[In the following essay, Pye analyzes the relationship between political power and theatricality in Richard II.]

I would like to begin this analysis of the relationship between theatricality and power in Shakespeare's Richard II by invoking one of those significant and nameless characters who inhabit the margins of Elizabethan political intrigue. In May 1582, during a renewal of Catholic “enterprises” against the English Queen, the crown uncovered its first threat from abroad in the form of a treasonous plot involving the Duke of Guise and the imprisoned Mary. Something caught the eye of Elizabeth's agent at the border. Arthur Kinney recounts that one of the crown's spies,

keeping watch along the border of Scotland, stopped a suspicious man who posed as a tooth-drawer, discovered he was a servant of [the Spanish Ambassador] Mendoza's, and learned he was carrying letters for Mary and Guise hidden behind the little looking-glass. This was the first indication the English government had of Guise's enterprise.

J. E. Neale adds a further note. Apparently, the suspect was able to bribe his guards and escape with his baggage, but “as luck had it” managed to leave behind the incriminating glass.¹ There is nothing particularly mysterious about this “suspicious man.” Indeed, the treasonous puller-of-teeth who escapes with everything except what he has to hide remains inscrutable precisely because he exposes the evidence of his crime a bit too openly. If his deed is uncovered it is only because the investigator of political crimes knew to look closest to home, in the “little looking-glass” where he recognizes himself.

Richard II bears quite directly on this smaller drama of power. It too is preoccupied with treason, with transgressed boundaries, with mirrors that both conceal and betray too much. The anecdote can also help us recognize, however, the outline of a larger drama in the story of a king's fall. For the cunning political go-between, caught on the border with his letters and his glass, can be seen to emblematize the relationship between power and theatricality in Renaissance England. The image of the letter on the other side of the looking glass is an apt figure for the textual and visual structure of theatrical production itself. Moreover, that obscure and in this case treacherous intersection between gaze and text also represents an ideological structure. The glass of the messenger at the threshold, with its power to captivate and betray every inquisitive gaze, would have been an absorbing object for the Renaissance subject insofar as it marked his own political and fundamentally theatrical condition. Ultimately, that may be the function and allure of Richard II as well.

The pleasing symmetry between authority and transgression conveyed by the story of a messenger who betrays himself, but in a form that mirrors and implicates any who would search out the crime, might lead us to suspect that we have uncovered a brief moral allegory, not an historical account at all. The self-betraying betrayer was a real enough phenomenon in the age of Elizabeth, yet he often raises the suspicion that the investigator has entered into the workings of some unfathomable fiction. Quoting Muriel Byrne, Lacey Smith comments that “whatever face it assumed … Tudor treason tended to be not only unbelievably maladroit but also ‘more wildly fantastic than any fiction.’ Embedded in this current of deviant malcontent was a self-destructiveness and hysteria that far exceeded mere artless mismanagement and bordered upon the neurotic. … Almost without exception, [traitors] behaved … as if they were asking to be destroyed.” W. K. Jordan suggests that the traitor Seymour “was more than a little mad,” and Neville Williams comments that the fourth Duke of Norfolk “behaved as one possessed.”² What strikes us as “mad” about these real-life figures is precisely their disquieting willingness to conform to their proper role in an ideological fiction, as though each were intent on proving to the death the myth of the sovereign's indestructability. And yet if Richard, a fictitious sovereign, can be taken as evidence, the king himself can be strangely “possess'd … to depose [him]self.”³ If there is complicity between authority and transgression it cuts both ways, and if there is an ideological production unfolding it takes possession of the king as much as it does of the traitor.

The concerns I touch on here—authority, subversion, theatricality—have been elegantly drawn together in the recent work of Stephen Greenblatt. In the Renaissance, Greenblatt argues, “power … not only produces its own subversion but is actively built upon it.” In reference to Shakespeare's sovereigns he writes that the “ideal image [of the king] involves as its positive condition the constant production of its own radical subversion and the powerful containment of that subversion … order is neither possible nor fully convincing without the presence and perception of betrayal.”⁴ A power thus engaged in staging and overcoming its own subversion depends upon a mobile, improvisatory, and vicarious structure such as theater to realize itself, Greenblatt suggests.⁵ Greenblatt's account of the aims of Renaissance power is both accurate and contradictory. If subversion is the “positive condition” of power—if it enables the possiblity of power—how can power be said to “create” that subversion? The contradiction should not be too quickly resolved, either in the direction of authority or subversiveness, for it suggests the possibility of a theater which exceeds the power that institutes it, one which, like the traitor's equivocal glass, betrays the very authority it reflects and confirms. The apparent indeterminacy of such a structure does not at all place it beyond the politics of representation. Insofar as it catches up the subject in its resolutely specular snares, theater sustains the dread that sustains the monarch.

I

Richard II certainly lends itself to Greenblatt's theory of power, for the central question in the drama is whether sovereignty can prove itself absolute by mastering its own subversion. That formulation is severe, particularly since Richard often seems drawn more to the pathos of his fall than to any affirmation of his glory. Yet Richard's rule does assume its most irrefutable form through negation. “Now mark me how I will undo myself,” Richard says, as if announcing a sleight of hand:

I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldly sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and majesty I do forswear;
My manors, rents, revenues, I forgo;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny.

(4.1.203-13)

As Bolingbroke knows, if power is to be transferred legitimately only the king may unking himself. And that is an impossible act. Pompously forswearing all pomp, decreeing the end of all decrees, the king speaks an oath that can't affirm itself except by refuting itself—that can only be spoken in endless self-mockery. At this thoroughly performative moment, Richard's power cannot be denied.

The cunning performativeness of the king's self-subverting oath suggests the grounds of the ancient claim that the king's words have the power to enact what they signify.⁶ The speech also suggests that, for all its elaborate hysteria, Richard's more overtly theatrical deposition of himself—his mirror game—reflects some of the serious requirements of absolutism. In the mirror scene, too, the king seems to defy his onlookers to read the moment of his undoing. “Mark,” he says again, after dashing the mirror to the ground, “How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face” (4.1.290-91). The scene is, of course, an overt bit of theatrics; Richard shatters only the “shadow of [his] face,” as the remote and knowing Bolingbroke calmly remarks (4.1.293). But the king's sport beguiles nonetheless.

Give me that glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? …
.....… O flatt'ring glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me. Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?
Is this the face which fac'd so many follies,
That was at last out-fac'd by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face;
As brittle as the glory is the face,
                                                                                                    [Dashes the glass to the ground]
For there it is, crack'd in an hundred shivers.

(4.1.276-77, 279-89)

Richard's melodramatic finale merely confirms his cool mastery of this mirror game. Absorbed perhaps more than the king himself in the specular play of his rhetoric, we had not caught the moment the “flatt'ring” and concealing glass became the brittle face itself. As a result, shattering the fragile glass merely serves to affirm its deceptive powers. The problem for the onlooker is not that Richard's sport seems real, but that its theatrical illusion seems limitless.⁷

The deception is not easily undone. If shattering the hollow glass merely seems to extend its domain, it is because the mirror never-was separable from the response it elicited. Conflating the king's glorious face and its effacement, sovereignty and its negation, the radically indeterminate glass reflects back from the outset nothing more than the marking of it. And as a fathomless mirror of reading, the regal glass proves the king's powers to be unassailable. Richard had set out to “read … the very book indeed / Where all [his] sins are writ” (4.1.274-75). Through his self-reading, Richard does indeed mark his cardinal sin—“undeck[ing] the pompous body of a king”—but only by way of an elusive reenactment that erodes all distinction between the king's reading and the event it laments. Through his limitlessly theatrical sport, Richard shows himself still king of his griefs, and still irrefutable master of his own demise.⁸

While all this makes perfect sense in theory, and follows a certain implacable logic, Richard's theatricalizing nevertheless continues to feel diversionary, a desperate antic set against a larger political drama over which he has no command. In fact, the king's claim that he “will read enough” by reading himself, that he is “the very book indeed where all [his] sins are writ,” is in itself a disavowal. At all costs, the king would avoid reading his crimes in another text, the paper recounting his transgression against the state that Northumberland has been insistently pressing upon him. Richard's self-deposition satisfied all demands but that one. “What more remains,” the king asks. “No more,” Northumberland replies, “but that you read / These accusations, and these grievous crimes / Committed by your person and your followers / Against the state and profit of this land” (4.1.222-25). Richard's reluctance seems understandable enough. If through his spectacular self-reading Richard can elude all who “stand and look upon [him],” the formal writ would separate the crime from the punishment and thus expose the king indeed.

Still, in seeking to deny his real condition, the king unmasks the more fundamental truth of his theatrical one. For here too Richard confronts a text of his sins that cannot be marked, but whose performative effects even the sovereign now cannot escape. “Gentle Northumberland,” Richard says,

If thy offences were upon record,
Would it not shame thee, in so fair a troop,
To read a lecture of them? If thou wouldst,
There shouldst thou find one heinous article,
Containing the deposing of a king,
And cracking the strong warrant of an oath,
Mark'd with a blot, damn'd in the book of heaven.
Nay, all of you, that stand and look upon me
Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself,
Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity—yet you Pilates
Have here deliver'd me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.
NORTHUMB.:
My lord, dispatch, read o'er these articles.
RICHARD:
Mine eyes are full of tears, I cannot see.
And yet salt water blinds them not so much
But they can see a sort of traitors here.
Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself,
I find myself a traitor with the rest.
For I have given here my soul's consent
T'undeck the pompous body of a king.

(4.1.229-50)

Richard's teary-eyed blindness feels like an evasion, a means of turning a blind eye to the articles being forced on him and of turning from the inscribed history of his crimes against the state to the present occasion of his self-betrayal. Yet Richard's self-protective tears betray him more than he knows. His assertion that his tearsoaked eyes blind him to the text of his crimes directly follows his pronouncement that “water cannot wash away [the] sin” of those who, “with Pilate, wash [their] hands, / Showing an outward pity.” Richard's tears do indeed show him to be “a traitor with the rest,” but they expose him in spite of himself; the king betrays himself even as he seeks to know himself for the self-betrayer he is.

The curious redundancy of Richard's response inheres in the nature of the crime itself. Richard's tears may blind him to the text of his sins, but in doing so they mimic the “heinous article / Containing the deposition of a king.” For that crime is itself “marked” only with a “blot,” only by its effacement. In Richard II and Elizabethan culture generally the most unspeakable of crimes is always marked in that unmarked form.⁹ “If ever I were traitor,” Mowbray exclaims, “My name be blotted from the book of life” (1.3.201-2). When York makes Bolingbroke read the “heinous … conspiracy” he cannot describe—“Peruse this writing here, and thou shalt know / The treason that my haste forbids me show”—the new king discovers a crime that can be pardoned but still not shown: “thy abundant goodness shall excuse / This deadly blot in thy digressing son” (5.3.47-48, 63-64). The digressing son's own attempt to answer to the sin committed against Richard is doomed to errancy and self-contradiction by the nature of the transgression he would amend. “Is there no plot / To rid the realm of this pernicious blot?” Aumerle asks, after viewing the “woeful pageant” of the king's deposition (4.1.324-25). To “rid” the realm of this “blot” would be to erase it, and to erase a blot is of course to renew it once again. The unmasterable persistence of treason's blot suggests that the mark of the king's undoing had always underwritten his absolute power; when Richard insists that “water cannot wash away” the sins of his betrayers, and that “salt water” blinds his own eyes, he unwittingly echoes his earlier pronouncement, “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king” (3.2.54-55).

Ultimately, Richard cannot be the master of his subversion because the crime is inscribed from the outset in his attempt to know it. Richard's tear-blinded sight is intimately bound up with the divisive and self-eluding gesture through which he would see himself for the traitor he is. Self-reflection once again reenacts the loss it would mark, but now the king's response to the text of his sins opens the more extravagant possibility that his grief, and his crime, are not his own. Yet despite the apparent political risks, Richard II gravitates toward the galvanizing pathos of these moments when inscription and speculation intersect. In the next section, I will consider a scene that opens out the drama of the betraying gaze in terms of an optical trope—anamorphosis—that bears on the politics of theater itself.

II

At a point well before the king's deposition, the play offers a bolder, though more marginalized, version of the theatricality of grief, one which more explicitly undermines our certainty about the origins of Richard's fall but which also suggests that such evocative drift need not be confined to the drama of sovereignty. During the brief interlude between her husband's departure for the Irish wars and Bolingbroke's usurping return from banishment, Queen Isabel feels a strange, premonitory sorrow: “Yet again methinks / Some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune's womb, / Is coming towards me” (2.2.9-11). In this scene, more dramatically, “blinding tears” disturb the boundary between the cause and the effects of loss; the queen's sorrow begets the event that prompts it as its “dismal heir” and “prodigy.” And here, too, grief itself assumes an unlocatable form, a “shadow” at once inward and alien. The account of Isabel's prescient sorrow is more than a passing testament to the power of womanly intuition. Disrupting sequence and reference radically, the scene raises the possibility that the play's entire narrative of usurpation and betrayal reflects a more fundamental drama concerning the origins of the political subject.

According to the queen's companion Bushy, Isabel's sense of foreboding does have a source and reference in her husband's departure. Like Bolingbroke, Bushy would reduce grief's elusive power to a play of shadows, here the magnifying and distorting effects of “false sorrow's” tear-stained eye on this recent parting. His account of sorrow's gaze in fact shows just how potently inexplicable the queen's grief is.¹⁰

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows,
Which shows like grief itself, but is not so.
For sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears,
Divides one thing entire to many objects,
Like perspectives, which, rightly gaz'd upon,
Show nothing but confusion; ey'd awry
Distinguish form. So your sweet Majesty,
Looking awry upon your lord's departure,
Find shapes of grief more than himself to wail,
Which, look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows
Of what it is not; then, thrice-gracious queen,
More than your lord's departure weep not—more's not seen,
Or if it be, 'tis with false sorrow's eye,
Which, for things true, weeps things imaginary.

(2.2.14-27)

As editors have noted, Bushy's oddly overelaborate conceit seems to modulate confusedly between two distinct optical devices. He alludes initially to the properties of a “multiplying glass cut into a number of facets each giving a separate image” to describe the way “sorrow's eyes, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects.”¹¹ Then, turning from the medium to the object of sight, he transforms the perspective glass to a perspective image—an anamorphic representation that assumes a coherent form only when viewed obliquely. Bushy's final application of the extended conceit conflates the two devices, for now “looking awry” on the king's departure errs both because it finds multiple shadows and because it resolves these fragments into recognizable shapes. The double perspective explains how grief can at once create false shadows and take them for the truth. Yet by suggesting that the view that fragments and the one that perceives coherency are equally forms of deception, Bushy raises the possibility that the queen's sorrow is more radically groundless than he intended; seen rightly, grief may be a shadow not of any prior substance at all but simply “of what it is not.”

The difficulties extend to Bushy's own discourse, which has a tendency to turn “awry” of its own accord. Contradictions of number and reference in the passage suggest how easily the multiplying and resolving devices slide into one another: “Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, / Which shows like grief itself”; “shapes of grief … looked at as it is, is nought but shadows.” The slippage between the optical figures also seems to entail a confusion between the viewer and the object viewed. When Bushy says that these “perspectives … ey'd awry / Distinguish form,” the perceived form seems to take on the properties of the discerning eye. At the same time, the viewer becomes as multiple and fragmentary as the scene she views: “Your sweet Majesty / … Find shapes of grief.”

The slippages in the account arise because the two optical structures Bushy describes are in fact one and the same. Pivoting without comment from one perspective device to the other, Bushy at once describes and mimics the moment sorrow's eye turns awry to view its own self-fragmenting vision rightly and in doing so renews the fragmentation it would discern. Seen as a reflexive and endlessly divisive moment, Bushy's anamorphic figure dissolves the distinction between the object and the source of sight. It also undoes the distinction between being caught up in grief's illusions and seeing them for what they are, between grieving and commenting on grief. Because the eye is fundamentally complicit in the fragmentation it would know—because that fragmentation is the condition of seeing truly—looking directly comes to coincide with looking awry; by virtue of his very desire to objectify sorrow's forms, to see grief's confused shadows “as it is,” the disinterested analyst of woe remains all the more caught up in the grieving eye's captivating effects.

“In this matter of the visible, everything is a trap,” Jacques Lacan remarks, speaking specifically of an anamorphic image—Holbein's “The Ambassadors.”¹² Lacan's analysis of the relationship between desire and sight suggestively relates Bushy's apparently marginal and misguided commentary on the optics of sorrow to an entire set of preoccupations marking the advent of the modern subject. According to Lacan, the unitary and self-sufficient Cartesian subject is founded on a visual illusion—the notion that consciousness is capable of “seeing itself see itself” (80, 83). Such a dream of reflexive completeness is possible, Lacan suggests, only through the active suppression of a function of sight that disrupts the very distinction between seeing and being seen, a function Lacan terms “the gaze.” In the most general sense, the gaze attests our constitution as fundamentally social beings. Before we are seers, Lacan says, “we are beings who are looked at in the spectacle of the world” (75).

Lacan's point, however, is not simply that we first conceive ourselves as objects under the gaze of others, for such a formulation would merely displace the problem of the origin of consciousness to other subjects. In a more radical sense, the gaze is the manifestation within the domain of sight of castration's central role in the organization of human desire, and as such recalls in especially palpable form the division and contingency that defines the subject in its essence. According to Lacan, the sensation of being looked at, of falling under a masterful gaze, arises from an alterity and invertedness informing the scopic drive itself; because a condition of being “given-to-be-seen” necessarily precedes and determines the possibility of seeing, sight will always be haunted by its own uncanny reversal into spectacle. As the sign of this division which inhabits and constitutes sight, the gaze amounts to an insistent reminder of the eye's absorption within a function that exceeds and masters it: “it grasps me, solicits me at every moment” (96).

The anamorphic device represents this captivation in pictorial terms. According to Lacan, the anamorphic form asserts its peculiar fascination for the first time “at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research” (88). It does so precisely because it conveys the true relation between sight and desire in the eliding movement beyond those geometrical and perspectival structures that sought to define the subject in a determinate and controlling position. Lacan describes the way Holbein's vanitas painting yields its secret—the perspectivally elongated image of a skull floating in the foreground—at the moment when the viewer gives up on the obscure form, moves past the painting, and then catches an oblique glimpse of the skull in passing. The skull represents the subject's nothingness, but it conveys this annhilation specifically in the form of a fatal entrapment within the field of pictorial representation. For it is in the movement of escaping the “fascination of the picture” that the observer finds himself inscribed within it, “literally called into the picture, and represented there as caught” (88, 92). The anamorphic viewer renews his captivation and loss just insofar as he seeks to evade it.

By representing sight as something divided and contingent, the anamorphic image evokes the thoroughgoingness of the subject's immersion within what Lacan terms the symbolic order, that is, within the purely differential economy of language; the anamorphic device suggests that even vision is a function of difference. But the conjunction of sight and signifier can work in more than one way. While anamorphosis unsettlingly demonstrates the eye's implication within language, the specular conceit also makes the irrecoverable moment of the subject's entry into the symbolic order legible by casting it in a recursive form, as an instance of loss endlessly returning upon the self.¹³ The captivating effects of Bushy's reflexive conceit carry over into the obsessive “turns” of the queen's language:

BUSHY:
'Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady.
QUEEN:
'Tis nothing less: conceit is still deriv'd
From some forefather grief; mine is not so,
For nothing hath begot my something grief,
Or something hath the nothing that I grieve—
'Tis in reversion that I do possess—
But what it is that is not yet known what,
I cannot name; 'tis nameless woe, I wot.

(33-40)

For Isabel, Bushy errs because he fails to recognize just how causeless her grief is. Not merely conceit, it is also “nothing less” than conceit; a signifier without a signified, divided and derivative in its essence, the queen's sorrow is the shadow not of anything that has gone before but solely of “what it is not.” Grief's “substance” lies in that movement of self-difference itself, conceived and sustained here in the form of a chiasmic reversal and return. Isabel too mimes the loss she would signify in the empty recurrence of her words: “Though on thinking on no thought I think”; “For nothing hath begot my something grief, / Or something hath the nothing that I grieve”; “But what it is that is not yet known what.” Like sorrow's reverting gaze, the queen's words seem to reverse and undo themselves even as they return, to deny even as they echo and affirm themselves.

“'Tis in reversion that I do possess,” Isabel says of her own grief. “As were our England in reversion his” (1.4.35), Richard says of Bolingbroke, recalling the departing betrayer's power to “woo” the populace with “craft of smiles / And patient underbearing of his fortune, / As 'twere to banish their affects with him” (1.4.28-30). The idea of possession in “reversion,” evolved out of the groundless specularity of the queen's sorrow, also lies at the heart of the play's central political event: the traitor's usurpation. By perplexing causation itself, however, the legal term also unsettles the distinction between Isabel's shadowy grief and the event it anticipates.¹⁴ Paradoxically, the queen feels that her “forefatherless” grief will nonetheless revert to her as to an original possessor, that her unborn sorrow is also a returning sorrow:

                                                                                Yet again methinks
Some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune's womb
Is coming towards me.

As though viewing its conception through an anamorphically divided gaze, the queen feels her grief at once as something that will emerge in the ripeness of time and as something that comes toward her from an already established futurity. Conflating these forms of temporality, Isabel's uncanny evocation gives the impression that her grief generates itself through the movement of its coming back, as if it had the power to undo the course of time itself.

The strangely “banished” form of the queen's own “affects”—her sense that her sorrow originates neither from within nor from without, but in “reversion”—lends credence to her assertion that she has actually given birth to the outward event she foresees:

So, Greene, thou art the midwife to my woe,
And Bolingbroke my sorrow's dismal heir;
Now hath my soul brought forth her prodigy,
And I, a gasping new-deliver'd mother,
Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow join'd.

(2.2.62-66)

Isabel imagines her delivery as the joining of inward and outward sorrow at the moment her intimations are borne out by events. But she also feels that her grief has given rise to the event it anticipates. As her “sorrow's dismal heir,” Bolingbroke is at once a separate figure to whom sorrow is transferred and the progeny brought forth by grief itself. A yielding up of what has already taken place, the return of what hasn't occurred before—the “prodigality” clearly lies in the manner of this indeterminate birth, not in the figure it brings forth.

Perceived in terms of the queen's premonitory sorrow, the traitor's crime does not involve turning against an already established origin. More baffling, he mocks and derides origination in the manner of his coming forth. But we need not look obliquely through the queen's sorrow to see that this is true. In the course of events, Bolingbroke's return makes Richard's fall a foregone conclusion. From that moment all is lost. Furthermore, for the king, the traitor's arrival is itself a fait accompli. By the time Richard returns from his exploits abroad, Bolingbroke has already intruded at home. York speaks to the grieving queen: “Your husband, he is gone to save far off / Whilst others come to make him lose at home” (2.2.80-81). Richard's missing the moment of Bolingbroke's return is not the result of contrivance or contingency, but instead reflects the originless nature of a loss that, from the moment it is realized, has already occurred within. Bolingbroke's return precipitates, or coincides with, a flood of belatedly recognized internal woes. A servant follows on York's heels to announce his son's dereliction—“my lord, your son was gone before I came”—and his wife's death—“my lord, I had forgot to tell your lordship … an hour before I came the Duchess died” (2.2.86, 93-96). When Richard does arrive, he first realizes his doom not in Bolingbroke's return but in his own untimeliness. Hearing rumors and reading the prodigal signs that “forerun the death or fall of kings,” Richard's troops had abandoned him before he appeared: “One day too late, I fear me, noble lord, / Hath clouded all thy happy days on earth. / O call back yesterday, bid time return, / And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men!” (3.2.67-70). Perceived at once too soon and too late, the king's loss is as causeless as the queen's. It is time itself, not any event, that effaces sovereignty: “Time hath set a blot upon my pride.”

We should be wary, however, of the momentousness this missed moment retains in the drama of kingship. Isabel's prescient grief suggests that that moment possessed solely in reversion may have more to do with the constitution of the subject than with the claims of any sovereign power. Still, for all its disruptions, that scene too has a resonant pathos about it that ultimately feels more comforting than subversive. What is its function? We have seen the way Bushy's visual conceit figures the subject's inscription within the symbolic register in terms of a structure of entrapment. There are prospects for dread in that specular capture. But possibilities for consolation as well. Where there is self-betrayal, even endless self-betrayal, there is a self to be betrayed.

Indeed, conceived as a function of theater explicitly, all that had been a source of prodigal dread can become proof of an equally strange benignity. Thomas Heywood offers a sure proof that theater can be a force for the good in terms that recall Richard II's preoccupation with invasions and critically missed encounters:

As strange an accident happened to a company … who, playing late in the night at a place called Perin in Cornwall, certaine Spaniards were landed the same night unsuspected, and undiscovered, with intent to take in the towne, spoyle and burne it, when suddenly, even upon their entrance, the players (ignorant as the townes-men of any such attempt) presenting a battle on the stage with their drum and trumpets strooke up a lowd alarme, which the enemy hearing … amazedly retired, made some few idle shots in bravado, and so in a hurly-burly fled disorderly to their boats. At the report of this tumult, the townes-men were immediately armed, and pursued them to the sea, praysing God for their happy deliverance from so great a danger, who by providence made these strangers the instruments and secondary means of their escape from such imminent mischife, and the tyranny of so remorcelesse an enemy.¹⁵

Heywood's inclusion of this fabulous tale of coincidental victory among his three sure examples of theater's powers will seem less whimsical if we see in it another account of that prodigal intersection of inward and outward events that marked Isabel's treacherous “birth.” Far from being a “strange … accident,” the story would represent something of the strange truth of the political subject's own theatrical origins.¹⁶ Just as “strangers” can be made the “instruments” of a miraculous escape, theater, then, seems able to fend off the very usurpations it threatens.

III

The elusiveness of the betrayal and loss in Richard II does not make it any less an agonistic drama—a drama of guilt and shame. For despite his critics' and Richard's own claims that he is the cause of his undoing, one comes to feel that the king is being accused of a more far-reaching transgression—the crime of making the cause of his crime unknowable. That decidedly redundant form of shame ultimately depends, I will suggest, on the specular nature of theatrical exorbitancy, and lies at the center of theater's power to “new mold the hearts of the spectators.”¹⁷

Gaunt, Richard's most aggrieved critic, spells out the king's transgression in the most explicit and, for our analysis, familiar terms. Richard has reduced England to a kingdom of writs. “This dear, dear land,” Gaunt says,

Is now leas'd out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat'ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

(2.1.57-68)

Gaunt will accuse the king of the far more dramatic sin of murdering his brother, Richard's uncle, Gloucester. That crime against kindred is no less a self-destructive act. “Like the pelican,” Richard has “tapped out” his own blood (2.1.126). Yet according to Gaunt, Richard's binding England with “inky blots and rotten parchment bonds” is the more scandalous sin. We have seen that a blot can be deadly: Bolingbroke speaks of “this deadly blot in thy digressing son.” We have also sensed what might make it worse than death—that it figures an event which can't be marked without mimicry and which therefore can't be situated at all. “I die pronouncing it,” Gaunt says.

In fact, the marked and unmarked “inky blots” Gaunt describes give such discursive effects a specific judicial and political context, for they draw together the two contradictory aspects of the legal transgression of which the king is accused. Even as Richard submits his rule to the law he voids the law. To supply the war in Ireland, Richard says, “We are enforced to farm our royal realm,” and “If that come short, / Our substitutes at home shall have blank charters, / Whereto, when they shall know what men are rich, / They shall subscribe them for large sums of gold” (1.4.45-50). According to Holinshed, these “blanks” or open-ended charters caused “great grudge and murmering” because the “king's officers wrote in the same what liked them, as well for charging the parties with paiment of monie, as otherwise.”¹⁸ The blankness of the writs gives Richard a certain omnipotence. He can assert his power at a remove through substitutes and surrogates, and he can command futurity, subscribing men for their “large sums of gold” as they acquire them. But Richard also depends on “parchment bonds,” the contractual agreements between landlord and tenant, to lease out his own royal realm. The danger arises when we draw together these two forms of entitlement. To supply his wants, the king binds himself to the terms of a law which at the same time he makes perfectly arbitrary and groundless.

The contradiction of a law that is as indeterminate as it is binding can be seen to arise from a single act: the king leases out all that he possesses. In doing so, he inscribes himself within the reign of the law he institutes:

GAUNT:
Why cousin, wert thou regent of the world,
It were a shame to let this land by lease;
But for thy world enjoying but this land,
Is it not more than shame to shame it so?
Landlord of England art thou now, not king,
Thy state of law is bond-slave to the law.

(2.1.109-14)

Critics have argued over whether Gaunt here laments a debasement of the king's divine prerogative or a transgression of the state of law, whether Richard II conveys the tragic abridgement of a theory of sovereignty based on divine right or on contract.¹⁹ In fact, Gaunt articulates an infraction that problematizes the origins of power altogether by unsettling the distinction between king and law. If Richard were regent of the world, Gaunt suggests, it would be shame enough to let England by lease. But this is a shame beyond shame because the king possesses nothing beyond the land he contracts out. The scandal is that the king has instituted a legal agreement that somehow exceeds and compasses everything, including the act that institutes it, and thus makes his law subject to itself: “Thy state of law is bond-slave to the law.”

The exorbitancy of Richard's act is reflected in the exorbitancy of the response it provokes. Gaunt's question, “Is it not more than shame to shame it so,” directly follows his evocation of the prophetic grandsire who would have robbed Richard of his shame before he had committed it:

O had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye
Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons,
From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame,
Deposing thee before thou wert possess'd,
Which art possess'd now to depose thyself.

(104-8)

Moments later, Gaunt himself adopts the voice of the vengeful prophet, condemning Richard to live with the foresight that his shame will exceed him: “Live in thy shame, but die not shame with thee! / These words hereafter thy tormenters be!” (135-36). The consequences Richard must suffer for his shameful act—to know that his shame will pass beyond him—echo the doom of the prophet who, foreseeing Richard's act, would lay his shame from him before it occurs. And both are reflected in the shame beyond shame that marks the deed itself. The loss of origins and agency implicit in the notion of a law that encompasses the gesture which institutes it is borne out by the elusiveness of the response the transgression prompts; Richard's shame is to be dispossessed of his shame, to experience shame as something that exceeds him from the outset. Richard's self-conquering act robs him even of the power to claim his guilt as his own.

In a sense, the king executes the perfect crime—one that elides itself as it is committed. We can easily enough imagine how such a transgression might work to prove the irrefutable nature of the king's power. In fact, Richard's “crime” simply unmasks the origins of his power, for in its ideal form sovereignty is embodied exclusively in the self-contradiction of those who seek to undo it. In a passage that draws together the captivations of the anamorphic gaze and the displacements of affect prompted by Richard's act, the king reminds the doubting Aumerle of his ancient power to betray—to expose and undo—treasons with a glance:

Discomfortable cousin! know'st thou not
That when the searching eye of heaven is hid
Behind the globe, and lights the lower world,
Then thieves and robbers range the world unseen
In murthers and in outrage boldly here,
But when from under this terrestrial ball
He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines,
And darts his light through every guilty hole,
Then murthers, treasons, and detested sins,
The cloak of night being pluck'd from off their backs,
Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves?
So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,
Who all this while hath revell'd in the night,
Whilst we were wand'ring in the Antipodes,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.

(3.2.36-53)

The king's penetrating gaze uncloaks the traitor's secret crimes. Furthermore, simply by exposing his deeds the sovereign debilitates the traitor, who is emboldened to commit his outrages only because they remain concealed from himself. In this sense, illuminating the criminal's sins directly, the king's gaze also lets the traitor betray himself through his own trembling self-fearfulness and shame. In a more baffling way, however, the passage suggests that it is the traitor's shame alone that betrays him. The myth of the king as a seeing sun whose gaze is tangible conveys the sources of the sovereign's power in the active subversion of the relation between sight and visibility, and between seeing and being seen. The reversals of sight are conveyed here in the ambiguities of Richard's reference to the “sight of day”—at once the traitor's sight of the king and the king's sight of the traitor—and, more boldly, in the way the blush that rises in the traitor's face to expose him mimics the king's rising as the glowing sun in the east. Later, on the battlements, Richard appears “as doth the blushing, discontented sun” (3.3.63). Seen in this reverting light, the traitor is self-affrighted indeed. The “sight” which he is “not able to endure” is neither the distinct gaze of the king, nor even his secret crimes, but the spectacle of his own revealed, and revealing, shame. Exposed solely by his shame at being exposed, the traitor is betrayed by the very groundlessness of his response. In that sense, there is no secret sin, only a spectacular self-betrayal; if treasons themselves “sit blushing in his face,” and “tremble self-affrighted” as though they had a peculiar life of their own, it is because the traitor enacts his crime fully in the hollow and dispossessed mask of his shame.²⁰

The sovereign's magic gaze compels the traitor to see that his crime was never anything more than a desire to betray himself. Of course, Richard articulates a myth of sovereign power. It is mythic not because its effects are fanciful, however, but because their potency can't be claimed by the king. In a moment, with the announcement that his own troops have already abandoned him, the king visibly proves the truth of that dispossession he had merely described:

SALISBURY:
One day too late, I fear me, noble lord,
Hath clouded all thy happy days on earth.
O, call back yesterday, bid time return,
And thou shalt have ten thousand fighting men!
To-day, to-day, unhappy day too late,
O'erthrows thy joys, friends, fortunes, and thy state,
For all the Welshmen, hearing thou wert dead,
Are gone to Bolingbroke, dispers'd and fled.
AUMERLE:
Comfort, my liege, why looks your grace so pale?
RICHARD:
But now the blood of twenty thousand men
Did triumph in my face, and they are fled;
And till so much blood thither come again,
Have I not reason to look pale and dead?
All souls that will be safe, fly from my side,
For time hath set a blot upon my pride.

(3.2.67-81)

Time blots the king quite vividly—right before our eyes. According to Richard, his sudden pallor is fully self-explanatory: but now the blood of twenty thousand men triumphed in his face, and now it is gone. For the sovereign who embodies all power, betrayal can only ever have its own cause. But Richard's sudden change is more redundant still. The king's transformation is unsettling because it seems to fulfill the premonition that prompted his troops' flight, and thus it amounts to being at once effect and cause of his fall. As a response which is simultaneously the event that prompts it, the king's change of face momentously demonstrates the irreducibility of the belatedness that haunts him; rather than signifying the king's death, Richard's loss of affect enacts that event directly in its own self-eluding occurrence. It is time's blot, but also a blotting elision of time itself.

Then again, one might argue that this unlocatable sign is actually no sign at all. We know of the king's pallor only through his on-looker's words, for in the theater no player could act such a transformation. But we should be wary of denying the presence of a blot. If Aumerle sees paleness in the place of blushing health, he merely repeats the undecidable form of reading that provoked foreboding in the first place: “The pale fac'd moon looks bloody on the earth” (2.4.10), said the Welsh captain, recounting those equivocal signs which foretell the death of kings. Like Aumerle, we too may be tempted to see death in the king's living face. Our vague misgivings over Richard's reference to the “blood of twenty thousand men” triumphing in his face are compounded a few scenes later when, rising “as doth the blushing, discontented sun” above the battlements for all to read—“mark Richard how he looks”—the king expresses his indignation at Bolingbroke's trespass: “Ere the crown he looks for live in peace, / Ten thousand bloody crowns of mother's sons / Shall ill become the flower of England's face, / Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace / To scarlet indignation” (3.3.96-99). Richard's words confuse the distinction between betrayer and betrayed: the triumphant blood of twenty thousand men is also the blood of the faithful that bedews England's “maid-pale peace,” and it is England's “scarlet indignation” at being betrayed that turns her face to blood. They also confuse the distinction between life and death.

The king's spectacular presence is then a spectacularly equivocal one—it is strictly a matter of interpretation. Indeed, the regal presence remains irredeemably “untimely” because, like the sign of treason, it is a sight that cannot be separated from the response it provokes. Does that reduction of the king's living presence to something ghostly and unlocatable—an interpretive phantasm of sorts—make Richard II a subversive play? In fact, sovereignty's ideological hold may be most complete at the moment it becomes nothing more than a stagey ghost. The first example Heywood provides of theater's benign potency, as unlikely as the tale of Spanish usurpers, focuses on theater's capacity to captivate the viewer, not the invader:

To omit all farre-fetcht instances, we wil prove [theater's powers] by a domesticke, and home-borne truth, which within these few years happened. At Lin in Norfolk, the then Earle of Sussex players acting the old History of Fryer Francis, & presenting a woman, who insatiately doting on a yong gentleman, had (the more securely to enjoy his affection) mischievously and secretly murdered her husband, whose ghost haunted her, and at divers times in her most solitary and private contemplations, in most horrid and fearfull shapes, appeared, and stood before her. As this was acted, a townes-woman (til then of good estimation and report) finding her conscience (at this presentment) extremely troubled, suddenly skritched and cryd out Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatning and menacing me. At which shrill and unexpected out-cry, the people about her, moov'd to strange amazement, inquired the reason of her clamour, when presently un-urged, she told them that seven years ago, she, to be possest of such a Gentleman (meaning him) had poysoned her husband, whose fearful image personated it selfe in the shape of that ghost: whereupon the murdresse was apprehended, before the Iustices further examined, & by her voluntary confession after condemned. That this is true, as well by the report of the Actors as the records of the Towne, there are many eye-witnesses of this accident yet living, vocally to confirm it.²¹

Though we have shifted to the more intimate politics of the home front, this account represents a juridical fantasy not unlike Richard's; self-affrighted, treason will out almost of its own accord. Now, it is the ghost of patriarchy, not its dazzling presence, that compels the betrayer to betray herself. In both cases, however, the potency of the spectacle derives from the instability of the theatrical threshold itself. Like the blotted apparition of the king, the phantom husband marks the exact point where the viewer can no longer draw the line between her truth and the theatrical mirror in which she sees herself exposed. She would be possessed of such a gentleman, one like that one on the stage, but she is haunted by that very ghost. Indeed, the passage hints that it is the phantom of theater itself that inspires dread and compels truth. The ghost of the husband doesn't appear in the shape of that image, his “fearful image personate[s] itself in the form of that ghost”; if a specter is raised here it is that representation might assume a life of its own.

Like the self-betraying betrayer, the phantom king was a real enough figure. According to the theory of the king's two bodies, the prince is most truly present when he is present in his most irreducibly theatrical form—in effigy at his demise.²² Indeed, when Richard makes his last appearance “all breathless” in the coffin borne by his murderer, the audience would have known that this thoroughly undecidable king had been exhumed forty years after his death and conveyed through the streets of London “in a roiall seat … covered all over with blacke velvet, & adorned with banners and divers armes.”²³ The phantasmal king may have a certain advantage over the more spectacularly dispossessing figure of the regal sun, for a ghost prompts conscience and so can transform a purely representational effect into a controlled drama of betrayal and shame.

Ultimately, however, the royal phantom's capacity to elicit unreasonable fear and shame depends on the paradoxical nature of its represented presence. While Richard's ghostly transformation amounts to an interpretive moment—something to be read rather than seen—his change of affect nonetheless remains intensely focalized and theatrical, as if inscription were somehow a spectacularly unmarkable occurrence.²⁴ That ambiguous crossing of sight and sign, inscription and speculation, recalls the betrayer's looking glass. But it also underlies the sovereign's theatrical powers, his or her ability to solicit a peculiarly groundless sense of exposure and shame.

We may be able to recover a glimpse of that elliptically specular kingship by recalling that there were in fact two probable sources for Shakespeare's preoccupation with anamorphosis: Holbein's attentuated death's head, of course, but also a ghostly king. Jurgis Baltrušaitis points out that Shakespeare was probably familiar with the famous anamorphic portrait of King Edward VI that hung in Whitehall, where the playwright's company had performed on occasion. The association between anamorphosis and regal portraiture extended back to the origins of the art; the association between anamorphosis and regal ghosts becomes explicit with the proliferation of anamorphic portraits of Charles I after his execution, some joining king and skull in the form of a perspectival riddle.²⁵ A telling slip in the inventory description of the Whitehall portrait hints at the source of the power of these images. The portrait, which included a sighting hole at its edge through which the viewer could obliquely resolve the apparition, is listed: “Edward ye 6th lookeing through a hoole.”²⁶ The possibilities for dread and solace inherent in that fleeting reversal of the gaze—a reversionary possession of sorts—lies at the heart of sovereignty's seductive ensnarements. The specter of sovereignty is a marvelously efficient ideological construct because, along with the threat of its presence, it carries with it the threat that it might disappear.

Notes

1. Arthur F. Kinney, Elizabethan Backgrounds: Historical Documents of the Age of Elizabeth I (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 138; J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1957), 271.

2. Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), 3, 31; W. K. Jordan, Edward VI: The Young King (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 381; Neville Williams, Thomas Howard Fourth Duke of Norfolk (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1964), 256. See Smith, 31.

3. King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure, The Arden Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), 1.1.108. All citations of King Richard II are to this edition and will be included parenthetically in the text.

4. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 24, 30.

5. On the relationship between power and improvisation, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 222-54.

6. On the self-subversive negativity of the performative utterance, see Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), 51, 141-45.

7. For a fine account of the “all-pervasive theatricality” of the sovereign presence, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), 148.

8. Extending Ernst Kantorowicz's reading in The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), Murray Schwartz argues that Richard's act of violence in the mirror scene entails a fragmentation that leads both to purely theatrical assertions of regal identity and to a first recognition of the individual behind such theatricalizing (“Anger, Wounds, and the Forms of Theater in King Richard II: Notes for a Psychoanalytic Interpretation,” in Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, vol. 2, ed. Peggy Knapp [Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1982], 120).

9. Only the most famous of dozens of blotted betrayers, Essex was purportedly urged not to reenter England “because he was not only held a patron of his country, which by this means he should have destroyed; but also should have laid upon himself an irrevocable blot, having been so deeply bound to Her Majesty” (“A Declaration Touching the Treasons of the Late Earl of Essex,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath [London: Longmans, 1862], 9: 315).

10. Ernest B. Gilman sees the ambiguous optics of the scene as a figure for the double vision required by the play as it calls on us to accommodate a providential view of history and a view acknowledging the “controlling majesty” of the crown (The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978], 94-128). Scott McMillin also takes this scene to be central in the play and associates it with Richard's deposition, discerning in it an acknowledgement of unseen dimensions of inwardness and loss that cannot be conveyed by theater (“Richard II: Eyes of Sorrow, Eyes of Desire,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 [1984]: 40-43).

11. See Ure's note to 2.2.18.

12. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 93; further citations are given parenthetically. Stephen Greenblatt also discusses the Holbein portrait, analyzing its systematically estranging effects especially in relation to More's self-conscious theatricalism (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 17-21). On the Holbein image, and on anamorphosis generally, see Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J. Strachan (New York: Abrams, 1977) and Gilman (note 10), 38-60. Timothy Murray offers a provocative account of anamorphosis as a model for the reader's voyeuristic, projective relationship to a literary text (“A Marvelous Guide to Anamorphosis: Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre,” Modern Language Notes 91 [1976], 1276-95).

13. Joel Fineman argues that in the Renaissance a distinctly visionary language ensured a structure of specular reflection through which representation could be seen to “iconically … replicate whatever it presents” and within which subversion and difference could be subsumed specifically as its difference, as “the difference of likeness” (“The Turn of the Shrew,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman and Patricia Parker [New York: Methuen, 1985], 151, 153). I am suggesting that the intersection of specular and linguistic structures works to subvert vision, even while it allows that subversion to be figured recursively as a moment of loss returning upon the subject.

14. “Reversion” is “a legal term for the reverting of property to the original owner at the expiry of a grant or on the death of the lessee” (Ure, note to 1.4.35). On the legal concept, see Paul Clarkson and Clyde Warren, The Law of Property in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1942), 72-75.

15. Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (1612), ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941), G 2.

16. In this realm of originally missed occurrences, the true may not be altogether distinct from the accidental. According to Lacan, because it plays a constitutive role, the “encounter, forever missed”—what he calls the “tuché”—remains unassimilable to consciousness and thus always appears to the subject “as if by chance,” imposing on all that follows “an apparently accidental origin” (54-55).

17. Heywood, B 4.

18. Geoffrey Bullough, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), 3:394.

19. Donna B. Hamilton summarizes the debate before arguing for a law-based reading of the passage (“The State of Law in Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 [1983]: 5-6).

20. My claim that the seeing sun conveys power through the subversions of the gaze should be compared with Joel Fineman's argument that the motif represents an ideally self-inclusive structure joining beholder and beheld and allowing language to “embody its ideal” (Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986], 12, 13).

21. Heywood, G 1-2.

22. Ernst Kantorowicz (note 8), 426. On the revival of the theory during Elizabeth's rule, see Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). My argument coincides with Stephen Orgel's account of the monarch's ambiguous relationship to royal display—his or her dependency on an inherently subversive form (“Spectacles of State,” in Persons in Groups: Social Behavior and Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard C. Trexler [Binghamton: Medieval Texts and Studies, 1985], 102-20). See also David Kastan's account of the threat posed for sovereignty by theater's “counterfeit” representations (“Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Rule,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 [1986]: 459-75).

23. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: Johnson, 1808), 3:62.

24. Julia Kristeva describes such a visual cathexis of “symbolic activity itself” as “the hallucination of nothing” (Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982], 42).

25. Baltrušaitis (note 12), 16, 19, 28, 107. Anamorphic portraits of the Emperor Charles V had been particularly popular.

26. Inventories and Valuations of the King's Goods, 1641-1651, ed. Oliver Millar, Walpole Society 43 (1972), 197. See Gilman, 248 note 9.