[In the essay below, Pye focuses on Act I, scene 4 of 1 Henry VI in order to study the economic and historical dimensions of subjectivity presented in the play.]

Nothing has so consistently underwritten recent efforts to historicize the study of Renaissance drama as a perceived correspondence between economic commodification and representation. In Worlds Apart, Jean-Christophe Agnew suggests how implicated the worlds of the theater and the market were during the early modern period. With the advent of exchange-value as a property independent of use-value, the market-place evolved from a localized institution to a supervening process capable of reconstituting the very society that set it in motion. “To those caught up in this expanded circulation of commodities of the early modern epoch,” Agnew writes, “the very liquidity of the money form—its apparent capacity to commute specific obligations, utilities, and meanings into general, fungible equivalents—bespoke the same boundless autonomy that Aristotle had once condemned as an unnatural, ‘chrematistic’ form of exchange.”¹ According to Agnew's account, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England the newly liquid market conspired with the protean character of theater to prompt a “crisis of representation” bearing on identity as such. “The new drama showed, as no other genre could, how precarious social identity was … By deliberately effacing the line between the self's iconic representation in art and ritual and its instrumental presentation in ordinary life, Renaissance theater formally reproduced the same symbolic confusion that a boundless market had already introduced into the visual codes and exchange relations of a waning feudal order.”²

Literary critics preoccupied with the economic determinations of cultural productions have figured this crisis in terms of an increasingly unbounded process of social commodification. Thus Don Wayne's reassessment of “Drama and Society in the Age of Johnson” turns on the dramatist's inability to conceive himself fully independent of an “emerging commodity system of economic and social exchange,” and Karen Newman reconceives the woman's role within drama of the era in terms of a generalized structure of consumption: “She is represented in the discourses of Jacobean London as at once consumer and consumed.”³ The centrality of the economic perspective in these accounts has considerable—even shrill—empirical support. Consider the not-so-obscurely intertwined proliferation of anti-theatrical and anti-usury tracts during the era, each declaring the limitless shame of a cultural transformation that threatened to reduce all to a groundless play of terms.

Yet it is precisely the sweeping and fundamental nature of such a transformation that raises methodological qualms. It is the constitutive force of economy—the prospect that one might be reduced to a commodity or mere factor in a system of exchange—that prompts fear and shame. But isn’t apprehension precisely what guarantees one's externality to the threatened transformation? From what position could one perceive one's own commodification with anxiety? The problem of registering the empirical ground of a structural transformation can similarly be posed at the level of the social totality. How is it possible to speak of the origins of an economic shift that reconstitutes the society that institutes it, thus eliding its own causes?

Paradoxically, far from disabling historical enquiry, economy's peculiarly equivocal status as an empirical phenomenon—its tendency toward a certain groundlessness—has if anything empowered historicism's most recent avatar, New Historicism. The writings arrayed under that heading are bound together in good part by their reliance on the ease with which economic description seems to lend itself to a generalized metaphorics of speculation and exchange, to a thrilling measure of discursive liquidity.⁴ Here is Stephen Greenblatt's account of the relationship between a historical document—the report of the wreck of a merchant ship written by a company man—and a literary work—The Tempest:

The changes I have sketched are signs of the process whereby the Bermuda narrative is made negotiable, turned into a currency that may be transferred from one institutional context to another. The changes do not constitute a coherent critique of the colonial discourse, but they function as an unmooring of its elements so as to confer upon them the currency's liquidity.⁵

Freed from the particularities of the market, the discourse of “negotiation,” “liquidity” and “exchange” comes to articulate an account of the entire social field, all under the inclusive rubric of “the circulation of social energies.”

In this case, one is prompted to ask, not so much what grounds economy, as what gives it its apparently limitless alchemical powers as a descriptive term. The effectiveness of New Historicism's cultural—or economic—poetics, its capacity to seem at once historically particular and boundlessly expansive, depends both on the residual empirical aura that clings to such economic language, and, as importantly, on economy's distinctive ability to dissimulate its status as a system. In Greenblatt's account, one is struck by the combination of fungibility at the level of discrete phenomena and totalizing force at the level of the social field itself, a globalization most evident when the cultural exegete is most at pains to banish it:

The circulation of social energy by and through the stage was not part of a single, coherent, totalizing system. Rather it was partial, fragmented, conflicted. … What then is the social energy that is being circulated? Power, religious awe, free-floating intensities of experience: in a sense, the question is absurd, for everything produced by the society can circulate. … Under such circumstances, there can be no single method, no over-all picture, no exhaustive and definitive cultural poetics.⁶

No single method or over-all picture except the most embracing—the economic concept of “circulation” itself. Whether at the level of the discrete subject or at the level of the social field, whether applied literally as final cause or figuratively as global function, the economic metaphor seems to enable the impossible fantasy of a comprehensive account of the loss of totality, the fantasy of cultural science itself, perhaps.

In the analysis that follows, I want to explore the relations among economy, theater, and subjectivity in the Renaissance by dwelling on an early, and formative, moment in Shakespeare's theatrical career: act 1, scene 4 of the dramatist's earliest and most dazzlingly unformed play, 1 Henry VI. The scene suggests that both in and beyond the stage a Renaissance subjectivity is indeed constituted in economic terms. It also shows how intimately theater is involved in such a process of subject-formation. But theater and market assume their constitutive power—the subject emerges—I will argue, only at the point where the economic function exceeds itself altogether. Not simply inscribed within an already fully constituted economic domain, not simply “commodified,” the early-modern subject emerges at the volatile limits of the economic function itself, the point where economy as a coherent mechanism falters. The politics of subject-formation, its relation to nationalism and to sexuality, should be understood, the scene suggests, in relation to that more radical horizon.

My aim in tracing the formation of an early modern subject to the limits of the economic—the most global as well as modern of functions—will be to suggest, not just the “liquidity” of social phenomena within a given culture, but the contingency of the social field itself. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have argued, rather than assuming the form of a prior totality, the social field is constituted at a charged and unstable limit, the point of its own impossibility:

The incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of ‘society’ as a sutured and self-defined totality. … There is no single underlying principle fixing—and hence constituting—the whole field of differences. The irresoluble interiority/exteriority tension is the condition of any social practice. … It is in this terrain, where neither a total interiority nor a total exteriority is possible, that the social is constituted.⁷

To advance a fully anti-essentialist account of any social formation it is necessary to include economy itself among the array of these differentially defined social practices, however paradoxical that may seem, for it has been economy more than anything else that has preserved the idea of society as a totalized field even among those analysts apparently most willing to embrace the discursive, open-ended nature of social forms. But our analysis will ultimately engage a dimension of contingency that Laclau and Mouffe do not entertain, one that makes anything like a history of the subject a vexed preoccupation. In so far as it represents the limits of the subject, the horizon of economy is also, the scene suggests, the boundary of the historiographic dimension itself. Rather than being the transparent medium within which phenomena such as market and subject emerge, history should be included among the forms constituted at the vanishing point of the social, a necessary and insupportable horizon where “the impossibility of the real … has attained a form of presence,” and which the early modern era termed the demonic.⁸

Act 1, scene 4 of 1 Henry VI is notable for the appearance of the French herione, Joan of Arc—“Pucelle,” as she is called—and for the way the emergence of that figure serves to galvanize the otherwise peculiarly drifting beginnings of the play and of the Histories. Shakespeare's Histories begin with an ending—with their own ending, in a sense. The curtain opens on the funeral of Henry V, the absolute sovereign whose glorious conquests the last play of the cycle will celebrate. Even before the body is buried, word arrives from France of the dissolution of the Empire, culminating with an account of the betrayal and capture of England's warrior hero, Lord Talbot. The play then shuttles back and forth between the French troops, temporarily emboldened by the appearance of the warrior-maid, and scenes of political disarray in England.

At the start of act 1, scene 4 England's fortunes seem momentarily to have reversed themselves again. Talbot has been ransomed from captivity, and, as the scene opens, stands with his companions on a turret overlooking Orleans, whose siege they are confidently planning. But a canon on the lower stage ignites, felling Salisbury and Gargrave, two of Talbot's comrades on the tower. Almost simultaneously, a messenger arrives to announce the approach of the “holy prophetess,” Pucelle. The mere word of her arrival suffices to raise the dead. Nevertheless, and despite temporary set-backs, Talbot, and the play itself, assume a minimally coherent trajectory for the first time in relation to this threat. Talbot's heroic exploits against Joan and the French go on to become the formal core of an otherwise stunningly fragmentary chronicle.

The structure of the scene is a familiar one: a threat from without is used to coalesce forces within, in this instance a sense of national and literary identity. For our purposes, the scene is equally noteworthy for the way it draws together the theater and the market. The scene that concludes with Pucelle's charged appearance begins with Shakespeare's most explicit articulation of the intimate relationship between market and spectacle. Appearing for the first time in the play, Lord Talbot discourses on his recent captivity by the French: “With scoffs and scorns and contumelious taunts / In open marketplace produc’d they me / To be a public spectacle to all.”⁹ The uneasy correspondence between the shaming effects of display and commodification that energized the anti-theatrical polemics of the age comes into plain view here, presumably because it has been displaced onto the French.

Indeed, Talbot's escape from the French amounts to a victory over the depredations of exchange and theatricalization alike. “By what means got thou to be releas’d?” Salisbury asks. Talbot answers:

The Earl of Bedford had a prisoner
Call’d the brave Lord Ponton de Santrailles,
For him was I exchang’d and ransomed.
But with a baser man of arms by far
Once in contempt they would have barter’d me;
Which I, disdaining, scorn’d, and craved death
Rather than I would have been so pill’d esteem’d;
In fine, redeem’d I was as I desir’d.

(1.4.27-34)

Talbot holds out for an exchange worthy of his class and honor. But he does more. Wagering the absolute term of his own death to accomplish the substitution he desires, Talbot controls and thus situates himself outside the blind denominations of exchange, and so gives exchange a faintly theological surplus, as the language of redemption suggests. Theater here is staked on class difference, for by maintaining at the risk of his life the all-important distinction between aristocratic ransom and the leveling and depletionary exchanges of a newer dispensation, Talbot preserves a redeeming, if minimal, difference between the English stage—the display the audience sees before it—and the site of the market.

Talbot's narrative of the spectacle in the market gives local form to a more submerged and troublingly expansive version of surrogacy associated with the English hero in the scene and the play, an unbounded representational economy which the scene will engage in detail before returning once again with Talbot's first victory to a concrete and familiar thematization of the market. “Talbot, my life, my joy, again return’d?” Salisbury exclaims from the upper stage as the hero enters for the first time (1.4.23). This is the language of redemption, perhaps. But the timing of the proclamation—from the moment he first appears, Talbot is “again return[ing]”—and the heightened reflexivity of the moment—“Discourse, I prithee, on this turret's top”—produces the impression that the hero's appearance coincides with the more insistent and quotidian reiterations of theater itself, where the most momentous arrival amounts to a return. The impression is only heightened by Talbot's oddly recurrent destiny in the play. We first hear of him when a messenger interrupts the opening funeral to announce that at the siege of Orleans Lord Talbot has been encircled by the enemy, betrayed by one Sir John Falstaff, and, we are momentarily given to believe, slain. And yet, Talbot's fate will indeed conclude when he is encircled by the enemy, betrayed once again by Sir John Falstaff, and slain.

We can make sense of Talbot's reiterative and reflexively theatrical status in the play by recognizing how bound up his fate is with the problem of origins in this originary drama—the first of the Histories, the first of Shakespeare's career. The play begins with the funeral of Henry V; in principle, the entire history cycle shores and initiates itself against the absolute measure of the sovereign's death. In fact, nothing could be less stable than the king's demise. “What say’st thou, man, before dead Henry's corse?” Bedford exclaims to the messenger announcing the fragmentation of the sovereign's empire. “Speak softly, or the loss of those great towns / Will make him burst his lead and rise from death.” Gloucester continues: “Is Paris lost? Is Roan yielded up? / If Henry were recall’d to life again, / These news would cause him once more yield the ghost” (1.1.62-67). Rising to cease again, reviving and ceasing in the same instant, Henry's return would only riddle death's limit and guarantee. The entire trajectory of the Histories, in which the sovereign does indeed return but through a double, lineal and cyclic form, can be seen to answer to this radical equivocation at the source.¹⁰ Talbot's “again return[ing],” and his surrogacy, should be understood in relation to the king's ghostly wavering. To initiate themselves at all, the Histories must check the prospect of limitless reiteration and of a boundless form of exchange that marks and derides their advent. Rather than simply enacting a narrative of nationalist exploits, Talbot is burdened with the task of generating in its sparest form the very possibility of a vectored and narratable history out of representation's empty returns.

From the moment he appears, “Talbot” is to a remarkable extent a theatrical construct. “Again return’d,” he tells his tale, a tale of specular aggression and counter-aggression:

With scoffs and scorns and contumelious taunts
In open market-place produc’d they me
To be a spectacle to all:
Here, said they, is the terror of the French,
The scarecrow that affrights our children so.
Then broke I from the officers that led me,
And with my nails digg’d stones out of the ground
To hurl at the beholders of my shame.
By grisly countenance made others fly,
None durst come near me for fear of sudden death.

(1.4.39-48)

It is specifically as a terrible spectacle, and in retaliation against those who would reduce him so, that Talbot displays the martial ferocity that historically defines him.

As Talbot continues his discourse, the theatrical aggressivity he recounts is gradually concatenated with his immediate position on stage before us. The scene is framed by an exchange between the French Master Gunner and his son in the besieged city down below. The Dauphin's “espials” have informed the Gunner “How the English, in the suburbs close intrench’d, / Wont through a secret grate of iron bars / In yonder tower to overpeer the city” (1.4.9-13). To “intercept this inconvenience,” the Master Gunner has placed “a piece of ord’nance” below on the stage proper aimed toward the grate in the tower where Talbot now stands (1.4.14, 15). The boy reappears below as Talbot completes the discourse on his captivity:

In iron walls they deem’d me not secure;
So great fear of my name ’mongst them were spread
That they suppos’d I could rend bars of steel,
And spurn in pieces posts of adamant;
Whereof a guard of chosen shot I had
That walk’d about me every minute while;
And if I did but stir out of my bed,
Ready they were to shoot me in the heart.
Enter the Boy with a Linstock

(1.4.49-57)

At this point, the boy appears as if the materialization of Talbot's victimizers. But in the interval between the lighting of the ordinance and its detonation the relations of power figured in Talbot's account are reversed. Vowing revenge on the English hero's captors, the men turn their gaze on the city spread before them, in fact, out over the stage toward the audience.

Salisbury: I grieve to hear what torments you endur’d
But we will be reveng’d sufficiently.
Here, through this grate, I count each one,
And view the Frenchmen how they fortify.
Let us look in, the sight will much delight thee.
Talbot: For aught I see, this city must be famish’d
Or with light skirmishes enfeebled.
Here they shoot, and Salisbury falls down
[together with Gargrave]
Salisbury: O Lord, have mercy on us, wretched sinners!
Gargrave: O Lord, have mercy on me, woeful man!
Talbot: What chance is this that suddenly hath cross’d us?
Speak, Salisbury; at least, if thou canst, speak.
How far’st thou, mirror of all martial men?
One of thy eyes and thy cheek's side struck off!
Accursed tower! accursed fatal hand
That hath contriv’d this woeful tragedy!

(1.4.57-77)

Whose contriving hand, exactly? Talbot's, perhaps. For the shot that rends the “secret grate of iron bars” erupts precisely at the moment when the figure who threatened to “rend bars of steel” in revenge against those who reduced him to spectacle turns outward and reduces all beneath his masterful gaze. But the metatheatrical element of the scene—“accursed fatal hand / That hath contrived this woeful tragedy”—signals a more radical uncertainty about the grounds of this stagey violence. For the moment Talbot “overpeers the city,” overlooking the canon below and gazing out beyond the stage, is also the moment the audience finds its own masterful and subjecting gaze returning upon it. The elaborate calculus of theatrical relations that constitutes Talbot's history works toward, or perhaps devolves from, this single instance of transgression, the moment spectacle returns the gaze, and the boundary between viewer and spectacle is rent.

Hardly an accident or a device, that reversal of object and gaze follows from and is inherent within the very economy of theatrical spectacle. To the extent that the viewing subject defines itself in reducing all to spectacle—insofar as the subject is itself a function of the initiatory division between a seer and a seen—spectacular power will invariably amount to a reversionary transgression, a violent and renewed revenging home. The oddly exact wound resulting from this disruption—“one of thy eyes and thy cheek's side struck off”—amounts to the disquieting specular image of the audience's divided and specular formation.

By all rights, the movement of mirroring exchanges should close itself off with that disastrous redounding. But for a detail. In fact, the violence does not exactly return home. The shot intended to “intercept” the overmastering onlookers is, in turn, intercepted, for it is not Talbot, the speaker who discoursed of rending barriers and revenging beholders, but his auditor, Salisbury, who suffers the violent returns. The effects of that misfire can be felt in the subterranean workings of Talbot's impromptu eulogy:

In thirteen battles Salisbury o’ercame;
Henry the Fift the first train’d to the wars;
Yet liv’st thou, Salisbury? Though thy speech doth fail,
One eye thou hast to look to heaven for grace;
The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.
Bear hence his body, I will help to bury it.
Sir Thomas Gargrave, hast thou any life?
Speak unto Talbot, nay, look up to him.
Salisbury, cheer thy spirit with this comfort,
Thou shalt not die whiles—
He beckons with his hand and smiles on me
As who should say, “When I am dead and gone,
Remember to avenge me on the French.”
Plantagenet, I will …
Wretched shall France be only in my name.

(1.4.78-97)

Through the dying Salisbury, Talbot receives—or ventriloquizes—the injunction that constitutes his martial identity—“avenge me on the French”—and, through the irreversibility of that loss, is able to stabilize the movement of exchange for the first time: “Frenchmen, I’ll be a Salisbury to you” (1.4.106). But that call to martial and national destiny is fragilely posed against signs of disquiet. Before the final beckoning, Talbot invokes his companion, buries him then reinvokes him again. He enjoins Salisbury to exchange gazes with the mirroring sun, with the dead or dying Gargrave, with every specular gaze except that of the true “mirror of all martial men,” himself.

Such wavering may be psychologized as Talbot's guilty response to the death of the man who stood in his place and intercepted his fate. In fact, what Talbot turns from exceeds the economy of guilt and shame altogether: “He beckons with his hand and smiles on me / As who should say, ‘When I am dead and gone, / Remember to avenge me on the French.’” The martial hero's history is grounded at its source on a critical misreading. At once more benign and more alarming than an agonistic call to revenge, Salisbury's smiling and beckoning represents the logical completion of the circuit of exchange in the workings of the death-drive. To close off the movement of substitutions and assume his proper place—to come into his own for the first time—requires the simple and impossible expedient of taking up the position of the dead man who had stood in his place. Not, or not merely, a reflection of guilt, the spectral solicitation confirms the more fundamental truth of Talbot's inscription within a representational economy that exceeds and defines him. Earlier, Talbot had “craved death” rather than submit to exchange. Here, he is shown to crave death precisely to the extent that he is a function of exchange, of an economic circuit that carries beyond any conceivable limit.¹¹

It is in relation to this solicitation of the death drive—the phantasmatic sign of a splitting within—that we should understand the abrupt appearance of a demonic force from without. No sooner has Talbot received, and refused, the fatal sign than news arrives of Joan's approach. Salisbury's flickering returns are now transformed into a more lurid automatism:

Wretched shall France be only in my name.
                    Here an alarum, and it thunders
and lightens
What stir is this? What tumult's in the heavens?
Whence cometh this alarum, and the noise?
                    Enter a messenger
Messenger: My lord, my lord, the French have gather'd head.
The Dolphin, with one Joan de Pucelle join’d,
A holy prophetess new risen up,
Is come with a great power to raise the siege.
                    Here Salisbury lifeth himself
up and groans
Talbot: Hear, hear how dying Salisbury doth groan!
It irks his heart he cannot be reveng’d.
Frenchmen, I’ll be a Salisbury to you.

(1.4.97-106)

Displaced outwardly to the French and to the demonized woman, the power to revive the dead reappears in a overcharged and exclamatory form—as conjury. The splitting within, manifest as an alarming call to quiescence, is now recast as a more familiar, and more manageable, national and sexual antagonism. Joan takes on all the coded and recognizable ambiguities of the castrating woman. “I know not where I am, nor what I do,” Talbot exclaims, “A witch by fear, not force … conquers as she lists” (1.5.20-22).

With this displacement outward, the field of power also shifts from the specular to the linguistic or symbolic register. Joan's potency is first visible, less in her literal power to raise the dead, than in the uncanny workings of the signifier that calls up that event as if of its own accord: “A holy prophetess new risen up, / Is come with a great power to raise the siege.’ / Here Salisbury lifteth himself up and groans” (emphases added). Although affiliated with the woman and the unanchored potencies of the demonic, such effects transpire entirely within the terms of the paternal order. While Talbot announces “wretched shall France be only in my name,” it is the phallic maid whose words initially assume that performative power associated with the name of the father: “Rescu’d is Orleance from the English! / Thus Joan de Pucelle hath perform’d her word, ” Pucelle declaims (1.6.2-3). Talbot's victory is sealed, not when he overcomes, but when his name does. Soldier: “The cry of Talbot serves me for a sword, / For I have loaden me with many spoils, / Using no other weapon but his name” (2.1.79-81).

The victory takes no time—a few scenes and a few skirmishes. For, despite the hyperbolic powers of the witch, the threat is already allayed from the moment it entered the field of castration and gendered sexuality. Neither, we might conjecture, does the direst risk coincide with the specular dimensions of the scene, whatever the genealogical progression from spare and violently unstable theatricality to safely thematized martial victory might suggest. Specular subversion, like symbolic castration, implies its own mechanism for articulating a subject, however volatile and contradictory. Instead, the danger around which the scene is structured should be seen to arise at the point where genealogy yields to exorbitant return and where all the articulatory resources of theater—specular and linguistic, imaginary and symbolic—encounter their vanishing point in the mute workings of the death drive. With Talbot's refusal of that solicitation, and with the displacements that follow from that disavowal, representation is checked at its limit, and a national, as well as personal and sexual, identity coalesce for the first time.¹²

The significance of Talbot's apostrophe on the turret top may be measured in the extent to which the entire, strangely reiterative movement of his career gravitates back to and rewrites the scene. In Talbot's final appearance, Salisbury's role is taken up by Talbot's son, and the splittings of the death-drive are recast in the form of a filial doubling: “No more can I be severed from your side,” young John Talbot says, “Than can yourself yourself in twain divide” (4.5.48-49). The father dies addressing-apostrophizing-the son who lies “inhearsed in [his]arms” (4.7.45). Hallucinatory misreading is replaced now by a knowing imputation, and the violent torsion of the death drive toward political bellicoseness is converted to a plangently sublimating redirection of revenge back against death itself:

Talbot: Brave Death by speaking, whether he will or no;
Imagine him a Frenchman, and thy foe.
Poor boy, he smiles, methinks, as who should say,
Had death been French, then Death had died to-day.

(4.7.25-28)

The radical equivocations of the opening scene are revised now as familiar oedipal ambiguities: “I have what I would have, / Now my old arms are young John Talbot's grave” (4.7.31-32).

More than a mimetic representation, then, the scene of Talbot's first appearance actively constitutes identity and narrative trajectory out of theater's unbounded returns. In that sense, the scene could be seen to play out within starkly political contours the stammering advent of a Shakespearean, and distinctly modern, character-based dramaturgy. But it is not just the figure on stage who is constituted in the refusal of the fatal solicitation on the turret top. To the extent that the entire scene is volatilized by the threat of the viewer's subversion, it also reenacts the founding of a political and sexual subjectivity beyond the stage, structured from its beginning under the aegis of a nationalist destiny and staked against the excluded and flamboyantly demonized woman.¹³

The subjectivity thus formed remains an explicitly economic one. Talbot's formative drama first emerged from the market in his opening narrative of captivity, and it is to the market that it returns. Talbot's “revenge” is completed when, a few scenes later, having recovered Orleans, he places Salisbury's body on display at precisely the point of his original, theatrical shame: “Bring forth the body of old Salisbury, / And here advance it in the market-place, / The middle centure of this cursed town. / Now have I paid my vow unto his soul” (2.2.4-7). Accomplished revenge serves the more critical function of revision, as the surrogate is inscribed—literally in the epitaph Talbot composes—at the source. The aim, and the instability, of that revisionary gesture is apparent in the way eulogy ambiguously mixes with confession, and the dead assumes the characteristics of the memorialist in the inscription Talbot proposes:

And that hereafter ages may behold
What ruin happened in revenge of him,
                                                                                … I’ll erect
A tomb, wherein his corpse shall be interr’d;
Upon the which, that every one may read,
Shall be engrav’d the sack of Orleance,
The treacherous manner of his mournful death,
And what a terror he had been to France.

(2.2.10-17)

Whose “treachery” is being marked and allayed in this epitaph? Indeed, who is buried here, Salisbury, or Talbot, the true “terror of the French”? Burial here is equally a process of psychic encrypting—the founding of a permanent partition within.

The burial ceremony marks a final settling of accounts—a ritualized management of the fatal appeal and impossible exchange that conditioned Talbot's emergence. The sealing off of that psychic risk coincides with the explicit drawing together of the market place and the place of the stage—the theater the audience sees before it. Theater acknowledges itself. Indeed, the audience may acknowledge itself as well. Unsure as yet where the ebb of battle has left them, it would be difficult for theater-goers not to hear in Talbot's call to process “here, in the market place, the middle centure of this cursed town” a reference to the present site of their viewing, and to their own conditions as economic, and shamefully theatrical, beings.¹⁴

The hero's conquest of the martial witch fulfills the conditions for the emergence of an explicitly theatrical and economic—a “commodified”—subjectivity in all its blazoned and perhaps energizing shame. But it also suggests the disavowal and the remainder that underwrites that construction: the market-place intersects with the stage in the process of subject formation, but as the site of an ambiguous burial. In his introduction to the work of the French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Jacques Derrida writes of a tomb or “cryptic enclave” erected in the midst of the city forum or market-place, a fragile and irreducible enclosure that defines the open space of discursive and economic circulation. “Within this forum, a place where the free circulation and exchange of objects and speeches can occur, the crypt constructs another, more inward forum like a closed rostrum or speaker's box, a safe: sealed, and thus internal to itself, a secret interior within the public square, but by the same token outside it, external to the interior.”¹⁵ Talbot's indeterminate ceremony, at once commemoration and disavowal, repeats in the psychic register the contradictions of this parietal, self-divided space, and might be seen to allegorize the distinctive condition—the internal fault-line—of a subjectivity forged from the traces of the theater and the market.

It is not commodification that inspires dread then, however much that fate is trumpeted as the sign of a fallen age, for instance in the moralized spectacle of a king who reduces his kingdom to “rotten parchment bonds”—“live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee”—or in the spectacle of a prince who exchanges honors and accounts with a “factor” as easily as an actor changes roles (Richard II, 2.1.64, 135; 1 Henry IV, 3.2.143-50). The more unsettling prospect is that the logic of exchange might by its very nature exceed any recognizable economy of self-interest, of investment and return. The scene raises the possibility that revenge—that motif through which a mercantilist age figured to itself in a mode of savored reprobation its reciprocal and economistic notion of identity—might be impelled by a far more disquieting lure than aggression.¹⁶ The repeatedly condemned and reinforced association between theater and market quells that threatened exorbitance at the core of Renaissance subjectivity. On the one hand, theatrical representation is bound to a localized, and thus restricted and comprehensible, version of the economic—to the place of the market. On the other hand, economic exchange is bound to theater's more manageable specular threat, not the death drive, but a familiar, even bracing, economy of exposure and shame. To feel the depleting shame of spectacle and to know one's place in the market's speculative returns is already to have entered the space of a newly valorized and contained subjectivity.¹⁷

It is not coincidence, then, that the era of the market was also the era of spectacle. But to speak of this as a simple historical moment overlooks how problematic history's own role is in this conjuncture, a fact evident in the way the eulogy that draws together theater, market, and heroic destiny solicits us across the interval of time. As if assuming from within the tragedy the role of the “fatal hand that hath contrived this woeful tragedy,” Talbot fulfills his task by inscribing an epitaph “that hereafter ages may behold” the events we are now seeing. The hero's discourse takes on peculiar immediacy here precisely in its empty reflexivity, to the extent it is felt to have been from the outset the groundless, epitaphic voice of the stage. The hard-won funeral clearly answers to the broken ceremony that fails to stabilize the opening of the play and the Histories—it is only now that that originating act is managed. Thus the spectral nature of the burial—it is a phantasm that is being laid to rest—is mimed in the contradictory status of the eulogy, which amounts to a founding revision, and of the discourse of the play itself, which assumes its potency at this moment by reflexively echoing and conjuring its own emptiness, like a theatrical beckoning from beyond the grave.

Whatever its disruptive effects, that contradictory discursive form—an inaugural doubling back and the conjuring of vacancy—may amount to the condition of historiographic writing as such. Since its beginnings in the sixteenth century historiography has entailed just such a double gesture, Michel de Certeau has suggested. Constituting itself against an excluded other, sustained by death's caesura, historiography simultaneously defined itself in its capacity to recover what it foreclosed. “It is an odd procedure that posits death, a breakage everywhere reiterated in discourse, and that yet denies loss by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge.”¹⁸ Talbot's phantasmatic mourning, a suturing of emptiness, may exemplify, not just the settled form of the “woeful tragedy” he inhabits, but of the modern discourse of history in all its headlong, self-overcoming expansiveness.¹⁹

Any effort to historicize Talbot's drama is at least complicated, then, by the possibility that the scene structures the terms for such a historical accounting. In other words, before we speak of the historical convergence of theater and market during the era, we should consider the way market and theater participate in the formation of history. To the extent that it implied a structural and synchronic form of analysis, the economic perspective would seem to oppose, perhaps even emerge as the concurrent inverse of, heroic history.

The separation of the state and civil society, the autonomization of the ‘economy’—all these factors associated with the evolution of English capitalism conduced to the atomization of the social world into discrete and separate theoretical spheres. And with it came a detachment of the social sciences from history, as social relations and processes came to be conceived as natural, answering to the universal laws of the economy.²⁰

And yet, the scene we have been considering suggests at another level a profound complicity between economism and historicism, even a common ground. In the scene, the encrypting that opens the possibility of a coherent space of exchange, and thus conditions the emergence of a commodified subject, coincides with the phantasmatic reserve that underwrites the historiographic function. That convergence may suggest the economic underpinnings of the sense of “historical solitude” that Thomas Greene sees attending the beginnings of early modern humanism.²¹ It might also explain the compelling mixture of economism and apostrophic mourning in Greenblatt's cultural poetics. “I began with the desire to speak with the dead,” begins the book that articulates the infinitely negotiable, circulatory character of human desire.²² So began Talbot and so begins history, perhaps.²³

To suggest, however, that the scene reveals in any unequivocal sense the origins of modern historiography entails an obvious methodological and ideological fantasy: the fantasy that one could occupy a position outside one's own history. It also overlooks just what the scene shows us: the insistence of the demonic in that emergence. As we have seen, Talbot is conjured up precisely by virtue of the belatedness of the epitaph he speaks; he emerges to the extent that he is felt to have been what we have known him to be from the outset—a theatrical revenant. Luridly evoked and excluded to stabilize a narrative trajectory, the demonic returns within, as history's animating condition. In so far as he takes on a form of theatrical belatedness—the status of one who will have been—as the condition of his historical being, Talbot undoes as much as he sustains history's comforting ratio and vector: it is from the future that the hero returns.²⁴ If the scene enacts the founding of the Histories—of the historiographic dimension as such—it is, then, in the form of that ellipsis at the core of symbolization that Jacques Lacan calls the “encounter forever missed” and that more recent psychoanalytic accounts have termed the empty, intractable stuff of mourning.²⁵

Does acknowledging this labile, metaleptic element within the historical dimension vitiate what claims one would want to make for the cultural and political specificity of Shakespeare's drama? The contextual and political character of social phenomena may become fully apparent only at the point where history's lapses and disjunctures come into view. Spectacle and market, subjectivity and history converge in the scene we have been considering, not as explanatory givens, but as fundamentally contingent phenomena actively constituted around their own volatile and mutually implicated limits. It would be misleading to claim that subjectivity is simply a function of the theatrical or economic domains, or even that the subject is constituted within history. The scene suggests instead that subjectivity is formed at the knotted vanishing point of an entire, specific array of social forms—theater, economy, history—a point of radically failed closure evoked in this instance under the sign of “demonism.” To acknowledge that subjectivity does not in any simple sense arise within history, as if history were nothing more than a prior and unproblematic envelope, is simply to recognize what makes subjectivity and history political phenomena—irreducibly contingent, and thus from the outset the consequence of an arbitrary, exclusionary and unstable gesture of force.²⁶

To realize its political dimensions fully, then, we should perhaps look beyond the scene of Talbot's emergence as a site of origins and consider instead its rather striking and unstable returns. I’m not the first to make claims for the scene. The earliest account we have of a Shakespeare production—a passage in Thomas Nash's defense of theater—involves the reappearance of a long-dead phantom:

Nay, what if I prove playes to be no extreame, but a rare exercise of vertue? First, for the subject of them … it is borrowed out of our English chronicles, wherein our forefathers' valiant actes (that have lyne long buried in rustie brass and worme-eaten bookes) are revived, and they themselves raysed from the grave of oblivion, and brought to pleade their aged honours in open presence; than which, what can bee a sharper reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours? How would it have joy’d brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeare in his tomb, he should triumph againe on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least, (at several times) who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding?²⁷

“Talbot, my life, my joy, again return’d”? Nash invokes heroic history specifically as a conservative stay against an “effeminate,” which is to say a usurious, economistic, age. “I will defend [plays],” he continues,

against anie collian, or club-fisted usurer of them all, there is not immortalitie can be given a man on earth like playes. What talke I to them of immortalitie, that are the onely underminers of honour, and doo envie any man that is not sprung up by base brokerye like themselves?²⁸

While Nash thus stakes the revivifying power of staged history explicitly against brokery's debased, indiscriminate method of making a man “spr[i]ng up,” one is nevertheless struck by just how equivocal Talbot's return remains in the theatrical apologist's account. The hero, who returns from the “rustie brass” of the grave as if of his own accord only to bleed freshly, recalls the opening of the Histories, where the sovereign threatens to “burst his lead and rise from death” in order to “yield the ghost.” Shoring chronicle history against the market merely brings into view that form of return that exceeds, and underwrites, both.

There is undoubtedly an element of subversive fantasy in the account of ten thousand spectators come to see England's national hero “fresh bleeding.” Pity mingles uneasily with animus in the impulse to “new embalm” the returning dead with tears. But that Nash is drawn to this ambiguous scene as the exemplum of the “vertues” of the stage suggests a more essential relationship between theater's power and these signs of exorbitance. In a later era, literature's hold will derive from the richly complicitous prospects of narcissistic aggrandizement and apprehension in the sinuous workings of a novelistic form in which the correspondence between narrative and private historicity went without saying.²⁹ Here, in the era of spectacle and of a subjectivity bound less by established resources of narrativity and inwardness than by an as yet fragile circuitry of exchange, the emergence of the subject is conditioned from the outset by history's proximity to demonic return, and by all the possibilities of reversal and captivation implicit in the workings of the death drive.³⁰

Notes

1. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 42.

2. Agnew (note 1), 112-13.

3. Don Wayne, “Drama and Society in the Age of Johnson: An Alternative View,” Renaissance Drama 13 (1982): 128, and Karen Newman, “City Talk: Women and Commodification in Jonson's Epicoene,” ELH 56 (1989): 506.

4. On economic discourse as an organizing feature of New Historicism, see H. Aram Veeser's introduction to The New Historicism, ed. Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), xiv-xv.

5. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 155.

6. Greenblatt (note 5), 19.

7. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 111.

8. Laclau and Mouffe (note 7), 129.

9. William Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), act 1, scene 4, lines 39-41. All subsequent references to Shakespeare's plays will be to this edition, and will be cited parenthetically within the text.

10. See Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle (London: Routledge, 1990), 18-23.

11. From the vantage point of the subject, the emergence of the death drive coincides with the point of expenditure without return, that uncanny space “beyond the personal and social” which William Flesch beautifully explores under the term “extremity” (Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992], 12-21). The relationship between the autonomous workings of exchange and the return of the dead is echoed in Philip Stubbe's invective against usury: “It is as impossible for any to borrowe money there [in the market] without … some good hostage, gauge, or pledge, as it is for a dead man to speak with audible voice” (The Anatomie of Abuses, ed. Arthur Freeman [1583; rpt., London: Garland Press, K^vr). Just invert the analogy to recognize the unspoken fear: raising the dead may be as easy as borrowing money. Death itself is not “gauge or pledge” enough against the exorbitancies of exchange.

12. The ventriloquistic apostrophe that allows the hero to assume his destiny by assuming the place of the dead in symbolic form only, even as it founds the symbolic order in all its autonomous potency—“wretched shall France be only in my name”—on a phantasmatic form of specular identification, represents theater's ideological function in its most irreducible form: a violently repercussive misreading, but a misreading that constitutes the possibility of meaning; a repression, but a repression that conjures what it excludes. For an analysis of the reliance of the symbolic on an arbitrary imaginary identification whose rhetorical form is apostrophe, see Cynthia Chase, “The Witty Butcher's Wife: Freud, Lacan, and the Conversion of Resistance to Theory,” Modern Language Notes 102 (1987): 1009-12. My account of Joan's function in the scene is not incompatible with Leah Marcus's suggestive argument that she represents a “distorted image” of England's own martial maid, Queen Elizabeth I, and thus taps the gender anxieties associated with female rule. See Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 51-83.

13. The scene thus bears out Homi Bhabha's argument that the homogeneous, “continuist” temporality of nationalist narrative is forged on the active forgetting of the “ghostly time of repetition,” a “zone of occult instability” prior to the founding of a determinate “national will” (“DissemiNation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha [New York: Routledge, 1990], 295-310).

14. According to the O. E. D., “centure” means “girdle,” thus bringing to mind the site of the theater just beyond London's walls. That this is a “middle centure” might suggest what is disquieting about this liminal site—that it should have constitutive powers.

15. Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, Foreward to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolfman's Magic Word, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), xiv. For a reading of Abraham and Torok's theory of “cryptation” in relation to the gender-specific foundations of Renaissance autobiography, see Timothy Murray, “Translating Montaigne's Crypts: Melancholic Relations and the Sites of Altarbiography,” in Reconfiguring the Renaissance: Essays in Critical Materialism, ed. Jonathan Crewe, Bucknell Review 35 (1992): 121-49.

16. The relationship between economy and revenge is evident in the fear, and the reassurance, each occasioned. The fear is that a human institution can assume a life of its own—the limitless circuits of exchange, the limitless cycles of revenge. The reassurance: precisely that the mechanism is self-sufficient, thus localizable and capable of being known.

17. That the specular metaphor functioned within economic thought as much as economy functioned within theater is evident enough in this climactic passage from Edward Misselden's The Circle of Commerce, the first English treatise to theorize economy as a fully autonomous function:

    It is said of Sapor King of Persia, that he carried a great globe to be made of Glasse, of such curiosity and excellency, that himself might sit in his throne, and he and it, in the Center thereof, and behold the motions and revolutions of the Starres, rising and falling under his feet: as if he that was a mortall man, would seem immortall. And surely if a King would desire to behold from his throne, the various revolutions of Commerce, within and without his Kingdome; he may behold them all at once in this Globe of glasse, The Ballance of Trade. For indeed if there bee any vertue in the Theorick part of Commerce, that might attract a Princes Eie to be cast upon it; surely it is in this kind of Exchange, that one Country maketh with another in the Ballance of Trade. … All the waight of Trade falle's to this Center, and comes within the circuit of this Circle. … This is the very Eie of the Eie; or it is the pupil or apple of the Eie, or as the Rabbins calle it, the daughter or image in the Eie. (The Circle of Commerce [1623; rpt., New York: Augustus Kelley, 1971], 141-42)

    Rather than undoing it, the notion of economy as a global function reinscribes sovereignty, not as the fixed term or ground of exchange, but as a specular reflection of the totality of the system itself. Although he speaks exclusively of the balance of trade, Misselden's elaborate optical and monarchic fantasy should be seen as the antecedent to any effort to elevate exchange “as such” to a sovereign term. Whether it is the subject who discovers his weakness in the shaming effects of commodification, or the sovereign who discovers his omnipotence reflected back in “the Eie of the Eie” of exchange, the economic register is bound up, then, with the empty, sustaining returns of the specular relation.

18. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 5.

19. On this self-overcoming, heroic history's relation to “the ascendant mode of modernity” and to conquest, see Wlad Godzich, “Foreward” to Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100-1750 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), x-xi.

20. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: An Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (New York: Verso, 1991), 91-92.

21. Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 8.

22. Greenblatt (note 5), 1.

23. A number of scholars have argued more generally that, to the extent that they exposed the contingencies of social formations, the phenomena of mercantilism and nationalism played a part in the advent of the modern, secular conception of history. See F. M. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580-1640 (London: Routledge, 1962), 3-7, and Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), 4, 16. Pocock associates the beginning of political consciousness in the sixteenth century—the dawning awareness of politics as “the art of the possible and therefore contingent”—with the advent of a secular theory of time, and of a historicist understanding of subjectivity: the idea that “we become what we do and so make our selves” (J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975], 8, 17). A number of critics have associated Shakespeare's Histories with the beginnings of a modern, secular conception of history. “In England, the sixteenth century saw the invention, not only of the English history play, but of history itself” (Rackin, “Temporality, Anachronism, and Presence in Shakespeare's English History Plays,” Renaissance Drama n. s. 17 [1986]: 103). Particularly because of its association with the market, theater was open to a more materialist and polyvalent conception of history than were traditional modes of historiography, Rackin argues (Stages, 22, 109), while David Riggs sees in the Henry VI plays reflections of the new “more localized and … systematic approach to the past” within the traditional humanistic mode of epideictic history (Shakespeare's Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971], 35-36). Against a tradition of providentialist readings, David Scott Kastan sees in Shakespeare's Histories a recognition of the open-ended “continuum of human time” (Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time [Hanover, N. H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1982], 46-47). My argument here is that the “continuum of human time” is as much an ideological construct as any providential schema, a construct that Shakespeare's theater actively functions to constitute, not just reveal.

24. Lacan describes the subject's inscription within the differential chain of signifiers in terms of “a retroversion effect by which the subject becomes at each stage what he was before and announces himself—he will have been—only in the future perfect tense” (Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Norton, 1977], 306). See also Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 141-42.

25. On the Real as missed occurrence, see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 53-64. On its relation to symbolization and history, see Žižek (note 25): “The process of historicization implies an empty place, a non-historical kernel around which the symbolic network is articulated” (135). On mourning and the limits of symbolization, see Julia Kristeva, “On the Melancholy Imaginary,” in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (New York: Methuen, 1987), 104-10, and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), 3-68.

26. I am not proposing an argument against periodization; for there to be disruption, there must be a structure in place to be disrupted. Instead, I am suggesting that to ignore history's dislocations—the fact that in quite determinant ways history fails—is to ignore the specific locus of subject-formation. For the argument that the subject is inevitably a function, not of social structures, but of their failure to constitute themselves as totalities, see Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990) 40-41.

27. Thomas Nash, Pierce Penniless's Supplication to the Devil (1592: rpt., London: Shakespeare Society, 1842), 59-60.

28. Nash (note 27), 60.

29. David Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 26-32.

30. I would like to thank members of the English Department and the Tudor and Stuart Club at Johns Hopkins University for sponsoring a version of this article as a lecture in Spring, 1991.