Despite its capacity for drama in Richardson's hands, the epistolary novel suffers from the limitation of presenting action at two removes: it is mediated both through the mind of the author and through the imagined mind of the letter-writer. The former mediation is that of any literature, though drama, and particularly drama seen on the stage, gives the greatest illusion of its absence. Performed drama presents, as it were, the living, suffering body; whereas the epistolary novel presents that body mediated through two levels of reflection. And what both Richardson and his protagonist Lovelace say about letters confirms this sense that the letter (at least as a means of communication rather than as a novelistic technique) denies the body. Richardson suggests that communication through letters is purer, less interrupted by accident, than ordinary conversation:

This correspondence is, indeed, the cement of friendship; it is friendship avowed under hand and seal: friendship upon bond, as I may say; more pure, yet more ardent, and less broken in upon, than personal conversation can be even amongst the most pure, because of the deliberation it allows, from the very preparation to, and action of writing.

The phrase 'even amongst the most pure' suggests particularly an element of puritanism behind this. And he goes on a few lines later:

Who then shall decline the converse of the pen? The pen that makes distance, presence; and brings back to sweet remembrance all the delights of presence; which makes even presence but body, while absence becomes the soul;¹⁵

The spiritualizing tendency of this, the sense of an escape from the physical, receives a more explicitly sexual connotation in a later remark in the same letter when the young lady to whom Richardson is writing is advised to write principally to her own sex 'since ours is hardly ever void of design, and makes correspondence dangerous'. Even at the safe physical distance implied by letter-writing the designs of men had to be closely watched.

This suggestion makes even more pointed the connection between the above letter and one of Lovelace's. He is telling Belford of a conversation with Clarissa about letter-writing, where he is trying to get Clarissa to let him read letters between her and Miss Howe:

I proceeded therefore—That I loved letter-writing, as I had more than once told her, above all species of writing; it was writing from the heart (without the fetters prescribed by method or study), as the very word correspondence implied. Not the heart only; the soul was in it. Nothing of body, when friend writes to friend; the mind impelling sovereignly the vassal fingers. It was, in short, friendship recorded; friendship given under hand and seal; demonstrating that the parties were under no apprehension of changing from time or accident, when they so liberally gave testimonies, which would always be ready, on failure or infidelity, to be turned against them.

(II.431)

The phrase 'The mind impelling sovereignly the vassal fingers' suggests the domination of body by the will, the (male) intellect, the exact opposite of Eliot's phrase about 'the intellect at the tips of the senses'.¹⁶ Here the senses are at the tip of the manipulating intellect. The 'design' of men's letters, which Richardson talks about in his own letter, is of course preeminently the quality of many of Lovelace's reported letters (though not, as I shall argue below, many of his printed letters), particularly those at the end of volume 1 where he is persuading Clarissa to agree to meet him in the summer house and elope with him (an agreement she subsequently tries in a further letter to revoke, but he deliberately fails to collect the letter); or where he persuades her to go to Mrs Sinclair's.

Letters in Shakespeare's plays also (doubtless partly because of the demands of the genre, and their use generally as part of the plot where they are items on which action will turn) have more often the character of agents of design than that of free disinterested communications of friendship. Indeed, letters in Shakespeare are more often than not extremely, untrustworthy or at least problematic—either because they are intended to trick or deceive, or because they are self-deceiving, or because they give bad advice or advice which the recipient is unwilling to take. (It has been said that nowhere in Shakespeare's plays is advice shown as doing any good: bad advice is followed and good advice is ignored.) In the comedies letters are used to show the affectation or pretension of the sender (Don Armado to Jaquenetta in Love's Labour's Lost or Orlando in As You Like It); or (as forged letters) to deceive and expose a recipient (Malvolio in Twelfth Night). The letter as a statement 'avowed under hand and seal' or 'upon hand' (to use Richardson's terms) is in Shakespeare something that is more often than not turned against the writer, either because it is intercepted by a hostile party (as the Duke intercepts Valentine's letter in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), or because it is read in a way that mocks the sender (as Rosalind does with Phoebe's letter in As You Like It).

In the history plays and tragedies letters often have a malign or negative part to play in the plot. The letter in 2.4 of 1 Henry IV which warns Hotspur against his undertaking against the King is condemned as that of a 'frosty-spirited rogue', and the advice is (fatally) not taken. The cool reasoning of a letter is not suited to Hotspur's fiery spirit. The letters to Brutus (as if coming from Rome itself) lead Brutus to promise an action which results in failure and death. The letter of Cressida to Troilus in Act 5 comes after Troilus has seen Cressida's infidelity with Diomedes, and is condemned as 'Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.' Edmund's forged letter in King Lear brings about Edgar's alienation from his father: Goneril's to Edmund, intercepted by Edgar, reveals a further dimension of her corruption. Macbeth first tells Lady Macbeth of the witches' prophecies in a letter which does not state any criminal intention, but which might darkly seem to prompt Lady Macbeth's more ready ruthlessness ('Lay it to thy heart'). Letters are also vulnerable to delay (a turning point in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet), crucial ambiguity (as in the order by Edmund of Edward II's death in Marlowe's play), destruction (as in Julia's tearing up of Proteus's letter in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) and ambiguity of author or addressee (as in Valentine's writing a letter as if from Julia, which she then gives to him, in the same play). Letters can be torn up into their constituent letters, as Julia does, and the names detached out of anger (Julia's towards her own name) or a kind of sentimental fetishism (as Julia does with the phrase 'love-wounded Proteus': 'my bosom as a bed / Shall lodge thee'.) In short, letters in Shakespeare's plays are distinctly slippery and malleable entities, more often the cause of misunderstandings and failures of communication than 'pure' or 'ardent' or displaying 'the force of friendship'.

Might one not suggest that Shakespeare's use of letters is symptomatic of an age more sceptical about writing and written correspondence than was the mid eighteenth century (when, too, writers first began to write private letters with an eye to eventual publication)? At any rate, Shakespeare's most articulate hero, Hamlet, is awkward in his letter to Ophelia; and, partly perhaps because 'presence' is such a vital matter for drama (the presence of a speaking subject), one cannot imagine any of Shakespeare's characters expressing the view of letters that Lovelace does. For in Shakespeare's plays, indeed, the general fate of letters suggests rather the pressures of 'time and accident', the vulnerability or unreliability of epistolary 'friendship given under hand and seal', and the proneness of letters 'to be turned against' their senders or recipients. They are rarely the embodiments of sincerity.¹⁷

Returning to Richardson we can say that a paradoxical feature of most of Lovelace's letters is that they are sincere. None of his 'designing' letters to Clarissa (with the exception of four letters after the rape, urging her to marry him (vol. III letters LIV, LV, LVI and LX are given directly, but are reported to Anna Howe and others by Clarissa herself, with her comments and criticisms, and sometimes of course her innocent credulities. So Lovelace as an epistolary plotter is not given predominance. Rather we see him most fully in his open and undesigning letters to Belford, where paradoxically we see his sincerity, and his powers of description. And in these letters, physicality, the 'body' that he tells Clarissa is excluded from letters can be allowed fully through Lovelace's powers, as it were, of a novelist, so we get something like the marvellously grotesque description of Mrs Sinclair (vol. III, pp. 194-5): or the vivid Lawrentian (and Chaucerian) sense of animal life in letter XIX of vol. II (pp. 67-8) where Lovelace describes a farmyard scene as an illustration of lovers' conferring and receiving obligations:

A strutting rascal of a cock have I beheld chuck, chuck, chuck, chucking his mistress to him, when he has found a single barley-corn, taking it up with his bill, and letting it drop five or six times, still repeating his chucking invitation; and when two or three of his feathered ladies strive who shall be the first for it [O Jack! a cock is a grand signor of a bird] he directs the bill of the foremost to it; and, when she has got the dirty pearl, he struts over her with an erected crest, and with an exulting chuck—a chuck-aw-aw-w, circling round her with dropped wings, sweeping the dust in humble courtship; while the obliged she, half-shy, half-willing, by her cowering tail, prepared wings, yet seemingly affrighted eyes, and contracted neck, lets one see that she knows the barley-corn was not all he called her for.

The life of the novel lies in its narrative drama and physical presentation (of which this is a small but vivid instance). But the moral message of the novel is the denial of this kind of life. Clarissa's letters only possess this dramatic power in volume I, before her elopement with Lovelace (particularly in those letters where she recounts the struggle with her family and the drama of her resistance to Solmes). In resisting her father and resisting Solmes's overtures she is resisting in the name of life, in the name of her own nature as a woman, and her letters have a corresponding passion. After her elopement with Lovelace she is forced to deny passion in the name of her sense of honour, and her letters become correspondingly a matter of moral and religious reflection, where they are not simply recounting facts. And the epistolary convention becomes in these instances a means of reflecting on moral questions rather than presenting drama. As a result, for the modern reader, the closing volume becomes the most difficult to read: the capacity of the epistolary form for moral disquisition takes over and quenches the drama.

It is difficult not to feel, in fact, that Richardson the artist is of Lovelace's party without knowing it; and that it is Richardson the moralist who takes over after the rape has been committed, and who has to take over then. One can go further, and say that after her elopement with Lovelace it is impossible not to feel that a certain over-delicacy and concern with mere reputation marks Clarissa's responses after her 'elopement'. In saying this I am aware that I am in the end running in the face of Richardson's whole intention—which is that Clarissa should stand for a moral principle, and stand for it in as human, self-doubting and passionate a way as possible. Lovelace is presented ultimately as tyrannical and ruthless. Had Clarissa submitted to him, the result might have been a different kind of tragedy. It might in fact have been more genuinely tragic in a Shakespearian sense—where tragedy means the following through of passionate impulse and meeting the consequences. The analogies in Shakespeare are not very close, but Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra would I suppose be the closest. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina would be closer still: Anna is married, of course; and Vronsky is not a rake. But Anna's defiance of respectability is almost as great as Clarissa's might have been; and a certain destructiveness in Vronsky is brought out in the horse-racing scene. In Shakespeare, as I've suggested, Measure for Measure is in some ways a closer parallel of the resistance of virtuous virginity to brutal compulsion: but, with great significance for the Shakespearian vision, Shakespeare allows the problem to be explored via the genre of comedy. Angelo is allowed to avoid the worst consequences of his acts, and Isabella is allowed to learn a more human virtue.