Act 3, scene 1, Kent sends a gentleman to Dover with letters and a token for Cordelia.⁴⁴ Now the gentleman tells Kent how Cordelia received ‘his letters’—letters of amicitia, vividly making absence present (‘Kent! father! sisters! What? i' th' storm! i' th' night?’), transmitting passionate feeling (‘O! then it mov'd her’).⁴⁵

But most of the many epistolary transactions in Lear are not so securely morally admirable. Feeling and attendant action are manipulated by letters not to connote the bonds of intense personal commitment, but rather to mislead and distort. The most obvious examples of this are the forged letter Edmund uses to persuade Gloucester that his son Edgar is treacherous, and the adulterous letter from Goneril to Edmund, whose interception brings about hers and Edmund's downfall. In between, letters which Gloucester receives secretly from France, the existence of which Edmund betrays to Cornwall, lead to Gloucester's mutilation. Clearly something un-Erasmian, or possibly anti-Erasmian is at stake here.

Let us look first at the two letters which are sent in haste towards the end of Act 1, the receipt of which provides a plot crux in Act 2. ‘I'll write straight to my sister / To hold my very course’, resolves Goneril in Act 1, scene 4, as she determines to insist on Lear's reducing the number of his followers and curbing their riotousness. At the end of the scene, after her confrontation with Lear and his precipitate departure, Goneril dispatches her letter at the hands of her household servant Oswald:

GON.
What he hath utter'd I have writ my sister;

.....

                                                            How, now, Oswald!
What, have you writ that letter to my sister?
OSW.
Ay, madam.
GON.
Take you some company, and away to horse:
Inform her full of my particular fear;
And thereto add such reasons of your own
As may compact it more.(46)

Oswald is here involved with the letter, not simply as trusted messenger, but as rhetorically expert co-author of the text—should the persuasive technology prove inadequate he is authorized to ‘add such reasons of [his] own / As may compact it more’. By contrast, Lear too resolves to send letters to Regan, informing her of his ill-treatment at Goneril's hands, and requesting lodging at her house. His messenger is the disguised Kent, who has specified his suitability for such message-carrying as part of his recommendation for Lear's service:

LEAR
What services canst thou do?
KENT
I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message bluntly; that which ordinary men are fit for, I am qualified in, and the best of me is diligence.(47)

Kent, in other words, is not the kind of servant to employ fancy rhetoric and pen his master's letters, nor add to their arguments if they fall short.⁴⁸ When Lear sends his letters he specifies that Kent will be the mere carrier of his message:

LEAR
Go you before to Gloucester [i.e. the place] with these letters. Acquaint my daughter no further with any thing you know than comes from her demand out of the letter. If your diligence be not speedy I shall be there afore you.
KENT
I will not sleep, my Lord, till I have delivered your letter.(49)

For Lear, letters are mere messages, sent by the fastest carrier to anticipate his own arrival. Or, put rather more closely in Erasmian terms, Lear does not trust the letter to convey the arguments of his love and authority, persuading for him in his absence; he simply dispatches it to herald his imminent arrival in person, which he assumes will be an argument irresistible in itself.

What happens to the letter sent, and to its messenger, conforms to the spirit in which it was dispatched: Lear's ‘blunt’ missive is repelled, its carrier clapped in the stocks; Goneril's messenger and message insinuate themselves into favour. As Kent describes it, after the event, to Lear:

KENT
                              My Lord, when at their home
I did commend your Highness' letters to them,
Ere I was risen from the place that show'd
My duty kneeling, came there a reeking post,
Stew'd in his haste, half breathless, panting forth
From Goneril his mistress salutations;
Deliver'd letters, spite of intermission,
Which presently they read: on whose contents
They summon'd up their meiny, straight took horse;
Commanded me to follow, and attend
The leisure of their answer.(50)

Because the contents of the letters are never revealed to the audience (they are never ‘read aloud’), their dramatized reception stands in for the contrast between their epistolary techniques.

On her arrival at Gloucester's Castle, Regan describes the way in which her sister's letter has prompted Cornwall's and her removal from their home to seek Gloucester's advice. They have come

REG.
                    Thus out of season, threading dark-ey'd night:
Occasions, noble Gloucester, of some prize,
Wherein we must have use of your advice.
Our father he hath writ, so hath our sister,
Of differences, which I best thought it fit
To answer [away] from our home; the several messengers
From hence attend dispatch.(51)

Effectively, this is a contest for affective impact between the two letters, a contest which apparently Goneril and the persuasive technology of Oswald's crafted letter win: Kent is clapped in the stocks, his message unanswered; Gloucester is persuaded to give shelter to Goneril, Cornwall and their cause, allowing Lear, on his arrival, to be turned out into the storm. Dramatically, the contest is displaced on to the messengers—their brawl physically reproduces the differing terms of the communications they bear. The insults Kent heaps upon Oswald all characterize him as a manipulator of language and forms, ‘a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super serviceable, finical rogue’; ‘you come with letters against the King, and take Vanity the puppet's part against the royalty of her father’.⁵² As for Kent himself, on the contrary, ‘'tis my occupation to be plain’. Or, as Cornwall puts it:

CORN.
                                                            This is some fellow,
Who, having been prais'd for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature: he cannot flatter, he,
An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth:
And they will take it, so; if not, he's plain.(53)

It is this plain truth which (as in the morality plays) ends up in the stocks. It is the smooth-tongued rhetorician who carries the day.⁵⁴

What we seem to have here is the demonization of the persuasive technology of affect. We recall that the rhetorical ‘feigning’ of the epistolary transaction, though sanctioned by Jerome (and Erasmus) nevertheless implies an ‘insincerity’ to which some commentators drew attention.⁵⁵ In this play, bastard sons and unnatural daughters conduct epistolary transactions which convince; plain folk and close kin are misled by letters, or betrayed by them.⁵⁶ The most striking contrast here is that between the intimate letters which are exchanged between Kent and Cordelia in private (through the trusted intermediary of the gentleman), and the mirroring exchanges of letters which bring about Gloucester's downfall. In the first scene of Act 3, Kent sends letters to the French camp; in the third scene, Gloucester tells Edmund he has received letters thence:

GLOU.
Go to; say you nothing. There is division between the Dukes, and a worse matter than that. I have receiv'd a letter this night; 'tis dangerous to be spoken; I have lock'd the letter in my closet.(57)

Challenged by Cornwall—‘Come, sir, what letters had you late from France?’—Gloucester tries to establish that these are familiar letters, not espionage:

GLOU.
I have a letter guessingly set down,
Which came from one that's of a neutral heart,
And not from one oppos'd.(58)

But in the economy of this play, letters are written and received to incite mendaciously to action and to pervert the truth.⁵⁹

The two most vital exchanges of letter for the plot, however, are of course those which involve the treachery and duplicity of Edmund. At the beginning of the play, it is the forged letter, supposedly from Edgar to his brother Edmund, which convinces Gloucester that his legitimate son is a traitor to him. In the final act, the intercepted letter from Goneril to Edmund, reminding him of their ‘reciprocal vows’, and inciting him to murder her husband, leads to the discovery of Edmund's general treachery. These are also the only two letters whose contents are discovered to us—both are banally instructive, without any kind of rhetorical embellishment. For Shakespeare's dramatic purposes, persuasive affect is located elsewhere. It is in the mouths of Regan and Goneril, contradicting their marriage vows in order to swear total love and duty to their father, and the mouth of Edmund, assuring his father of his trust at the moment he betrays him.

For the final section of this paper I want to argue that this is significant: that Lear severs affect from its epistolary setting where it could be controlled, and leaves it circulating at large—on the Heath. Affect, let loose from its civilized setting in the familiar letter, is demonized as the trigger for social disruption and disturbance.

CORD.
Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your Majesty
According to my bond; no more nor less.
LEAR
How, how, Cordelia! Mend your speech a little,
Lest you may mar your fortunes.(60)

True blood kin, in Lear, are distinguished by their reluctance to commit their feelings of obligation and love to any contrived form of words. Cordelia loves ‘according to [her] bond’, but refuses to enhance that bond's immediate value by giving it rhetorical expression.

Neither Cordelia nor Edgar is prepared to manipulate expressions of feeling within the setting of court and household to match the complex version of ‘service’, as technical command of language transactions, manifested by Regan, Goneril and Edmund.⁶¹ These latter, unlike the ‘natural kin’, held in place by innate, unexpressed emotional bonds, are problematically placed in relation, in particular, to first-born sons. Rather than being held in place by locally specific bonds of emotional and economic dependency, they become threateningly mobile as a result of their capacity to ‘study’ to create affection and compel belief.⁶²

Exchanges of letters in Lear seem to draw attention to their disturbing efficiency as instruments for effecting social mobility. Just those features of the familiar letter which Erasmus values for their ability to create intense feeling at will, to concoct amicitia and its associated binding emotional intensity are shown to be capable of loosening existing bonds of affection and creating new alliances where expedient. Letters transform old affections, persuade friends to new courses of action and, finally, make the reader of the printed text (the audience) morally complicit. With each alteration in the configuration of alliances in Lear, fresh letters redefine the bonds of affection amongst the remaining protagonists. The news of Cornwall's death, and the putting out of Gloucester's eyes, is brought to Goneril and Albany accompanied by urgent letters for Goneril from her sister:

MESS.
This letter, Madam, craves a speedy answer;
'Tis from your sister. [Presents a letter.]
GON.
                              … I'll read, and answer.(63)

In Act 4, scene 5, Regan knows that there is some reorganization of the bonds of affection as soon as she hears that Oswald carries a letter from Goneril to Edmund:

REG.
Why should she write to Edmund? Might not you
Transport her purposes by word? Belike,
Some things—I know not what. I'll love thee much,
Let me unseal the letter.(64)

Her remedy is herself to send a note, by the same bearer, to Edmund, to persuade him to turn his affections towards her.

Which brings us, finally, to that almost intolerably powerful emotional effect which we as audience experience on the Heath with Lear, and on Dover cliffs with Gloucester and Edgar. For if the persuasive technology of familiar letters has been demonized in this play, where does that leave the true amicitia between friends and close kin, and its possibilities for expression?

Cordelia's consternation at the play's opening already answers the question:

LEAR
                                        what can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.
CORD.
Nothing, my lord.
LEAR
Nothing?
CORD.
Nothing.(65)

Equally unjustly accused of unfilial conduct, Gloucester's ‘true’ son Edgar also finds himself incapable of confecting the kind of plausible utterance which would restore him to his father's favour: ‘Edg. Edgar I nothing am.’⁶⁶ So strong is their resistance to ‘feigned’ sentiment of the kind so adeptly marshalled in the play's familiar letters, that each child is reduced to inarticulateness and verbal helplessness before the spectacle of their father's misfortune in the last two acts of the play. There is, within the play's ambit, no scope for ‘true expression’, to set against the sentimental contrivedness of Edmund and Oswald, Goneril and Regan.

For Erasmus, the beauty of the familiar letter lay in its structuring and controlling emotional transactions, so that their moral value was enhanced. In Lear such controlled expression of feeling is apparently not available—it has been banished from the scene, and replaced by a version of epistolary artifice which distorts and misleads because it is in the wrong hands (always a risk the rhetorician is aware of). In consequence, I suggest, the only emotional transactions to which true kin have access are uncontrolled and unstructured—are technically out of control. Cordelia cannot ‘heave her heart into her mouth’ to order, for her father, she can only pant out verbal ejaculations of distress to represent her true feelings:

GENT.
Faith, once or twice she heav'd the name of ‘father’
Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart.(67)

Throughout his companionship with Lear on the Heath, and his compassionate guiding of his blinded father, Edgar utters not one word of comfort or consolation to either. Instead he contributes a sense of surreal dislocation of speech and action, which produces an almost intolerably emotionally meaningless commentary on the events as they unfold.

Such emotional dyslexia is meant, I think, to be a terrifying prospect. Lear and his party on the Heath, and Gloucester and the disguised Edgar at Dover Cliffs, are offered as appalling manifestations of helplessly uncontrolled feeling, damagingly circulating without motive or purpose, its moral efficacy terribly out of focus. When unnatural sons and daughters have taken control of the technology of affect, for their own manipulative purposes, there is, it seems, no possibility of articulation left for the naturally caring members of the family. This is the play's catastrophe—its darkly nihilistic message, not its resolution.

Once we historicize the networks of feeling which form and reform the bonds of duty and friendship in Lear, around the persuasive technology of letter writing and reading, we are bound, I think, to recognize that the ‘natural’ and uncontained versions of passionate emotion in the play are not available as a solution to the problems raised by Lear's misconstruing his daughters' declarations of love. Raw emotion is not an attractive prospect for an audience which had placed its trust in Erasmus's promise that mastery of the familiar letter would enable humane individuals to persuade one another affectively to collaborate for a better, more Christian Europe. The spectacle of such ‘civilized’ technical skill working successfully on the side of deception and self-interest is disturbing and deeply pessimistic. Yet it is to precisely this vividly dramatized scenario that we, the modern audience, respond positively and intensely emotionally, because it is, of its essence, a representation of emotion unmediated by historicized social forms. The combination of horror and embarrassment with which we experience the spectacle of Edgar deluding the desperate Gloucester into casting himself down from a non-existent cliff owes nothing to Erasmus, or to humanist rhetoric, or to Renaissance philosophy. Like Gloucester and Edgar, we experience with immediacy that raw emotional intensity, in a moral, social and historical void.

Notes

1. Myles Coverdale, Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable letters of such true Saintes and holy Martyrs of God, as in the late bloodye persecution here within this Realme, gaue their lyues for the defence of Christes holy gospel: written in the tyme of theyr affliction and cruell imprysonment. Though they suffer payne amonge men, yet is their hope full of immortalitie(London, 1564).

2. J. H. P. Pafford (ed.), The Winter's Tale, Arden edn (London, 1963), 1.i.22-9.

3. This piece of work has been shaped by extensive discussion with Lorna Hutson, particularly about the links between Erasmus's textbook treatment of letter-writing and the technology of textual affect in King Lear. I am deeply grateful to Lorna for the intellectual support she has always given to my work.

4. See my ‘“Why should he call her whore?” Defamation and Desdemona's case’, in M. Warner and M. Tudeau-Clayton (eds.), Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation (London, 1991), pp. 124-53.

5. There are, however, some suggestive pointers, prompting inquiry into the influence of Erasmus and an Erasmian concern with the rhetorical production of feeling in Shakespeare in Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1977), pp. 9-13. It might be argued that all Shakespeare criticism has, until comparatively recently, been fundamentally about ‘feeling’, in the sense that it set out to match intensity of emotion in the Shakespearean text to the sensibility of the critic's own period. The difference between such an approach and the one I have in mind here is, of course, that such criticism was committed to the view that feeling was transhistorical—that feeling elicited by the text in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries was necessarily that feeling which it had elicited when first written and performed. I would like to thank Emrys Jones and Barbara Everett for extremely helpful suggestions made for clarifying points in a version of this piece of work delivered to their graduate seminar at New College Oxford in January 1994.

6. I have in mind the fact that the entire Erasmus literature is grounded upon P. S. Allen's monumental compilation of Erasmus's letters: the Opus epistolarum Erasmi. For the purposes of such work, Erasmus scholars almost inevitably treat these letters as pure content—the transparent transmission of authentic detail concerning Erasmus's life, thought and work. See my Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton NJ, 1993).

7. In their different ways, Deborah Warner, directing the play in 1992 at the National Theatre, and Max Stafford Clark, directing it at the Royal Court in 1993, both still structured their productions around this emotional intensity. In the case of Max Stafford Clark's production, which aspired to contemporize the play (with the divided map used to evoke the current disintegration of the nation state in the Balkans), this investment in a transhistorical emotional core was particularly striking.

8. Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, recognita et adnotatione critica instructa notisque illustrata (Amsterdam, 1969) (hereafter ASD) 1-2, 225. On some of Erasmus's indebtednesses in defining letter-writing in the De conscribendis epistolis, see J. Monfasani, ‘Three Notes on Renaissance Rhetoric’, Rhetorica 5 (1987): 107-18; ‘Two Greek Sources for Erasmus's De conscribendis epistolis’, 115-18.

9. I suspect that nowadays we reserve the form of ‘affect at a distance’ which Erasmus associates with the letter for telephone communication.

10. It is this nonchalance concerning ‘feigning’ in order to achieve ‘sincerity’ which we shall see causing difficulty and anxiety in King Lear.

11. Erasmus, Epistolae Hieronymi (Basle, 1524) I, 218.

12. For example, Barlandus produced a slim manual on letter writing in the 1520s, consisting of three commented letters of Jerome's, of which the first is the letter to Nitias.

13. Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1976-) (hereafter CWE), LXI, 109.

14. CWE LXI, 109-10.

15. I should say here that this is the only one of the letters which has such an annotatio artis in addition to its primary commentary. Nevertheless, the fact that this is the first letter suggests that Erasmus attached importance to establishing the possibility of such commentaries. Characteristically, in volumes annotated by Erasmus, commentaries tail off, and become perfunctory, some little way into the edition.

16. Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1981) I, 537.

17. CWE LXI, 123.

18. CWE LXI, 124-5.

19. CWE LXI, 126.

20. ASD 1-2: 353.

21. CWE LXI, 124.

22. The annotatio artis contains a discussion of persuasive and hortatory epistolary writing which is repeated almost verbatim in the De conscribendis epistolis. ‘And first to say something about the kind of subject, it belongs to the hortatory genre … This is so close to the persuasive kind of discourse that Aristotle did not think that there was any distinction between the two. In my judgment, however, there is some difference. For the aim of persuasion is to influence the will; the aim of exhortation is to encourage and enable. Persuasion is directed at the irresolute, exhortation at the inactive. We persuade when we show what it is advantageous to do, we exhort when we add emotion to our discourse … Exhortation has this special feature: it is more fiery and has a large admixture of the laudatory, which however Jerome does not use in this letter. For men are incited above all by two factors, praise and the fear of disgrace’ (CWE LXI, 124).

23. CWE XXIV, 348; CWE XXIV, 354.

24. For another relevant link between the De copia and letters (this time Seneca's), see my Erasmus, Man of Letters, chapter 5.

25. For evidence of such careful ‘staging’ of a text by means of the accompanying letters and verses, in which Erasmus was closely involved, see the exchanges of letters soliciting endorsements for Thomas More's Utopia.

26. One further piece of cross-referring by Erasmus links Jerome and familiar letters to the Schürer volume. In Book Two of the De copia there is a section entitled De parabola, which provides the structural context for the insertion of parabolae (comparisons) of the kind collected in the companion text in the volume. The example Erasmus chooses to illustrate this technique is Cicero's use, in the Pro Murena, of an extended comparison as follows: ‘Those just sailing into harbour after a long sea-voyage eagerly give information to those setting out about the likelihood of storms and the pirate situation and what the different places are like, because it is natural to feel kindly towards those who are about to face the dangers which we have just escaped. What then should be my feelings, who am just coming into sight of land after a terrible tossing, towards this man who, as I can see, must go out to face dreadful storms?’ (CWE XXIV, 621). He goes on immediately to point out that Jerome closely imitates this passage of Cicero's, in the letter to Heliodorus, and cites that passage also in its entirety (CWE XXIV, 621-2).

27. For example: ‘It was possible, when I was with you, to see in one city the virtues of all the most celebrated city-states: Roman severity, Athenian wisdom, and the self-restraint of Lacedaemon’ (amplification of place) (CWE II, 26); ‘That incomparable young man Jakob Sturm, who adds lustre to his distinguished family by his own high character, crowns his youth with a seriousness worthy of riper years, and gives great charm to uncommon learning with his incredible modesty’ (amplification of person) (CWE II, 27); ‘Do not forget Ottmar, a man who seemed to me well read without ostentation, who with the rapid trilling on his pipes that outdid the very nightingale so ravished me that I seemed rapt in ecstacy’ (amplification of person) (CWE II, 29).

28. The only other letters to or from Wimpfeling in Allen are equally formal, endorsing, or seeking endorsement of, printed works. Allen I, 463 [ep. 224] (Wimpfeling defends himself against anti-Erasmian sentiments in a letter appended to Schürer's edition of the Moriae encomium (1511)); Allen II, 180 [ep. 382] (unpublished; Wimpfeling tells Erasmus he has mentioned him favourably in his Cathologus of writers); Allen II, 187-8 [ep. 385] (Erasmus's nine-line courtesy reply, published in a volume of Mantuan edited by Wimpfeling).

29. CWE II, 33.

30. This is inevitably the point at which a note is needed to indicate how totally the historical context of both letters and poems is lost as they are presented (or rather, not presented) in CWE. Allen already obscures the relationship between the four letters by reassigning them to their (effectively spurious) chronological positions within his Opus epistolarum Erasmi. Thus Erasmus's letter to Wimpfeling is separated from the letter which elicited it as formal response, and the preface to Schürer follows, rather than precedes these letters. Allen does, however, indicate that the poems alluded to are included with the text of the letter in the Schürer volume. CWE omits these notes, and instead refers the reader to Reedjik's collected edition of Erasmus's poems for the texts. It is no longer clear that they were, to all intents and purposes, produced for the volume. As far as the History of the Book is concerned, we have altogether lost the book. The book is replaced by pseudo-biography.

31. CWE II, 29.

32. CWE II, 44.

33. The second edition of the Parabolae was printed by Martens at Louvain, edited by Gilles, suggesting that this text was truly his gift.

34. Erasmus expresses closely similar sentiments to Thomas More.

35. CWE II, 43-6.

36. For a somewhat similar argument about textual strategies for manipulating feeling in the period, see K. Meerhoff, ‘Rhetorica: creativiteit’, in M. Spies and K. Meerhoff, Rhetorica: Strategie en Creativiteit (Amsterdam, 1993), pp. 25-53.

37. ‘I will neither wish that the love of your freends … nor yet mine authoritie that I have ouer you, should do me any good at all, to compasse this my request, if I shall not proue unto you by most plain reasons … to be necessary for you at this time to marry’ (G. H. Mair (ed.), Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560) (Oxford, 1909), p. 40).

38. See n. 1 above. I am grateful to Lorna Hutson and Alan Stewart for finding this passage. Here, as always, their breadth of reading and alertness to reference has proved invaluable.

39. Ibid., sig.a.ii.^r-v.

40. See Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters, pp. 60-2.

41. Arden edn, 161. This scene is not in the 1623 folio.

42. Ibid., 162-3.

43. Ibid., 79: ‘Approach, thou beacon to this under globe, / That by thy comfortable beams I may / Peruse this letter. … I know ‘tis from Cordelia, / Who hath most fortunately been inform'd / Of my obscured course.’

44. Ibid., 102-5: ‘If you shall see Cordelia,— / As fear not but you shall—show her this ring.’

45. Leo Salingar has suggested to me that the letter Macbeth sends to Lady Macbeth in Act 1, scene 5 of the play, informing her that the witches' prophecy has already begun to come true also conforms to this Erasmian model. The audience experiences the full emotional intensity of the incident for Macbeth by watching the histrionic and rhetorical response of his wife to the letter (‘Glamis thou art, and Cawdor …’). It is also worth noting that the most familiar type of such a letter (to which, in a sense, Macbeth's letter conforms) is the intimate love letter. In the sixteenth century it was already customary for a love letter to be a particularly significant ‘gift’ from a lover (see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England 1300-1840 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 301-3).

46. Arden edn, 54-5.

47. Ibid., 38.

48. It would be attractive to argue that the exemplary letter received by Cordelia, and written by Kent, in Act 4, scene 3, which exists only in one text of the play, was an addition for dramatic effect, which, however, is actually not strictly in character with Kent's ‘bluntness’ elsewhere.

49. Ibid., 56.

50. Ibid., 84.

51. Ibid., 67.

52. Ibid., 70.

53. Ibid., 74-5.

54. Lorna Hutson points out that in the earlier chronicle play, King Leir (registered in 1605) letters already structure the contest for authority here between Goneril and Lear. But in King Leir Goneril intercepts letters intended to warn Lear, and substitutes letters addressed to her sister ‘which contayne matter quite contrary to the other: ther shall she be given to understand, that my father hath detracted her, given out slanderous speeches against her; and that hee hath most intollerably abused me, set my Lord and me at variance, and made mutinyes amongst the commons’. And she instructs the messenger to lay false oath if necessary, to ensure that her letters are accepted as true: ‘These things (although it be not so) / Yet thou must affirme them to be true, / With othes and protestations as will serve’ (Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare 7 (London, 1973), pp. 360-1). Here it is plotting by means of letters (instrumentally), rather than rhetorical effect through letters which secures the desired outcome.

55. Tony Grafton points out to me that Justus Lipsius stressed this misleading quality as potentially exploitable in familiar letters.

56. I owe this insight to Lorna Hutson.

57. Arden edn, 112.

58. Ibid., 140-1.

59. The same letter is sent on from Cornwall to Albany at the beginning of Act 3, scene 7, as evidence that the French have landed (138).

60. Ibid., 9.

61. For a full version of this argument see Lorna Huston, The Usurer's Daughter (London, 1994).

62. At the very beginning of the play, when Kent is not known to Edmund, Gloucester instructs Edmund, ‘remember him hearafter as my honourable friend’: ‘Edm. My services to your Lordship. Kent I must love you, and sue to know you better. Edm. Sir, I shall study deserving. Glou. He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again’ (4-5). In other words, Edmund has to build the bonds of kin and service with learnt knowledge of affect.

63. Ibid., 159-60.

64. Ibid., 7.

65. Ibid., 9.

66. Ibid., 82.

67. Ibid., 162.