SOURCE: "Violence Done to Women on the Renaissance Stage," in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Routledge, 1989, pp. 77-97.

[In the following essay, Tennenhouse explores the political implications behind the portrayal of violence perpetrated against the aristocratic female body in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.]

1

The following essay deals with the particular form of violence directed against the aristocratic female body in Jacobean drama. I will be considering that body as well as its treatment as a discursive practice, I do not take it to be either a "real" body, or a "mere" representation of the female, but rather an actor playing the part of an aristocratic woman. That such a practice existed there can be no doubt. Around the year 1604, dramatists of all sorts suddenly felt it appropriate to torture and murder aristocratic female characters in a shocking and ritualistic manner. This assault was quite unlike anything seen on the Elizabethan stage—even at its most Senecan. If any statement holds true about violence done to these female characters, it is that such violence is never simply violence done to them as women. It is always violence done to one occupying a particular position in the social body as it was conceived at the time. Given my reliance on these terms, then, let me briefly explain what I mean by "the social body" and "the aristocratic body."

The "body" is a problematic term to begin with, because in recent years it has been so widely used with varying degrees of looseness and precision. Indeed, we have reason to think the body itself has been used in most cultures and at different times as a figure with which to think out the relationship between individual bodies and that aggregate of bodies called society. Discussing the anthropology of the body, Jean Comaroff summarizes the current view on the construction of the body as a social subject: "Through socialization, the 'person' is constituted in the social image, tuned, in practice, to the coherent system of meanings that lies silently within the objectives of a given world" (1985: 7). Further, that body is always inscribed with and used to think about social relationships. Even in modern cultures, the body is not so much a natural object as an image or sign we used to understand ourselves as selves. We carry a body around in our heads that governs the ways in which we represent ourselves to the world. We also carry about a social body image which we use to represent the world to ourselves. For these two images are actually a single cultural formation.¹

In truth, I cannot decide which is the more difficult project—to understand our own bodies as cultural objects or to determine what members of another culture—in this case, one several centuries earlier than ours—imagined their bodies to be. Such is the nature of cultural counter-transference where bodies are concerned that we cannot know another's without having some idea of the conceptual contours and ideological projects inscribed on our own. About the middle-class body, Nancy Armstrong has written:

Ours is a social body divided in two along lines of gender: a male body corresponding to the masculine domain of productive labor and a female body corresponding to the feminine domain of the household. While all cultures both make things and reproduce people, industrial societies are unique in their way of gendering labor, the space in which it occurs, and the bodies performing it. (1988: 4).

This is not to say that the difference between male and female was insignificant to the people for whom Shakespeare's company performed. It obviously mattered. But more important still than the question of whether one were a male or a female was the question of membership of the aristocracy. When Bakhtin sought to describe the concept of the body one needed in order to make sense of Rabelais, he employed a primary basis for difference other than gender. He called it the "mass body" and set that body in opposition to the classical or elite body. Where the classical body, or what I shall call the aristocratic body, was ordered, hierarchized, impermeable, and pure, the mass body was open and protruding, riotous, heterogeneous, sensual, and renewable.

Obviously gender plays a significant role in such a social body, but it does not determine the distinction of first importance in maintaining an aristocratic culture. In a culture that understands difference first and foremost in terms of whether one belongs inside or outside a privileged community, gender is one more way of marking difference between the elite and mass bodies. One way of understanding the difference between the symbolic properties of Renaissance women and those inhering in a culture where gender overrides class in determining identity is to see how this difference was inscribed on the body. Anatomy books, midwifery guides, and manuals on obstetrics represented male and female as possessing essentially the same body (Eccles 1976; Martin 1987: 27-32; Laqueur 1986: 4-16). The two were structurally homologous, and difference was understood to rest on the degree of heat one possessed, which varied according to whether the sexual organs were inside or outside of the body. Thus one cannot speak about gender in the Renaissance without first speaking about political hierarchy. The aristocratic female was automatically superior to a man from the lower ranks. Within the aristocratic body, however, she occupied a position of lesser degree in relation to the male of the same station.

But while this is a good rule of thumb, it does not tell us all that much about the symbolic properties of Shakespeare's women or the various fates that befell them on the stage. Never a stable entity, the aristocratic body was constantly changing. Not only did its size and membership change over time, but individual monarchs also left their respective marks on representations of that body. Under Elizabeth, the highest position, that of the patron of patrons, was occupied by a woman, and so we may speculate it made perfect sense to represent the aristocratic body as a female body. Indeed, as I will explain, Elizabeth insisted upon it. Under James, however, this gender theme was revised and incorporated in a new image of the body politic. On the one hand, we find romances and tragicomedies that celebrate the reunion of an originary family under a chastened monarch/father. No matter what human forces seek to dismember this body, a miraculous force watches over members of the royal body and ensures their mutual attraction. Tragedies, I will argue, approached the same problem of revision from an entirely different angle. They stripped away the very qualities that had distinguished heroines of just a few years before. Thus on the Jacobean stage we see aristocratic women punished for possessing the very features that empowered such characters in Elizabethan romantic comedy. The ritual purification of these bodies did not simply give vent to misogynistic impulses (although I am sure it did that as well, and indeed continues to do so); it also revised the political iconography identified with an earlier monarchy, which was understood by English monarchs to be a very real instrument of their power. Only this, I believe, could have made the assault on the Elizabethan style of female so pervasive.

It is difficult to think of a Renaissance tragedy in which at least one woman is not threatened with mutilation, rape, or murder. Her torture and death provide the explicit and exquisite dénouement and centerpiece of the play in question. Yet despite concerted efforts to historicize the literary past, criticism has done little to account either for the pervasiveness of such violence or for the gender of its victims. That the body of an aristocratic female was the centerpiece of the spectacles of violence on stage had everything, in the Elizabethan period, to do with the Queen herself. She constantly encouraged an equation to be made between the health of her body, its wellbeing and integrity, and that of the state. During her reign, this iconic identification between the queen's body and the land was such that the violence done to one was the same as violence to the other. Thus the theater regularly staged scenes of violence and disorder in order to materialize an opposition to the monarch over which monarchy asserted its order. On the Jacobean stage, however, the aristocratic female having acquired this usage had to be both different from the king's body and yet essential to the purity of the aristocratic community. Once again, she was the site on which to stage an assault on the monarch. As a source of pollution, she empowered the monarch by subjugating her in a ritual that purified the community.

Hamlet shall be a test case for this proposition, because in that play there are two forms of violence, both indicative of earlier cultural practices, and each centering on a female. In the assault on Gertrude, we find a characteristic Elizabethan representation of violence which threatens to dismember the state by internal division. By way of contrast, the Player Queen episode imagines a different model of violence, one more characteristic of the assault against women found on the Jacobean stage. Before turning to Hamlet, it is first necessary to suggest how the body of the aristocratic female on stage was used to produce such a political literacy.

II

Elizabeth Tudor knew the power of display. She also knew how to display her power as queen. But this is not to say that even so powerful a monarch as she could determine the conditions for effectively displaying political power. Upon her accession, if not well before, Elizabeth found herself thoroughly inscribed within a system of political meaning. Marie Axton explains:

for the purposes of the law it was found necessary by 1561 to endow the Queen with two bodies: a body natural and a body politic. (This body politic should not be confused with the old metaphor of the realm as a great body composed of many with the king as a head. The ideas are related but distinct.) The body politic was supposed to be contained within the natural body of the Queen. When lawyers spoke of this body politic they referred to a specific quality: the essence of a corporate perpetuity. The Queen's natural body was subject to infancy, error, and old age; her body politic . . . was held to be unerring and immortal. (1977: 12; my italics)

The "lawyers," Axton observes, "were unable or unwilling to separate state and monarch" (1977: 12). Elizabeth insisted upon representing her body as one and the same as England. She made this equation on the grounds that her natural body both contained and stood for the mystical power of blood which had traditionally governed the land and made it English. The concept of the body politic was redefined in certain characteristically Elizabethan ways as it became that of a female patriarch. According to the English form of primogeniture, a female could legitimately and fully embody the power of the patriarch. That power was in her and nowhere else so long as she sat on the throne. In being patriarchal, state power was not necessarily male, for Elizabeth was represented and treated as a female. Thus we may conclude that Elizabethans saw the state as no less patriarchal for being embodied as a female, and they saw the queen as no less female for possessing patriarchal powers. In other words, the idea of a female patriarch appears to have posed no contradiction in terms of Elizabethan culture.

The queen's body was displayed in official portraits, on coins, in the royal coat of arms placed in all the churches of England, and in her official passages through London and royal progresses in the countryside (Strong 1963; Phillips 1973: 119). In the context of her considerable entourage, Elizabeth's very presence called forth elaborate pageants, tributes, opulent shows of all kinds, speeches, orations, and the presentation of gifts, these to be witnessed by large numbers of people.² Of particular importance was the role that the public theater played in displaying and idealizing forms of power that were grounded in the value and importance of the aristocratic female body. It is in this sense, I shall argue, that Shakespeare's drama played an active role in the political life of Renaissance England. In arguing for its historical significance, then, I do not want to privilege a topical meaning as paramount in understanding the success of Elizabethan drama. Rather, I want to suggest that the drama for which Elizabethan culture is known offered one of the more important means of controlling how various people imagined state power and understood themselves in relation to it. Given the importance of displaying the aristocratic female body—the most powerful manifestation of which was the appearance of the queen herself—the theater was never more political than when it called attention to the body of an aristocratic female. Elizabeth and her people understood the display of her body in terms of those practices which identified the monarch's body with English power in all its guises.

But a strategy that enabled this unprecedented consolidation of English power in the monarch and her court necessarily gave rise to a major political crisis by the late 1590s with the obvious decrepitude of Elizabeth's body. Visible signs that her natural body was failing called into question the relationship between the queen's two bodies upon which hinged in turn the monarch's symbolic control over England. The crisis brought on by the loss of symbolic power that would accompany her aging and death appears to have been resolved by a shift towards representations that placed compensatory stress on the monarch's body metaphysical. To foreground the continuity of patriarchal power, writers and performances of all kinds emphasized the masculine nature of legitimate political power and, at the same time, began to imagine the aristocratic female body as having the potential to disrupt the flow of power from one male to another. It was in the public theater and the Inns of Court drama that flourished during Elizabeth's reign that such changes in the aesthetics of display became particularly apparent. Within Shakespeare's career, most notably, one can see the interdependence of the queen's two bodies give way, following Elizabeth's death, to an increasing emphasis on the metaphysical nature of the crown over and above the individual monarch who momentarily held sway over the land.

Hamlet is one of the plays to appear during the time when people were finding it necessary to revise the aesthetics of Elizabethan display to suit an impending Jacobean reality. The play presents two quite different displays of power, each centered around the body of a different aristocratic female. On the fate of Gertrude and the disposition of her body depends both the wellbeing of the state and the fate of the royal Danish line. In this sense, Gertrude belongs among Elizabethan representations of the queen's two bodies. These characteristically equate the health of the state with that of the queen's body. In having Hamlet stage the play within the play, however, Shakespeare uses the aristocratic female body in a different way. The Player Queen behaves like all the other aristocratic females on the Jacobean stage who are tortured, stabbed, poisoned, or hung. It is by defining them as the site of pollution and removing them from the line of authority that patriarchal power is itself authorized.

To read Hamlet historically, in my opinion, it is not our task to explain away this about-face in the strategies of political display. This is what we do whenever we try to contain the contradictions posed by the two queens within Hamlet's "consciousness," making them his problem rather than our own. Contrary to this way of reading Hamlet, I would like to consider the play as a refiguring of the monarch's body in view of Elizabeth's immanent decay. Far from embodying the power of the state itself, the aristocratic woman would, in the years immediately following the production of Hamlet, provide playwright after playwright with a figure for the source of pollution. As such, she was none the less subject to the aesthetics of display, for her purification alone appeared to insure the perpetuity of power.

III

I shall offer a brief description of Lavinia from the much abused play Titus Andronicus by way of background against which we can determine the ways in which Gertrude observes the Elizabethan formula. Despite its popularity on the Elizabethan stage, Titus generally strikes modern readers as a thoroughly debased representation of sexuality (Brooke 1968: 13-5).³ Yet what may appear as perverse and gratuitously violent assumes this form because the dramatic action of the play turns on the whole notion of the State as the body of an aristocratic female. Particularly disturbing is the fact that Titus' daughter is not only raped and disfigured in the second act of the play but also brought upon the stage to display her mutilated condition. The sheer spectacle of a woman, herself dismembered, carrying her father's amputated hand in her mouth has not earned this play a particularly high place in a literary canon based on lofty ideals and good taste. The mutilation of Lavinia's body has been written off by critics as one of the exuberant excesses of an immature playwright or else as the corrupting influence of another poet. But I find it more useful for the purposes of historicizing Shakespeare to consider these sensational features as part of a political iconography available to the playwright, one which he felt obliged to use as well as free to exploit for his own dramatic purposes. With this purpose in mind, then, we can consider as culturally important information the otherwise outrageous scene in which Titus receives his own hand along with the heads of his two sons from Saturninus, the emperor. Seeing the human members which have been severed from himself, Titus issues this memorably gruesome command,

 Come, brother, take a head,
  And in this hand the other will I bear;
  And, Lavinia, thou shalt be employed;
  Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy
  teeth.

(III.i.279-82)

To tell her father she has been raped as well as mutilated, Lavinia has to rifle through a volume of Ovid with her handless arms until she finds the account of Philomel. Shakespeare's stage direction reads, "She takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps, and writes" (s.d., IV.i.78). What is important in this—as in the other scenes where Lavinia's body appears as synecdoche and emblem of the disorder of things—is that Shakespeare has us see the rape of Lavinia as the definitive instance of dismemberment.

I say this knowing that it defies the logic inherent in the figure of rape. We are accustomed to think of rape as a forcible violation of some sacred cultural boundary enclosing the aristocratic body if not that of the private individual. But Elizabethan drama does not use rape in this way. Lavinia's rape represents the crime of dismemberment. The mutilation of Lavinia's body restates her father's self-inflicted amputation, his dicing up of the emperor's stepsons for their mother's consumption, and all the slicing, dicing, chopping, and lopping that heaps bodies upon the stage in Titus Andronicus. Lavinia's body encapsulates and interprets this seemingly gratuitous carnage in a way that must have been clear to an Elizabethan audience, for her body was that of a daughter of the popular candidate for emperor of Rome, the first choice of wife for the emperor of Rome, and the betrothed of the emperor's younger brother. That as such she stands for the entire aristocratic body is made clear when Marcus Andronicus, inspired by the pile of bodies heaped before the banquet table, enjoins the citizens of Rome, "Let me teach you how to knit again / . . . These broken limbs into one body" (V.iii.70-2).

The logic of dismemberment is not that different if one is willing to consider it as such. Dismemberment entails the loss of members. Thus the initial gesture of penetration is not so well pronounced in Shakespeare's version of the Philomel story as the mutilated condition of Lavinia's body which both conceals and points back to the act of rape. Rather than the object of illicit lust, Lavinia's body provides the setting for political rivalry among the various families with competing claims to power over Rome. For one of them to possess her is for that family to display its power over the rest—nothing more nor less than that. By the same token, to wound Lavinia is to wound oneself, as if dismembering her body were dismembering a body of which one were a part, and thus to cut oneself off from that body. It is in pursuing this logic that one sees how Titus' farewell to Lavinia transforms the concepts of dishonor and pollution usually associated with rape into quite a different order of transgression: "Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, / And with thy shame thy father's sorrow die" (V.iii.41-2). True to this suggestion that she is his body because she is the body of Rome, the play demonstrates that the murder of Lavinia is a self-inflicted wound on Titus' part. It leads to the death of the entire ruling body, competing families and all.

IV

Gertrude's body observes the same political imperative as that of Lavinia and the young Elizabeth. To possess her body is to possess the State. So powerful is the queen's body that it takes precedence over the laws of primogeniture allowing Claudius to rule instead of Hamlet. According to common practices of primogeniture, when Old Denmark died his crown and his land should have passed uncontested to his son. Had he died without issue, then and only then could the crown pass to his brother. But Claudius's ascendence does not observe this principle of inheritance. His claim to power—and the election that ratified his claim—rested on his claim to Gertrude's body. It is Claudius's acquisition of power through his marriage to Gertrude that gives rise to the dilemma organizing this play, the action of which turns upon the meaning and disposition of Gertrude's body.

There is a logic at work in Hamlet which explains this source of power. Such a logic, however, is neither to be found in the Danish history of Saxo Grammaticus which Shakespeare consulted as a source for his play, nor can we attribute it to the peculiarities of Danish political practice with which Shakespeare may or may not have been familiar. We can, however, see this logic at work in any number of romantic comedies where a young man comes to possess power, wealth, and land through marriage. Bassanio's marriage to Portia, Lorenzo's to Jessica, Petruchio's to Kate, and Sebastian's to Olivia are cases in point. In each play the female provides access to a patrimony that belongs to another male. The patrimonies thus in question might range from the kingdom of Belmont to something considerably less grand, like the dowry Kate brings with her to the marriage. I am suggesting that when he has Claudius come to the throne through marriage to Gertrude Shakespeare is drawing on the same theory of power that also organized his romantic comedies.

Hamlet's obsession with his mother's body can be explained in terms of this theory. When Hamlet urges his mother to refrain from having sexual contact with Claudius, his words, taken at face value, quite accurately describe the problem that arises from the premise that power inheres in her body. He represents the queen's coupling with Claudius as the gratification of a monstrous appetite:

Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear,
  Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you
  eyes?
  Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,
  And batten on this moor?

(III.iv.64-7)

To think of Gertrude's union with Claudius as a form of gorging ("batten") makes sense only if one remembers that she should represent the aristocratic body itself. Hamlet's language transforms the ideal representation of that body, the body of the queen, into one that is quite grotesque and common. In the passage quoted above she has become the voracious mass body that regularly stands opposed to the aristocratic principles of exclusion and hierarchy.⁴ And lest we miss the point, Shakespeare has Hamlet elaborate this view of the queen's body. To mate with Claudius, in his words, is:

 but to live
  In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
  Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making
  love
  Over the nasty sty.

(III.iv.92-5)

But how does Gertrude become this gorging, sweating, corrupt, and bestial woman? The answer seems to lie with Hamlet's description of the man he thinks wrongly possesses her body. Thus Hamlet describes Claudius as

 a Vice of kings,
  A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
  That from a shelf the precious diadem stole,
  And put it in his pocket . . .
  A king of shreds and patches—

(III.iv.98-102)

As he leaves, Hamlet implores his mother not to let "the bloat king tempt you again to bed" (III.iv.182). To have the prince call Claudius "a bloat king," a lecher, a "cutpurse of the empire," "a Vice of kings" is for Shakespeare to construct the usurper out of the same materials he used in fabricating Falstaff. Unlike Claudius, then, for whom Gertrude's body is Denmark, Hamlet understands Gertrude's body as the vessel through which the royal blood of the Danish line has passed; she is not the political body incarnate. She disrupts the continuity of Old Denmark's line by authorizing his brother's usurpation of the throne. That she does so certainly suggests that the conditions of the queen's body and that of the State are not the same. This was a mistake for which Hamlet played out a tragic fate, but it was nevertheless a possibility Shakespeare could imagine and through which create new dramatic uses for the aristocratic female.

V

By the end of the 1590s, the physical condition of the heirless queen evidently made it necessary to reconsider the relationship between that body and the political strength of England. Although a concerted effort was made to maintain her traditional hold on the popular imagination, the queen's age made it necessary to modify the displays which had identified her natural body with the power inhering in the body politic. Aware that her health was increasingly a matter of political gravity, Elizabeth sought ways to insist upon the vitality of her body. During the Christmas celebrations of 1600, for example, Elizabeth made a public show of dancing with Duke Bracciano. John Chamberlain writes, "The Queen entertained him very graciously, and to show that she is not so old as some would have her danced both measures and galliards in his presence" (1939: 115). Despite her attempts to comply with the aesthetics of display, the signs of her age were everywhere to be seen. At the opening of parliament in 1601, it was reported, "her robes of velvet and ermine had proved too heavy for her; on the steps of the throne she had staggered and was only saved from falling by the peer who stood nearest catching her in his arms" (Jenkins 1958: 321). Her increasing feebleness threatened to shake the political foundations of the State. When, in August 1599, Londoners lived in fear of a Spanish invasion, John Chamberlain explained to Dudley Carleton how the appearance of military commanders at the Paul's Cross sermons was regarded by the crowd:

The Lord General with all great officers of the field came in great bravery to Paul's Cross on Sunday . . . and then was the alarm at the hottest that the Spaniards were at Brest. . . .

The vulgar sort cannot be persuaded that there was some great mystery in the assembling of these forces, and because they cannot find the reason for it, make many wild conjectures and cast beyond the moon: as sometimes that the Queen was dangerously sick. (1939: 83)

Rather than the routine attendance of military men to hear a sermon the "vulgar sort" took the military presence to mean that the queen was certainly failing. With the failure of the monarch's natural body, they assumed that the magical power of the crown was also in question, and the nation, therefore, in a state of imminent peril.

What is most important for purposes of my argument, however, is the suggestion that Elizabeth's age made it dangerous to equate her body with the body politic. We might understand the Essex rebellion in relationship to new fault lines in the iconography of power that further threatened the stability of the Tudor reign, shakiness that consequently afflicted the reigning aesthetics of monarchy. Angry at the queen for her support of Cecil, angry at her, too, for reprimanding him when he granted wholesale knighthoods in Ireland, angry at being denied the opportunity to dispense patronage in England, and angry at the recent Star Chamber proceedings against him, Essex is said by Camden to have complained bitterly that Elizabeth was "grown an old woman and as crooked in mind as in her carcase" (Birch 1970: 463). Clearly Essex believed that the symbolic powers of the queen's body were susceptible to appropriation. Even after the government discovered his plans, Essex behaved as if the mere display of his colors and the support of relatives, friends, clients, and household retainers would give him the authority he needed to overrule the queen. Essex no doubt assumed that the queen's body contained the magical power of the blood, but evidently he did not see that magic as the sole source of English political power. Indeed, in his manner of using the aesthetics of display to rebel against the queen's authority, he distinguished between the immanent magic of blood and the queen's symbolic display of that power, as if to say that such a display of power could empower him as well. If he behaved like a monarch, according to this inverted logic, he could attract support from the people. Following his arrest, the indictments charged Essex with attempting "to usurp the Crown," and the Earls of Essex, Southampton, Rutland, and Sandys with conspiring to depose and slay the queen (Akrigg 1968: 120-1). Two days after his conviction, Essex contested this change, claiming that he meant only to seize the queen and use her authority to change the government. He did not want to weaken her authority but merely to remove her advisors and condemn them for mismanaging the state (Akrigg 1968: 127). In either case, however, he had questioned the bond between the monarch's two bodies. Whether he intended to overthrow the queen—which is unlikely—or simply to force her to name the successor of his choice, Essex had granted the display of power priority over the natural body of Elizabeth and, by implication, over the mystic line of succession.

The question of which of the two had priority—the natural body or the metaphysical body of the monarch—held little fascination for people during much of Elizabeth's reign, so firmly linked was the national identity with her figure. For this very reason, however, the question became all the more urgent with the approach of the queen's death. On the one hand, her death meant the end of the only English monarch most of the population had ever known and in whom they read the fate of the nation. To detach the whole idea of state authority from the queen's body was—as John Chamberlain's report of the panic at the Paul's Cross sermon suggests—a dangerous proposition. On the other hand, it was just as dangerous to maintain the iconic link between that body and the state, for the aged virgin bore not only signs of decay but also signs of sterility that told of an uncertain future for England. Legitimate power, as the Essex rebellion suggested, might pass to whomever put on the symbolic displays that legitimized power. Thus we may speculate that it became necessary for playwrights to stress the metaphysical over the natural body of the monarch—to demystify the queen's body, that is, and to remystify patrilineage.

VI

The Murder of Gonzago—Hamlet's play within the play—is but one of a number of performances that would bring about this historical transformation. No longer iconic, the Player Queen's body opens up the possibility of another poetics of power, one that would come to dominate the stage once Elizabeth passed from the scene. Though the female body in Hamlet's drama is no longer wed to the land, it nevertheless authorizes monarchy. In fact, as I have suggested, it must be detached from the land in order to authorize monarchy. If we look ahead two or three years to the Jacobean aesthetics that come to dominate the public theater, we see that numerous playwrights find it necessary to torture, smother, strangle, stab, or poison an aristocratic woman in order to stage a tragedy. Desdemona, Cleopatra, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, the Duchess of Malfi, and Vittoria Corombona are among those who testify to this compulsion. These aristocratic females all share one of two features in common: (1) they are either the subject of clandestine desire or (2) they are the object of desire that threatens the aristocratic community's boundaries. Their innocence notwithstanding, women in The Revenger's Tragedy must be poisoned once they become objects of adulterous desires. The Count Montsurrey in Bussy D'Ambois tortures Tamyra for her secret assignations, and Othello murders Desdemona because he assumes that she has been guilty of infidelity. True, he is wrong to doubt her innocence. On the other hand, Desdemona has, like the Duchess of Malfi, violated the law of her blood in marrying him. And her marriage to the Moor echoes the mismating of the Egyptian and the Roman, of the duchess and her steward, of the duke and the white devil, as well as those two queens of Britain who lust for the bastard Edmund. In each case, these women are subjected to spectacular scenes of punishment, because each poses a threat to the Jacobean notion of monarchy.

In Jacobean tragedy, the line between the two social bodies—the aristocratic body and that of the people—appears to close. Othello, Malfi's husband, Vittoria Corombona, and Edmund seem capable of becoming part of the aristocratic body, but the fact of their transgression is acknowledged as they produce disease, filth, and obscenity that must be purged in order for there to be a pure community of aristocratic blood. The staging of such scenes of punishment are attempts to rid the community of some kind of pollution, the conditions for which Mary Douglas describes:

Pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined .. . a polluting person is always in the wrong. He has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed some line which should not have been crossed.... Pollution can be committed unintentionally, but intention is irrelevant to its effects. It is more likely to happen inadvertently.

(1978: 113)

It is according to this sort of logic that innocent characters are often slaughtered on the stage while morally despicable conduct seems to go unpunished.

In Jacobean tragedy, any sign of permeability poses a threat to the community. The bodies of such women as Desdemona, Tamyra, the Duchess of Malfi, and Lear's daughters blur the distinction between what belongs inside and what must be kept outside the aristocratic community. Each of these women negotiates a sexual union that is represented as a form of pollution. Although the female body must be understood in terms of the metaphysics of blood, on the Jacobean stage the female body no longer exists in the same iconic relationship with that of the monarch and with the magical power of blood. If anything, Jacobean tragedy insists on this disruption of the Elizabethan model all the more forcefully by imagining the state as nothing else but the blood, the blood in its purest form; in other words, the blood of the patriarch. A closer look at one of the more famous scenes of punishment will reveal the logic that governs pollution and purification rituals as opposed to that of dismemberment. Although Renaissance drama consistently inflicted elaborate and brutal punishments on the bodies of aristocratic women, differing techniques of mutilation reveal underlying political tendencies that changed the aesthetics and theatrical display with the change in monarchs.

As he tortures his wife in Bussy D'Ambois, the Count Montsurrey claims it is not he but her lust that murders her:

The chain shot of thy lust is aloft
  And it must murder; 'tis thine own dear twin.

(V.i.91-2)

Lust doubles the woman. In that it produces either a desirous or a desiring self, lust makes her monstrous in some way. It should not be surprising in this regard to discover that twinning and doubling occupied a major section of Renaissance books on monsters and monstrosity. In his book on monsters and marvels, Ambroise Paré describes twins who share a single head, twins joined at the belly, or twins that have but a single anus between them (1982: 27).⁵ Or he describes the monstrous as a single figure with twinned arms on one side of the body, one that has double the number of legs, another with extra fingers, and those bearing extra members of other kinds as well. Particularly important among these is the hermaphrodite. By virtue of possessing a second set of sexual organs, the hermaphrodite resembles other monsters in that he violates natural categories. In doing so, however, the hermaphrodite could also be used to clarify these differences. It was always necessary to determine which set of sexual organs was dominant and thereby remove the hermaphrodite from the status of a monstrosity. Paré explains that whenever both sets of sexual organs were fully formed in an individual, both ancient and modern law obliged such monsters to say "which they wish to use, and then they are forbidden upon pain of death to use any but those they have chosen" (ibid.). By containing an extra member, hermaphrodites not only violated the natural order, as did all Paré's monstrous creatures, but they also threatened to pollute the community. It was therefore necessary to suppress the supplementary feature.

The monstrous woman also possesses an extra member. Women subjected to punishment are those who either bring an extra member into the body politic or else take on the features of masculine desire themselves. Malfi's marriage adds an extra member to the aristocratic body, and this member is referred to as the "hermaphrodite." Claiming she has polluted his blood, Malfi's brother takes the form of a lycanthrope. Similarly monstrous, Vittoria Corombona is a masculine woman, twinned by lust, and rendered so monstrous by desire that she is called the White Devil. Indeed, it seems that whenever the rigid boundaries that define the pure community are obscured within the female body, Jacobean drama reclassifies the woman as a monster, suggesting, Mary Douglas argues, that pollution represents a type of danger that occurs where clearly defined social lines have been muddled. The bodies of such women as Tamyra, the Duchess of Malfi, Desdemona, Cleopatra, Goneril and Regan, and Vittoria Corombona, among others, obscure that boundary distinguishing what may be contained inside the community from what must be kept out. Thus their bodies, like that of the hermaphrodite's, provide the place where difference must be re-established.

Having noted then how the body of the aristocratic female on the Jacobean stage takes on a decidedly different figurai connotation, we can consider how the particular form of sexual violence to her differs from that portrayed in an Elizabethan play like Titus Andronicus. To begin formulating an answer, I would like to return to one of the most self-conscious of the Jacobean plays and examine its dramatization of punishment. Here are the terms in which Tamyra would have us understand the forthcoming scene of her torture in Bussy D'Ambois:

Hide in some gloomy dungeon my loathed face,

Hang me in chains, and let me eat those arms
  That have offended: bind me face to face
  To some dead woman taken from the cart of
  Execution

(V.i.103-10)

This passage sets up a parallel between the husband-wife relationship and that of sovereign and subject that would have automatically made sense of Tamyra's crime as well as the scene of punishment: the wife's assertion of power against her husband must be understood in relation to the subject's assault upon the sovereign's power. In the second chapter of Discipline and Punish, Foucault suggests that, in considering such scenes in pre-Enlightenment culture, we must take the homology literally. Whatever attacks the law of the sovereign also attacks him physically, since the force of the law is the force of the prince. When popular power—always expressed in the language of festival and always illegitimate—forgets the truth that legitimate power is absolute, according to Foucault's model, scenes are staged to display that radical disymmetry of power. Foucault writes:

If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal; in the same horror, the crime had to be manifested and annulled. The nature of the threat posed by the criminal can only be intensified when the crime is a crime against the aristocratic body itself. (1977: 50)

The wife's crime against her husband is a crime against the crown. The punishment of unchaste aristocratic women therefore displays the truth of the subject's relation to the state. It displays the disymmetrical relationship by imprinting the crime on the subject's body, in this way demonstrating the state's absolute power over that body. Tamyra's husband orders her to write the name of the go-between as she is stretched on the rack. At the same time, he repeatedly stabs her arms. Since the permeability of her body wounded him, the cultural logic which organizes the play dictates that he should cut openings upon her, for this makes her crime against the state legible. As they subordinated female to male in such an extravagantly artificial manner, dramatists testified to the absolute power of the state. But it is important to understand that certainly in England this subordination could only take place once the figure of the aristocratic female body was understood as something separate from the crown. Given my construction of the cultural milieu in which Shakespeare wrote, Hamlet's attempt at staging a play is very much an attempt on the playwright's part to imagine a situation in which political power was not associated with a female and the aristocratic female was not iconically bonded to the land.

VII

The Murder of Gonzago is Hamlet's attempt to locate and purge a corrupt element within the aristocratic body. In this respect, he acts in his capacity as would-be sovereign, for Shakespeare gives to Hamlet the sovereign's power to discover and punish a crime against the aristocratic body. As he explains:

 I'll have these players
  Play something like the murther of my father
  Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks,
  I'll tent him to the quick. If a' do blench,
  I know my course.

(II.ii.594-8)

Hamlet means the play to "tent," or probe, Claudius as with a dagger that opens an infected wound. In this way, he intends to re-enact the crime of regicide for the purpose of punishing the murderer. By staging a torture and seeking to extract a confession, Hamlet takes it upon himself to exercise what Foucault has claimed was "the absolute right and the exclusive power of the sovereign." To carry the point still further, chronicle history plays (which were, along with romantic comedies, a preferred Elizabethan mode of drama) establish the legitimacy of a monarch both by staging his control over truth through the exercise of punishment and by displaying his ability to possess the territory of England by means of a miraculous victory over a stronger opponent. A year or two into the reign of James I, romantic comedies and chronicle histories were eclipsed by problem comedies and tragedies that threatened if they did not actually enact extravagant scenes of punishment on the body of an aristocratic woman. This, rather than the monarch's possession of the land, established his (always his) legitimacy.

But Hamlet's play fails in two respects to materialize as a spectacle of punishment which would establish Hamlet's power over Claudius. Because the play is only a play, first of all, and not an official ritual of state, its truth is marked as a supposition rather than a re-enactment of the truth. It is another instance of Shakespeare's giving Hamlet a mode of speech that cannot constitute political action because it automatically translates all action onto the purely symbolic plane of thought and art. Only here, as opposed to earlier moments in the play where Hamlet's speech renders him unable to act, it is not his use of Stoic discourse but of the Senecan mode of tragedy that turns the exercise of power into a purely symbolic gesture. Secondly, even as a symbolic gesture, the play fails to hit its mark. Hamlet has chosen to produce The Murder of Gonzago to display a political truth. The "play," he says, "is something like the murder of my father." Indeed, the play is a re-enactment of the fratricide in that it portrays the aristocratic body (one brother) turning against itself (another brother) to inflict a wound that will ultimately kill them both. But Hamlet's gloss on the play informs us, curiously enough, that he has chosen a play portraying the murder of an uncle by his nephew. Hamlet explains, "This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king" (III.ii.244), and then adds:

'A poisons him i' th' garden for his estate. His name's Gonzago, the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian. You shall see anon how the murtherer gets the love of Gonzago's wife.

Love'sii.26M)

To say that this play shows "how the murtherer gets the love of Gonzago's wife" is to say that The Murder of Gonzago does not depict regicide as a crime against a patrilineal system of descent. The same thing is further indicated by the fact that it is not first and second sons, or even the progeny of siblings, who contend for the throne, although this is initially the order of conflict that brought down old Hamlet and provides the framework of Shakespeare's play. Unlike Claudius, who murders his brother, Hamlet's Gonzago murders his uncle, and it is through possession of his uncle's wife that this usurper symbolically gains control of Gonzago's patrimony. That Hamlet represents the original fratricide as the murder of an uncle by a nephew has empowered many modern readers to regard the play within the play as psychological information—as representing, that is, Hamlet's wish to possess his mother and not as Hamlet's attempt to reveal the guilt of Claudius in the re-enactment of that crime as punishment. But given a cultural milieu in which any display of the aristocratic body would have been highly meaningful politically, I think it more likely that, by casting the murderer as nephew to the duke, Shakespeare deviated from his source and from the kinship relations dominating the play as a whole in order to represent the queen's body as an illegitimate source of political authority (Bullough 1973: 30, 172-6). It is highly doubtful that Shakespeare meant to say both things—psychological and political—at once, since they more or less cancel each other out. Hamlet cannot be desiring his mother (according to the modern Oedipal pattern) and still want to identify her as the site of political corruption and danger to the state.

This revision of Elizabethan thinking is more likely Shakespeare's attempt at updating Claudius's crime to address historical circumstances very different from those in which he staged the chronicle history plays. Having dramatized how power passes into the wrong hands through the body of a woman, however, Hamlet folds back into an Elizabethan mode of thinking and equates Hamlet's abortive attempt to enact the rites of punishment with Claudius's crime. Both assault the sovereign's body rather than establish the absolute power of the aristocratic body over that of its subject as both turn out to be self-inflicted wounds. The play concludes according to the Elizabethan logic which governs Titus Andronicus by heaping up the bodies of the royal family where there should have been a banquet scene. Thus this play materializes the truth that the murder of one member of the aristocracy by another is an assault on the entire body or, in other words, an act of suicide.

I am suggesting that the dilemma of the play arises from and turns upon the meaning and disposition of Gertrude's body. Where Lavinia provided the site for the various forces competing for Rome, Gertrude's body stages a conceptual shift in the representation of political disorder. Her body becomes the place where the iconic bonding of blood and territory breaks down into competing bases of political authority. Claudius's authority rests on his marriage to Gertrude. To Hamlet, on the other hand, authority depends on birth. The question is not a matter of which family embodies legitimate power over the land, but a matter of which claim—blood or the possession of territory—is more important in constituting legitimate authority.

The play within the play represents the Player Queen's body in terms that go still further in contradicting the politics of the body that governed many of the symbolic practices of an Elizabethan England. But The Murder of Gonzago ends before the logic of the representation can play itself out. Even so, the dumb show which precedes the performance—in combination with Hamlet's gloss and his uncle's angry reaction to it—bears intimations of another politics of the body. Hamlet's gloss on the play tells of a nephew poisoning his uncle, the king, and then wooing the queen. The audience has seen the king murdered "for his estate," Hamlet explains, only to add, "You shall see anon how the murtherer gets the love of Gonzago's wife" Love'sii.261-4). After this statement, Claudius rises and closes down the theater before the drama of illicit sexual relations can fairly get under way. Coming when it does, this interruption of the play within the play further distinguishes two acts of treason—the seizure of royal property and the possession of the queen's body—one from the other. It is more than a little interesting to note that the threat to the aristocratic body is a double threat which distinguishes two points where the aristocratic body could receive a mortal wound. It might be said that Shakespeare formally posed a political threat of this same magnitude simply by mutilating the female body, but now he feels somehow compelled to launch two separate assaults: one, to lose the land and, two, to destroy the sacred symbols of state. To reinforce the sense that these sources of power are separate and distinct, Shakespeare has the Player Queen in Hamlet's script describe her own sexual behavior as an assault on the political body separate and distinct from that which destroyed the king's natural body: "A second time I kill my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed" (III.ii. 184-5).

I am certainly not suggesting that such splitting of the political body according to sex makes sexual desire any less political than it was in earlier drama. It only means—in Hamlet at least—that the politics of the body is susceptible to change. The Player Queen in Hamlet's revised script opens up a new category of crime. Her body is no longer the state. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say this the other way around, that the political body is no longer a woman. Accordingly, the Player Queen ceases to be a source of legitimate power. Like Gertrude, she crowns a counterfeit monarch who possesses the land on a basis other than blood. In the play within the play, then, the female body becomes a place where the body politic can be corrupted. And as the Player Queen corrupts rather than legitimates the blood, she corrupts the official iconography of state; she becomes an object of desire in her own right, a desire for the signs and symbols of power dissociated from the metaphysics of blood. This presumably lies behind Hamlet's promise that the bulk of the play will dramatize "how the murtherer gets the love of Gonzago's wife" (III.ii.363). Different conceptions of the female body thus interact in Hamlet to the external fascination of modern readers. It is particularly difficult for us to understand the political basis of this debate because doing so depends upon seeing the body politic as female. The second notion of the female body develops with the revision of the first under the pressure from Elizabeth's aging body and the subsequent formation of new political resistance to the patriarchal ideal.

This second notion of the body politic sees the female body—and by this I mean specifically that of the aristocratic female—as the symbol and point of access to legitimate authority, thus as the potential substitute for blood and basis for counterfeiting power. The historically earlier view sees the aristocratic female body and the political body as one and the same, a view that resists our attempts at privileging sexual differences over those based on blood. The second view of the body allows us to translate political relationships into sexual relationships as it cuts a clear difference between the body politic and that of the female. With the possibility that her body serves as the symbolic substitute for some original body, furthermore, comes the possibility of construing the aristocratic woman as an object of sexual desire rather than as the means to political power. But to regard Gertrude in the light of modern sexuality is to reverse the priorities of Jacobean thinking where sexual desire always has a political meaning and objective. We regularly perform this gesture of historical reversal when we read the political formations overlapping in Hamlet as events in an interpsychic melodrama where the two queens are no longer political figures but ciphers of Hamlet's relation to his mother. Instead, I am stressing the figurai discontinuity between Gertrude's body and that of the Player Queen.

The fate of Gertrude makes Hamlet an Elizabethan play. Upon the condition of her body depends the health of the state. Like Old Denmark before her, Gertrude dies from taking poison into her body, and the same poison strikes down Hamlet, Laertes, and Claudius as well. Her death thus initiates the heaping of bodies which characterizes the Elizabethan Seneca; the wounding of one of its members is the wounding of the entire political body. In this case, however, the infiltration of that body with poison puts an end to the Danish line. This is the fate, experienced by one, that all members share. By this means, and not by a blow, then, is how Shakespeare imagines a lethal assault on the body politic. But The Murder of Gonzago takes the logic of this figure one step further. Shakespeare uses poison to threaten the political body in a manner which appears to contradict the politics of dismemberment. Merely by inciting desire, the queen's sexuality becomes a form of corruption equivalent to but not the same as the poison which has been poured into the ear of the sleeping king. Thus Hamlet insists upon shifting the crime from the fact of regicide to the act of "incest," the term which he uses to describe the relationship between Claudius and Gertrude, his brother's wife.

The play within the play can be viewed as Hamlet's way of distinguishing the one crime from the other, a distinction which relocates the political body in the female. Such a shift can occur only if the queen does not embody patriarchal power, otherwise any misuse of her sexual body, however deliberate on her part, would constitute a direct assault on the whole concept of patriarchy. Hamlet's obsession with the misuse of the queen's sexuality, more than with his uncle's possession of the state, transforms the threat of dismemberment into one of pollution. We might say that, in redefining the nature of the threat against the body politic, Hamlet attempts to stage a Jacobean tragedy. But the political context of Hamlet's play—in other words, Shakespeare's play—proves more powerful than Hamlet's attempt to transform the political relationships that prevail outside his theater. It is to the Elizabethan dynamic of competition that he eventually succumbs as Shakespeare brings Hamlet's struggle on behalf of a later construction of patriarchy to an Elizabethan conclusion. Hamlet fails to transform the iconography of state. In the tragedies that follow Hamlet, however, the aristocratic female is regularly caught up in assaults on the principle of blood only to be tortured or murdered, thus testifying to the metaphysics of the monarch's body.

Notes

¹ The anthropologist Emily Martin concludes after studying representations of the body in medical school textbooks, magazines, journals, and newspapers that everything from cell structure to reproduction bears features of the modern industrial state and, as such, shapes our most basic evaluations of ourselves and others. Cells are described as factories, the brain is a co-ordinating center for sending and receiving messages, the AIDS virus is represented as a factory producing anti-immune tanks. If anything, Martin's study (1987) tells us the simple truth that the body is always a product of a particular culture.

² For discussions of the politics of the queen's display of her body, see Greenblatt (1980: 166-8), Goldberg (1983: 28-30), and Bergeron (1971: 12-32).

³ Despite the persistently low esteem in which critics hold Titus, there have been useful efforts to explain the aesthetics of violent display in the play (Bevington 1984: 29-32).

⁴ Of the mass body and its opposition to what 1 am calling the aristocratic body, Bakhtin writes that "it is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive, socioeconomic and political organization" (1968: 255). Contrary to the closed, rigidly hierarchized, and pure figure of the desirable woman which authorized the blood, the grotesque body is open, heterogeneous, undifferentiated, sensual, concrete, endlessly copulating, always hungry, and forever reproducing itself. I am also indebted to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White for their important discussion of the mass body.

⁵ I am indebted to Stephen J. Greenblatt for calling this material to my attention. He kindly allowed me to consult a manuscript "Fiction and Friction in Twelfth Night" (1988: 66-93) in which he discusses at length the Renaissance preoccupation with monstrous births.

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