"A strange-disposed time"

Although poet remained both the popular and technical term for the playwright during Shakespeare's lifetime,²⁴ there are reasons both historical and textual to suppose that dramatists working in England's increasingly public theaters had occasion to reevaluate and revalue this term. As Elizabeth's court blurred the distinction between private courtship and public courtiership, so her elaborately theatricalized self-presentation erased the boundaries between stagecraft and statecraft. When political power can be dramatized, power itself devolves to a public where interpretive possibilities proliferate. On the Renaissance public stage, sovereign self-presentation is necessarily subjected to representation; the autonomous production of ideology (like selfhood) is rendered an object of the contingencies of reproduction. It was less theatrical self-assertion, therefore, than a complaint of theatrical vulnerability that underlay Elizabeth's remark to a deputation of Lords and Commons: "We princes are set upon stages in the sight and view of all the world."²⁵ Like Elizabeth, Hamlet realizes the danger of playing to the world. The collaborative social act of public theater, however, demands this economy, and Hamlet must finally submit to theatrical appropriation: "High on a stage . . . placed to the view"; reduced, like the court jester he has elegized, to a silent and portable synecdoche of the self; he becomes an erased mouth, a silence inviting spectators' glosses, the quietus ultimately required of the observed of all observers. For Hamlet and Elizabeth, the stage inexorably transforms the self into a passive spectacle fashioned for and by "the sight and view" of others.

In 1601 the Queen of England identified herself as the property of a public beyond her control: "I am Richard II. Know ye not that? .. . He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors; this tragedy was played 40tie times in open streets and houses."²⁶ Stephen Greenblatt has observed that Elizabeth responds here to the potential for iteration and indeterminacy²⁷ of a play construed after a subversive fashion, a play that seems to have broken the boundaries of its house and emerged into a world of limitless audience and multiple factions. To this we should add that her response is concomitant with a perceived disintegration of patronage assumptions ("He that will forget God, will also forget his benefactors"), and with her recognition that she has become a victim of other-fashioning. Whether referring to Shakespeare's play or to Hayward's tract, the anger and anxiety of Elizabeth's self-identification with Richard responds to the fact that it is an identification thrust upon her, an identification that threatens her identity. Like the commissioning viewer of an anamorphic painting, she looks to the story of Henry of Lancaster and Richard of Bordeaux for a familiar reflection of her self-image and finds instead—from another's perspective—a radically subversive alterity, a subrogated persona that troubles the semiotics of the whole composition.²⁸

Two years before this dramatic alteration challenged Elizabeth's "Semper Eadem," the Chamberlain's Men had completed a metaphoric transition—from The Theatre, through The Curtain, to The Globe—²⁹ that seems appropriately responsive to a self-conscious shift, in England's public drama, from the aesthetically insulated to the politically fraught. It was on the Globe's stage, in 1599, that an actor playing the Chorus in Henry V anticipated a Caesar-like "general of our gracious Empress" returning triumphantly from Ireland (5.30-34); and it was earlier in this same year, many scholars agree, that Julius Caesar was first produced as the inaugural play in "this wooden O."³⁰ 1599, the year the "newly built" Globe became "the possession of William Shakespeare and others,"³¹ would have been particularly unaccommodating for the vision of playwrighting "as a publicly intimate relationship between poet and patron." For the preceding year, the Privy Council responded to the annual letter of complaint from the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen with a resolution that was unprecedented: it declared that all public playhouses were to be "plucked down" due to the "lewd matters that are handled on the stages" and the "very great disorders" resulting from the "resort and confluence of bad people." This order of the Privy Council (July 28, 1598), which might have given specific topical resonance to the antitheatrical and anticongregational Tribunes in the first scene of Julius Caesar, was of course never executed, but it marked the beginning of an intense period of legislation against London's public theaters. To gain "possession" of the Globe near the end of the sixteenth century was to enter a theater of contest in which private enterprise and state power were frequently at odds.

Indeed, the Globe itself was constructed of contested property. On December 28, 1598, James and Richard Burbage, together with a master carpenter and a dozen tradesmen, dismantled the deserted Theatre and transported its valuable timber to the Bankside, where it was erected as the new home of the Chamberlain's Men. Giles Allen, the increasingly antitheatrical landlord of the Theatre who had requested the departure of his thespian tenants earlier that year, seems to have desired to "convert the wood and timber thereof to some better use." In the subsequent lawsuit Allen's plaint is remarkable for its representation of the defendants as a mob run amok, threatening city and crown. The Burbages and their accessories, he charged,

then and there armed themselves with divers and many unlawful and offensive weapons, as, namely, swords, daggers, bills, axes, and such like, and so armed did then repair unto the said Theatre. And then and there, armed as aforesaid, in very riotous, outrageous, and forcible manner, and contrary to the laws of your Highness' realm, attempted to pull down the said Theatre, whereupon divers of your subjects, servants, and farmers, then going about in peaceable manner to procure them to desist from that their unlawful enterprise, they (the said riotous persons aforesaid) notwithstanding procured then therein with great violence, not only then and there forcibly and riotously resisting your subjects, servants, and farmers, but also then and there pulling, breaking, and throwing down the said Theatre in very outrageous, violent, and riotous sort, to the great disturbance and terrifying not only of your subjects, said servants, and farmers, but of diverse others of your Majesty's loving subjects there near inhabiting.³²

It is tempting to compare this riotous representation to the plebeians, "moved"—by Antony's promise of a new recreational park "On this side Tiber," fit for "common pleasures" (3.2.249-50)—to "Pluck down benches! Pluck down forms, windows, anything!" (3.2.258-59). Less conjecturally, we can observe that Allen's no doubt embellished account comes very near the energies that Shakespeare represents in the Globe's inaugural play. An intriguing insight into Shakespeare's complex response to this moment of artistic reassessment appears in Andrew Gurr's demonstration that, around the year 1600, he began to reconceive his customers as spectators rather than auditors.³³ Some of the epistemological and political implications of this transformation appear most clearly when we consider the altogether different response of a rival playwright to this same period of change.

For Ben Jonson, the recurrent metaphor of the "Poetomachia" is that of the trial or arraignment, so that the warring dramatists present, in Tibullus' phrase, competing "Law-cases in verse."³⁴ But Jonson's problem, even as he goes about defining the role of the socially relevant public poet, lies in determining that court in which he wishes to appeal his case. In Poetaster (1601), for instance, he legitimizes his ideal, politically and morally salutary poets (Horace and Vergil), by banishing the socially marginal (Ovid), and by purging the civically deleterious (Crispinus and Fannius). Jonson's poetic ideal proves less than efficacious on the public stage, however, where cases are tried not in Augustus' court, but by a corrupt jury. Jonson sends "An armed Prologue" to defend his play from rooms filled with "base detractors, and illiterate apes";³⁵ and in his "apologeticall Dialogue," addressing not a multitudinous spectatorship but an individual reader, he declares the world a "baud" and promises his next dramatic effort will seek a fit audience, however few: "Where, if I prove the pleasure but of one / So he judicious be; He shall b'alone / A Theatre unto me" (213-15). But in the public theater, such retreats into Stoic self-sufficiency are as impossible as imposing a fixed, textual meaning on a script intended for common consumption. In the Globe, to turn one's back on the world is inevitably to invite backstabbing. Thomas Dekker therefore prefaces his theatrical response to Jonson in terms perfectly pitched to elicit the latter's anxiety: "Horace hal'd his Poetasters to the barre, the Poetasters untruss'd Horace: how worthily eyther, or how wrongfully, (World) leave it to the jurie."³⁶ Before this jury, Dekker in Satiro-Mastix (1601) does with Horace much what the Essex party does with the story of Richard II in the same year: as a deposition scene appears subversive when placed in the contemporary political context, so does Horace look ridiculous when dropped "into the middle of a flamboyantly romantic tragi-comedy."³⁷ For Jonson, as for his Queen, the public theater submits one to an audience composed of both predatory rival playwrights and an injudicious tribunal.

Finding his case altered by 1603, then, Jonson replaces the Augustan court with the Tiberian to reflect the willful misreading and evidentiary misconstruction to which the public poet is vulnerable. In his dedicatory epistle to Lord Aubigny, he at once identifies Sejanus' reception with that of its dismembered "subject," and seeks to appeal the Globe's unjust verdict to a single patron: "It is a poem that—if I well remember—in your Lordship's sight, suffered no less violence from our people here than the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome, but with a different fate, as (I hope) merit."³⁸ Here, perhaps, is a case for Taylor's criticism of the dramatist disingenuously posing as an apolitical creature victimized by a world he claims the right to ignore, a playwright for whom "our people here" are indeed "vulgar interlopers" mangling the intimate artistic utterance of a play that has silently become "a poem."³⁹ For the Jonson of 1603, theatrical values ultimately prove corrosive to his conception of artistic integrity; the Globe, engaged in a bacchanalia of epistemological and evaluative indiscrimination, must either consume the Orphic poet or exile him to a private, meritocratic world elsewhere. What would later in Jonson's dramatic career become an effort to prevent this indiscrimination by seeking a poetic audience, not a theatrical spectatorship,⁴⁰ takes an early shape in his desire to place his literary evidence before homogeneous judges, not a heterogeneous jury. As late as 1611, in fact, he intermittently appeals to a higher evaluative court; his epistle to the Earl of Pembroke, published prefatorily to Catiline, reveals an attempt to convert drama into patronage poetry: "Now, it approcheth your censure cheerefully, and with the same assurance, that innocency would appeare before a magistrate." Like Milton after him, Jonson inhabits a "solitude" threatened by "evil tongues," a fragile kingdom of intentionality "with dangers compassed round," and he seeks to define his hermeneutically "fit audience" by insulating it from "the barbarous dissonance" of those inimical to his poetic meaning.

But this defiant, embattled stance must not be confused with Shakespeare's in the same period. If any Shakespearean dramatic text seems to invite such confusion, it is Troilus and Cressida (1601-03?), with its appended preface addressing an "eternal" reader in an ideal act of literary communication independent of history, the staling stage, and "the palmes of the vulger."⁴¹ More substantially, however, the play represents a self-conscious departure from Jonson's conception of the theater poet; it may even be Shakespeare's fullest acknowledgment that the public playwright is not an innocent victim of the interpretive energies of a place such as The Globe.

Troilus and Cressida's chiastic mock of Poetaster's "armed Prologue," for instance, recognizes the permeability of authorial prophylactics against promiscuous interpretation. Rather than guarding his play from the audience's subjective misconstruction, Shakespeare's "prologue arm'd" (Prologue, 23) invites the audience to participate in this martial drama as autonomous, potentially combative judges: "Like or find fault, do as your pleasures are, / Now good or bad, 'tis but the chance of war" (30-31). If the preface contemptuously dismisses the clapper-clawing hands of the multitude, this prologue submits the play's reception to the multiple "pleasures" of a similarly arbitrary jury. And in his epilogue Pandarus suggests that all those who have participated in this sullying "performance" are not only infected by a venereal clap, but also equipped with a rapacious claw. The "traders in the flesh" (5.10.45) who fill "Pandar's hall" (47) figure a collaborative spectatorship that would hypocritically distance itself from the prurient and purveyant drama it has employed. In a rebuke that reminds us his name means nothing but "to go between," however, Pandarus refuses his customers such a voyeuristic withdrawal:

O world, world, world! thus is the poor agent despis'd! O traders and bawds, how earnestly are you set a-work, and how ill requited! Why should our endeavor be so lov'd and the performance so loath'd?

(36-39)

Pandarus' diction here, if not his sense, is that of the antitheatricalist excoriation of a Babylonian stage endeavoring to satisfy a devouring world—a pandering playwright vending his diseased images to an easily infected audience in the "market of bawdrie." His almost post-coital regret and eruptive self-aversion, in fact, seem to anticipate the contrition, as described in A Refutation of the Apology for Actors, of playgoers who "know the Histories before they see them acted [and] are very ashamed when they have heard what lyes the Players insert among them, and how greatly they deprave them."⁴² Far from a defense of poetry, this epilogue incorporates the antitheatrical position in an unrepentant admission of dramatic guilt that finally indicts the audience as an accessory. To show, claims Pandarus, is to violate; to watch is to participate.

Such a conclusion is the caustic culmination of a play that metatheatrically considers its own role in the deflation and perversion of classical heroic characterology. The "strange fellow" whose argument Ulysses reiterates to lure Achilles to battle seems to articulate a benign version of this role when he claims that "[N]o man is the lord of any thing . . . Till he communicate his parts to others; / Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, / Till he behold them formed in th' applause / Where th' are extended" (3.3.115, 117-20). But James Calderwood's description of this communicative theory as involving "a generative intercourse between bearer and observer"⁴³ plays down Shakespeare's emphasis on the degenerative potentiality of such intercourse. In a drama that itself refracts the epics of Homer and Vergil through several different "recuyells" of the histories of Troy,⁴⁴ the fate of history and its subjects ultimately rests in the hands of the dramatist and his audience. Like Pandaras, the playwright can commodity the "parts" of historical subjects by assembling a textual pastiche for a predatory public; like Thersites, who is himself addressed as a "fragment,"⁴⁵ the playgoer can reduce all such representations to scabrous objects through dissective evaluation. The same hands that manufacture constitutive applause can serve as claws of misconstruction. By dramatizing such a transaction and transformation, Troilus and Cressida explores the darker possibilities of a theater that defines the dramatist not as a victim but as a conspirator. We can trace this exploration back to the Globe's inaugural play.