[In the following essay, Maus explores the relationship between sexual jealousy and the performance of theatrical spectacle in the English Renaissance, with particular emphasis on Shakespearean drama, notably Othello.]

The cuckoo then, on every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
                                        Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

(Love's Labor's Lost, 5.2.888-92)

Anxiety about sexual betrayal pervades the drama of the English Renaissance. Traditionally the material of comedy, cuckoldry or the fear of cuckoldry becomes a tragic theme as well in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: in Heywood's Woman Killed With Kindness, Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, Ford's Broken Heart, Shakespeare's Othello. Not only does jealousy dominate the plots of many plays, but songs about the cuckolded and the abandoned, jokes and saws about the unreliability of wives and lovers, turn up in other plays on the slightest of pretexts—in Rafe's death scene in Beaumont's Knight of the Burning Pestle, in the song at the beginning of Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, and so on. In The Tempest, when Miranda learns of her noble origins for the first time, she wonders who Prospero really is: “Sir, are you not my father?” “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter,” Prospero answers, remembering at this unlikely juncture, years after his wife's death, that no man can be absolutely certain of paternity (1.2.55-57).

Prospero's odd response seems to reveal something about his character, and critics have adduced it as evidence of his suspicion of female sexuality.¹ But even ingenious and satisfying psychological accounts of individual characters—Othello, Leontes, Claudio, Hamlet, Prospero—cannot explain why this particular pathology should turn up in so many different sorts of plays, nor why it should interest dramatists of such varied talents. As a result some critics are inclined to look for cultural explanations; for them the phenomenon reflects in a particularly telling way the instabilities and tensions of a patriarchal social order.² Extraliterary evidence certainly reinforces the view that anxiety about female sexual fidelity ran high in English Renaissance culture; historians report, for instance, that the opprobrious terms cuckold, whore, and whoremaster account for most of the defamation suits brought in sixteenth century church courts.³

Nonetheless, illuminating as both the characterological and the cultural approaches often are, they leave an important generic question unaddressed. Complexities of psychology and social organization presumably interest writers of all kinds. But English Renaissance dramatists seem much more likely than nondramatic writers to use situations of sexual betrayal as a means of exploring these perennial artistic concerns; and when they do so they are apt to delineate the feelings of the jealous individual with special care. A comparison of Shakespeare's great plays about jealousy with their nondramatic sources demonstrates that these emphases are hardly inevitable.⁴ Geraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatomithi 3.7, the source for Othello, elaborately details the Moor's agonies of repentance after the murder, but describes the motive for the crime in brief and general terms. Robert Greene's Pandosto, the source for The Winter's Tale, attends closely to the reactions of the wronged queen as she is deprived of liberty, reputation, and newborn child. It provides only a very summary description of her husband's unjust suspicions. Shakespeare, by contrast, banishes Hermione to offstage gardens and prisons in order to concentrate on Leontes. In La Prima Parte de le Novelle del Bandello, one of Shakespeare's sources for Much Ado About Nothing, the traduced maiden describes her emotions in two lengthy speeches, while her duped, jealous lover remains inarticulate and on the sidelines. In Shakespeare's version the maiden swoons, leaving her justification to others; the outraged lover and baffled, angry father are made the center of attention. In another source for the Claudio-Hero story, canto 5 of Orlando Furioso, the deluded lover is again a marginal, shadowy figure; for Ariosto the most important characters are the servant who has unwittingly betrayed her mistress, and a knight who volunteers to defend the lady without knowing whether she is innocent or guilty. In the dramatic adaptations, the jealous husband or lover consistently receives far more attention than he does in the nondramatic sources, and alternative foci of narrative interest—the woman, the rival—become correspondingly less important.

What does jealousy have to do with the drama? Why should this particular sexual anxiety be represented so often and so vividly in this particular artistic form? Why does the subject intrude so frequently in apparently irrelevant contexts, and provide a constant topic for nervous jokes? I shall argue that sexual jealousy fascinates English Renaissance playwrights not only because it is a psychologically and socially interesting phenomenon, but because the dynamic of sexual jealousy provides a complex analogy to theatrical performance and response in a culture that tends to conceive of theatrical experience in erotic terms, and of certain sexual impulses as highly theatrical in character. Theatrical enactment, I shall argue, is a particularly appropriate way of depicting this particular emotional material, and conversely, the experience of the jealous husband attracts dramatists because it provides a way of clarifying and reflecting upon some of the more troubling aspects of the relationship between spectacle and spectators.

I. OCULAR PROOF

Renaissance treatises on the passions describe jealousy as a combination of the two primary “appetites,” concupiscence and irascibility. Confused in its origins, it is perverse and unstable in its effects: “the Gaule that corrupteth all the Hony of our life: it is commonly mingled with the sweetest and pleasantest actions, which maketh so sharpe and sower as nothing more … it ingendreth a pernitious curiosity and desire in a man to cleere himselfe of that evil, which being past remedie, by too much stirring stinketh the more.”⁵ Both this affective complexity and this epistemological disquiet, as we shall see, appeal strongly to English Renaissance dramatists.

In several respects, however, the playwrights' treatment of sexual jealousy is idiosyncratic; or rather, without necessarily departing from the common conception, they tend to focus intensely upon some elements and to ignore others. Their contemporaries represent jealousy as a passion incident to both sexes. Montaigne argues that women are naturally so prone to jealousy that it is not even worth counselling them against it (785); Burton that “men and women are both bad, and too much subject to this pernicious infirmity” (3.266).⁶ In Sidney's Arcadia the queen, Gynecia, is as formidable in her jealousy as she is in her adulterous passion for her daughter's lover. Both Corneille and Racine are deeply interested in the dramatic possibilities of female sexual jealousy. But heroines on the order of Medea are notably absent from the English Renaissance drama. In this tradition sexual jealousy is typically the weakness and prerogative of the male. Helena and Mariana mourn the loss of a desired object; Othello and Leontes are jealous. Even Goneril and Regan, whose competition over a man reaches a murderous pitch, seem driven more by sibling rivalry—noticeable even in the first scene, as they strive to outdo one another in the praise of their father—than by specifically sexual jealousy as the heroes experience it.

The English dramatists differ from their contemporaries, too, in the extraordinary emphasis they place on the jealous husband's desire for a specifically visual corroboration of his suspicions. Shakespeare and his contemporaries almost invariably depict male jealousy in terms of a particular scenario: a man looks on while his beloved betrays him sexually with another man.⁷ “Give me the ocular proof!” Othello insists, “Make me to see't!”—and Iago can intensify his suspicions merely by clarifying the implications of that demand: “Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on, / Behold her topped?” (3.3.357, 361, 401-2).

The scenario remains the same whether the betrayal is imaginary or real, whether it occurs onstage or off, and regardless of which characters have gained the sympathy of the audience. In The Winter's Tale, Leontes's jealousy surges up unexpectedly as he stands by watching his wife and best friend “paddling palms, and pinching fingers … and making practis'd smiles” (1.2.115-16). In Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, Balthazar enters “above” to witness Bel-Imperia taking the erotic initiative with Horatio; in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Giovanni peers anxiously over the balcony to see how Annabella responds to Soranzo's courtship; in Philip Massinger's Roman Actor, Caesar likewise hovers unseen above his wife and her lover; in The Taming of the Shrew, Hortensio spies upon Bianca and Lucentio; in Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio hides below Hero's window to see if she will play him false. Chaucer's Troilus learns of Cressida's infidelity in a dream, but Shakespeare's Troilus ventures behind Greek lines to witness the betrayal in person. In Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Prince Edward, in Oxford, peers through a magic glass that allows him to look on while his proxy Lacy, in Suffolk, abandons his duty to his master and begins to court the beautiful Margaret of Fressingham for himself. In The Duchess of Malfi, the incestuously possessive Ferdinand rages when he learns that his sister, whom he has supposed celibate, has borne a child:

FERDINAND:
                    Talk to me somewhat, quickly,
Or my imagination will carry me
To see her in the shameful act of sin.
CARDINAL:
With whom?
FERDINAND:
                                        Haply with some strong-thighed bargeman;
Or one o'th' woodyard, that can quoit the sledge
Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire
That carries coals up to her privy lodgings.

(2.4.39-45)

The exemplary husband in A Woman Killed With Kindness refuses to trust his servant's reports, and feels he must make certain of his wife's guilt by catching her in flagrante delicto. As he steals toward the bedroom he quails at what he knows he is about to encounter:

O keep my eyes, you heavens, before I enter
From any sight that may transfix my soul,
Or if there be so black a spectacle,
O strike mine eyes stark blind.

(13.26-29)

But he forges ahead regardless.

If the woman's transgression is so painful why participate in it, even if only as a witness? Partly, no doubt, because “ocular proof” of the beloved's infidelity constitutes satisfaction in more ways than one. In Volpone, Corvino's eagerness to prostitute his wife is a natural (or unnatural) corollary of the pathological jealousy that leads him to confine and abuse her. When Celia refuses to cooperate with his plan he tries to reason with her, but his imagination defeats his attempt at argument:

                                                                      if I thought it were a sin
I would not urge you. Should I offer this
To some young Frenchman, or hot Tuscan blood
That had read Aretine, conned all his prints,
Knew every quirk within lust's labyrinth,
And were professed critic in lechery,
And I would look upon him, and applaud him
This were a sin.

(3.3.61-68)

Disturbed and thrilled by his voyeuristic fantasies, Corvino forgets Celia's moral dilemma in order to luxuriate in his own. For his purposes the young Frenchman, or the sexually expert Tuscan, would be more gratifying rivals than the supposedly impotent Volpone. Later in the play Corvino fabricates testimony about Celia's supposed union with the vigorous, manly Bonario, expatiating in such vivid detail about what “these eyes” have seen that he must be hustled from the courtroom. The cuckold is entranced by the scene of his own betrayal.⁸

The jealous male watches or imagines himself watching from a hidden place, his gaze unreturned by the individuals he views. Not surprisingly, he tends to play an important role in plays self-conscious about such theatrical analogues as eavesdropping, deception, and spying: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Volpone, Bussy d'Ambois, The Widow's Tears, Cymbeline. Sometimes the meta-theatrical point is explicit; in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, when Prince Edward attempts to interrupt the wooing taking place before his outraged eyes, Bacon must require him to “sit still, my lord, and mark the comedy” (6.48). But the correspondence between the cuckold's voyeurism and theatrical spectatorship is not merely formal. More interesting and complex connections suggest themselves in the light of the English Renaissance conception of theatrical experience, as that conception emerges from the many attacks upon and defenses of the stage published during the period.

Writers on both sides of this argument describe the experience of audiences in remarkably vivid terms. Audiences are “impressed,” “wrought upon,” “inflamed,” “ravished” by the performance. “So bewitching a thing is lively and well spirited action,” writes Heywood in An Apologie for Actors, “that it hath power to new mold the hearts of the spectators and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”⁹ For proponents of the theater, the intensity of the audience's involvement makes theatrical spectacle a potent force for moral improvement. Defenses of the theater abound with anecdotes of those inspired to great deeds by the heroism enacted before them. Heywood, for instance, describes how the spectators' identification with the protagonists of a history play stimulates their patriotism:

what English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth not hugge his fame, and hunnye at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprise with his best wishes, and as beeing wrapt in contemplation, offers to him in his hart all prosperous performance. … What English Prince should hee behold the true portraiture of that famous King Edward the third, foraging France, … and would not bee suddenly Inflam'd with so royall a spectacle, being made apt and fit for the like atchievement.

(B4r)

The spectator becomes like what he views.

Writers who disapprove of the theater do not question this rhetoric of excitation and malleability, but they put a more sinister construction upon what Sidney calls the “sweet violence” of stage representation. “Poetes that write playes, and they that present them upon the stage, make our affections overflow,” writes the antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson, “whereby they draw the bridle from that parte of the minde, that should ever be curbed.”¹⁰ In his monumental antitheatrical treatise Histrio-Mastix, or the Scourge of Players, the Puritan polemicist William Prynne explains why it is even worse to see plays staged than to peruse scripts:

Stageplayes may be read without using or beholding any effeminate amorous, lustful gestures, complements, kisses, dalliances, or embracements; any whorish, immodest, fantastic, womanish apparell, vizards, disguises, any lively representations of Venery, whoredom, adultery, and the like, which are apt to enrage mens lusts … but they can neither be seene nor acted, without all, or most of these.¹¹

For the antitheatricalists all theater is pornographic, and the response of the spectator is a sexual capitulation. The peculiarly overheated quality of their denunciations follows from their conviction that the audience's susceptibility is a form of lasciviousness, a wallowing in venery.

In their conflation of aesthetic and erotic excitement the antitheatricalists rely upon a time-honored association between female promiscuity and theatrical display.¹² It is this association that Corvino invokes in Volpone, when he berates Celia for appearing momentarily at a window. Though she is actually a spectator herself of Volpone's mountebank act, Corvino imagines her as spectacle, simultaneously a prostitute and a player on a public stage:

                                                                                                    You smile,
Most graciously, and fan your favors forth,
To give your hot spectators satisfaction!
.....You were an actor with your handkerchief.

(2.3.7-9, 40)

For the jealous husband, a whore is an actor. For the antitheatricalist, an actor is a whore. Renaissance English idiom facilitates the equation: the word “action” can mean both “sexual intercourse” and “theatrical performance.” Thus Prynne describes the dramatic spectacle, whatever its apparent content, as essentially a sexual act performed before an audience:

Those common whores whose misfortune hath prostituted them. … Those adulterers also who have sold their chastity, are ashamed to be seene in publicke: But this our publicke lewdnesse is acted in the open viewe of all men: the obscaenity of common whores is surpassed, and men have found out how they may commit adultery before the eyes of others.

(331)

In the antitheatrical account, the performers enact precisely the scene the jealous husband sees, or thinks he sees.

The theater audience's vicarious participation in the represented action—the sympathy that seems, for the defenders of the theater, the key to its morally salutary effect—is thus to Prynne's mind a perverse collaboration between exhibitionist and voyeur. He deplores

that viva vox, that flexanimous rhetoricall Stage-elocution, that lively action and representation of the Players themselves which put life and vigor into their Enterludes, and make them pierce more deepely into the Spectators eares and lewde affections, precipitating them on to lust.

(930-31)

Histrionic spectacle penetrates the “lewd affections” of the audience; as Prynne formulates it more explictly elsewhere, the “lascivious whorish Actions” of the performers “are as so many fiery darts of Satan to wound our soul with lust; as so many conduit-pipes … to usher concupiscence into our hearts, thorow the doores, the portals of our eyes and ears” (375).

If the relationship of spectator to spectacle seems analogous to the erotic relationship of man to woman, Prynne's language suggests a number of paradoxes. The spectacle is conceived as “whorish” female, but it manifests its power by ravishing the spectators with phallic “darts of Satan.” Though the audience is imagined as male, its role in the sexualized transaction is a passive one: it takes the spectacle in through the sensory orifices, “the doores, the portals of our eyes and ears.” Further complicating this account of the sexualized theatrical transaction is the fact that the “female” role is really enacted entirely by males—sometimes transvestite males—and the “male” role is taken by an audience that includes both men and women. In the epilogue to As You Like It, Rosalind playfully invokes and subverts the conventional associations at the same time: “If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not” (214-17). Rosalind is and is not the assertive and promiscuous female spectacle; the members of the audience are and are not ravished males—some of them are female, and all of them are erotically stimulated at least as much by one another as they are by the play: “I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them—that between you and the women the play may please” (209-14). For the antitheatricalists, this wholesale confusion of gender roles does not amuse. They imagine the audience becoming indistinguishable from that which they view: “neither men nor women, but Monsters” (172). Theatrical performances, Prynne writes, “effeminate their Actors and Spectators … enervating and resolving the virility and vigor of their minds,” making them “womannish both in their mindes, their bodies, speeches, habites, and their whole deportment” (546, 547). At the foundation of the antitheatrical fear of histrionic display is a fear of losing male identity.

In short, the antitheatricalists argue that the exciting theatrical identification of (male) spectator and (female) spectacle represents a profoundly dangerous form of sexual compromise. For the jealous husband, identification with what he sees is similarly unavoidable, and perilous for some of the same reasons. In a discussion that has proven important for psychoanalytic critics of Othello, The Winter's Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, and Cymbeline, Freud notes that what he calls “normal” jealousy is often “experienced bisexually”; that is, the sufferer imagines himself not only in the place of the rival but in the place of the beloved.¹³ “Delusional” jealousy, more extreme in its manifestations, involves a slightly different form of identification: the jealous male projects his homosexual wish for the rival upon the beloved (“I do not love him; she loves him”). The Shakespeareans have drawn upon Freud's model to explain the persistent tendency of his jealous characters to identify with both members of the supposedly adulterous couple, and to confuse heterosexual with homoerotic or homosocial bonds.¹⁴ The jealous onlooker participates vicariously in his own betrayal, indulging heterosexual and homosexual fantasies at the same moment, without ordinarily recognizing his motives or acknowledging the implications of those fantasies to himself. Thus Renaissance dramatists, Shakespeare and Jonson perhaps most insistently, connect sexual jealousy with a flaw in masculine self-knowledge or with its loss.

But the cuckold's situation is still more complicated than this account would suggest. If he really identified wholeheartedly with his betrayers he would not experience jealousy, which is predicated upon a consciousness of distance as well as a consciousness of intimacy. The scene of betrayal is typically staged in a way that insists upon this separation; the jealous male conceals himself “above” while the lovers embrace “below,” or vice versa. Unlike an ordinary voyeur, moreover, he has a proprietary claim upon the sexual scene acted out before him; he ought to be able to interfere, and has every reason to do so. But he is pointedly excluded, unable at least for the moment to affect the outcome of events or to announce his presence.

The jealous witness, seeing but himself unseen, is inclined in his frustration to imagine the woman's fault as a form of blindness.¹⁵ He conceives of her infidelity as a kind of careless obliviousness to the distinction between man and man. Cressida overlooks Diomed's inferiority to Troilus, Gertrude the difference between Hyperion and a satyr. In The Winter's Tale the very likelihood of error seems to convince Leontes of Hermione's adultery. Leontes and Polixenes are two of a kind—both kings, each with a wife and a son—and moreover, they revel in their similarity. As adults they consider themselves “brothers” and in childhood they were, according to Polixenes, “twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun, / And bleat the one at th' other” (1.2.67-68). But the notion of friend-as-duplicate-self, taken literally, endangers Leontes's exclusive claim to his wife and to his throne, and lends a kind of spurious plausibility to his accusation of Hermione: “You have mistook, my lady, / Polixenes for Leontes” (2.1.82-83). Hamlet accuses his mother of making a similar “mistake”: “Have you eyes?” he asks his mother in the closet scene. “Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed / And batten on this moor? Ha! Have you eyes?” (3.3.66-68). He tries to train his mother to see as he sees. “Look here upon this picture, and on this, / The counterfeit presentment of two brothers” (3.4.55-56). But Gertrude's failure to see the Ghost suggests her inability to assume his point of view. And Hamlet's attempt to reeducate the impercipient female is practically unique; the woman who has once “made a spectacle of herself” is ordinarily not considered salvageable.

The unacknowledged presence of the cuckold clarifies for him his impotence and helplessness; that is why it is so galling. At the same time, however, his marginality confers a compensatory form of potency: the power of superior discernment. He comprehends more than his oblivious beloved and rival. “Would you, the supervisor, behold her topped?” Iago asks Othello. Psychoanalytic critics have tended to interpret his question in one of two ways. Some maintain that it evokes for Othello the complicated trauma of the primal scene. Others read the “supervisor” as a version of the censoring superego.¹⁶ But in fact both readings are true at once. The jealous male's distance from what he sees casts him as both traumatized, impotent child and as omniscient father-judge. The Ghost charges Hamlet with the task of being the latter without being the former: of being an agent who uses his privileged knowledge to reestablish order without tainting his mind. The command is difficult, perhaps impossible, to obey, not only because Hamlet's detachment is always threatening to disappear into hysterical identification, but because his jealous marginality is itself inevitably ambivalent.

Dramatists often acknowledge the complex ambivalences of the jealous protagonist, the “forked one,” by distributing his various attributes among more than one character. For the jealous male commonly has an antithetical associate who nonetheless seems to participate in the same pathology, as Othello has Iago: in Bussy d'Ambois Montsurry has the Monsieur; in A Woman Killed With Kindness Frankford has Nicholas; in Troilus and Cressida Troilus has Ulysses; in Much Ado Claudio has both Don Pedro and Don John; in The Widow's Tears Lysander has Tharsalio; in Cymbeline Posthumus has Iachimo; in 'Tis Pity She's A Whore Soranzo has Vasques. The man who finds himself jealous alone tends to search for confederates: Ford tries to enlist Page in The Merry Wives, and Leontes Camillo in The Winter's Tale. Antigonus, in fact, has difficulty imagining that vengeful and loving impulses can originate in the same breast, and assumes that Leontes must have been “abus'd, and by some putter-on” (2.1.141).

Of course Antigonus is wrong, and in fact emotional division of labor in this matter is never really successful. Furthermore, while the jealous male yearns to have his suspicions endorsed by others, his impulse is dangerously self-destructive. Just as his involvement with the scene he witnesses is sexually arousing, but carries with it the threat of unsexing, so his position as male spectator is paradoxically susceptible of reversal. Once the cuckold's plight becomes public he loses his peculiar privileges as unseen witness and becomes himself a feminized spectacle at which others point mocking, phallic fingers.¹⁷Any act of sexual assertion or self-justification thus threatens to emasculate him.

Typically the jealous male consoles himself in his perplexity by imagining a revenge which, like the scene he witnesses, is always the same. “I'll tear her all to pieces!” Othello exclaims, “I will chop her into messes!” (3.3.438; 4.1.196). Posthumus echoes him in Cymbeline: “O, that I had her here, to tear her limb-meal!” (2.4.147). “I'll hew thy flesh to shreds!” exclaims Soranzo to Annabella in 'Tis Pity She's A Whore (4.3.58). In The Merry Wives of Windsor Ford looks forward to torturing his wife; in Bussy d'Ambois Montsurry actually puts his wife to the rack onstage, and stabs her repeatedly. Corvino manages to combine his impulse to mutilate with his voyeuristic penchant when he promises Celia that “I will make thee an anatomy, / Dissect thee mine own self, and read a lecture / Upon thee to the city, and in public” (2.3.70-72). In every case the jealous male punishes, or imagines himself punishing, the beloved by visiting upon her his own painful self-fragmentation. If he as witness must despite himself identify with her, then she must be forced to reciprocate. The justice of it pleases.

The analogue to the cuckold's marginality is the exclusion of the spectator from the action of the play, an exclusion ambiguous in precisely similar ways. Like the cuckold, the spectators in the theater see but are themselves unseen. On the one hand they obtain a uniquely comprehensive perspective upon the action, a perspective denied any characters. Thus in Timber, or Discoveries Ben Jonson connects the detachment of the theater audience with the superior awareness of good men, who “plac'd high on the top of all vertue, look'd down on the Stage of the world, and contemned the Play of Fortune. For though the most be Players, some must be Spectators” (1106-9).¹⁸ Hamlet, struggling for detached equilibrium, inflicts a version of his own dilemma upon his enemy when he causes Claudius to suffer a disastrous loss of aesthetic distance at the performance of The Murder of Gonzago.

At the same time, the spectators' distance from the action prevents their special awareness from having any apparent consequences. They have a proprietary claim upon what happens onstage—they have paid for the performance and it seems to exist solely for their gratification. Nonetheless, they are unacknowledged by the characters onstage: “we are not in, and cannot put ourselves in, the presence of the characters,” as Stanley Cavell writes.¹⁹ The force of this generalization becomes clear when one considers what seem to be counterexamples, plays in which the separation between the spectator and the theatrical enactment is mediated or blurred. In Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, for instance, two members of the audience insist that if they are going to subsidize the dramatic performance, then they must be allowed to control what happens during the course of the play. They seem to be granted the privilege of interfering with the action, but they obtain this privilege because they are actually, of course, characters themselves, and subject as such to the scrutiny and judgment of the “real” spectators. A gain of power in one direction inevitably entails a loss of power in another.

II. IMPUTATION AND STRONG CIRCUMSTANCES

For the jealous male and the theater audience, then, both distance and intimacy have a double aspect. But the analogy between the spectator and the cuckold seems imperfect, for the jealous male does not simply duplicate the audience's point of view on stage. Ordinarily there is an important gap between our experience and his. Most of the time the audience knows things he does not know: sometimes who his rival is, sometimes what his real motives are, sometimes that his jealous fantasies are imaginary. Othello, Leontes, and Claudio err drastically, and their mistakes are the more serious because they pretend to certainty. Presented with a quasi-theatrical “scene,” they do not push the theatrical metaphor far enough, to consider that what they are being shown might itself be a figment, a charade. Some of Shakespeare's contemporaries make the discrepancy between the audience's awareness and the character's even greater: in Chapman's The Widow's Tears the hero, who has attempted to cuckold himself posthumously, is not allowed in the “recognition scene” to learn that he has succeeded! In an old joke retold by both Edward Bullough and Stanley Cavell in their discussions of aesthetic distance, a yokel stands up during a performance of Othello to inform the hero of Desdemona's innocence. It is a breach of theatrical decorum far more intelligible in the case of Othello than for King Lear or Titus Andronicus or Macbeth. For Othello's mistake is the mistake of a bad audience; the correspondences between his perspective and ours makes the gallery seem a peculiarly appropriate place from which to offer advice.

Given the structural analogies in the experience of the jealous husband and the experience of the theater audience, what is the effect of the discrepancy in their perspectives? I shall argue what may at first glance seem an unintuitive point: that the differences between the audience and the jealous male point up even more strongly the essential similarity of their respective situations. Since I shall be dealing with aspects of theatricality which are not explicitly discussed in Renaissance accounts, I shall rely more heavily than I have done heretofore upon suggestions merely implicit in the plays, and upon my own assumptions about experiences modern audiences share with the original ones.

The yokel believes he can enlighten Othello on the matter of his wife's fidelity. But the difference between the spectator and the jealous male is not merely a disagreement about a matter of fact. For even when his jealousy turns out to be fully justified, the cuckold is to some extent a dupe. At the very least, his unconsciousness of his relationship to the audience seems to puncture his pretensions. Priding himself on his spectatorial prowess, he is as blind to us as his beloved and her rival are to him. He does not know that he is a character in a play. Shakespeare emphasizes the inevitable difference between the perspectives of character and audience even when Ulysses shows Troilus true “ocular proof” of Cressida's infidelity.

TROILUS:
Was Cressid here?
ULYSSES:
                                                                      I cannot conjure, Trojan.
TROILUS:
She was not, sure.
ULYSSES:
                                                                      Most sure she was.

(5.2.123-24)

Ulysses may not be able to conjure, but an audience knows that Shakespeare can.

The perceptual advantage does not, however, rest entirely with the audience. One of the many ironies of “ocular proof” is that it does not exist and could never exist in a theater in which the representation of sexual intercourse is taboo.²⁰ As Iago tells Othello, “It is impossible you should see this” (3.3.408). Just as the cuckold's horns are real but invisible, so the domain of the characters' sexual activity is taken for granted but inevitably eliminated from view. There are things the characters know that we do not.

Shakespeare sometimes arranges for his audience's surmises about the offstage world of the characters to overlap or correspond analogically with the surmises of the jealous male who plays the spectator onstage. Watching the closet scene in Hamlet, we wonder what Gertrude's relationship with Claudius has involved and will involve. How long have Claudius and Gertrude been living in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed? Do they continue to do so after Hamlet's conversation with his mother? As Othello speculates about Desdemona and Cassio, so the audience speculates about Othello and Desdemona. Is Iago right when he shouts to Brabantio that “even now, now, very now” the old black ram is tupping the white ewe? Or do the nocturnal broils in Venice and Cyprus prevent the couple from consummating their marriage?²¹

It is hard to know what would constitute a definitive answer to such questions, given the texts as they now stand. But it is also hard to know how to make moral, psychological, or even narrative sense of Renaissance plays without using what is presented to infer a fictional world elsewhere, offstage, within: a world that “passeth outward show.” The organizing fact of the first half of The Winter's Tale is Hermione's innocence, but this is not a fact amenable to staging. What the audience actually sees is Hermione in a flirtatious conversation with her husband's friend. If she were guilty we would not be shown much more.

Unlike the writer of romance or epic or lyric poem, any writer for the theater must take into account the limits upon what can be presented in performance. Some dramatic traditions address this problem by narrowing the range of appropriate plots and subjects: neoclassical writers endorse the unities of time and place, for instance, on the grounds that following these rules increases plausibility. But most English Renaissance playwrights refuse to accept such restrictions. Ambitious and wide-ranging, they inevitably encounter a gap between their relatively limited theatrical resources and the extravagant requirements of the situations they dramatize. “Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France?” asks the Prologue in Henry V: “Or may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?” (11-14). Many Renaissance dramatists, Shakespeare perhaps most insistently, advertise the incompleteness of their accounts, endlessly referring the spectators to events, objects, situations, landscapes that cannot be shown them. We are provided less with a story than with the synecdoche of a story: not with pitched battles between rival armies but with “alarums within” and short representative skirmishes; not with people on horseback but with descriptions of people on horseback; not with an actual sexual act but with the preliminaries or consequences of a sexual relationship.²²

In a theater that insists so self-consciously upon its own representational limitations, the spectator is obliged to evaluate symptoms, behavior the cause of which may be hidden or withheld. The art of spectatorship is an art of diagnosis.²³ Does Hamlet behave erratically because he is mad or because he is pretending to be mad? What motivates Antonio's generosity to Bassanio? Why does Rosalind remain in male disguise after she has reached the safety of the Forest of Arden? Why do the courtiers in The Tempest argue about Tunis and Carthage? In each case the audience must draw its conclusions from appearances, and appearances, as virtually every Renaissance play reminds us, are radically untrustworthy.

The theater audience's necessary, but perilous and frustrating, reliance upon inferential reasoning is perhaps its strongest connection to the cuckolds and jealous husbands who populate Renaissance drama so thickly. Freud describes a man jealous of an “impeccably faithful wife”:

[he] drew its material from his observation of the smallest possible indications, in which the utterly unconscious coquetry of the wife, unnoticeable to any other person, had betrayed itself to him. She had unintentionally touched the man sitting next to her with her hand; she had turned too much towards him, or she had smiled more pleasantly than when alone with her husband. To all these manifestations of her unconscious feelings he paid extraordinary attention, and always knew how to interpret them correctly, so that he really was always in the right about it, and could justify his jealousy still more by analytic interpretation.²⁴

Freud himself notes the similarity between the patient and a psychoanalyst. Both kinds of interpreter employ an inductive method that refuses to acknowledge the conventions that dismiss certain phenomena as meaningless or unmentionable. But Freud's formulations here and elsewhere in the discussion refuse to specify the source and the validity of such interpretations:

[Jealous husbands] do not project … into the sky, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already. They let themselves be guided by their knowledge of the unconscious, and displace to the unconscious minds of others the attention they have withdrawn from their own.²⁵

On one hand the husbands console themselves, like the jealous males in Renaissance plays, with a fantasy of spectatorship that allows them to remain unscrutinized even by themselves. Their jealousy serves their own requirements, and truth seems not to be at issue. On the other hand they do not project into an empty sky. Freud insists that the behavior of his patient's wife encourages suspicion: “he really was always in the right about it.” When Stephen Orgel describes Shakespearean plays as “collaborative fantasies” he stresses the element of projection in any audience response, and remarks upon the way such projection will alter the conventions of interpretation for different spectators and in different ages.²⁶ But how exactly does this collaboration take place? Who or what determines its shape?

In an essay on the female nude, John Berger describes the social practices that inform the artistic tradition:

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at … the surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.²⁷

As in the Renaissance theater, the generic spectator is male, the spectacle female, and in some sense sexually available. In the paintings Berger describes, however, the “painted woman” knows that she is watched, and her consciousness of this fact is profoundly flattering to the observer.

Everything is addressed to him. Everything must be the result of his being there … Her body is arranged in the way it is, to display it to the man looking at the picture … [Her expression] is the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm to a man whom she imagines looking at her—although she doesn't know him. She is offering up her femininity as the surveyed.

(54-55)

Such paintings, reflecting back to the spectator confirmation of his own significance, are comparable in this respect to those Renaissance court masques that celebrate the indispensable centrality of the monarch and his court. In the theater the relationship between spectator and spectacle seems to be conceived quite differently. Intensely self-conscious about their theatricality, these plays represent the conditions of dramatic performance in a wide variety of forms. But even when the presence of the spectator is directly acknowledged, as it is in the play-within-the-play, the acknowledgment is rarely flattering. “Pyramus and Thisbe,” in A Midsummer Night's Dream, hardly provides Theseus and his followers with an idealized view of their own sexuality. In The Spanish Tragedy, in Hamlet, and in The Revenger's Tragedy, a ruler requests a performance, but the spectacle produced under his auspices veers out of his control, manipulated in secret by forces that desire not to gratify, but to murder him. Eavesdropping scenes exclude the spectator in a different way: in Much Ado About Nothing Beatrice, Benedick, and Claudio experience themselves as the unseen spectators of episodes that unbeknownst to them are designed to be overseen, to alter their feelings and behavior. Here again the spectacle seems to possess an agenda of its own, of which the spectator is not entirely aware. As a figure for the audience, the jealous male represents the spectator at his most agonizingly involved and his most scandalously marginalized. He is not the only model for the Renaissance dramatic spectator, but he is in some respects the most disturbing.

For even when his perspective seems radically at odds with the audience's, the cuckold's combination of awareness and ignorance, marginality and power, distanced superiority and voyeuristic submission to the blandishments of spectacle, recapitulates the paradoxical relationship of audience to theatrical performance. “O curse of marriage,” exclaims Othello, “That we can call these delicate creatures ours / And not their appetites!” (3.3.272-74). He laments an arrangement that grants men ownership of women but which cannot grant them the usual correlatives of possession, knowledge and control. In the Renaissance theater the spectators at a play find themselves in a similar dilemma. Though they have paid for the performance—though the play is ostensibly performed for their benefit—they seem to be denied control over and knowledge of that which they seem to own. Interpretation is the attempt to escape the horns of this dilemma.

Notes

1. See, for example, David Sundelson, “So Rare A Wondered Father: Prospero's Tempest,” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980) 35-36; and Stephen Orgel, “Prospero's Wife,” Representations 8 (Fall 1984): 1-2, 4-5.

2. Literary critics' attempts to explain sexual jealousy in terms of psychology (the character's or the author's) include Abraham Feldman, “Othello's Obsessions,” American Imago 9 (1952): 147-64; John Ellis, “Rooted Affection: The Genesis of Jealousy in The Winter's Tale,” College English 25 (1964): 545-47; Stephen Reid, “Othello's Jealousy,” American Imago 25 (1968): 274-93; Robert Rogers, “Endopsychic Drama in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 20 (1969): 205-15; Murray M. Schwartz, “Leontes' Jealousy in The Winter's Tale,” American Imago 30 (1973): 250-73; Arthur Kirsch, “The Polarization of Erotic Love in Othello,” Modern Language Review 73 (1978): 721-40; Andre Green, The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979) 88-136; Janice Hays, “Those ‘soft and delicate desires’: Much Ado and the Distrust of Women,” The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), 79-99; Edward Snow, “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384-412; Joel Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles,” Representing Shakespeare, 70-109; Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982); and Carol Cook, “‘The Semblance of Her Honor’: Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado about Nothing,” PMLA 101 (1986): 186-202. Critics who relate Shakespeare's treatment of sexual jealousy to the problems of heterosexuality in a patriarchal culture include Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 222-54; and Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 119-50. In The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 481-96, Stanley Cavell provides a cultural explanation of a different order, linking Othello's distrust of Desdemona with problems of philosophical skepticism. Of course the cultural and the psychological approaches need not exclude each other, and many recent critics tend to combine both.

3. For concurrent accounts of different regions, Essex and York, see F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1973), 48-68; and J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York (York: Borthwick Papers 58, 1980).

4. These narratives are conveniently available in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957-1975). Compare also the treatment of adulterous liaisons in Boccaccio's Decameron: jealous husbands provide obstacles to the lovers' unions, but the tales typically focus on the ingenuity of the transgressive couple in surmounting those obstacles.

5. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom [De La Sagesse], trans. Samson Lennard (London, n.d.: dedicated to Prince Henry), 92. An Englishman in the first half of the seventeenth century would have had access to a respectable literature on the passions even if he did not read Latin or French, the languages in which many of the treatises were originally composed. During this period, the most important account of jealousy in English is Richard Burton's in The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3.3. Also available to the English speaker were such Continental writers as Charron; Michel de Montaigne's Essayes in John Florio's translation; Nicholas Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions [Le Table des Affections Humaines], trans. Edward Grimeston (London, 1621); and Juan Luis Vives, The Office and Duetie of an Husband, trans. Thomas Parnell (London, 1553)—all of whom provide short discussions of sexual jealousy.

6. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: Vintage, 1977); Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, trans. John Florio (New York: Modern Library, 1933).

7. A Freudian might construe this as a version of the “primal scene,” in which the child sees or imagines he sees his parents engaged in sexual intercourse. The classic discussion of the primal scene is Freud's famous case-history of “the wolfman,” From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), Collected Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 5:473-607. Some Shakespeare critics analyze his presentation of jealousy in terms of oedipal or pre-oedipal trauma: of those cited in note 2, for example, Murray Schwartz on The Winter's Tale, Janice Hays on Much Ado, and Stephen Reid and Andre Green on Othello; and also Randolph Splitter, “Language, Sexual Conflict, and Symbiosis Anxiety in Othello,” Mosaic 15/3 (1982): 17-26. Indeed Shakespeare consistently connects sexual jealousy with a relation to the parents and especially to the mother. In some plays about jealousy, for example, Hamlet, fantasies about parental sexuality are obviously at issue (although here the curiosity is reciprocal, the parents attempting to spy on their children's courtship). In Othello, the handkerchief links the sexuality of mother and wife; in Cymbeline, when Posthumus becomes convinced of his wife's infidelity he immediately calls his mother's chastity into question. But in non-Shakespearean drama—Bussy d'Ambois, The Duchess of Malfi, Volpone, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore—sexual jealousy, though sometimes incestuous, is rarely if ever connected to a relation with the parents. Since I am interested in those features Shakespeare shares with many other writers, rather than in those features which are distinctively Shakespearean, I am purposely avoiding any gratuitous interpretive move from relations between the sexes to the relations between the generations.

8. The jealous male's ambiguous collusion in his fate is suggested in the myth of Actaeon, the “horned man” whose name becomes synonymous with cuckoldry in the Renaissance. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Actaeon is merely unfortunate; he accidentally comes upon Diana bathing, and when she realizes that he has seen her naked she turns him into a stag. But many accounts rationalize his punishment by making him a willful voyeur daring or stupid enough to play peeping Tom to a goddess. (This is the version of the myth Jonson uses in Cynthia's Revels.) In “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 317-59, Leonard Barkan has shown how the myth of Actaeon becomes a vehicle for the exploration of problems of identity and identification similar to the ones I discuss later in this essay.

9. Thomas Heywood, An Apologie for Actors (London, 1608?), B4^r. English Renaissance writers draw their conception of audience response from rhetorical treatises: thus the emphasis on moving and persuading the onlookers. Both pro- and anti-theatricalists argue, however, that dramatic performance elicits for better or worse a more wholesale response than other forms of oratory, because it joins the persuasive power of language to the persuasive power of spectacle. English writers on the theater do not share their Continental contemporaries' interest in Aristotle's theory of catharsis; they never assert that the theater siphons off or exhausts the emotional energies of the audience.

10. Philip Sidney, A Defense of Poesy, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963), 24; Stephen Gosson, Plaies Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582), Fl^v.

11. William Prynne, Histrio-mastix, or, the Scourge of Players (London, 1633), 930. I quote from Prynne because his treatise is by far the most comprehensive, but I am also interested in him as the representative of a position that enjoys considerable prestige in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. The tropes I discuss are shared by Prynne's forbears and contemporaries: for example, John Northbrooke, A Treatise Wherein Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Plaies … with other idle pastimes … are reproved (London, 1579); Stephen Gosson, Plaies Confuted in Five Actions and The Schoole of Abuse (London, 1579); Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, (London, 1580); Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583); and John Rainolds, Th'Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1599). Antitheatrical attitudes influence the closing of the theaters in 1642, and even in the heyday of the English Renaissance antitheatrical sentiments are expressed by those who would seem least likely to sympathize. As Jonas Barish writes in The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981): “The defenses of the stage that survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tend to be fuller than the attacks on it. The defenders usually share the assumptions of their opponents” (117). He notes that some antitheatricalist pamphleteers were “reformed” playwrights, and deals at length with Jonson's antitheatricalism (132-54). In Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), 165-207, Anne Righter discusses what she sees as Shakespeare's ambivalence about theatricality in the latter part of his career.

12. For discussion of the logic of this connection see Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Playhouse Flesh and Blood: Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress,” ELH 46 (1979): 595-617, esp. 603-9, and Laura Levine, “Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization from 1579-1642,” Criticism 28 (1986): 121-43. In my article I mention that Renaissance antitheatricalists and antifeminists blame the seductiveness of both actors and whores for personal and social disruptions they supposedly produce in their admirers. But the unfaithful woman threatens more than susceptible men. Her refusal to acknowledge the supposedly self-evident distinctions between man and man endangers a social order that depends precisely upon those distinctions, and furthermore upon their “naturalness,” “obviousness,” and “justice.” So it should not be surprising that the woman's confusion seems most dangerous when it is most comprehensible: that is, when the structure of social distinctions is already for some reason precarious. Hamlet does not know, and never bothers to learn, whether his mother was an accessory to his father's murder, because for him her inability to distinguish Hyperion from a satyr is sign enough of her participation in the social disruption Claudius initiates. In Troilus and Cressida, which depicts a pervasive loss of confidence in the competitive means by which distinctions are obtained, the male characters scapegoat Helen and Cressida, pretending that the women's refusal to differentiate one man from another is responsible for the disintegration of an entire social order. It is no accident that Ulysses, so eloquent upon the indispensability of “degree,” should also be so quick to accuse Cressida of whoredom, nor that he should be the character who disillusions Troilus on the subject of his mistress.

13. Sigmund Freud, “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality,” in Collected Papers, 2:232-40.

14. Many critics have suggested a homosexual element in sexual jealousy as Shakespeare depicts it. For general accounts, see Kahn, Man's Estate, 119-50; and Madeline Gohlke, “‘I wooed thee with my sword:’ Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigm,” Representing Shakespeare, 174-75. On Leontes's jealousy see John Ellis and Murray Schwartz; on Othello's Abraham Feldman and Andre Green; on Claudio's Janice Hays (note 2). I am not aware of anyone having made this point about Corvino in Volpone, but it would not be difficult to do so.

15. In Othello, Emilia provides a female corrective to this male fantasy when she argues that women's adulteries are a response to the infidelities of men, and a sign moreover not of the obtuseness but of the acuity of the female senses.

                                                                                                        Let husbands know
    Their wives have sense like them. They see, and smell,
    And have their palates both for sweet, and sour,
    As husbands have. What is it that they do,
    When they change us for others? Is it sport?
    I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
    I think it doth. Is't frailty that thus errs?
    It is so too. And have we not affections?
    Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
    Then let them use us well; else let them know,
    The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

    (4.3.93-103)

    Emilia understands that the double standard which allows women less sexual freedom than men is linked with another kind of double standard that casts the male as perceiving subject and the female as perceived object.

16. For example, Randolph Splitter maintains that “Othello is in the position of a child wishing to observe the disturbing, confusing and sexually exciting ‘primal scene’ of his parents making love … In effect, Iago ‘impregnates’ Othello … with the poisonous image of a primal scene” (24). But Edward Snow claims that “In Freudian terms, Iago is alienating Othello from the sexual act by making him participate in it from the place of the superego. Shakespeare's ‘supervisor,’ in fact, neatly condenses the watching, controlling, and judging function that Freud defines as the superego's three attributes” (396).

17. Thus in the final scene of Volpone, Corvino is deprived of his wife and sentenced to public humiliation:

    AVOCATORE:

                                                                                    Thou, Corvino, shalt

    Be straight embarked from thine own house, and rowed

    Round about Venice, through the Grand Canale,

    Wearing a cap with fair, long ass's ears

    Instead of horns; and so to mount, a paper

    Pinned on thy breast, to the berlino—

    CORVINO:

                                                                                                                  Yes,

    And have mine eyes beat out with stinking fish,

    Bruised fruit, and rotten eggs.

    (5.12.134-42)

    This punishment defines Corvino's crime not as perjury or pimping but as incompetence in the role of masculine spectator; it constitutes a “fitting” demotion to the status of spectacle. Significantly, given the issues I discuss above, Corvino anticipates that this demotion will involve a blinding. The Freudian connection between blinding and castration is relevant here.

18. Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 8:562-649.

19. Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), 337. Cavell writes at length of the frustrations of audience exclusion from tragic drama (317-44). Edward Bullough provides a more general and more sanguine account of the audience's unique perspective in “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and Aesthetic Principle” (first published 1912), Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957), 93-130.

20. Even the antitheatricalist Stephen Gosson, who calls the theater “a generall market of Bawdrie,” admits that no “filthynesse in deede, is committed within the compasse of that grounde, as was done in ancient Rome” (The Schoole of Abuse, 34).

21. Coppelia Kahn, with many other critics, assumes that Gertrude's sexual relationship with Claudius begins during old Hamlet's lifetime (Man's Estate, 132-35). But Rebecca Smith, in “A Heart Cleft in Twain: The Dilemma of Shakespeare's Gertrude,” The Woman's Part, 194-210, argues that Gertude is only guilty of hasty remarriage. Edward Snow maintains that “Desdemona is in high spirits the day after the wedding night … Her mood is what chiefly suggests that the marriage has been happily consummated, and that in the process Desdemona has become ‘half the wooer’” (406). But in “Othello's Unconsummated Marriage,” Essays in Criticism 33 (1983), T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines insist that “Othello fails to consummate his marriage with Desdemona because of pressures placed on him during the couple's first night in Cyprus” (1). Andre Green suggests that Othello may have been impotent on his wedding night (110). In The Claim of Reason Stanley Cavell, correctly I think, sees Shakespeare's lack of clarity as strategic; he relates it to the skeptical philosophical problems he sees the play as exploring.

22. In “Falstaff Uncolted,” Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), 121-30, Harry Levin shows how self-consciously Marlowe and Shakespeare play with the convention that horses never appear on stage. Tamburlaine harnesses men to his chariot. In Richard III, it is a foregone conclusion that no horse will materialize even when the hero is willing to offer his kingdom for one.

23. This description of interpretation may seem to apply to the experience of nondramatic texts as well—or indeed to any confrontation with objects in the external world. I am arguing not that the relation between play and audience raises unique problems, but rather that the circumstances of theatrical performance tend to exacerbate particular interpretive dilemmas. The famous dispute between the formalists and the old-style Bradleyan critics of Shakespeare, who speculated freely upon the offstage lives of the characters (“How many children had Lady Macbeth?”), was essentially a dispute about the nature and proper range of the audience's inductive inquiry.

24. “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality,” 235. Compare Richard Burton's description of a jealous husband in The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3.3.2: “As a Heron when she fishes, still prying on all sides, or as a Cat doth a Mouse, his eye is never off hers; he gloats on him, on her, accurately observing on whom she looks, who looks at her, what she saith, doth, at dinner, at supper, sitting, walking, at home, abroad, he is the same, still inquiring, mandering, gazing, listening, affrighted with every small object; why did she smile, why did she pity him, commend him? Why did she drink twice to such a man? Why did she offer to kiss, to dance? &c., a whore, a whore, an arrant whore!”

25. “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms,” 236.

26. Orgel (note 1), 2-4.

27. John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1972), 47. Berger's account, of course, deals with the relationship of spectator to spectacle in a very narrow range of visual art; it is not meant to be exhaustive. For more wide-ranging discussions of the variety of ways visual art can imply a relation to an observer, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), and “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, No. 10 (1967): 12-23.

I would like to thank the following people for bibliographical advice: Michael Cadden, Carol Neely, Fred Maus, Andrew Ross, and P. Adams Sitney; and to thank Fred Maus, Stephen Greenblatt, and Jonathan Goldberg for helpful comments on a draft of this article. A note on editions: I have cited modern, easily obtainable texts where possible. Shakespeare references are to The Arden Shakespeare, eds. Una Ellis-Fermor, Harold Brooks, Harold Jenkins, and Brian Morris (London: Methuen, 1954-81). Many of the other plays I mention are available in Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin's two volume anthology, Drama of the English Renaissance (New York: MacMillan, 1976). The pro- and anti-theatricalist tracts are published in facsimile from Garland Press.