SOURCE: Barish, Jonas. “Hats, Clocks and Doublets: Some Shakespearean Anachronisms.” In Shakespeare's Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions, edited by John M. Mucciolo, pp. 29-36. Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Barish examines anachronisms in Shakespeare’s plays, particularly in Julius Caesar and Cymbeline, and argues that most of Shakespeare's anachronisms are unobtrusive, and that Shakespeare's original audiences were less likely than modern ones to notice them.]

Shakespearean drama, as we all know, is riddled with anachronisms. Repeatedly the plays jolt us out of the historical moment in which their stories are supposed to be unfolding, by reference to some event or custom or historical person that could not, so far as we know, have coexisted with the setting. Hector quoting Aristotle—several centuries before Aristotle was born; the future Richard III, while Duke of Gloucester, measuring his own ruthlessness against that of the murderous Machiavel—at a time when Machiavelli was still in his infancy; Hamlet attending an as-yet-unfounded Wittenberg University; Cleopatra playing billiards: these are the kinds of error from which our most universally revered culture hero seems not to have been exempt.

The first thing, however, that needs to be said about these and similar oddities of temporal displacement is that anyone composing a fiction based on a past epoch is virtually doomed to fall into anachronism, even when making strenuous efforts to avoid it. Some degree of chronological incongruity would appear to be inherent in the attempt to recreate a past, hence by definition a lost and alien culture, and therefore to some extent an irrecoverable one. We cannot, after all, know any former epoch with the kind of intimacy with which it was known to its original inhabitants, nor can we divest ourselves of our own immersion in our own epoch, so that when transplanting ourselves imaginatively into the past we are more or less certain to stumble into mistakes: our modernity is sure to betray us in ways we can neither predict nor control. And this would apply even to works written about past eras close to our own—to plays on relatively recent American history, for example, such as Robert E. Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939); or Sunrise at Campobello by Dore Schary (1958), which chronicles the emergence of Franklin D. Roosevelt onto the American political scene, not without many compressions, ellipses and rearrangements of recorded fact; or (most recent of all) A Walk in the Woods by Lee Blessing (1987), in which an American and a Soviet negotiator on nuclear arms control engage in a private conversation while walking in the Geneva woods, removed from direct surveillance by their respective governments. This last-named play succeeds precisely to the extent that it deals with immediate, virtually contemporary history, the actual walk in the woods on which the play is based having taken place only five years earlier than the play itself. Even then it concerns a series of wholly invented conversations that conform to certain stereotyped notions of how a zealous young American and a more seasoned Soviet negotiator in such circumstances might perhaps have been expected to behave, but which nevertheless did not escape severe comment in the press on the distorted picture it implied of the actual process of international debate over ways of forestalling a nuclear holocaust. As little as five years after the event, the play seemed already, to some, to be caught in a time warp. All plays on historical subjects, then—and they are legion—lend themselves inevitably to anachronism, and the fact should cause no surprise.

But these American instances at least presuppose a certain degree of familiarity on the part of spectators with the basic historical materials—with Lincoln, with Roosevelt, and with the deadlocked negotiations on arms control between America and the Soviet Union. Such would not have been the case with spectators in 1595 or 1605, a fact which the playwrights of that epoch did not fail to exploit, since some of Shakespeare's contemporaries indulged in anachronism much more promiscuously and, it would seem, knowingly, than he, indifferent to coherency of setting or historical verisimilitude. Cleopatra's billiards, it appears, were suggested by an earlier play of George Chapman's, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, first performed in 1598. At least, so thought a late nineteenth-century commentator cited in the Furness Variorum edition of Antony and Cleopatra. To which Furness himself, quoting the NED, appended the relevant observation that in the same play (i.e. The Blind Beggar) ‘the hero flourishes a pistol, smokes tobacco, swears by “God's wounds”, and talks fair modern Spanish, in the time of the Ptolomies.’¹ In other words, Chapman simply rides roughshod over all considerations of chronological plausibility, and glories in doing so. Chapman of course may have thought that that was part of the fun of what is, after all, an exceedingly casual throwing together of miscellaneous elements designed to produce a comic romance. Dekker's and Marston's Satiromastix (1601), similarly, picks up certain characters from ancient Rome, others from the streets of Elizabethan London, and plunks them down in the days of William Rufus, without the slightest attempt to make the eleventh-century setting even minimally believable. The king in the play, seeking to exercise his droit de seigneur over the betrothed of one of his vassals, might just as well be named Hadrian the Seventh or Harlequin the Ninth as William Rufus. Here, as in the case of The Blind Beggar, we might be said to be dealing with an identifiable subgenre, pseudo-historical romance, peculiar to an epoch in which history in our sense had not yet fully disengaged itself from fiction.

Furness's observation is relevant also because it reminds us that Shakespeare offers very few examples of such wanton flouting of temporal plausibility. Though he cannot be said to have attempted anything like the rigorous adherence to documentary sources aimed at by Ben Jonson in his tragedies Sejanus his Fall and Catiline his Conspiracy or (to a lesser degree) in his ‘comical satire’ Poetaster—all of which, despite their author's massive scholarship and his labours of archaeological reconstruction, are themselves open to criticism for their lapses from the annals and other records on which they are presumably based—Shakespeare too was plainly aiming at a persuasive recreation of older cultures. In consulting the English or Scottish chroniclers or the Roman or Greek historians, he selects the details that matter to him with a remarkable degree of artistic conscience.

The fact is that most of Shakespeare's anachronisms are discreet, sometimes to such a point that editors today do not always trouble to comment on them. The New Arden editor of King John, E. A. Honigmann (Methuen, London, 1954), for example, has nothing to say about the repeated references in that play to cannon, a weapon not invented until several centuries after John's reign. No more does A. R. Braunmiller, editor of the Oxford Shakespeare edition of the same play (1989), or L. A. Beaurline, editor of the play for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (1990). Nor do editors bother to remark on the engines of war Lady Hotspur has heard her restless husband call out in his sleep—the basilisks and culverins along with the cannons—in equal defiance of chronological possibility. John Dover Wilson, in his Cambridge New Shakespeare (1946), again of King John, glosses ‘basilisk’ and ‘culverin’ but says nothing about their being anachronisms. The New Arden editor of King Lear, lastly, Kenneth Muir, passes in silence over the oddity by which, in a play set in ancient Britain, Edgar is made to disguise himself as a ‘Bedlam beggar’, a thousand years or so before Bedlam—Bethlehem Hospital—even came into existence, let alone became a byword for a lunatic asylum. And so with most of the other editions of these plays that I have been able to consult.

In short, in none of these instances is the anachronism felt as an anachronism, even today. The reason, I suspect, is that Shakespeare, in these as in dozens of comparable cases, manages the references so unobtrusively, makes them seem so natural and inevitable a part of his story that it simply would not occur to us to question them unless someone questioned us about them. And if we, with our historical noses to the ground, do not scent historical falsity in these cases, surely no Elizabethan theatregoer, far less schooled than we in detecting historical discrepancies, would have noticed anything amiss, or would have cared two pins if he had.

One sort of anachronism, which I do not recall seeing mentioned elsewhere, smote me between the eyes as I was pondering this topic. It crops up in a speech in Troilus and Cressida, when Troilus, having just witnessed Cressida's betrayal, is asked by Ulysses whether he is as moved as his agonized outburst seems to indicate. ‘Ay, Greek,’ replies Troilus, ‘and that shall be divulged well / In characters as red as Mars his heart / Inflam'd with Venus’ (V, ii, 162-4).² With reference to the memorial token bestowed on Cressida, Troilus's presumably ornamental sleeve—itself an anachronism—which Cressida has now conferred on Diomed, Diomed has sworn to display it on his helmet in the next day's battle. Troilus declares grimly,

That sleeve is mine that he'll bear on his helm.
Were it a casque compos'd by Vulcan's skill,
My sword should bite it. Not the dreadful spout
Which shipmen do the hurricano call,
Constring'd in mass by the almighty sun,
Shall dizzy with more clamor Neptune's ear
In his descent then shall my prompted sword
Falling on Diomed …

(V, ii, 169- 76)

Here we encounter references to four gods in the Olympic pantheon: Mars, Venus, Vulcan and Neptune. Why, I found myself asking, should Troilus, at the height of the Trojan War, many centuries before the founding of Rome, refer to those gods by their Roman names? Why not Ares and Aphrodite? Hephaestos and Poseidon?

Does Shakespeare, I wondered, ever give these deities their proper Greek names? At this point I resorted to the Harvard Concordance for some checking, and made an enlightening discovery. In the course of the canon Shakespeare alludes at least 56 times to Mars, including numerous instances in Troilus, Timon of Athens, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, all set in ancient Greece, but never once to Ares. Less often, but quite often enough, he mentions Venus, Vulcan and Neptune, also Juno, Hercules and Ceres. Very often indeed—137 times—he refers to Jove or Jupiter, but not once in any of these cases does he use Hellenic nomenclature. Against 14 references to Mercury I found only a single one to Hermes. I thought these statistics striking, and I sought then to learn whether any editor had commented on the situation. I could not find that any had.

Digging further, I unearthed another curious fact: even the (relatively) erudite Chapman—whose translation of the first eight books of the Iliad (published in 1598) apparently served Shakespeare as a source for Troilus—even Chapman, working (at least largely, we assume) from the Greek, also gave his gods their Roman names—Jupiter, Jove, Juno, Neptune, Venus and Mars—almost as though by this means to anglicize them. When, in Book I, he departs from this practice (perhaps for metrical reasons) and calls his Olympian artificer ‘Ephaistus’ [Hephaestos], he carefully supplies a marginal note to explain that this was ‘a name of Vulcan’, and he follows the same note with three others in which he insists on the more familiar Roman term, including one in which he identifies ‘Ephaistus’ as ‘Vulcan skinker [i.e. tapster, or drawer] to the Gods’.³

We know too little about Chapman's early years even to speculate about his education—he may have been mainly self-taught—but for Shakespeare the explanation is probably simple enough. Shakespeare, trained in the Stratford grammar school, saturated in the Roman classics—particularly Ovid, but also Virgil, Horace, and Terence, and in Renaissance authors like Erasmus and Palingenius—must from childhood have been completely at home in the ancient pantheon. He knew the characters in those myths under the Latin names by which they had been known in his schoolbooks, and he knew them like the back of his hand. He probably knew their Hellenic equivalents but would not naturally have used them, or put them in the mouths of his characters. Doubtless even his literate auditors would have been in the same position; they would have found the Greek names Greek indeed. The fact that we, with our even less Greek than Shakespeare, find ourselves in essentially the same plight, would seem to be borne out by the ease with which we too accept what in all historical rigour is a striking anachronism, and by the silence of editors on the subject (whom I do not in the least mean to be faulting on this score).

What this all suggests is that audience recognition of anachronism is very much a sometime thing, dependent on the nature of the specific instance and on how adroitly the playwright works it into his discourse. The reason that audiences never think to bristle at Hotspur's being shown as the same age as Prince Hal, when in actual fact he was older than King Henry IV, is that they do not know it. Instead of unconsciously monitoring the play's presentation of history, audiences—including alert and instructed audiences—are in fact usually learning their history from the play. The reason that hats, clocks and doublets spring to our attention as they do is that they belong to the world of visible, tangible objects, in two cases familiar items of clothing that the characters on stage must either wear, or which, if they do not wear, must open an awkward and disconcerting gulf between what we hear and what we see.

Hats have given a good deal of trouble in Act II of Julius Caesar. Lucius, Brutus's page, tells his master that the conspirators have arrived. ‘Their hats are pluck'd about their ears,’ he says, ‘And half their faces buried in their cloaks’ (II, i, 73-4), prompting a memorable reply from Brutus concerning the stealth, and indeed the hypocrisy, to which he and his associates are driven by the nature of their undertaking. A memorable editorial response to the incident came from Alexander Pope in his edition of Shakespeare. Pope, horrified by the thought of ancient Romans wearing hats, simply omitted the word; rather than attempting any emendation, he left a blank in the text, as though deleting a foul expletive. Later, when editing Coriolanus, he altered his strategy, this time changing ‘hat’ to ‘cap’.

John Dover Wilson, in his New Cambridge edition of the same play (1949), p. 127, suggested that ‘Shakespeare, knowing nothing of Roman headgear, “dressed his Romans in the slouch hats of his own time”’, citing the Clarendon Press edition of 1884. But T. S. Dorsch, the play's New Arden editor (1955), points out that, on the contrary, ‘the Romans did use headgear of various kinds: the petasus, a broad-brimmed travelling hat or cap, the pilleus, a close-fitting, brimless felt hat or cap, worn at entertainments and festivals, and the cucullus, a cap or hood fastened to a garment.’ (p. 38, line 73n.). Dorsch however offers no hint as to which of these varieties of headgear—if any—might most appropriately be worn in the scene in question. In any case the reason for editorial debate over such a detail stems from the fact that here the hats form part of the visible furniture of the scene, part of its material substance, which we are asked to gaze upon and recognize as lending a disquieting furtiveness to their wearers. They play their part, these hats, in establishing the conspiratorial atmosphere and helping to articulate the morality of the episode. They cannot therefore simply be brushed aside, but must either be shown or their absence somehow accounted for.

The same would be true, certainly, of the ‘sleeve’ already mentioned, which Troilus bestows on Cressida, Cressida gives to Diomed, and Diomed swears to affix to his helmet in sign of his proprietorship over Cressida. Here too we are dealing with a palpable stage prop that carries a high emotional charge, something that must be seen and its psychic and social meanings grasped; but this time we are once again dealing with legendary history, pseudo-history, of an epoch so unfathomably remote from our own time—from ours or the Elizabethans'—that our ignorance protects us, as it doubtless protected its author, from feeling as such the anachronism in which, no doubt, the entire play must strictly speaking be said to be saturated.

Comparable, but of lesser moment, would be the ‘doublet’ Caesar is said to wear when offered the crown, which in a theatrical gesture he is reported to have plucked open so as to offer his throat to the people, and the ‘sleeve’ by which Cassius tells Brutus to tug Casca as he passes by—though of course the Roman toga had no sleeve—or the ‘lace’ which Cleopatra begs Charmian to ‘cut’ in a moment of emotional agitation—though ancient Egyptian ladies did not wear lace that required cutting. In such instances as these, the allusion is so transitory, and the action so distanced from us (in the case of Caesar) or so confined to words alone (as in the other cases) that we scarcely notice. Very likely Shakespeare did not notice either.

As for the clock that strikes so insistently in the orchard scene and later in Julius Caesar and which serves, according to the New Oxford editor, Arthur Humphreys (1984), to ‘stress the inexorable drive of time toward the climax’ (II, i, 193n., p. 139—a strained and portentous reading, to my mind), it has caused less trouble than the hats precisely because it need not be seen. It need only be heard, as it is heard also in Cymbeline, warning Iachimo that it is time to leave Imogen's chamber, where he has been hiding to collect the data he needs in order to win his wager.

Cymbeline of course, provides a kind of total immersion in anachronism, since it seems to be set simultaneously in Renaissance Italy and in the Rome of classical antiquity, as well as in ancient Britain. Yet this logical absurdity, which outraged Dr Johnson, is in fact negotiated so as not to abuse our credulity. During the Italian scenes we are plainly in a corrupt Italian milieu, inhabited by characters with names like Philario and Iachimo, whereas in Britain we find ourselves in the ancient world, in an outpost of the Roman empire, with a Roman general named Caius Lucius declaring war on the rebellious Britons in the name of Caesar Augustus, in order to enforce the payment of tribute. All this being the case, such trifling incidental anachronisms as Pisanio's provision of a man's disguise for Imogen, including ‘doublet, hat, hose’, can hardly be said to be disturbing.

Perhaps generic considerations come into play here, with Shakespeare himself attempting the sort of romance cum history or history cum romance that popular writers like Chapman, Marston and Dekker had dealt in so freely. Shakespeare, as usual, succeeds in both honouring the hybrid genre and turning it to his own more serious and probing purposes. On the one hand he is plainly continuing his prolonged inspection of Romanitas, of the character of Rome itself as the great ancestral matrix from which Elizabethan England was thought to have sprung, while simultaneously recreating a version of England's more indigenous past, that of the native Britons, along with the folklore and fairytale elements that (in his representation) belonged to that domain. He thus dramatizes the colliding, and with the reconciliation at the end, the ultimate merging, of the two main currents that (in his understanding) fed into and eventuated in his own composite culture.

As for Renaissance Italy, part of the anachronistic ‘confusion of the names and manners of different times’ that Dr Johnson complained of,⁴ it would not of course have been ‘different times’ or ‘history’ at all to Shakespeare's audiences, but rather the contemporary world, their world, at a slight geographical remove, vividly glimpsed and serving to warn impressionable Englishmen to cease aping Italian manners or risk being infected by Italian vices. In the story of the wager they would have seen a once-honest and in most respects exemplary British gentleman, Posthumus Leonatus, converted by residence in Italy into the incarnate devil not long since denounced so scathingly by Roger Ascham.⁵ They would then have seen his return to Britain as restoring him to the more wholesome air of his own country, causing him to abandon Italianate jealousy and revenge in favour of forgiveness, repentance, self-castigation and self-amendment. They would have watched the rage and quarrelsomeness picked up in Italy now no longer directed against a malicious rival (from whom he has also learned boastfulness and suspiciousness) but in honourable battle against the invaders of his native soil.

If this conjecture is right, we are less likely than Dr Johnson to regard the mingle of disparate elements as an instance of ‘unresisting imbecility’. We are less likely, that is, to be unnerved by the play's hybrid nature, or offended by its temporal irregularities, since we may take a less rigorous view of the playwright's obligation to adhere to the letter of the chronicles, or to the unities of time and place, and care less than Johnson did about fidelity to the separation of genres. The romance ahistoricism, or antihistoricism of Cymbeline is so deliberate, its collapsing of diverse historical elements so unabashed, and yet the imaginative pressure fusing these ingredients reaching such a pitch of incandescence, that it ends by creating a new chemical compound, with its own odour, taste and colour, its own unique and recognizable character. They serve at one and the same time, these disparate elements, to explore England's past, to warn against some of the dangers of its present moment, and to stake out valid and meaningful alternatives for the future.

In short, and to make an end, I would stress three simple points: first, some element of anachronism is all but inescapable in any fictional recreation of a past epoch, as it no doubt must be in any historical writing, however scrupulously the author may struggle to deal with what Sidney would have called his ‘mouse-eaten records’—his archives, his documentary proofs, his archaeological relics. Second, the Elizabethans were doubly vulnerable to anachronism, given the fact that fiction and history had only barely begun to acquire the separate and distinct characters we have until recently assumed them to possess. And third, Shakespeare, by the instinctive tact and poetic intensity with which he worked, somehow managed almost to dissolve the element of anachronism into the mainstream of his discourse, so that most of the time it passes us harmlessly by, unnoticed, or when we do notice it, as in Cymbeline, it succeeds in conveying wisdom that the playwright is unmistakably eager for us to acquire.

Notes

1. Horace Howard Furness (ed.), The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1907), pp. 128-9.

2. Citations from Shakespeare will be to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, Houghton-Mifflin, 1974).

3. Allardyce Nicoll (ed.), Chapman's Homer, Bollingen Series XLI, (New York, Pantheon, 1956), I (Iliad), 40-1.

4. Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson with Jean M. O'Meara (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986), p. 307.

5. English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, The University Press, 1904), p. 229.