SOURCE: "Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter's Tale 4.3," in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. XXII, 1994, pp. 58-76.

[In the essay that follows, originally presented at the Shakespeare Association of America in 1991, Mowat explores act four, scene three of The Winter's Tale—where Autolycus is introduced—as a dramatic moment in which the surface context and its "infracontexts" create a number of tensions that establish Autolycus as a rogue character.]

As I look at a particular intertextual moment in The Winter's Tale (the scene in which we meet Autolycus), I begin by assuming that the first printing of the play in the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio is a "text"—that is, dialogue initially crafted as a script for performance but nevertheless preserved for us as printed symbols, inked pages. I also assume that this moment of Autolycus's appearance came into existence within a field of printed texts to which it was contextually related. By describing and thus delimiting the moment's context as "printed," I do not deny it other contexts; rather, I argue that among the many contexts—social, cultural, variously semiotic—implicated in Shakespeare's text, one of the more significant is that massive field of discourse that issued from printing houses.

Not that the boundary between printed discourse and surrounding discourses is fixed or impermeable. Indeed, as we trace the interweavings of printed texts within Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, we trace at the same time the social and moral worlds represented in those texts, and we hear the debates in which the texts engaged. There is merit, though, in focussing attention as unwaveringly as possible on printed discursive systems. Such careful focussing forces us to acknowledge the constructedness of even supposed eye-witness accounts and heightens our awareness of the ideological freight carried by both the most fanciful of mythological tales and the most laconic of statutes and chronicles.

The word text in my title, then, refers primarily to the Folio words that preserve and transmit The Winter's Tale 4.3 and secondarily to printed discourse in general. The word infracontext I borrow from Claes Schaar, whose work in intertextual theory I find particularly helpful vis-à-vis Shakespeare.¹ Schaar suggests that the works of certain poets can best be described as vertical context systems; in these works, within and beneath, as it were, the surface context are embedded infracontexts that "constitute a matrix, a bed or mould which serves as the base for the surface context" and which, when recognized, expand and stratify meaning. The surface context functions as signal, sometimes in an overt or covert allusion, sometimes as a mere reminiscence or faint echo. Once the reader or listener recognizes the infracontexts and "recognition turns to understanding, the signal . . . and [the] infracontexts coalesce"; in some cases, the surface context is, in effect, annotated by the infracontext; in other cases, the meaning of the surface context is expanded through a vaguer merging as the infracontexts "rub off on the surface context. Schaar's construct is a variant of familiar intertextual models from Bakhtin through Kristeva to Riffaterre.² It differs from other intertextual models in that it bases itself "on distinctive, mostly verbal similarities between surface and infracontexts" and in that it focusses on a given intertextual moment as "a closely connected semantic whole, a functional entity" whose meaning is expanded and enriched by its infracontexts.

In these pages I argue that The Winter's Tale 4.3 is a dramatic moment in which the surface context and its infracontexts create a wonderfully complex contextual universe, one that, like so much of Shakespeare's work, constitutes a special variant of Schaar's vertical context system. Beneath the moment's surface context are distinct sets of infracontexts, some of which supplement and intensify each other, while others set up sharply contrasting associations and patterns. These conflicting infracontexts generate intensely complex meanings as, to quote Schaar, "irreconcilable worlds and value systems are pitted against each other."³

The Winter's Tale as a whole is, of course, an interesting intertextual transformation of Robert Greene's Pandosto. Woven into and transforming Greene's story of jealousy, attempted incest, and suicide are Ovidian, Apuleian, and Euripidean incidents and motifs that lift the play out of Greene's sordid and prosaic pages and into an almost mythic world of metamorphoses: of shepherdesses into princesses, of raging tyrants into repentant fathers, of statues into living women. Act 4, scene 3, has no parallel in Pandosto. It opens with the entrance of a new character who introduces himself to the audience as a thief and explains how he got the name Autolycus. A second character, the son of the Old Shepherd, enters, trying to calculate the money that this year's shearing will bring in; unable to do it "without counters," he abandons the effort and instead begins to read aloud his shopping list for the coming sheepshearing festival: sugar, currants, rice, saffron, mace, nutmegs, ginger, "four pound of prunes, and as many of raisins o' the sun."⁴ Autolycus, to lure this "prize" into his trap, lies down and cries out for help, claiming that he has been robbed and beaten. As the shepherd charitably lifts him up, offering him money and offering to take him to shelter, Autolycus cleans out the shepherd's purse. They part, the shepherd going, he thinks, to buy spices for the feast, and Autolycus making plans to attend the festival himself, where, he says, he will turn the shearers into sheep for his own fleecing.

The signals in this scene that have alerted previous scholars to two of the scene's infracontexts are Autolycus's name and the general configuration of the trick he plays on his victim. "My father named me Autolycus," he tells us, "who, being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles." This single sentence compresses several Greek-mythological pieces of text (most of them reprised in Ovid's Metamorphoses) that tell the story of the master thief Autolycus, son of the god Mercury. While Shakespeare's Autolycus is "littered under Mercury" in the sense, one presumes, that he was born when the planet Mercury was in the ascendant, his namesake was actually sired by the god Mercury, inheriting from his father the magic power to transform stolen booty into new, unrecognizable forms. As Ovid writes (in Golding's 1567 translation), the maiden Chyone

. . . bare by Mercurye
A sonne that hight Awtolychus, who provde a wyly pye
And such a fellow as in theft and filching had no peere.
He was his fathers owne sonne right; he could mennes eyes so bleere
As for to make the black things whyght, and whyght thinges black appeere.

⁵

Shakespeare's Autolycus does his namesake proud. He, too, is "a wyly pye" who "in theft and filching" has no peer. His link to Mercury—the trickster god, god of thieves, lord of roads, known primarily for his "subtle cunning"⁶ —gives Shakespeare's Autolycus a quasi-mythological status, casting a kind of glamor on his thieving. One finds a parallel glamorizing of the thief in the second infracontext that has been cited by scholars, a story in Robert Greene's Second Part of Conny-Catching, one of five such books written by Greene in 1591-92 that describe con men (or, as he calls them, conny-catchers); Greene's announced purpose is to display the evil doings of conny-catchers and alert honest citizens to their tricks. Among Greene's tales of clever crooks versus innocent gulls is that of a wary farmer unknowingly stalked by conny-catchers. As he walks the inner regions of St. Paul's, the farmer refuses to take his hand off his "well lined purse." The hero/villain of this tale is a master deceiver—"one of the crue," writes Greene, "that for his skill might haue bene Doctorat in his misterie."⁷ Having tried a series of ploys to get the wealthy farmer to remove his hand from his purse, the thief disguises himself as a gentleman and falls down as if ill at the farmer's feet, begging the farmer to help him; as the farmer "stept to him, helde him in his armes, rubd him & chaft him," the farmer's purse is neatly removed. This tale, "A kinde conceit of a Foist performed in Paules," is generally accepted as underlying the Autolycus gulling-incident.⁸

The tale of the wary farmer and the clever pickpocket is a London story, set in the middle aisle of St. Paul's. The Winter's Tale sets its parallel incident in the country and has its con man fall down beside what, within the fiction of the play, is a country road. This seemingly minor shift in the story's location begins the process of bringing into play sharply conflicting infracontexts. As I have already suggested, the mythological context and the conny-catching context, though they take us into radically different discourses, do not themselves markedly differ in the stance taken toward Autolycus the thief. Both contexts convey a more-than-sneaking admiration for the trickster. It is not such a long step from Ovidian commentary on the subtle cunning of Mercury, god of thieves, and on his son Autolycus as a "wyly pye," to Greene's statement that his pickpocket "for his skill might haue bene Doctorat in his misterie." However, when Greene's young gentleman is taken from London and put in rags and made to cry out for help from beside a roadway, a signal is given that opens another, immensely complicating set of infracontexts in which Autolycus is far from glamorized. When, in his seeming distress, the ragged Autolycus is succored by a stranger passing along the road, what is replayed is the familiar story of the Good Samaritan⁹—except that in Shakespeare's version of the story, the part of the man set upon by thieves, stripped, beaten and left by the side of the road, is enacted by Autolycus, the thief, and the charitable Samaritan is presented as a gullible fool taken in by outward signs of victimization and suffering.

This complicated dramatic moment represents with remarkable economy the essence of a century-long struggle among and within texts as to how individuals and states should respond to those in distress. In the biblical text, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate what is meant by "loving one's neighbor." Loving one's neighbor means aiding anyone in distress.¹⁰ But, beginning in texts in the late fifteenth century, one finds the question posed again and again: how can one know whether apparent distress is genuine? In Brandt's Ship of Fools, in "Cocke Lorelles Bote," and in the Liber Vagatorum—all published around 1500 and all drawing, to a greater or lesser extent, on an advisory issued by the Senate of Basel around 1475¹¹—we read about healthy "beggars who sit at the church doors . . . with sore and broken legs . . . [tying] a leg up or besmear[ing] an arm with salves . . . and all the while as little ails him as other men"; we read about beggars who pretend to suffer from epilepsy, falling down "with a piece of soap in their mouths, whereby the foam rises as big as a fist"; we read about beggars who apply corrosives to their skin or who leave their clothes at the hostelry

and sit down against the churches naked, and shiver terribly before the people that they may think they are suffering from great cold. They prick themselves with nettle-seed and other things, whereby they are made to shake. Some say they have been robbed by wicked men; some that they have lain ill and for this reason were compelled to sell their clothes. Some say they have been stolen from them; but all this is only that people should give them more clothes, [which] they sell . . . and spend a whoring and gambling.¹²

When the Liber Vagatorum—from which the above quotations are taken—went into its nineteenth printing in 1528, it included a preface by Martin Luther, who wrote that "the . . . true meaning of the book . . . is . . . that princes, lords, counsellors of state, and everybody should be prudent, and cautious in dealing with beggars, and learn that, whereas people [who] will not give and help honest paupers and needy neighbors, as ordained by God, . . . give . . . ten times as much to Vagabonds. . . . I have myself of late years been cheated and befooled by such tramps and liars more than I wish to confess."¹³

The theme of the evil perpetrated by what I call "the ounterfeit distressed" continues throughout the century. In Robert Copland's Hye way to the Spyttell house, written in the 1530s, the truly poor and infirm are shown as left to die in the cold while those merely pretending to be poor and sick receive charity:

Some beggarly churls . . . . . .
walk to each market and fair
And to all places where folk do repair,
By day on stilts or stooping on crutches
And so dissimule as false loitering flowches,
With bloody clouts all about their leg,
And plasters on their skin when they go beg.
Some counterfeit lepry, and other some
Put soap in their mouth to make it scum,
And fall down as Saint Cornelys' evil.
These deceits they use worse than any devil;
And when they be in their own company,
They be as whole as either you or I.

¹⁴

The tricks purportedly used by healthy beggars to prey upon the pity of charitable individuals appear in text after text as warnings to gullible Christians: from the Liber Vagatorum and the Ship of Fools to Copland, from Copland to Awdeley (in 1561) and thence to Harman (in 1567), and from Harman verbatim into Dekker's 1608 Bellman of London.¹⁵ Nor does it stop there: Robert Burton, who, in his copy of the Bellman of London, traces Dekker's liftings from Harman, includes in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy a discussion of beggars who "counterfeit severall diseases, . . . dismember, make themselves blind, lame, to haue a more plausible cause to beg, and lose their limmes to recover their present wants."¹⁶

But it was not only individuals who were represented as concerned about how to be charitable but not gullible. English statutes, annals, and chronicles beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century represent the state as aware of the need to distinguish the distressed from the counterfeit distressed so that those who genuinely need help can be relieved. Earlier in the century, English statutes and royal proclamations attack vagabonds and sturdy beggars (i.e., beggars who are healthy enough to work) not on the grounds that they fraudulently receive aid that rightfully belongs to the legitimately distressed but rather because, as a statute passed in 1547 put it, "Idelness and vagabundry is the mother and roote of all theftes Robberyes and all evill actes and other mischiefe."¹⁷ Although the 1547 statute does not address the question of how the state should take care of the truly distressed when the realm is purportedly filled with "a multitude of people given to" idleness and begging, chronicles represent the state as becoming aware of this issue by mid-century.

For example, in Grafton's 1569 Chronicle (from which it was picked up by later chroniclers) we read that in 1553, the last year of Edward VI's reign, Bishop Ridley preached a sermon on poverty and the urgent need for charity that so moved the king that he had Ridley set up a council to find a solution to the problem of how to relieve the needy. The council began its work by classifying the poor into three major categories and recommended that two of the three (those legitimately in need) should receive charity, and that those in the third category, "the thriftless poor" (i.e., "the riotous that consumeth all," "the vagabond that will abide in no place," and "the idle person, as the strumpet and other"), should be sent to workhouses.¹⁸

A statute passed in the fifth year of Elizabeth's reign suggests that Edward's plan did not solve the state's problem. "To thintent," it begins, "that idell and loytering persons and valiant [i.e., healthy] Beggers may be avoyded, and thimpotent, feble, and lame, which are the Poore in very dede, should bee hereafter relieved and well provided for: Bee it enacted . . ."—and the statute goes on to order that the truly distressed should be taken care of by local governments while the healthy unemployed poor should be publicly whipped and put to work.¹⁹ Statutes from the fourteenth and thirty-ninth years of Elizabeth's reign and from the first and seventh years of James I's reign make clear that the state's response to the truly distressed and to the counterfeit distressed were represented as a problem throughout the period, up to the very year in which The Winter's Tale was probably written.²⁰

When Autolycus pretends to be in need of aid, then, and when he caps that pretense by robbing the man who ministers to him, he incarnates a figure presented in a host of texts as an evil disrupter of the commonwealth. Autolycus himself calls attention to this ominous infracontext of pamphlets, statutes, and chronicles when, in his dialogue with the shepherd, he labels his current knavish profession as that of "rogue." Pretending to describe the thief who robbed him, Autolycus says: "I knew [Autolycus] once a servant of the Prince. . . . He hath been since an ape-bearer, then a process-server . . ., and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in rogue." "A rogue," of course, is what Autolycus is called in the Folio dramatis personae list. Shakespeare had used this word in earlier plays in some of its looser senses, but in The Winter's Tale 4.3 it seems technical, as if it were the name of a "knavish profession."

The word did, in fact, have such a specific, legal meaning. The word rogue entered the English language—in print, at least—in 1561, with John Awdeley's Fraternity of Vagabonds.²¹ There, rogue is the name given a particular kind of vagabond, a beggar who uses as his excuse for being on the road the tale that he is seeking a kinsman. Thomas Harman, who, in 1567, expanded Awdeley's small book into the more substantial A caueat or warening for common cursetors vulgarely called Vagabones, gives a much fuller character sketch:

A Roge is neither so stoute or hardy as the vpright man. Many of them will go fayntly and look piteously when they see [or] meete any person, hauing a kercher, as white as my shooes, tyed about their head, with a short staffe in their hand, haltinge, although they nede not, requiring almes of such as they meete, or to what house they shal com. But you may easely perceiue by their colour that thei cary both health and hipocrisie about them, wherby they get gaine, when others want that cannot fayne and dissemble. Others therebee that walke sturdely about the countrey, and faineth to seke a brother or kinsman of his, dwelling within som part of the shire. . . . These also wyll pick and steale. . . . ²²

Harman's Caueat puts the rogue primarily among the counterfeit distressed, one of the twenty-three kinds of vagabonds and beggars Harman claims to have himself met.

The word rogue spread quickly after Harman's very popular book was published in 1567.²³ As the word spread and was taken up into legal terminology, it lost much of the meaning that Awdeley and Harman had given it and became a more general term used to name the healthy unemployed poor. Most significantly, in the statute against vagabonds passed and published in 1572 (14 Eliz. c.5), a rogue is legally defined as a healthy person who has neither land, nor master, nor a legitimate trade or source of income. In that same statute, the phrase "Beggars, Vagabonds, and Idle Persons"—a phrase that had appeared with slight variations in comparable statutes back to the time of Richard II²⁴—now becomes, for the first time, "Rogues, Vagabonds, and sturdy Beggars," and thus it appears in every statute for punishment of the unemployed poor throughout the reign of Elizabeth and into the reign of King James. From the 1572 statute the word rogue passed immediately into Stow's 1573 Summarye of the Chronicles and from there directly into Holinshed's 1577 Chronicles—and even into the Chronicles' index.²⁵

We learn from the statutes and the chronicles that, for the crime of having neither land nor master nor legitimate source of income, the rogue received various punishments: from 1572 to 1597, he or she was stripped to the waist, whipped until bloody, and had a hole burned through the gristle of the right ear; from 1597 to 1604, he or she was merely whipped until bloody, then sent back to his or her place of birth and put to work. In 1604, in James's first parliament, the 1597 statute was declared ineffective

for that the said Rogues hauinge no marke upon them . . . may . . . retire themselves into some other parts of this Realme where they are not knowne, and soe escape the due punishmente . . . : For remedie whereof be it ordained and enacted, That such Rogues . . . shall . . . be branded in the lefte Shoulder with an hot burning Iron . . ., with a greate Romane R upon the Iron, . . . [so] that the letter R be seene and remaine for a perpetuali marke upon such Rogue during his or her life.²⁶

The fierceness of attack—both physical and rhetori-cal—on the unemployed destitute is usually linked in the chronicles, statutes, and pamphlets to the biblical injunction against idleness. God had ordered man to labor; anyone who did not labor did not deserve to live. As Sir John Cheke wrote in 1549, people think of drones, caterpillars, and vermin as noisome beasts in the commonwealth. But what, he asks, is an idle person?

A sucker of honie, a spoyler of corne, a destroyer of fruite, Naye a waster of money, a spoyler of vittaile, a sucker of bloud, a breker of orders, a seeker of brekes, a queller of life, a basiliske of the commune wealthe, whiche by companie and syght doth poyson the whole contrey and staineth honeste mindes with the infection of his venirne, and so draweth the commune wealthe to deathe and destruction.²⁷

According to Cheke (and to many others writing through-out the century), unemployed persons simply hated work,

leauing labour, which they like not, and following idlenes, which they should not. For euery man is easely and naturally brought, from labor to ease, . . . from diligence to slouthfulness. . . . [V]aliaunte beggers play in tounes, and yet complaine of neede, whose [beggar's] staffe if it be once hoat in their hande, or sluggishnes bred in their bosome, thei wil neuer be allured to labour againe, contenting them selues better with idle beggary, then with honest and profitable labour.²⁸

William Harrison's "Description of England," printed as an introduction to Holinished's 1577 and 1587 Chronicles, includes a section entitled "Of Provision Made for the Poor."²⁹ Echoing the commonplace that many are idle because they hate to work—they "straie and wander about, as creatures abhorring all labour and euerie honest exercise," he writes—Harrison lashes out at the unemployed poor with a vigor comparable to Cheke's:

[the idle] are all theeues and caterpillers in the commonwealth and by the word of God not permitted to eat, sith they do but licke the sweat from the true laborers browes & bereue the godlie poore of that which is due unto them . . ., consuming the charitie of well disposed people . . . after a most wicked & detestable maner.³⁰

But Harrison, in describing the numbers of rogues and beggars in the commonwealth, asks a question of the situation that places Autolycus and his shepherd victim in a different light. Noting that "[i]dle beggers are such either through other mens occasion, or through their owne default," he writes that,

By other mens occasion (as one waie for example) when some couetous man . . . espieng a further commoditie in their commons, holds, and tenures, doth find such meanes as thereby to wipe manie out of their occupiengs and turne the same unto his priuate gaines.

In the margin of Harrison's text appears this statement: "A thing often seene." The text then continues: "Hereupon it followeth, that . . . the greater part [of those so dispossessed] commonlie hauing nothinge to staie vpon . . . do either prooue idle beggers, or else continue starke theeues till the gallows do eat them vp." The marginal comment on this sentence reads: "At whose hands shall the bloud of these men be required?"³¹

This small questioning of who is to blame for the numbers of unemployed poor who haunt the English streets and countryside summons up a host of texts that present the story of the vagrant from quite a different perspective than that shown in the statutes against vagabonds or in the moralizings by Harman and Cheke and all the others who attack the idle poor. The other side of the story, as Harrison so briefly suggests, is that many are unemployed because their lands or jobs have been taken away from them, a point that is made in statutes "for the maintenance of husbandrie and tillage" throughout the century and in numerous pamphlets and tracts that plead to various English monarchs on behalf of the dispossessed.³² Nowhere is this side of the story told more poignantly than in More's Utopia. There the point is made that England is overrun by thieves, not because thieves enjoy stealing (as one of the characters in Utopia claims) but because people have lost their livings: serving men out of work, returned soldiers, evicted farm laborers thrown out of work when farms are sold—these are the men and women frantic for food and driven to begging and stealing: "they that be thus destytute of seruice, other [i.e., either] starue for honger, or manfullye playe the theaues. For what wolde yow haue them to do?" Hythloday asks.³³ "I pray you," he goes on to ask, "what other thing do you [Englishmen do, but] . . . make [people into] theues and then punish them?" That which sets England apart from other nations, Hythloday says, is the way English sheep are responsible for such problems. These supposedly peaceful animals "consume, destroy, and deuoure hole fieldes, howses, and cities." Noblemen, gentlemen, and abbots, he explains, "leaue no grounde for tyllage, [but] enclose all in pastures: they throw downe houses; they plucke downe townes, and leaue nothing stondynge." One greedy sheep owner may

inclose many thousand acres of grounde together . . . [while] the husbandmen be . . . compelled to sell all; by one meanes . . . or by other, . . . by howke or crooke they must nedes departe awaye, pore, sylie [i.e., simple], wretched soules, men, women, husbandes, wyves, fatherles chyldren, widdowes, woful mothers, with their yonge babes. . . . Awaye they trudge . . . out of their . . . howses, fyndying no places to rest in. . . . And when they haue wanderynge about sone spent [all that they have], what can they then els do but steale, . . . or else go about beggyng? And yet then also they be caste in prison as vagaboundes, because they go aboute and worke not: whom no man will set a worke, though they neuer so willingly offer them selfes thereto.³⁴

This yet darker side of vagrant life in England, with its textually familiar picture of wealthy, covetous men who buy up land for pasturage and in the process dispossess thousands of people, shadows the scene in The Winter's Tale at which we are looking, a meeting between a rogue and a wealthy owner of sheep. Their vocations can hardly be seen as coincidental: it is not alone in More's Utopia that the sheep owner is blamed for the plight of vagrants and thieves.³⁵ Nor can it be a coincidence that the shepherd enters calculating the amount of money that will come in from this year's shearing—more than £140, a goodly sum at that time—and that he then lists the expensive delicacies that he is off to buy. In the previous scene, we were told that this shepherd and his father had "beyond the imagination of [their] neighbors . . . grown into an unspeakable estate." (4.2.39-40). We know that the money that purchased that estate was the money found with the baby Perdita sixteen years before (3.3.116-20), but the shepherd's calculation of the money coming in this year merely from the wool of fifteen hundred of their sheep tells us that, as More and others make clear—and as is wonderfully exemplified by the fortunes of the sheep-raising family of Spencers (by 1610 having achieved a baronetcy and the reputation of having the most money of any family in England³⁶)—the wealth from their sheep-herding estate will bring in annually more and more wealth. In contrast, Autolycus's downward descent from serving man of the prince to the profession of rogue echoes the progress catalogued by More and many others describing the background of England's thieves. Autolycus is thus reminiscent of one of More's wretched souls who steal because "what would you have them do?"

But here the struggle between infracontexts becomes intense. Autolycus may incarnate the unemployed vagrant, a figure represented as either scandalously evil or truly pitiable. But Autolycus is given songs and dialogue that signal contexts in which he is neither evil nor pitiable. Like the vagabond poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he claims to love his life of wandering: he enters singing songs that echo both the well-known medieval "Confessions of a Vagabond," in which the wandering life is celebrated, as well as goliardic rejoicings in spring and in casual sexual encounters.³⁷ This lyric infracontext immensely complicates the emotive and ideological stance of the scene. Further, Autolycus's catalog of the history of his progress from one knavish profession to another signals yet another complicating infracontext, that of sixteenth-century picaresque tales that recount the adventures of the antihero who moves from profession to profession, celebrating himself and being celebrated by others for his quick wit and ability to survive.³⁸

The vagabond songs and the dialogue's picaresque tonality supplement and intensify the infracontexts mentioned at the outset-----the mythological texts that make Autolycus a trickster in the likeness of Mercury and the conny-catching tales that point up his cleverness vis-à-vis the foolish gull. One set of infracontexts, then, makes of the dramatic moment a variously nuanced celebration of the cunning of the trickster. Another set makes the moment instead an enactment of frightening social conflicts. When Claes Schaar briefly discusses this kind of complicated variant of his vertical context system, he notes that, in texts like this, "complex significance is very clearly to the fore" and "meaning is movable, shifting radically as different infracontexts are brought into focus." "The semantic result," he writes, is "quite different as we 'tilt' the text one way or the other."³⁹ In The Winter's Tale 4.3, if we tilt the text toward Autolycus the trickster, the moment becomes resonant with the mythology of the trickster archetype, and Autolycus can be seen as a stand-in for the artist himself, endowed with Mercury's gifts of eloquence and illusion-making, a kind of earlier-day Felix Krull.⁴⁰ If we tilt the text toward Autolycus the rogue, mentally branding his left shoulder with a great Roman R, the moment speaks more of social and economic struggle, of counterfeiting, of acting, if you will, as Autolycus first licks the sweat off the true laborer's brow and then exits to change his costume for his next actorly role.

Over the centuries, The Winter's Tale 4.3 has been read primarily as tilted toward the trickster infracontexts, and Autolycus has been seen as a great comic creation, a figure in which to delight. In 1611, the tilt—at least for Simon Forman—was instead toward Autolycus the rogue. As Forman wrote, after having seen the play at the Globe:

Remember also the Rog that cam in all tottered like coll pixci. and howe he feyned him sicke & to haue bin Robbed of all that he had and howe he cosoned the por man of all his money. . . . beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouss.⁴¹

Forman's use of the terms "rog," "feyned him sicke" and "feined beggars" foregrounds the moment's economic and social infracontexts; his reference to the play's wealthy shepherd as "the por man" and his warning to "beware of trustinge . . . fawninge fellouss" place Forman himself on the side of those who, like Martin Luther, felt threatened by such impostors. Forman's description of Autolycus as coming in "all tottered [i.e., tattered] like coll pixci" suggests that Forman had picked up (from the costuming, it would seem) an infracontext with links to the mythological (a coll-pixie was a mischievous supernatural being that lured people astray, into pixie paths and bogs),⁴² but, for Forman, even the mythological infracontext tilts the meaning of Autolycus toward the ominous.

Today, the word rogue has lost its darker pejorative resonance, shepherds are no longer viewed as a primary enemy of the downtrodden, and one suspects that few readers or auditors pick up the allusion to Autolycus's namesake. For today's audience, these contexts, then, are mostly "absent structures," to borrow Umberto Eco's phrase, infracontexts that "remain inaudible like . . . voice[s] out of earshot."⁴³ As with so many moments in Shakespeare, though, once the voices are heard, the moment becomes tantalizing in its complexity. Thus, although Shakespeare turned printed texts not directly into other printed texts but into air, into scripts for the ephemeral breath of the stage, I would add his name to those of such poets as Dante, Milton, and Eliot, artists whose poetic effects are "powerful and dynamic [in part because they are] based . . . on . . . complex meanings emerging along vertical axes."⁴⁴ To read Shakespeare intertextually, as I've tried to show, is to recover those complex meanings, to recognize "powerful and dynamic" poetic and dramatic effects, and to exchange the amusing surface context of The Winter's Tale 4.3 for a supercharged contextual world.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Vancouver, March 1991. I am grateful to the Newberry and the Huntington Libraries for research support.

¹ Claes Schaar, The Full Voic'd Quire Below. Vertical Context Systems in Paradise Lost. Lund Studies in English 60 (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1982), 11-33.

² See, e.g., Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Julia Kristeva, "Word, Dialogue, and Novel," trans. Alice Jardine, Thomas Gora and Léon S. Roudiez, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 34-61, and Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 13-17, 57-61; and Michael Riffaterre, "Syllepsis," Critical Inquiry, 6 (1980). For helpful discussions of intertextuality, see John Frow, "Intertextuality," Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), 125-69, and Louise Schleiner, "Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare's Writing of Hamlet, " Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 29-48, esp. 45-48.

³ Schaar, The Full Voic'd Quire Below, 24.

⁴ All quotations from The Winter's Tale are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

⁵The xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter by Arthur Golding (London: Willyam Seres, 1567), bk. 11, 11. 359-63. Lewis Theobald, in his edition of The Winter's Tale, writes that "The Allusion is, unquestionably, to this Passage in Ovid. . . . The true Autolycus was the Son of Mercury; our fictitious one, born under his Planet; the first a Copy of his Father; the other, suppos'd to derive his Qualities from natal Predominance." The Works of Shakespeare, 1733, 3:116, n. 23.

⁶ Walter F. Otto, "Hermes," in The Homeric Gods, trans. Moses Hadas (London: Thomas and Hudson, 1979; orig. pub. 1954), 104-24, esp. 104. Otto notes that Hermes (i.e., Mercury) "distinguished his son Autolycus among all men in the accomplishments of thieving and perjury," citing Iliad 10.267 and Odyssey 19.395 (p. 104; see also p. 108). See also Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Pelican Books), 1:65, 216-19, and passim.

⁷ Robert Greene, The Second Part of Conny-Catching, 1592, in The Bodley Head Quartos, ed. G. B. Harrison (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1923), 40-42, esp. 41.

⁸ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in his introduction to the New Cambridge Winter's Tale, 1931, seems to have been the first scholar to note the parallel: "let anyone turn to Greene's Second Part of Conny-catching (1592), he will find the trick played by Autolycus on the Clown so exactly described as to leave no doubt that poor Greene was again drawn upon." Kenneth Muir, in The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (1977), writes that "Autolycus . . . might have stepped out of one of the pamphlets of Harman, Greene, or Dekker, exposing the iniquities of the criminal underworld. Several of his tricks do in fact come from Greene's coney-catching pamphlets," one of which "describes . . . Autolycus' . . . robbing of the shepherd's son" (275-76).

⁹ The parable is found in The Gospel of Saint Luke 10.25-37. This parable, according to the 1539 Book of Common Prayer, was to be read in church each thirteenth Sunday after Trinity.

¹⁰ Jesus tells "a certain expounder of the law" (Geneva translation) that, in order to inherit eternal life, he must "love thy Lord God with all thine heart . . ., & thy neighbour as thy self." When the lawyer "said unto Iesus, Who is then my neighbour? . . . Iesus answered, and said, A certeine man went down from Ierusalem to Ierico, and fell among theues, and they robbed him of his rayment, and wounded him, & departed, leauyng him halfe dead." "A certeine Priest" and then "a Leuite" pass by the wounded man while "a certeine Samaritan . . . had compassion on him and went to him, & bounde vp his woundes, and powred in oyle and wine, and put him on his owne beast, and brought him to an ynne, and made prouision for him. And on the morowe when he departed, he toke out two pence [marginal note: which was about 9 pence of sterling money], and gaue them to the hoste, and said unto him, Take care of him, and whatsoeuer thou spendest more, when I come againe, I wil recompense thee." Jesus then asks the lawyer, "Which now of these thre, thinkest thou, was neighbour vnto him that fell among the theues?" "And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Iesus unto him: Go, and do thou lykewyse." In the Geneva Bible (from which this is quoted) the marginal gloss on Jesus's final sentence reads: "Helpe him that hath nede of thee although thou knowe him not."

¹¹ Sebastian Brandt, Narrenschiff, 1494 (trans. Alexander Barclay as Shyp of folys [London: Pynson, 1509]); "Cocke Lorelles Bote" (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1510? [reprinted in Ancient Poetical Tracts of the Sixteenth Century, ed. E. F. Rimbault [London: for the Percy Society, 1843]); Liber Vagatorum der betler orden (Augsburg: Joh. Froschauer, ca. 1509; reprinted eighteen times before being issued in 1528 under the title Von der falschen Betler Bueberey. It is this 1528 edition that is translated as The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars with a Vocabulary of Their Language and a Preface by Martin Luther, ed. D. B. Thomas [London: Penguin Press, 1932]).

The relationship among these books is not clear, in part because it has been impossible to determine when "Cocke Lorelles Bote" and Liber Vagatorum were first printed. All are dependent, directly or indirectly, on the advisory about beggars and vagrants issued by the Senate of Basel sometime in the fifteenth century. This advisory was transcribed, probably in 1475, by Johannes Knebel, then chaplain of the Cathedral of Basel. Because Brandt published Narrenschiff in 1494 when he was living in Basel, and because many details in Narrenschiff come from the advisory, D. B. Thomas has surmised that Knebel drew Brandt's attention to the advisory (The Book of Vagabonds, 11). "Cocke Lorelles Bote" seems to have been inspired either by Narrenschiff or Shyp of folys. The Liber Vagatorum depends on the Basel advisory for both substance and form; much of it is taken verbatim from the advisory, which is available to us in volume 1 of Heinrich Schreiber's Taschenbuch für Geschichte und Alterthum in Suddeutschland (Freiburg, 1839), 330-43.

¹² Thomas, ed., The Book of Vagabonds, 75-77, 89, 103-5.

¹³ Ibid., 63-65.

¹⁴ Robert Copland, The hye way to the Spyttell house (London: R. Copland, 1536?, reprinted in A. V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld [London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930), 1-25, esp. 7. Copland draws on both Shyp of folys and "Cocke Lorelles Bote," but he gives much more space to describing beggars and vagrants than do these earlier works.

¹⁵ John Awdeley, The Fraternitye of Vacabondes. As wel of ruflyng Vacabondes, as of beggerly, of women as of men, of Gyrles as of Boyes, with their proper names and qualities. With a description of the crafty company of Cousoners and Shifters. Whereunto also is adioyned the .xxv. Orders of Knaves, otherwyse called a Quartern of Knaues. Confirmed for euer by Cocke Lorell. (London: 1575; reprinted in Awdeley's Fraternitye of Vacabondes, . . . , ed. Edward Viles and F. J. Furnival [London: published for the Early English Text Society, 1869; rpt. 1975]). Furnival and Viles argue persuasively that this book was first published in 1561 (i-iv). Thomas Harman, A caueat or warening for common cursetors vulgarely called Vagabones (1567; Harman refers to this earliest extant copy as "the second edition"), ed. Viles and Furnivall, 19-91; Thomas Dekker, The belman of London bringing to light the most notorious villanies now practised in the kingdome (N. Okes for N. Butter, 1608).

¹⁶ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 1, sec. 2, memb. 4, subs. 6 (Oxford: J. Lichfield and J. Short, 1621), 202-11, esp. 209.

¹⁷ "1 Edw. VI.c.3. "An Acte for the Punishment of Vagabondes and for the Relief of the poore and impotent Persons." Statutes of the Realm . . . from Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, 9 vols. (1801-1822), vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 5. This particular statute, sometimes called the "slavery act," set as punishment for any unemployed person who refused to work that he or she be declared a vagabond, branded on the chest with a burning iron in the shape of the letter V, and made a slave for two years; the statute was soon repealed on the grounds that the punishment was so severe that few would enforce it—though as A. L. Beier notes, "the first proposal of the 'Considerations delivered to the Parliament' of 1559 was the revival of the slavery act of 1547 against vagrants." "Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England," Past and Present, 64 (1974): 3-29, esp. 27.

¹⁸ Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at large . . . of the affayres of Englande . . . (London: 1569). Two volumes in one. 2:1320-22.

¹⁹ 5 Eliz. c. 3 "An Acte for the Releif of the Poore," Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 411.

²⁰ 14 Eliz. c. 5 "An Acte for the Punishement of Vacabondes, and for Releif of the Poore and Impotent"; 39 Eliz. c. 3, "An Acte for the Releife of the Poore"; c. 4, "An Acte for the punyshment of Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars"; 1 Jac. I. c. 7, "An Acte for the Continuance and Explanation of the Statute . . . intituled An Acte for Punishmente of Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdie Beggars [39 Eliz. c. 4]"; 7 Jac. I. c. 4, "An Acte for the due execucion of divers Lawes and Statutes heretofore made against Rogues, Vagabonds, and sturdy Beggars and other lewde and idle persons." (Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4, pt. 1, pp. 590-98; vol. 4, pt. 2, pp. 896-99; vol. 4, pt. 2, pp. 899-902; vol. 4, pt. 2, pp. 1024-25; vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 1159.) The parliament that passed 7 Jac. I. c. 4 was held in 1609-10. The Winter's Tale is thought to have been written in 1610 or early 1611; Simon Forman saw a performance of it on 15 May 1611 at the Globe.

²¹ For Awdeley and Harman, see note 15.

²² Viles and Furnival, Fraternitye of Vacabondes, 36-37.

²³ For the argument that Harman's lost original version and the (expanded) earliest extant version were both published in 1567, see F. J. Furnival, preface to Viles and Furnival, Fraternitye of Vacabondes, iv.

²⁴ See, e.g., 12 Ric. II, c. 7-10, "Punishment of wandering beggers," Statutes of the Realm, vol. 2, p. 58.

²⁵ John Stow includes in his account of the year 1572 the following summary of that year's Parliament:

"In this Parliamente, for so much as the whole Realme of England was excedinglye pestered with Roges, vagaboundes & sturdye beggers . . . it was enacted that all persons above the age of 14 yeares, being taken begging, vagrant, & wandring misorderly, should be apprehended, whipped, and burnt through the gristle of the right eare, with a hot Iron of one inche compasse. . . ."

In the margin appear the words "Roges burnt through the eare." (A summarye of the Chronicles of Englande from the first comminge of the Brute into this Land, unto this present year of Christ, 1573 [London: Thomas Marshe, 1573], fol. 430.)

Holinshed's 1577 Chronicles (fol. 1862) reproduces this passage verbatim, and lists in the index [sig. K4v, 1st column, 13th entry] "Roges appoynted to be burnt through the eare. 1862.2". Raphael Holinshed, The laste volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Ireland (London: 1577.) The passage appears in The Third volume of Chronicles . . . first compiled by Raphael Holinshed . . . now newlie . . . augmented and continued. . . to the yeare 1586 (London: 1587), 1228. The 1587 index adds as an entry the word "Vagabonds" and cross-references "Roges" and "Vagabonds."

²⁶ 1 Jac. I C.7. Statutes of the Realm, vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 1025.

²⁷The hurt of Sedition, how grieueous it is to a Commune welth (1549), sig. E5v. This work was included as an "Admonition" from Sir John Cheke in Holinshed's 1577 Chronicles, 1688-89 [1689 is incorrectly numbered 1869], and in Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles, 1042-55.

²⁸ Cheke, sigs. E4v-E5.

²⁹ Harrison's Description appears as "An Historicall Description of the Islande of Britayne, with a briefe rehearsall of the nature and qualities of the people of Englande . . ." in Raphael Holinshed, The firste volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande. . . . (London: 1577), fols. 1-125; the section on the poor appears as bk. 3, chap. 5, fols. 106 v-107 r. The Description appears as "An Historicall description of the Hand of Britaine . . . Comprehended in three bookes," in Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles . . . London: 1587, 1:1-250; the section on the poor appears as bk. 2, chap. 10, pp. 182-30.

³⁰ Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles . . . London: 1587, 1:183.

³¹ Ibid.

³² See, e.g., Simon Fish, A Supplication for the Beggers (ca. 1529) and A Supplication of the Poore Commons (1546), in Four Supplications, ed. J. M. Cowper, pp. 1-18, 59-92. See also Robert Crowley who, in 1550, addressed the wealthy as follows:

If you charge them wyth disobedience, you were firste disobedient. For without a law to beare you, yea contrarie to the law which forbiddeth al maner of oppression & extortion, & that more is contrarie to conscience . . . ye enclosed from the pore their due commones, leavied greater fines then heretofore have been leavied, put them from the liberties . . . that they held by custome, & reised theire rentes. . . . if you had loved your contrei, would you not have prevented the great destruction that chanced by the reason of your unsaciable desire? . . . How you have obeyed the lawes in rakeing together of fermes, purchaising and prollynge for benefices. . . (The Way to Wealth, wherein is plainly taught a most present Remedy for Sedicion, in J. M. Cowper, ed., The Select Works of Robert Crowley [Early English Text Society, extra series, 15, 1872; rpt. Kraus Reprint, 1975], 130-50, esp. 144-45.)

Crowley again, in his An information and Peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore Commons of this Realme, writes to the wealthy:

Beholde, you engrossers of fermes and teynements, beholde, I saye, the terible threatnynges of God, whose wrath you can not escape. The voyce of the pore (whom you haue with money thruste out of house and whome) is well accepted in the eares of the Lord. . . . Knowe then that he hath not cauled you to the welthe and glorie of this worlde, but hath charged you wyth the greate and rude multitude. And if any of them perishe thorowe your defaute, know then for certentye, that the bloode of them shall be required at your handes. If the impotent creatures perish for lacke of necessaries, you are the murderers, for you have theyr enheritaunce and do minister vnto them. If the sturdy fall to stealeyng, robbyng, & reueynge, then are you the causers thereof, for you dygge in, enclose, and wytholde from the earth out of whych they should dygge and plowe theyr lyueynge. (J. M. Cowper, ed., Select Works of Robert Crowley, 151-76, esp. 161-64.)

³³A fruteful and pleasant worke . . . called Utopia . . . by Syr Thomas More. trans. Raphe Robynson (London: Abraham Vele, 1551), sig. C4v.

³⁴ Ibid., sigs. C6V-C8.

³⁵ See, eg., Certayne causes gathered together wherein is shewed together the decaye of England, only by the great multitude of shepe, to the utter decay of houshold keping. . . . (1550-53), a petition addressed to Edward VI's council:

We saye, as reason doeth leade us, that shepe & shepemasters doeth cause skantyte of corne [;]. . . where tillage was wont to be, nowe is it stored with greate vmberment of shepe. . . . [As people are thrown off the land,] whether shall then they go? foorth from shyre to shyre, and to be scathered thus abrode, within the Kynges maiestyes Realme, where it shall please Almighty God; and for lack of maisters, by compulsion dryuen, some of them to begge, and some to steale.

. . . thre hundred thousand persons were wont to have meate, drinke, and rayment, uprysing and down lying, paying skot and lot to God & to the Kyng. And now they haue nothynge, but goeth about in England from dore to dore, and axe theyr almose for Goddes sake. And because they will not begge, some of them doeth steale, and then they be hanged, and thus the Realm doeth decay. . . .

Four Supplications, (Early English Text Society, extra series, 13, 1871; rpt. Kraus Reprint, 1981), ed. J. Meadows Cowper, 95-102, esp. 95-98, 101-2.

³⁶ Mary E. Finch, "Spencer of Althorp," in The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families. 1540-1640 (Oxford: Printed for the Northamptonshire Record Society, 1956), 38-65.

³⁷ See, e.g., the following stanza of the most popular of all the goliardic lyrics, the "Vagabond's Confession," by the "Archipoeta" in Vagabond Verse: Secular Latin Poems of the Middle Ages, trans. Edwin W. Zeydel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 61):

Down the highway broad I walk,
Like a youth in mind,
Implicate myself in vice,
Virtue stays behind,
Avid for the world's delight
More than for salvation,
Dead in soul, I care but for
Body's exultation.

³⁸ See, e.g., The Pleasaunt historie of Lozarillo de Tormes, trans. D. Rouland (London: A. Jeffes, 1586); Henry Chettle, Piers Plainnes seauen yeres Prentiship (London: J. Danter, 1595); Nicholas Breton, A Merrie Dialogue betwixt the Taker and the Mistaker (London: James Shaw, 1603; published in 1635 as A Mad World My Masters); Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveler (T. Scarlet for C. Burby, 1594). See also Robert Alter, Rogue's Progress. Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964).

³⁹ Schaar, The Full-Voie'd Quire Below, 27.

⁴⁰ For Mercury as god of eloquence, see Walter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods (note 6, above); for Thomas Mann's Felix Krull as the trickster/artist, see Donald Nelson, Portrait of the Artist as Hermes. A Study of Myth and Psychology in Thomas Mann's Felix Krull (University of North Carolina Press, 1971), and Alter, Rogue's Progress, 126-29.

⁴¹ This record of the performance of The Winter's Tale at the Globe on 15 May 1611 is found in Forman's manuscript The Bocke of Plaies and Notes thereof per formans for Common Pollicie. The record is printed by J. N. P. Pafford in his Arden edition of The Winter's Tale, xxi-xxii.

⁴² Pafford notes that "coll pixci (i.e., Colle- or Colt-pixie)" is "a hobgoblin, particularly in the form of a ragged (tattered) colt which leads horses astray into bogs, etc." (xxi). In Nimphidia: The Court of Fayrie, (published in Battaile of Agincourt, 1627, 117-34), Michael Drayton conflates the "colt-pixie" with Hobgoblin or Puck:

This Puck seemes but a dreaming dolt,
Stil walking like a ragged Colt,
And oft out of a Bush doth bolt,
Of purpose to deceive us.
And leading us makes us to stray,
Long Winters nights out of the way,
And when we stick in mire and clay,
Hob doth with laughter leave us.

(Stanza xxxvii)

⁴³ Umberto Eco, La Struttura Assente (Milan, 1968; cited by Schaar, 17); Schaar, 17.

⁴⁴ Schaar, 24.