In this brief conversation, I asked Tom Magill about the localization of Mickey B and its reception beyond Northern Ireland.

—Sarah Werner

The three bookies/witches

Sarah Werner: Mickey B is an adaptation that puts Macbeth in decidedly local terms, starting with its setting in a Northern Ireland prison and its echoes of the Troubles.

Tom Magill: The language is colloquial and rooted in the culture of Belfast prison slang. The language is sharp and sparse; some people have said “rich and poetic.” Working with Michael Bogdanov taught me that Shakespeare requires updating and translating to be meaningful and relevant to an audience today. I wanted to see if Shakespeare was relevant to a contemporary prison culture. My conclusion after making Mickey B is a resounding yes, Shakespeare is relevant to a prison culture today. For me, the Prison has replaced the Tavern—when I think of Falstaff today, I think of him in prison. That’s why I think there is so much relevancy and scope in Prison Shakespeare—Macbeth is a murderer, Scotland is a fortress, it fits in a prison culture.

The characters in the film have come through the conflict and now they are in a post-ceasefire society. New allegiances are being formed, new enemies are on the horizon. The recent influx of East European labour has spawned a new battle with “The Cossacks” in a drugs turf war. Former Republican and Loyalist adversaries are re-forming into one crew to resist the new “foreign” enemy.

Duncan (played by Sam McClean)

Sarah Werner: But the film has been shown in international festivals, most recently at the University of Guelph conference “Outerspeares: Transcultural / Transmedia Adaptations of Shakespeare,” where you were also a keynote speaker. How has reception of the film been different outside of Northern Ireland?

Tom Magill: In Canada the film had a great reception, stirred a lot of interest re future publications, collaborations, and return visits to Guelph. The Canadians got Mickey B. Outside Northern Ireland the film screens differently. People abroad often remark upon the distinctive accents of the prisoners and how different they are to the representations that appear in films about  Northern Ireland’s conflict. Audiences abroad don’t have the “cultural capital” to read the films as a local audience would. This means they often miss the parallels in the film—e.g. the assassination of MacDuff’s family draws heavily upon the assassination of the wife of Irish National Liberation Army leader Dominic McGlinchey, Mary McGlinchey, bathing her two children at home. (See this website for further details.)

I think that getting the prison context to fit the story of Macbeth and then being true to the local prison culture has given us a global audience. I have found that people globally are interested in the conflict in Ireland, particularly if they have an experience of conflict within their own society. The film had a very warm reception in both Korea and Israel, where it played with Korean and Hebrew subtitles. The film has also been translated into German and French, and is currently undergoing a Portuguese translation. I think there is something of real interest in the film to colonial cultures or cultures that have been colonised.

The gates to Maghaberry Prison, the location of the fictional Burnam Prison

At a recent screening in Northern Ireland, a person remarked about how “strange and uncomfortable it was hearing those voices [of prisoners] speaking [Shakespeare’s] words.” So I think Mickey B challenges people here in Ireland, too. Especially in relation to this “underclass” of prisoners doing Shakespeare—the establishment and cultural icon of the English-speaking world. In this context, Mickey B speaks as a counterhegemonic discourse privileging and accrediting the subaltern voice.

And the film has paid the price for that radical positioning. Although Mickey B was completed in 2007, the Northern Ireland Office, through the Northern Ireland Prison Service, restricted the film being shown or distributed within the UK and Republic of Ireland without their prior consent for three years after its completion. Their legitimate fear was the reaction of local victims and victim’s groups. ESC suggested a screening specifically for these groups to address the concerns. But the suggestion was never taken up.

Ladyboy/Lady Macbeth (played by Jason Thompson)

ESC had to agree to these terms or else the Northern Ireland Prison Service would not sign off on the Location Agreement, that is, their agreement to let us film in their location, a maximum security prison. We knew how ridiculous it would be if we refused to sign the three-year restriction and went to court to ask a judge if he agreed with us, that they had in fact, given us permission to film in their maximum security prison with their most recalcitrant prisoners. But we signed in good faith because we wanted to have good relations with the prison staff and go on to make another film in the prison.

What we have learned since, is that the three-year restriction means the film is not eligible for entry at many film festivals where the criteria for selection states that the film entry must have been completed within the last twelve months. For ESC, Mickey B was an accredited arts educational project, enabling violent prisoners to understand their previous motivations through an updated version of the Macbeth story; where ruthless ambition ends in destruction. However, for some staff in the Northern Ireland prison service, we were simply “turning murderers into movie stars.”

Mickey B Trailer from Educational Shakespeare Co on Vimeo.

Still shots from Mickey B graciously provided by Tom Magill.

Tom Magill cofounded and directs the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC). He currently writes and directs ESC’s films and runs workshops and courses, encouraging people to explore their own stories through the medium of film. He is a specialist in Forum theatre, created by Nobel Prize nominee Augusto Boal, and is Boal’s representative in Northern Ireland. Magill’s ambition is to continue using his own life experience to inspire others to transform their lives by unlocking their creativity.

You can learn more about “Surviving Hamlet,” guest-edited by Jonathan Gil Harris, on Shakespeare Quarterly’s Project MUSE web page.

Copyright © 2011 Folger Shakespeare Library

Hamlet survives as a foundational text of modern Western culture in part because it anticipates modernity’s ideology of cultural survival. Both the Freudian discussion of the play’s Oedipality and the Derridean attention to its interest in inheritance and “patrimonial filiation” respond to Hamlet’s prolepsis of the subject of reproductive futurism.¹  If Freud’s association of Hamlet with Oedipus makes the latter, as Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard observe, “only retroactively ‘prior,’” if the Freudian reading might be said, that is, to “Oedipalize” Oedipus through Hamlet, it can do so only because Hamlet, no less than the Oedipus complex itself, belongs to the universe in which the Child has become the guarantor of futurity: a fantasy figure produced as the promise of secular temporal closure intended to restore an imaginary past in a future endlessly deferred.²  Insofar as that deferral in the form of the Child defines our contemporary ideology of social and cultural survival, conferring on the Child the privilege of figuring the subject par excellence, survival remains inseparable from a negativity that haunts the social order in the form of a repetition compulsion—which is also to say, of a death drive—recurrently projected onto those who occupy the position of the queer: those abjected as non-reproductive, anti-social, opposed to viability, and so as threats to the Child who assures and embodies collective survival. In Hamlet that question of survival, given its canonical modern form in the prince’s “To be, or not to be” (3.1.58ff.), carries an explicit negativity that Hamlet and the play both seek to expel.³ And this imbrication of survival, repetition, and negativity’s disavowal makes the play a crucial document for thinking futurity’s relation to the queer and so for thinking the relation between negativity and the concept of queerness itself.

For negativity, like the queer, is intolerable, even to those who call themselves queer. To be queer, in fact, is not to be, except insofar as queerness serves as the name for the thing that is not, for the limit point of ontology, for the constitutive exclusion that registers the no, the not, the negation in being. Radically opposed to normativity and so to the order of identity, queerness confounds the notion of being as being at one with oneself. It attests to the impossibility of a concept’s or an entity’s survival in anything other than a state of exception to its nominal consistency. Opposing all normative logics, including those that would reify queerness as a positive and determinate identity, queerness is nonetheless central to every presentation of normativity. Metabolized and abjected as the remainder of any identity procedure, its unincorporability alone permits the consolidation of form. Thus queerness, as I have argued elsewhere, occupies the place of the zero, the nothing, that invariably structures the logic of being but remains at once intolerable to and inconceivable within it. It follows that those who call themselves queer and think queerness is a matter of being must reject the negativity of queerness—and negativity tout court—as virulently as any other subject invested in survival. For queerness induces a peculiar and disturbing relation to survival, and to political fantasy as well, by underscoring a tension always at work within those terms.

In associating queerness with the non-cognizable status of the zero, with the element inassimilable to the presentation of any order as such, I have argued that the zero obtrudes, nonetheless, in moments of traumatic jouissance that the One of the Symbolic attempts to survive by mobilizing a self-negating impulse, what Jacques Derrida refers to as an “autoimmunitary process,” inseparable from the death drive that queerness is conjured to conjure away from the norm.⁴   I want to approach this nexus of questions about survival, queerness, and the zero by thinking about what survives the queer encounter with jouissance and how institutions of knowledge, including the literary studies for which Hamlet continues to function as a metonym, reinforce the sublimation enshrining the Symbolic’s law of the One by repudiating the trauma of queerness as radical encounter with the Real. That repudiation, that decisive negation, informs the constitutive political act: the creation of dissensus by way of performatively articulating collectivity. The queerness of the traumatic encounter, therefore, establishes as the ungrounding ground intrinsic to the formulation of any politics, as the primal negativity that shapes it, the zero that procures and undoes at once everyone and every “One.”

Though no “One” as such can ever survive this seizure by the Real, this fracture that induces abjection in a ceaseless attempt to make oneself One, something does survive, nonetheless, that attests to the absence of the One, something by means of which absence speaks, negating the loss or the void it affirms by bequeathing, instead, a residue, a self-contradictory sign of loss to keep loss from taking place. From such a perspective, absence occasions a type of visitation, an encounter with whatever makes present a lack and thereby registers loss. But the loss experienced is also denied by this encounter with what remains. Consoling as fortification against the traumatizing Real—the Real whose zero annihilates knowledge and the subject that knowledge calls forth—this something that indicates “absence” provides a lifeline confirming survival, an umbilical cord that attaches us to a past that never passes, or not, as Hamlet famously swears, “whiles memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe” (Q2; 1.5.96–97). Such a memory, such a survival, results from the mark of an absence absenting the very absence that it marks, obeying in this the Symbolic law that turns zero into one. “Nothing,” like zero, appears therefore in the order of what we can know only as something construed as not-being because of, but also except for, the lack that effectively embodies it, a paradox that implicates zero, and the void it refers to, in the One, in the primal signifier engendered to track another signifier’s absence. Lacan, for this reason, describes the signifier as a “symbol only of absence” and declares that something can be missing, by which he means “missing from its place,” only in the Symbolic where everything “must be or not be in a particular place,” everything, that is, but the signifier, which as a presence that designates absence, “will be and not be where it is,” joining loss and survival in one.⁵

Hamlet, of course, in his best-known speech, whose first six words survive among literature’s most recognized quotations, confronts just this question of what “must be or not be in a particular place.” And he does so by attending to what troubles a universe organized by the logic of “or”: the excess inherent in the signifier that disorients the order it ordains. Less a philosopher himself than the manifestation of the “supra-cognitive” surplus an anti-philosophy would propound, Hamlet, a personification of too-muchness beyond philosophy’s reason, fingers the stops of rhetoric’s flute without stopping for, or even in, death, as if driven by some implacable machine that governs what he calls, in his letter to Ophelia, “this / machine [that] is to him” (2.2.123–24).⁶  His last words, pronounced as if posthumously (after he acknowledges, “I am dead” [5.2.280]), remain fixed precisely on the paradox of what remains in the wake of his words. “The rest is silence” (l. 300), he declares at the end, imprinting himself on that silence, effectively making it his silence, which now serves as his remains. The rest of the world, what rests in the world, is now what rests of him. Horatio, himself enjoined to survive to tell his prince’s story, immediately tries to limit the sense of “rest” to final repose, the better to forestall the prospect of Hamlet’s spectral circulation. “Good night, sweet Prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (ll. 302–3), he intones. But this lyric vision of death as rest ignores life’s restless remnant (by which, of course, the play has been literally haunted from the beginning), denies the “something after death” (3.1.80), the queer excess beyond death’s “bourn” (l. 81) and so beyond the “or” that draws the border determining life or death: “To be, or not to be” (l. 58).

The specters that cross that border (and thereby make it spectral, too) frequented the work of Jacques Derrida throughout his career. Not two full months before his death, in an interview printed first in Le Monde and then published the following year as a book called Apprendre à vivre enfin, Derrida reflects on the place of survival and spectrality in his thought:

I have always been interested in this thematic of survival, whose meaning is not something that adds itself to living and to dying. It is originary: life is survival. To survive in the current sense means to continue to live, but also to live after death. With regard to translation, Benjamin underlines the distinction between überleben, on the one hand, to survive death as a book can survive the death of its author or a child the death of its parents, and, on the other hand, fortleben, living on, to continue to live. All the concepts that have helped me to work, notably those of the trace and the spectral, were bound up with “to survive” (survivre) as a structural and rigorously originary dimension. It doesn’t derive from either to live or to die.⁷

Neither supplementary to living and dying, nor derived from one or from the other, survival precedes and determines both, according to Derrida, unsettling from the outset every attempt to distinguish between the two. As primal trace, as originary writing, before and without which there is nothing to write nor anyone to write it, survival survives by precipitating the differential order it refuses. It occasions and requires a conceptual geography of places in which everything “must be or not be,” such that even non-being would inhabit a place, would assume the signifiable form that turns it into a one. In short, survival determines the Symbolic as the order of survival, giving rise, at the moment when immortality and “‘a sense of posterity’” conjoin, to borrow a concept from Claude Lefort, to what I’ve called reproductive futurism.⁸

Consider, in this light, Derrida’s account of Benjamin’s two senses of survival. If überleben pertains to the traces that are left in the wake of someone’s death and fortleben to whatever successfully eludes the grip of death in the first place, then Derrida’s chosen examples of the former, by no means idiosyncratic, may point to an opening that troubles the border those examples are meant to define. The book that survives an author’s death, whether it names that author or not, allows its readers, by virtue of such features as rhetoric, narrative, genre, and style, to generate, from those features alone, an account of the author who produced it. Hamlet tells more about the author called “Shakespeare” than Shakespeare does about Hamlet. But Hamnet, Shakespeare’s biological child, had he lived instead of the fictional character who survives, some have said, in his place, would have little to tell about the author of the plays who, as “Shakespeare,” leaves Shakespeare behind. For the child that its parents leave behind is not, like a book, the product of a system we can figure through an author’s name, but rather a living organism, endowed with such agency as that entails, shaped by and carrying the genetic materials in which its parents live on.⁹  At the crossing of überleben and fortleben, then, those genetic materials, which precipitate the child, constitute the site where residual trace and the thing itself coincide, where the very inscription of what’s dead throbs with life and life takes its cue from a code, calling into question the Benjaminian distinction between living after and living on.¹⁰

Because such genetic “living on” can offer, by itself, no assurance of survival in and as cultural memory, the child as biological survivor (fortleben) requires an educational supplement to make its survival equivalent to a book (überleben), a supplement that renders the biological organism a mere substrate for the imperative pronounced by the ghost: “Remember me” (1.5.91). Internalizing that injunction, Hamlet identifies his brain as a book that contains and preserves his father’s words, thus realizing a mode of survival that makes of the prince the specter’s specter much as Hamlet will make of the world, when he finally leaves it, his specter in turn:

                                                     Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
Unmixed with baser matter.

                                                                     (ll. 97–104)

Taking writing as the figure of knowledge, and so, by extension, of education, Hamlet associates its material inscription with the “trivial . . . records” he disdains, with the lifeless copies of “pressures past” that his hand can “wipe away.”¹¹ By contrast, he vows that in the “table of his memory,” which constitutes “the book and volume of [his] brain,” he will carry now only his father’s “commandment,” free of the material excrescence of writing and therefore “unmixed with baser matter” such as writing might convey. If Hamlet’s mind contains what Jonathan Goldberg’s crucial account of this speech describes as a “scene of writing,” Hamlet seems at the same time to know, as Goldberg concisely puts it, that in order for “memory to be supplemented, it must also be supplanted.”¹²  The “trivial” or merely mechanical supplement to memory’s vital self-presence infects and destroys that spontaneous agency, leaving it as empty as writing itself and as easily “wipe[d] away.”

But Hamlet insists that in the book of his brain his father’s words “all alone shall live,” enjoying the vital presence denied to mere records or representations. The paternal commandment must escape, in his mind, the triviality pertaining to the copy so as to endure instead as a pressure not past, a pressure comparable to that of a drive that doesn’t remind but insists. Hamlet becomes, in consequence, a sort of appendage to this living book, the substrate supporting a survival that lives, in more than one sense, in his place. Goldberg evokes this perfectly when he notes that “Hamlet voices his father’s text.”¹³For child and book exchange properties as soon as the son becomes the repository that houses the father’s word: the former acquires the status of memorial while the latter attains to the presence of life. And survival depends on preserving, as an archive anticipating a future whose very anticipation effectively prevents it, an order kept in motion by its persistent repetition and, in consequence, by the death drive. “Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat,” Freud remarks in Civilization and Its Discontents, a normalizing practice of “regularization” that determines, once it has been laid down, “when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision.”¹⁴ One is spared, that is, all encounter with life unsheltered by the regular, machine-like response that obviates “hesitation and indecision.” If these words seem resonant in relation to Hamlet, where hesitation and indecision attend a demand for the restoration of order pronounced by a ghost whose appearance per se performs its violation, then that resonance may express the impossible tension that inheres in the fantasy of the living book, of the spontaneously present archive, the fantasy that underwrites the order of survival through reproductive futurism. For that tension inheres in every attempt to affirm the order of survival as something inherently resistant to, or in conflict with, the death drive.

In his constant return to the topic of survival, which occupies such a central place in his thinking of life and death (“I never stop analysing the phenomenon of ‘survival’ . . .  it’s really the only thing that interests me”),¹⁵   Derrida focuses, time and again, on the function of the specter, in Hamlet and elsewhere, as it bears on just these questions of futurity, the death drive, and cultural transmission. Although his single most significant engagement with Hamlet introduces his Specters of Marx, Archive Fever (Mal d’archive) reveals more emphatically the ideological stake in the specter as figure of survival, not only for Derrida’s critical thought but also for the culture we inherit from Hamlet, where the Child embodies survival as fortleben and überleben at once. Having associated the archive with “consignation,” meaning both “the act of assigning residence or entrusting so as to put into reserve” and that of “gathering together signs” into “a single corpus . . . in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration,” Archive Fever acknowledges, at the very heart of any such archive, the “anarchivic” and “archiviolithic” death drive that seeks to destroy it.¹⁶ The threat Derrida sees in that drive, the threat that with a single stroke (the stroke of the signifier as such) produces the archive and undoes it, lies in the forgetfulness or erasure it induces, leaving behind no trace, no survival, of itself or of what it destroys:

The death drive . . . not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnēmē or anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mnēmē or anamnēsis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnēma, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of the breakdown of the said memory.¹⁷

The archive responds from the outset to the prospect of this “breakdown,” this annihilation of living memory, by gathering together and holding in reserve the signs, themselves already specters, of what no longer possesses life, but always at the risk of its own eradication by the death drive to which it attests—a drive called forth, as Lacan observes, by the signifying system from which alone spring loss and its corollary, survival.

Hamlet, however, in the passage above, speaking on behalf of a futurism that Shakespeare’s play, initiates (much as, for Freud, it generates the Oedipality of Oedipus), denies the universal incompatibility of the archive with “anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal.” Although he acknowledges that the hypomne-mic supplement, the externalized remainder essential to the archive as site of consignation, can indeed be forgotten, “wipe[d] away,” he nonetheless proclaims his brain the “book” in which his father’s commandment, fully present, will manage to live on and live after. The Hamlet who declares, at Ophelia’s grave, “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (5.1.241–42), assumes the status of an archive that keeps his father’s word “alive” by becoming the agent of his father’s will, the instrument of a vital force to which he must cede his own. He establishes thereby the contours of a reproductive futurism bringing archive and anamnesis together in an ideology whose complicity with aesthetic education and therefore with the violence of aesthetic education not only shapes the text of Hamlet but also contributes to its privileged position as the paradigmatic literary work of modern Western culture. Equally invested in the violence that constitutes cultural transmission (“a violence that cannot and must not be reduced, because otherwise there would be no more culture”),¹⁸ Derrida posits the archive as memorializing the “spontaneous” memory it annihilates, but he shares with Hamlet a messianic belief that the archive can nonetheless quiver with life through its opening onto the future.

Like Hamlet, then, Archive Fever disputes the binary alternative of life or death, “to be, or not to be,” and does so while referring to conversations with the dead and a father’s attempt, through a return from the past, to produce in his son an archive enshrining the paternal injunction to remember. Given the conflation of parent and child promoted by reproductive futurism, Freud appropriately takes on both of these roles as Derrida reads Josef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. As a son, Freud receives, for his thirty-fifth birthday, his childhood bible rebound with “new skin” and bearing an inscription that declares it “a memorial and . . . a reminder of love from your father.”¹⁹ As a father himself, he’s called back from the grave, like a specter Yerushalmi conjures, to permit the latter, writes Derrida, to hear “the last word, the last will, the ultimate signature . . . of a dying father—and to be even more sure, of an already dead” one.²⁰ In addition, as Derrida observes, Yerushalmi concludes the last section of his book with a query for this spectral Freud about a statement sent to Hebrew University by the psychoanalyst’s daughter, Anna, to mark the establishment of an endowed chair there in honor of her father. “Was she speaking in your name?” Yerushalmi asks about her comments for that occasion, or as Derrida rephrases the question, had Freud’s child, precisely as his child, “always spoken in the name of her father”?²¹

Bound to the parent who gets under its “skin” and lives on in the “book” of its brain, reproductive futurism’s figural Child may signify survival, but the child caught up in that figure’s grasp can never survive as itself, fated as it is to disappear in the act of acculturation that compels it, like Hamlet according to Goldberg, to voice another’s text.²² Immersed in the medium of the Other’s speech, conscripted to serve as the archive in which the Other as One returns to itself through the violence of a consignation that gathers the traces of the archontic power that “posits and conserves the law,” the Child instantiates the reach of that law whose commandment to memory, in Derrida’s words, “turns incontestably toward the future to come” in an act of affirmation that remains the “self-affirmation of the Unique,” of the law as singular, as One.²³

Although the archive’s order of memory always pledges itself to the future, as Derrida consistently maintains, there operates within that archive (and within that future as well) something at odds with real openness to the unknown of the “à-venir.” Derrida evokes the archontic commandment to remember in the following terms:

It orders to promise, but it orders repetition, and first of all self-repetition, self-confirmation in a yes, yes. If repetition is thus inscribed at the heart of the future to come, one must also import there, in the same stroke, the death drive, the violence of forgetting, superrepression (suppression and repression), the anarchive, in short, the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition: the archon of the archive, the table, what carries the table and who carries the table, the subjectile, the substrate, and the subject of the law.²⁴

The “yes” that Derrida refers to here acknowledges survival as the privilege of the One by affirming submission to the archive’s conflation of the future with repetition. Like Hamlet’s thrice repeated response to his father’s “Remember me—“Ay,” “Yea,” and “Yes, yes, by heaven” (1.5.96, 98, 104)—the “yes, yes” cited by Derrida strategically performs, in the name of remembrance, a forgetting of the Lacanian Thing and with it a negation, in affirmation’s guise, of the objectless act of remembrance that’s silently entrusted to the death drive alone.²⁵

This last phrase must seem incongruous. What could the death drive serve to remember when it incites, in the words of Derrida, “forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory”?²⁶ Lacan provides an answer when he revises Freud’s framing of the death drive. Where Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, associates the death drive with the wish to return to a preorganic condition unvexed by susceptibility to stimulation, Lacan distinguishes, in Seminar VII, “between the Nirvana or annihilation principle, on the one hand, and the death drive, on the other—the former concerns a relationship to a fundamental law which might be identified with that which energetics theorizes as the tendency to return to a state, if not of absolute rest, then at least of universal equilibrium.” The death drive, by contrast, as Lacan explains, “can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain. . . .  It requires something from beyond whence it may itself be grasped in a fundamental act of memorization, as a result of which everything may be recaptured.”²⁷ The Symbolic may constitute the order of history that “presents itself as something memorable and memorized,” but the death drive corresponds to “that structural element which implies that, as soon as we have to deal with anything in the world appearing in the form of the signifying chain, there is somewhere—though certainly outside of the natural world—which is the beyond of that chain, the ex nihilo on which it is founded and is articulated as such.”²⁸ The death drive, that is, remembers what all the “memorable” aspects of history and the reality shaped by the signifier obliterate: the Thing always absent from the Symbolic, the inarticulable loss that accompanies and makes possible subjectification—a loss of what never existed to be lost before subjectification.

As the memory of nothing, of the zero or void that evokes the “ex nihilo on which [the Symbolic] is founded and is articulated,” the death drive looks like forgetfulness only insofar as it insists on “what by its very nature remains concealed from the subject: that self-sacrifice, that pound of flesh which is mortgaged [engagé] in his relationship to the signifier.”²⁹ The object of desire, designated by Lacan as objet petit a, merely fills out the place, and so covers the absence, of what “remains concealed”: the Thing as Being, as jouissance, as what “cannot be subjectified as such.”³⁰ To capture this “hidden element” inaccessible to subjectification, Lacan proposes a “mathematical metaphor” describing “human life . . . as a calculus in which zero [is] irrational.”³¹ This strange numerical figure, at odds with zero’s algebraic status as rational and even as even, indicates Lacan’s alignment of the subject in its zero degree, in the “hidden element of living reference” never accessible through subjectification, with the permanent non-closure of irrational numbers whose decimal transcriptions neither terminate nor resolve into regularly repeating sequences.

The zero’s metaphoric irrationality stands in for the insistence of something within signification incapable of totalized identity. It suffers no distortion then, as I have suggested elsewhere, if we see that irrationality, in its ultimate unthinkability, as the definition of a “queerness” whose structuring presence in every order qua normative regime remains perpetually beyond our thought, even in the moment of naming it as perpetually beyond our thought. “Irrational,” as Lacan makes clear, denotes, like the square root of minus one that he invokes in “The Subversion of the Subject,” “what doesn’t correspond to anything that is subject to our intuition, anything real—in the mathematical sense of the term—and yet, it must be conserved, along with its full function.” Evoking what, in Lacan’s characterization, “is missing in the desired image” by which subjects apprehend themselves in the order of the Other, this irrational zero, like the imaginary number defined as the square root of minus one, “comes to symbolize the place of jouissance,” the place of what we sacrifice, before we exist to possess it, on entering the order of signification.³² As whatever a given order excludes from the logic of intuition, queerness, similarly, refers to a jouissance incapable of positivization. Corrosive of every identity, and so possessing none of its own, it serves instead to figure, and so to make present and absent at once, the inassimilable element that disintegrates integrals from within even as its unthinkability makes possible the law’s self-assertion as One.

In this context consider one more passage from Lacan’s psychoanalytic mathematics. Discussing the signifier of the Other’s lack, the signifier of the structural incompleteness that prevents the Other from achieving the totality or the stability of a rational number, Lacan, in “The Subversion of the Subject,” denies the possibility of “conferring on [this] signifier . . . the meaning of mana or of any such term.” He explains: “Claude Levi-Strauss, commenting on Mauss’ work, no doubt wished to see in mana the effect of a zero symbol. But . . . what we are dealing with in our case is . . . the signifier of the lack of this zero symbol.”³³ At stake is the absence of a symbol as such, or rather, the insistence of what the Symbolic order necessarily absents: the queerness that refuses the minimal coherence that characterizes an entity and so escapes positivization in any system of exchange. But the order that forecloses that queerness cannot succeed thereby in escaping it any more than producing a zero symbol can avoid an encounter with the void. The constitution of the Symbolic archive enabled by the signifying system opens a space construed as beyond it, the space Lacan refers to as the “ex nihilo on which it is founded.” It thus gives rise, along with the archive, to Derrida’s mal d’archive, the malady or evil of the death drive that follows from the signifier’s archivizing function. In doing so it establishes the inconsistency internal to life and to death that prevents them from forming, as Hamlet would have it, a couple divided by “or,” the inconsistency Slavoj Žižek notes while glossing the Lacanian death drive:

Death is the symbolic order itself, the structure which, as a parasite, colonizes the living entity. What defines death drive in Lacan is this double gap: not the simple opposition of life and death, but the split of life itself into “normal” life and horrifying “undead” life, and the split of the dead into “ordinary” dead and the “undead” machine. The basic opposition between Life and Death is thus supplemented by the parasitical symbolic machine (language as a dead entity which “behaves as if it possesses life of its own”) and its counterpoint, the “living dead” (the monstrous life-substance which persists in the Real outside the Symbolic). This split which runs within the domains of Life and Death constitutes the space of the death drive.³⁴

In this sense the death drive betrays, within the Symbolic, the excess that erupts from the constitution of the Symbolic: an excess that resides in the nothing that emerges precisely as that order’s beyond, eluding all capture within it by anything conceived as a zero symbol and attesting, instead, to the absence of a symbol that could positivize that nothing, that could make it obey the Symbolic law that turns everything into a one.

If we return, then, to Derrida’s account of how archival consignation establishes “the One” in a way that “can only repeat and recall [an] instituting violence,” we can better understand how the archive’s anticipatory promise of “the future to come” commits it, nonetheless, as Derrida notes, to an act of “self-repetition, self-confirmation in a yes, yes.” Such a “yes” affirms, in the name of the future, an identity, precisely that of the One, that obliges the future to conform to the past, to affirm itself as survival within an economy of reserve. The archive, after all, like the specter, and so like the ghost of the dead King Hamlet, evinces that reserve whose survival produces the future as its own. However much it presents itself as life in its infinite openness to something unknown that remains to yet to come, this future, like the “yes” by which archivization proposes to affirm it, performs a compulsory return to the One of the law and of the father. Derrida’s dedication of Mal d’archive not only to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose work he directly addresses, but also, as he writes, “to my sons—and even to the memory of my father, who was also called, as is life itself, Hayim,” makes perfect sense in this regard.³⁵ Life, as prolepsis and memory, returns to the father twice over here. But in doing so, it suffers what we might well call a “dead-ication,” the condition of being mortified into the figure of vitality that offers as the image of the future to come a memory that returns from the past, like the apparition in Hamlet that is from the outset a “reapparition,” as Derrida says in Specters of Marx.³⁶ As he puts it later in that same text, “Here again what seems to be out front, the future, comes back in advance: from the past, from the back.”³⁷ Futurism in this sense might be understood as a sort of proleptic behindsight: the father’s penetration from behind, from the back, of what he thereby conceives as the future in an act of self-affirmation by which the Child, like Hamlet, gets screwed.

What should we make in this context, then, of Derrida’s own explicit affirmation of the future in Mal d’archive? “The affirmation of the future to come,” he writes, “this is not a positive thesis. It is nothing other than the affirmation itself, the ‘yes,’ insofar as it is the condition of all promises or of all hope, of all awaiting, of all performativity, of all opening toward the future, whatever it may be, for science or for religion. I am prepared to subscribe without reserve to this reaffirmation made by Yerushalmi. With a speck of anxiety, in the back of my mind, a single speck of anxiety about a solitary point. . . . This unique point can be reduced, indeed, to the Unique, to the unity of the One and of the Unique.”³⁸ Although rejecting Yerushalmi’s claim for the absolute and exemplary uniqueness of what Derrida describes as the “link between Jewishness, if not Judaism, and hope in the future,” Derrida nonetheless declares himself “prepared to subscribe without reserve” to the “yes, yes” of the “reaffirmation” that expresses his “hope in the future.”³⁹

Such a hope, of course, remains fixed to the framework—historical, cultural, political—from which it springs, imprisoning the future it imagines in the imaginary form that always mirrors back its own subjective formation. Even where that hope, conforming to the terms of Derrida’s messianicity without messianism, identifies justice as the making of space for the event of the radically unknown, it presupposes our capacity to know in advance that justice will make itself known—that the signifying system might somehow, that is, incorporate its own beyond—and that we, or some future human subject, might be and exceed ourselves at once, by knowing what is excluded from the Symbolic by virtue of our subjection to the signifier, by knowing the zero as zero and therefore knowing what withholds itself from the possibility of being known.

This fantasmatic future, even when adduced without explicit belief in its possible realization, even when understood as performatively instantiating the openness for which it calls, imposes on messianicity a form that is always already our own, reflecting in this the rigor mortis of our attachment to the Symbolic order and to the name of the father that Derrida, like Hamlet, construes as “life.” In Apprendre à vivre enfin, Derrida proclaims his affiliation bluntly: “I don’t want to give free rein to an interpretation according to which survival is on the side of death, of the past, rather than of life and the future. Everything I say . . . about survival as a complication of the life/death opposition proceeds, where I am concerned, from an unconditional affirmation of life. . . The view I hold isn’t mortifying, but, to the contrary, it’s the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and, therefore, surviving to death.”⁴⁰ The affirmation of such a survival, which extends the living being’s identity, at its preference, into the future, enacts a resistance to the radical event as which the future is also invoked. How could an event take place for us if the event itself, as the radically unknown, would revoke the ways of knowing by which we understand ourselves and thereby understand our world? How can we survive the event that ruptures the order of survival itself?

The Derrida who makes this “unconditional” affirmation of life and elsewhere subscribes “without reserve” to Yerushalmi’s “reaffirmation” of the future is the Derrida who understands full well that “to ask me to renounce what has formed me, what I have loved so much, what has been my law, is to ask me to die,” and who adds, “In that fidelity there is a sort of instinct of conservation.”⁴¹ That instinct evinces the mortification that Derrida denies: the mortification by which the Symbolic order “colonizes the living entity,” as Slavoj Žižek writes, precisely to make it into an entity possessed of a unity whose preservation it identifies with “the good.” When push comes to shove, however, that good, even for one as committed as Derrida to a “complication of the life / death opposition,” compels the choice of life over death, of a conservative rhetoric of futurism over real openness to an event, of a liberal version of messianicity ensnared in messianism’s coils. We see that in Derrida’s meditation on the terrorism linked with the name of bin Laden:

What appears to me unacceptable . . . is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purpose of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political scene, of the ‘world’ itself, then there is, it seems to me, nothing good to be hoped for from that quarter.⁴²

W. J. T. Mitchell rightly notes that “Derrida’s assertion that bin Ladenism has no future is . . . not just empirically wrong, but the projection of a nihilism, a hollowness onto the figure of the enemy,” and he adds, still more importantly, that it undermines Derrida’s own investment in the work of deconstruction as “mythic violence . . . that may lead to a new order of reading or of legality and political order to come.”⁴³ The “good” for which Derrida speaks, that is, requires our “faith in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political scene.” He acknowledges here no future but an evolutionary one, which is also to say an evolution precisely toward the condition of the One, toward an “absolute law” associated with “universal sovereignty” that utopically moves toward the perfection of justice, political order, and the “world” we know.⁴⁴ Lacan, like Badiou, like the queer, like the figure of “bin Ladenism” adduced by Derrida (and unlike bin Laden himself ), denies this evolutionary model in favor of the death drive’s creation ex nihilo, refusing the instinct of conservation that by anticipating the future prevents it, allowing it recognition only in a form already known.

Perhaps in resistance to this conservative instinct to which he finds himself bound, Derrida recurs throughout Mal d’archive to a striking qualification of the future: “What is at issue here,” he writes, for example, “is nothing less than the future, if there is such a thing.”⁴⁵ How do we reconcile this uncertainty with Derrida’s subsequent account of himself as “prepared to subscribe without reserve” to “the affirmation of the future to come“? The answer may lie in the contradictory nature of affirmation “without reserve.” “Yes, yes,” the quintessential affirmation, always expresses, by virtue of its status for Derrida as “self-repetition, self-confirmation,” the archivizing gesture par excellence, the sign of the consignation by which the One is procured and perpetuated. But the archivizing imperative, like the act of affirmation that reasserts the archive as law, rests upon and necessitates an economy of reserve, an economy of return by means of which the future promises “the good.” As early as 1968, with the publication of the essay “Différance,” however, Derrida elaborated the complication such an economy must confront.

How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have [sic] been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy? It is evident—and this is the evident itself—that the economical and the non-economical, the same and the entirely other, etc., cannot be thought together.⁴⁶

To affirm the future without reserve, it follows, must deny it, must interrupt the economy of the good with the aneconomy that knows nothing about it and of which the subject of the good necessarily knows nothing at all in turn. But what if the very impossibility of thinking the economical and the noneconomical together were simply the ruse that enabled economy, affirmation, reserve, the archive, futurity, and therefore, the law, to survive, which is also to say, that enabled the survival of survival as economy, by positing themselves in opposition to the aneconomy they enact? In that case the structuring unthinkability to which Derrida’s argument points would coincide with a similar unthinkability that he noted in 1966: “It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical conceptualization, which is systematic with the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest.”⁴⁷ Futurism, the prohibition of incest, the reification of differences that establish the totalizing order of “or”: we’re clearly heading toward Hamlet here. Or have we been there all along, from the moment the question of survival first engaged the signifier’s spectrality and so set off the conservative instinct to preserve the promise of signification and with it the protomessianic faith in the world’s perfectibility, the faith in our capacity to know “the good” as the attribute of the human?

For Hamlet remains a question posed to the concept of the human whose normative shape it nevertheless imposes on us all. Let us call it, then, a “questionable shape” (1.4.24), this human that emerges from the putative inwardness of Hamlet’s habitual questions, his restless returns to the site of non-knowledge where obsession, perhaps even madness, becomes the template for human consciousness and the human becomes the ghost of a query—“To be, or not to be”—between whose terms it finds itself poised and by which, from the outset, it’s poisoned. The venom in its ears is “or,” which bestows on Hamlet’s most famous oration a ration of Horatian rationality that aims, by means of scholastic dispute, to establish a ground to stand on through the logical parsing and limitation of terms that distinguishes one from another. But in Hamlet’s world, in Elsinore, there’s something else in “or”: a fetishization of difference to which the prince of puns is heir, a primal irrationality lodged at the origin of “or,” something fully as unheimlich as Hamlet, who proves to be blind to it in himself but spots it at once in the gravedigger’s reasoning, that mode of perverse literality so clearly the double Hamlet’s own. “How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us” (5.1.126–27), Hamlet exclaims.

The “or” of categorical thinking thus would forestall equivocation by installing, instead, the logic that distinguishes Hyperion from a satyr, preserving the order of nature from threats of monstrosity and confusion, from “uncle-father and aunt-mother” (2.2.358), from incestuous ecstasy and corruption, from the lust that occasions everything “carnal, bloody, and unnatural” (5.2.325). To affirm this order of “or” that keeps what is from being undone, the dead King’s spirit walks by night, enlisting his son as a soldier pledged to defend the sexual norm: “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damnèd incest” (1.5.82–83) is the injunction he imparts. And Hamlet understands full well, like any moral zealot, that he’s charged not just to treat the symptom but to wipe out the very disease. “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” (ll. 189–190). And “set it right” means “set it straight,” since “out of joint,” as the Oxford English Dictionary notes with specific reference to this line, bespeaks a state “disordered, perverted, out of order, disorganized,”⁴⁸ like the “unweeded garden / That grows to seed” (1.2.135–36) in an earlier soliloquy, or like Hamlet himself when Ophelia, making use of a horticultural metaphor after Hamlet has called her a whore, paints him as the “form and feature of blown youth, / Blasted with ecstasy” (3.1.158–59). Derived from the Greek for “put out of place,” this “ecstasy,” marking the distance from reason at the root of all passionate attachment, recognizes the irrational cathexis that motivates Hamlet’s absolute distinctions, the undoing of which leaves time out of joint—perverse, disordered, out of place—which is also to say, ecstatic from Hamlet’s own ecstatic viewpoint.

Made by paternal command a sort of disease to assail the diseased—”like the hectic in my blood he rages” (4.3.67), Claudius muses to himself—Hamlet may be the “mould of form” (3.1.152) for the modern human being, but only insofar as it, like him, is a monster of normativity, incapable, for all the self-consciousness we as his scions gladly grant him, of seeing how much he gets off on the luxury of his antiluxurious discourse. Repelled not just by “country matters” (3.2.105) but also by matter as such, he looks to master matter by riding a raging torrent of words through which his passion (out-of-joint, displaced, made spiritual or intellectual) comes in hot and steady bursts to castigate passion’s slaves. Laced with a rancid misogyny, Hamlet’s outbursts vilify sex with the prurience of delirious disgust. He links the unkemptness of “grow[ing] to seed” which properly names the cessation of flowering on the development of the seed itself, to the condition of being possessed, taken over, by things that are “rank and gross” (1.2.136); that representation seems anodyne when compared with his acid precision in evoking what he calls “compulsive ardour”: “to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (3.4.76, 81–84).

Disdaining the putrid carrion that is all he recognizes in flesh, Hamlet dismisses life and sex as equally excremental. “[W]e fat ourselves for maggots” (4.3.23), he notes, and traces the course of Alexander’s dust to find “it stopping a bung-hole” (5.1.188–89). He may pray for sublimation—“O that this too too solid flesh might melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” (1.2.129–30)—and imagine himself as standing apart from any earthy appetite—“I eat the air” (3.2.85), he jests—but his mind is drawn to dirt and stench with what we must call a vengeance. His revulsion in the face of embodiment, redoubled at the very thought of sex, leads him beyond the paternal charge to root out “damnèd incest,” even to the point of decrying conception and demanding “no more marriages” (3.1.146–47). Fanning the flames of Hamlet’s loathing for all “That flesh is heir to” (l. 65), the Ghost, to which Hamlet is heir as well, leaves Hamlet, as son, asunder: torn between the enforcement of sexual norms to repair what is out of joint and the extravagance of his passion for enforcing those norms, which exceeds all normative bounds. By being too much his father’s child, he would have no children be fathered; defending too well the institution of marriage, he would have no marriage at all.

Stricken by this excess of filial passion for the reassertion of norms, Hamlet is truly “too much i’th’ sun” (1.2.67) too much, that is, his father’s son, for his brief against breeding not to breed, as he claims the sun does, maggots—the maggots, I mean, that taint his mind as it feasts on decay and corruption, leaving Hamlet as much out of joint as the time, as perverse as his father’s restless ghost, that thing that violates nature’s bounds to condemn violations of boundaries, refuting in advance the order of “or” he returns from the grave to defend by mocking the very distinction pronounced in “To be, or not to be.” The inwardness, construed as psychic depth, for which Hamlet provides the model, responds, therefore, to the impossible task he confronts as his father’s child: to live from the outset an after-life as ambassador of the dead without, in the process, becoming a mere ambassador of death.

But Hamlet learns that success in one means failure in the other. In accepting the duty to set time right, he keeps it out of joint, becoming thereby the prototype of the modern subject as Child, the subject who attempts, through an infinite future, to make present a ghostly past, producing in the process the emergent order of heterotemporal repetition. If this Child, however, proves time out of joint, then how can Hamlet set time to rights without putting an end to the Child? “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (3.1.122–23) Hamlet asks a startled Ophelia, who understands that breeding as such is what he seeks to prevent. And he does so because he knows full well, as subject in the form of the Child, that breeders of life prevent life too, and literally, by coming before. “Remember me” is the fatal text the past inscribes on the Child, making it into a memorial object, a tombstone endowed with breath, the primordial prosopopeia through which the dead continue to speak, and preventing it ever from living a life not out of joint with time. The prince’s remarks about child actors could apply to all subjects constrained, like Hamlet, to inhabit, though it puts us out of joint, the structural place of the Child: “their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession” (2.2.335–36). Born to shoulder the burden of debt owed by and to the dead, and so to assume the cause of the father as surely as his name, Hamlet, like the modern Child whose reign he effectively anticipates, knows neither success nor succession, certainly none that he, forever the son, could properly claim as his “own.” Consider the words he hurls at Polonius as a key to his relation to his father: “yourself, sir, should be old as I am—if, like a crab, you could go backward” (ll. 201–2). Isn’t Hamlet, that eternal Child, precisely his father going backward, the ghost of a ghost compelled to go, aghast, against time’s tide? His inwardness marks the struggle between two forms of human subject: that of the now-dead model of heroic, because unfathered, subjectivity and that of the Child commanded, by the father, to preserve that older model, but helpless, by its very fidelity to the command, ever to succeed in doing so. No wonder the question of Hamlet’s age exerts such fascination; something prevents him from ever escaping the role of his father’s son.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare names that something and bequeaths it to us all. Beckoned to follow his father’s ghost, but held back by Marcellus and Horatio, Hamlet cries out: “By heav’n, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me” (1.4.62). Playing on the double sense of “let”—to permit or allow, on the one hand, and to hinder or prevent, on the other—these words free Hamlet to follow his father, to pursue the spirit he might properly call the “ghost of him that lets me”: the ghost of him who gave life and preempts it; the ghost who confirms, in more ways than one, that time is out of joint; the ghost whose example dooms Hamlet at once to be and not to be—that is, to be and not to be “Hamlet,” the name by which he’s prevented from being what it gives him leave to be. But that, of course, is what Hamlet means, even literally: “[I] am let.” It’s also what normativity means in the world we inherit from Hamlet: to be let, constrained, or prevented by the power that grants us permission to be, even while it perversely incites our passion to constrain what appears as perverse. “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damnèd incest,” the ghost enjoins his son. And by way of “let not” Hamlet is let and left in the knot of his name, which he, though left without children, must leave to the world he leaves behind, affirming a heterotemporal subjectivity indebted so deeply to the dead that it needs to invent the future to pay off what’s mortgaged to the past.

When Horatio proposes to die like a Roman by his dying friend’s side, Hamlet, assuming his father’s place—“I am dead,” he twice exclaims (5.2.275, 280)—immediately intervenes to prevent him, instead imposing the obligation to memory—the obligation that Hamlet has answered with his life and by which he still hopes to survive:

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.

                                                                               (ll. 286–91)

Hamlet, the name of an unhealed wound for the sake of which blood must be let, can’t let the lack of a namesake leave his wounded name stained with blood. Charged with its restoration, Horatio, like that wounded name, must “live behind,” a phrase that perfectly captures the temporal order we inherit from Hamlet. He must live, that is, in perpetual arrears, in the indistinction of future and past, in the endless out-of-jointedness that distinguishes the time of the Child and that fuels the machinery of the death drive at work in the secularized messianicity of reproductive futurism.

Perhaps that explains an oddity of Derrida’s Mal d’archive. Here is the passage where Derrida inscribes the title phrase in his text: “The death drive is not a principle. It even threatens every principality, every archontic primacy, every archival desire. It is what we will call, later on, le mal d’archive, archive fever.”⁴⁹ A few pages later, however, when that “later on” arrives and the phrase returns in the midst of a discussion of “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” something noteworthy takes place: “The model of this singular ‘mystic pad,’” writes Derrida, “also incorporates what may seem, in the form of the destruction drive, to contradict even the conservation drive, what we could call here the archive drive. It is what we called earlier, and in view of this internal contradiction, le mal d’archive.”⁵⁰ Time’s out-of-jointedness asserts itself here at the very moment when Derrida tries to nominate the death drive: what he first proposes to name “later” he later purports to have designated “earlier.” The death drive’s evocation as “le mal d’archive” belongs, indifferently, to future or past, but it never occupies the present. In the order of reproductive futurism, the event to come will have taken place even before its arrival and the death drive will always be sublimated into a principle of conservation. That, as Oscar Wilde wrote, is what fiction means, and what education as (and in) fiction means too: the compulsory and routinized sublimation that turns us, whether we will it or not, into apostles of a secular messianicity.

However we read it, Hamlet must sublimate the impossible Thing, the unthinkability at its core, so long as we bestow on its specter, and so on its always ungraspable queerness, the marketable value of a domesticated and domesticating good, of a faith in the power of literature to make us better, more fully human. Could any pedagogy renounce the sublimation inherent in acts of reading, taking seriously the status of teaching as an impossible profession and seeing ourselves in relation to our students as agents of a radical queerness whose assault on meaning, understanding, and value would take from them more than it ever could give? “What is someone who has been psychoanalyzed?” asks psychoanalyst Jean Allouch, in the course of his own compelling reading of Derrida’s Mal d’archive. And he answers without hesitation, “He is . . . someone who no longer has a future.”⁵¹ We might say that he is someone who faces the empty page of “freedom” in a world with no promise of meaning in advance, a world with no master whose teaching protects against the death drive such teaching enacts. What Hamlet does not and cannot teach, and what we can never know, is how to escape the will-to-be-taught, the desire for a lesson—a profit, a one—to take the place of the zero; how to allow for not saying “yes” to the imperative of life; how to let the future be by being what lets the future.⁵²

Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature and Chair of the English Department at Tufts University. Along with numerous essays in the fields of queer theory, cinema studies, and British and American literature, he is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire; Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory; and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. He is completing a book on sexuality, aesthetic philosophy, and humanistic values to be titled Bad Education.

You can learn more about “Surviving Hamlet,” guest-edited by Jonathan Gil Harris, on Shakespeare Quarterly’s Project MUSE web page.

Copyright, The Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last: Portraits, Poet, Patron, Poems. Edited by Stanley Wells. Revised edition. Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK: Cobbe Foundation / Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2011. Illus. Pp. xiv + 118. $55.00 cloth.

I reviewed a first edition of this book, published in 2009;¹ readers are referred to that review for a general description of its contents. The book’s main point of interest to biographers was the bold claim that a portrait now in the collection of the Cobbe family is of William Shakespeare; and moreover, that it once belonged to the third earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s “patron,” said to be the subject of a portrait in the same family collection. This revised edition was produced to accompany a recent exhibition of the “Cobbe” portrait at the Morgan Library, New York, and incorporates recent research that it is hoped will strengthen the case for the authenticity of the Shakespeare image.

Certainly one development is of considerable interest. At the time of original publication it was argued that the Cobbe portrait was the “master” from which, at an early date, several copies (or copies of copies) were made. At that point, one of these copies was only known in the form of a black-and-white photograph but in recent months the original has not only resurfaced but has been acquired by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Scientific examination, we are told, has shown it to be an early copy, perhaps even contemporary with what is taken to be the original.

This, however, does not do much to buttress the claim that it is a portrait of Shakespeare. An effort to strengthen the attribution has been made by additional documentary research into the original portrait’s alleged transmission from the third earl of Southampton, who died in 1624, to Charles Cobbe, in whose possession it (and the Southampton portrait), is recorded in the 1740s (although not, it must be added, under that name, it having been assumed by Charles Cobbe, presumably on information supplied to him, that it was Sir Walter Raleigh). No material, or circumstantial, evidence was produced in the first edition to substantiate this descent, only a genealogy to demonstrate that the earl’s great-granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Noel (a third daughter of a granddaughter) married Richard Norton of Southwick, third cousin of Charles Cobbe, whose grandfather had married Honor Norton, of a senior branch of the family settled at Rotherfield. This I thought insufficient to justify such a bold claim, especially as no evidence was provided that any other artifact followed such a route. Chapter 4 has therefore been revised to address this issue.

It is argued, first, that Richard Norton can be shown to have been in possession of heirlooms belonging to the Wriothesley (that is, Southampton) family as the result of his marriage to Elizabeth Noel, the great-granddaughter of the third earl. These heirlooms, however, turn out to be nothing more than what sounds like a miniature “in an ivory case” of her grandmother, the countess of Southampton, and a lock of her mother’s hair, items known to have been in Elizabeth’s possession and which are said to have passed on her death to her husband, Richard Norton, even though they had been living apart for some years.² From this the authors argue that the case for Elizabeth having brought Wriothesley portraits to Southwick has been strengthened: indeed, in their minds, it “confirms the route.” Others, however, may not be so easily persuaded that the resurfacing of two minor items clearly of immediate personal importance to this one family member would automatically imply that a significant transfer of earlier family portraits had taken place.

Another piece of new evidence is cited to support the claim that the portrait (indeed, portraits), having reached the Southwick Nortons, then migrated to the distant Rotherfield ones, into whose family the Cobbes had married. But again, this proves to be highly circumstantial; namely that one picture, of a mother with her child, once thought to be Honor Norton of the Rotherfield branch (died 1703) has now been re-identified, on the grounds of costume, as Honor Norton of Southwick (died 1648), thus demonstrating that one picture at least passed from one branch of the family to the other. This, of course, is not impossible but we are not told when the “Rotherfield” attribution had first been made and on what evidence, only that it had been “historically identified.” But if, as one suspects, there was no intrinsic evidence to identify it in the first place as Honor Norton, either of Rotherfield or Southwick, then the argument that any portraits of anybody, let alone of Shakespeare and the earl of Southampton, crossed the divide between the two families surely remains largely a matter of speculation based only on tenuous family links.

The authors have also had to address what has come to be known as “the Overbury issue”: the suggestion first made by David Piper that one of the copies of the Cobbe portrait (formerly owned by Lord Ellenborough and since acquired by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) might in fact be of Thomas Overbury. This proposal was based partly on a likeness that he (and others) have detected between that copy and an authentic portrait of Overbury now at the Bodleian Library Oxford, but also on a mention of a portrait of Overbury listed in the 1790s as hanging at Southam Delabere, the house later acquired by Lord Ellenborough. As this Overbury portrait had never resurfaced under that name, Piper suggested that, when the Ellenborough collection of paintings came to be sold in the twentieth century, the Overbury portrait could perhaps be identified with the “portrait (said to be Shakespeare)” which turned up at the 1947 sale of part of that collection. This argument was dismissed in the first edition of Shakespeare Found on the grounds that in the 1790s Southam was in the hands of a different family and that, of the nineteen paintings then listed as hanging there (of which the Overbury portrait was one), only one later resurfaced at the 1947 sale. However, as I then pointed out, even a limited examination of the 1947 catalogue revealed that it included at least five of these paintings. Moreover, the authors’ recent discovery of a detailed inventory of the Ellenborough paintings at Southam has now led them to conclude that eleven of the paintings from the 1790s were still in the house in 1926. To this can presumably be added another (of Jane Shore) sold off in 1908.³

The balance of probability would therefore now seem to be clearly in favor of all nineteen paintings having passed to Lord Ellenborough when he acquired Southam, and that the one of Overbury would therefore have been amongst them. No such portrait is listed in the 1926 inventory but this need not mean that it was not there, only that by that date it may have been wrongly attributed. Thus, the cautious description of the portrait in 1947 (‘said to be Shakespeare’) could still be significant. If the inventory had listed both a portrait of Overbury and a portrait of Shakespeare, then Piper’s original suggestion would, of course, have become invalid. But it lists only Shakespeare, leading the authors to propose that the Overbury portrait, and other family items linked to it, must have been withdrawn from the house earlier-though they do not mention that the 1926 inventory does include a panel exhibiting the arms of the Overbury and related families which remained at Southam until the 1947 sale.⁴ Thus, far from discrediting the Overbury connection, this new evidence now makes it more likely. The fact that the authors have demonstrated that the Shakespeare attribution was being made some twenty years before the 1947 sale (and this can be pushed back to an inventory of 1878 which is not, in fact, lost as the authors state⁵) surely means very little as long as an alternative portrait of Overbury remains elusive.

On the same theme, the authors present as new evidence a detailed comparison between the Cobbe portrait (and its copies) and the authentic portrait of Overbury at the Bodleian Library. This does reveal a very close match between the Cobbe portrait and its acknowledged copies, leading the author of this new study, Rupert Featherstone, to propose that they were produced by an accurate transfer technique, if not contemporaneously, then in quick succession. Comparison with the authentic Overbury portrait at the Bodleian Library, however, reveals several important differences, leading to the conclusion that they were not derived from a cartoon or pattern common to both. Featherstone does not rule out the possibility, however, that the sitters in both portraits, assuming them to be independent works, are the same person, only that it is unlikely. Nevertheless, given the stronger case that has now emerged that the “lost” Overbury portrait might indeed have passed to Lord Ellenborough, some may conclude that this issue is still in the balance.

Robert Bearman

Robert Bearman, until 2007, was Head of Archives and Local Studies at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon. He has contributed articles on Shakespeare biography to Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, and Midland History.

Footnotes

1. Robert Bearman, review of Stanley Wells, ed., Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last: Portraits, Poet, Patron, Poems, in Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 483-87.

2. Elizabeth Norton’s will (The National Archives, London, PROB 11/547, ff. 139-42) made no such provision, her leasehold house in London, and all its contents at the time of her death, being left to her sister Lady Jane Digby, but permitting Elizabeth’s husband to “hold and enjoy the same” for the duration of the 24-year lease, “if he shall so long live.” As no references are provided in Shakespeare Found, it is not possible to verify its claim that instead these specified items passed to Richard Norton unconditionally.

3. Gloucester Archives (GA), D1637/E25.

4. GA, D1637/E19; D 2299/4800, 9111.

5. It is part of GA, D2299/9111.

We’re delighted to have Lee discuss the issues he raises in this essay and his work here in an interview with Madhavi Menon, editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (2011). Associate Professor of Literature at American University, Dr. Menon is also the author of Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (2004) and Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film (2008).

Why Hamlet? Given Hamlet’s special relation to the category of “the human,” à la Harold Bloom, does even a reading that insists on an in-human Hamlet run the risk of reinscribing the originary status of the play for a Western conception of humanity? 

Why not, as you so aptly put it, “risk . . . reinscribing the originary status of the play for a Western conception of humanity”? Could we hope to eradicate, once and for all, that inscription’s every trace? Surely, whether we like it or not, we are ourselves that trace. And if one of the strands of my essay insists on the necessity, against and despite ourselves, of becoming something that we do not anticipate or recognize as ourselves, then Hamlet, doing what it always does best, anticipates us even here. The thematics of delay and postponement so frequently commented on in relation to Hamlet are just the other side of the coin that the play has put in circulation (an “other side” continuous with what it only seems to reverse): that of a reproductive futurism in which we are always already anticipated. When Lacan maintains, with regard to Hamlet, that what’s important is that he doesn’t exist, this non-existence is not only the condition of his theatrical representation, but also the consequence of his being produced as a prototype of the subject as Child consigned to the function of repetition. Hamlet, to return to Lacan’s formulation but with a rather different emphasis, remains in this sense an “hommelette”—a little man destined to the tragic impossibility of taking the place he is at once commanded and forbidden to assume. To return to your canny phrasing, then, Hamlet invents the human only insofar as it reads the “originary” moment as itself a “reinscription.” But what’s reinscribed in the name of the human is nothing more than the repetition that constitutes the death drive. Hamlet, like its various interpretations that identify the prince with the human per se, performs the sublimation of that death drive into the promise that signification will finally redeem instead of undo us.

What does Shakespeare have to offer queer theory?

What Shakespeare has to offer queer theory is a difficult question to answer—and difficult largely because the question’s form risks totalizing the terms it puts into play so as to stage an encounter between them. But Shakespeare and queer theory are not, as you yourself have shown so brilliantly in your introduction to Shakesqueer, distinct from one another à priori. In fact, they are implicated in each other from the outset and in a multitude of ways. Shakespeare’s queerness, for example, forms the basis for a certain version of literary theory to the extent that our theory of the subject contains, in both senses of the term, an encounter with the incoherence or queerness informing his texts. The plays are as much an assault on meaning as an affirmation of it and the way they dismantle language, pushing it well beyond the familiar, produces a literary criticism aimed, to some extent, at denying that fact, at recuperating the plenum of meaning that “Shakespeare” must contain. What is Hamlet, though, but the inevitable conflict between the two senses of containment? Isn’t it the tragedy of discovering that the effort to eradicate what’s in excess of order redoubles the very excess one is seeking to rein in? To answer your question properly would require us first to assert definitively that (as well as what) “Shakespeare” means (which is, of course, the goal and effect of institutionalizing “Shakespeare”) and to assume that such specification would not be invalidated from the outset by “Shakespeare” as an ideological shorthand for our very relation to “meaning.” Since “queer theory” inhabits the space of a challenge to every such relation—a space it shares with Shakespeare’s texts—it is less a matter of trying to determine what Shakespeare offers queer theory than of seeing how his cultural positioning as the cynosure of meaning (and hence of all that follows from it: the law, the norm, and the State) denies “his” implication in the queering of meaning as such.

All major psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet—by Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, Jacques Lacan—address the question of sexuality in the play, whether the repressed desire of Hamlet for his mother, Hamlet’s role in the Oedipal triangle of the play, or his yearning to have and be the Phallus. But your psychoanalytic account of the play does not speak of sexuality—why is that?

I suppose that the first thing I ought to say is that the psychoanalytic accounts to which you refer presuppose, enshrine, and elaborate on the heteronormative reification of the difference between the sexes. Even Lacan, whose insistence on the impossibility of the sexual relation hinges on the fact that sexual difference as such remains unknowable, tends to slip back into a quasi-biological positivization of that difference. As a result, the readings of Hamlet that you mention all function, in their various ways, as allegorizations of sexual difference in relation to the Phallus—allegorizations that posit the Oedipal relation as operating in its “default” mode of heterosexualized desire. Not that Freud and Lacan don’t allow for alternatives to normativity, but their readings of Hamlet—a play that flamboyantly interrogates sexual norms—ultimately reinscribe it in normativity, effectively reinforcing their investments in the heterosexual privilege of the Phallus even when they open onto the lack, the castration, that the Phallus evokes as signifier of the signifying system. But then castration, in that sense, is the fantasy-logic of heteronormativity itself and it authorizes the drama of the Phallus in order to supersede (either logically or developmentally) the alternative erotics of the oral and anal. It’s not my goal to take the Phallus from Hamlet and so to reproduce the logic of castration that generates reproductive futurism as one of its historically contingent supplements in the Phallic economy of supplementation. Rather, I wanted to explore how this specific interpellation of the Child (and the future) in the position of supplementarity coincides with the enjoined enforcement of a sexual norm so excessive, so virulent, that it offers, in relation to the paradigm of the modern Western subject, an unmistakable insight into the perversity of those sexual norms that simultaneously father and destroy us, those norms, as I suggest in reading Hamlet’s name, by which we all are “let.”

What, then, is queer theory’s relation to sexuality?

What an impossibly large question: queer theory’s relation to sexuality! To respond to it adequately, one would first have to specify what exactly we mean by “sexuality” in order to clarify that queer theory has an historic, but by no means essential, relation to the fields once defined as lesbian and gay studies. That relation is vexed insofar as queer theory, though first enabled by the politicization of sexual orientation, operates as a resistance to the identitarianism produced by such a politics. It’s fitting, then, that the rainbow flag is the emblem of gay pride, since it literalizes the fantasy of harmonious unity among people of different stripes. But in doing so it presupposes (as the rainbow, of course, does not) that each stripe has its integrity, its particularity, its determinate border. So, too, lesbian and gay liberation participates in the endless proliferation of identities, all of which have their value in contesting the fixity of the social order, but all of which do so while harboring investments in a categorical fixity of their own. Queer theory, though also susceptible to such positivistic appropriations, undertakes to uncouple itself from identitarian moorings by focusing, instead, on resistances to social normativity and on the political, philosophical, aesthetic, and affective consequences those resistances entail. But the construction of a stigmatized category of those identifiable as “queer”—even when not conflated with the politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex identities (all of which, as social movements, seek institutional normalization and protection by the state)—does not escape inflection by a relation to sexuality. For stigma—and stigma, not self-affirmation, properly registers queerness—reflects the operation of a libidinal economy in which enjoyment and disgust are endlessly braided in the making of a norm. Queer theory, then, retains its indicative association with sexuality precisely in its attention to the libidinal politics that normativity compels—a libidinal politics whose consequences extend beyond sexual identity, but which remains bound up with the subject’s relation to narcissism, abjection, and enjoyment. Marking the inseparability of the libidinal from the politics of sociality (and so from every form of collectivity or community), queerness insists on the real of a jouissance that can’t be assimilated to the order of meaning whose guardian is the Law.

Are some texts more conducive to a queer analysis than others?

Since the previous answer was rather long, let me compensate by keeping this short. No text in itself is more conducive to queer analysis than any other. What counts is not the text but the reader’s ability to encounter within that text the ways it refuses interpretative limits based on cultural norms. No text as text embodies pure doxa. Queer readings afford us access to what’s paradoxical within the doxic itself. But the best queer readings don’t try to show that they’re smarter than the text, more knowing, or more politically astute; instead, they strive to encounter in the text a queerness of its own. There, in the space of resistance to the various ways we think we know, we encounter what’s always without a name, what eludes all our efforts to give it one, and what thereby holds open the place of the queer and, paradoxically, of what’s common to all of us. That this universal element affords no ground for communal organization reminds us that queerness cannot be severed from its structuring negativity and that every effort to give it a literal referent, a determinate content, reflects our investment as social subjects in eliminating what’s queer. The texts most useful for queer readings, then, are those that a given reader finds sufficiently compelling to live with in ways that bring out the incoherence of what normative readings reduce to sense. The queer readings that resonate most powerfully arise from deep textual attachments—the sort of attachments that allow us to recognize contradictions, overdeterminations, and irrational flashpoints in the people that we love and to find them, in their inconsistency, frustrating, baffling and compelling at once.

Robert Bearman’s review of the revised edition of Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last, edited by Stanley Wells, will appear in the summer 2011 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly. We invited Dr. Bearman and Dr. Wells to discuss some of the issues and controversies about the Cobbe portrait, and Shakespeare portraiture in general, for the SQ Forum. Comments and responses by our readers are welcome.

The “Cobbe” Portrait of William Shakespeare

Robert Bearman

The most dramatic claim of recent years that new material relating to William Shakespeare has come to light must surely be the identification of him as the subject of a portrait currently exhibited at the Morgan Library, New York—and, what’s more, executed, it is claimed, in 1610 when he was forty-six. It is now for convenience referred to as “the Cobbe portrait,” having languished unnoticed since the mid-eighteenth century “in a dark corner” of the Cobbe family home in Ireland. Many doubts have been expressed as to the confident manner in which this attribution was so abruptly made in 2006 when the portrait was “unveiled” in England, including my own as outlined in my review of the book Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last, published in Shakespeare Quarterly in 2009. In response to these criticisms, a new edition of the book was published in 2011 to accompany the Morgan Library exhibition; however, in my view, this will serve only to increase skepticism, as I explain in a second review to appear shortly in SQ.

Critics have drawn attention to a number of difficulties in accepting such a confident attribution: there is, for example, no obviously discernible likeness between this portrait and the two authentic images which we already have—the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio and the bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. In particular, while the engraving and bust agree in depicting the subject as suffering from classic middle-age baldness, the Cobbe portrait, said to date from only six years earlier, shows him with a good head of hair. Nor does the subject look like a forty-six-year-old man. In any case, he is surely overdressed, even for a successful playwright.

Artist unknown, The Cobbe Portrait of William Shakespeare, ca. 1610, oil on panel. Collection of Archbishop Charles Cobbe (1686–1765); Cobbe Collection, Hatchlands Park.

Then there is the awkward fact that he looks more like Thomas Overbury (depicted in a portrait now at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) than either of the authentic images of Shakespeare. This is relevant because in the late eighteenth century, another portrait of Overbury is known to have existed at Southam Delabere, Gloucestershire. When, in 1947, a collection of paintings from the same house was sold, there was listed in the catalogue a portrait of a man “said to be Shakespeare.” However, its similarity to the Overbury portrait in the Bodleian Library led the eminent art historian David Piper to suggest that it might instead be the Overbury portrait earlier recorded at Southam, of which nothing further had been heard. Whether or not this was so, the portrait, now christened the Ellenborough” after its last previous owner, disappeared from view following the 1947 sale. Recently, however, it has not only resurfaced but has proved to be a direct copy of the Cobbe—the two near-identical portraits were exhibited alongside one another at the Morgan Library. But there does remain the possibility, of course, as first put forward by David Piper, that the subject of both portraits is not Shakespeare but Thomas Overbury. Not surprisingly, much effort has been expended, especially in the revised edition of Shakespeare Found! to discredit this idea, but in my opinion, for reasons given in my forthcoming review, this has served only to increase the probability.

 Portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury, bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1740.

The supporters of the authenticity of the Cobbe portrait must also explain how it had come into the possession of the Cobbe family by the mid-eighteenth century. An attempt at this has been made by drawing attention to a tortuous link between the Cobbe family and the third Earl of Southampton, confidently identified as the commissioner of the 1610 painting, even though there is no evidence of any contact between him and Shakespeare, other than Shakespeare’s dedication of two poems to him back in 1593/94. But as I explain in my two reviews, the evidence for the eventual transmission of any significant heirlooms from between the earl to the Cobbes is so circumstantial as to be almost irrelevant.

But it is not these themes that I want to develop here. In my view, this episode fits well into the long history of dubious claims about Shakespeare ranging from forgery or deliberate misconstruing of evidence to misplaced confidence arising out of preconceived ideas. One might suspect, simply upon opening it, that Shakespeare Found! is part of this tradition, for it at once becomes clear that, although superbly illustrated, it falls far short of what scholars would expect of a publication which announces such a major discovery. In fairness, one should add that the book is made up of a collection of papers variously authored, only the first four of which (37 pages out of 114) seek to establish the picture’s authenticity. But in this crucial section, no footnotes or references are supplied by which any of the statements can be verified by those wishing to pursue the matter further; when the more determined do eventually reach the sources (especially concerning the picture’s provenance, and its possible Overbury connection), the research is often found to be unsound and the manner in which the evidence is interpreted overhopeful, if not sometimes misleading. Of course, it’s just possible that a genuine portrait of Shakespeare has surfaced: but to have the case made with such confidence despite the many doubts that exist makes the book unacceptable as a work of scholarship, the lack of academic rigor serving instead merely to discredit the claims that are made. Ironically, it is even alleged that David Piper, who first drew attention to the possible Overbury connection, “suppressed” information (Shakespeare Found!, revised edition, page 17), a serious and unfounded accusation which in any case should hardly have been made by those who have occasionally been tempted to over-egg the pudding.

Many of those who have pondered what sort of man Shakespeare might have been have come to this point through a study of his work. So thoroughly have they become immersed in this that they imagine they already know their man. Early in the twentieth century, Frank Harris believed, after a lifetime of reading Shakespeare’s plays, that he could “distinguish more and more clearly the features of the writer.” Later, Caroline Spurgeon, after similar total immersion, attempted a complete character assessment summed up in five words: “sensitiveness, balance, courage, humour and wholesomeness.” However, detecting such qualities in the authentic images of Shakespeare, as served up by Martin Droeshout and the sculptor of Shakespeare’s bust, was no easy matter. How much easier would it have been for them to have detected such attributes in the fine Cobbe portrait: an image of a handsome, sensitive, and well-dressed man clearly well able to have lived up to their expectations. He would simply have been the man for them, despite anything which might be said to the contrary. One suspects that for some the same might be the case today.

Facsimile of the Shakespeare Memorial Bust, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library. Photograph by Julie Ainsworth.

Washington Irving, in a delightful phrase, expressed the necessity of “resolute good-humoured credulity” in the face of the flood of Shakespeare folklore to which he was exposed on his visit to Stratford in 1815. No doubt he would have enjoyed listening to the arguments about the Cobbe portrait in the same indulgent manner; more interested in the people presenting the arguments, and their manner of and reasons for doing so, than in the credibility of the statements. Henry James, in his short story, “The Birthplace,” clearly inspired by a visit to Stratford, had fun implying that the more extravagant were the stories his fictional custodian fed to the visitors to his unidentified “Birthplace,” the better it was for “the receipts.” But for those who wish to get as near to an accurate picture as one can after four hundred years, it is a disciplined approach to the evidence and the deductions which can reasonably be made which are the important issues. Interpretation may vary over time, the result not only of new evidence but of our changing views of driving forces within our own society; but arguments are still better put if based on evidence rather than on unprovable hunches.

(For the comments by Harris, Spurgeon, Irving, and James quoted here, see David Ellis, That Man Shakespeare [Hastings, UK: Helm Information, 2005]).

One of the reasons we were interested in doing another open review was to build on the success we saw with last year’s New Media special issue. In that open review, there were debates in the comments that helped define why the submissions were important pieces of scholarship. We also saw that authors were able to engage with each other, strengthening the work of everyone involved. In the Performance open review, we are again seeing some great responses to the submissions from commentators sharing their expertise. The breadth of the reviewers is especially helpful since the submissions cover a wide range of subjects: Merchant of Venice in post-war West Germany; political theatre as staged by the RSC’s most recent stagings of the Histories; Othello in 1903 Japan; a film about a Northern Ireland prison adaptation of Macbeth ; prophecy as a trope for performance; and a review of Ninagawa Yukio’s recent Doctor Faustus.

This time around, we also wanted to encourage an active conversation around a topic that is relevant to many of us who study and who read about performance. To that end Michael Dobson allowed us to post his review of a recent As You Like It, a review that has prompted an ongoing debate about who the audience of academic theatre reviews is and what the conventions of reviewing might be.

I hope that we’ll see more of you join in the conversation around the submissions in the coming days. I know this is a strange medium for many of us who are used to reading on paper and to writing anonymous responses to an editor, who then chooses how to pass those comments on to the author. This open review, with the need to read on screen and to respond publicly on screen, for the author and all other reviewers and readers to see, might nudge us out of our comfort zone. But the aim of the open review is not any different than what our aim is in any intellectual endeavor: to push forward the boundaries of learning and to help our field produce exciting scholarship. So take a look around the site, read some of the submissions and comments, and let us know what you think. The authors and the editors will be grateful for your participation!

Sarah Werner

Associate Editor

I am delighted to announce that an open peer review for Shakespeare Quarterly’s special issue on Shakespeare and Performance is now online at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/shakespearequarterlyperformance/ and will remain open for commenting until 31 March.

I hope that you will come read and comment on the essays we are considering for publication in the Shakespeare and Performance issue. The essays cover a range of interesting subjects: a film about a Northern Ireland prison adaptation of Macbeth; Othello in 1903 Japan; Merchant of Venice in post-war West Germany; prophecy as a trope for performance; political theatre as staged by the RSC’s most recent stagings of the Histories; and a review of Ninagawa Yukio’s recent Doctor Faustus.

We are also excited to include a review by Michael Dobson. The review focuses on the Bridge Project’s 2010 As You Like It, but also raises provocative questions about what shows scholars choose to review and how we engage in the act of writing about and remembering performance. I hope that you will participate in that conversation, whether you had a chance to see this As You Like It or not. It’s an opportunity to engage in a debate about writing, publishing, and reading reviews that I hope will be relevant to all of us.

This online peer review is open to all scholars with an interest in Shakespeare and performance. You may read and comment on all the essays, or only on one or two. Information on the review process and on procedures for commenting are online at our site; should you have any questions, you can leave questions on the site or contact Shakespeare Quarterly at SQ@folger.edu.

I hope that you will all visit the site and comment on the works posted there; your participation will help ensure that the submissions get rigorous feedback and that the journal will be able to publish exciting new work. Please do spread the word to any potentially interested colleagues, and I look forward to seeing your comments at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/shakespearequarterlyperformance/.

Sarah Werner

Associate Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly

Today, we’re delighted to speak with Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor of English Emerita at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. She is the author of Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (2001) and The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (1991) and has published widely on theater history. Her essay “What’s So Special about 1594?” appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly’s special issue “1594.”

Are Shakespeare specialists and theater historians laying too much stress on the year 1594—or not enough?

Theater historians, just like other historians, want to construct a narrative from the bits of evidence they have available. And they’ve gotten into the field to begin with because they think some people, or events, matter more than others. When the desire for narrative is added to a set of priorities, the inevitable result is to promote some pieces of evidence above others. One of my friends, complimenting my “1594” essay, emailed me with the tactful observation that “still and all, it [1594] was an interesting year.” Of course it was. But it is hard to find a year when nothing happened of significance to the business of playing. The elevation of 1594 has as much to do with scholars’ fascination with Shakespeare and a cultural belief that politicians saw the playing companies as useful pawns in some power game as it does with any specific event that occurred.

Your comment about a “cultural belief” seems to point to the duopoly theory—or are you speaking more broadly, perhaps, to historicist concerns with power and governance?

One of the reasons why the field of theater history has been so interesting in the last thirty years is that a number of its practitioners have paid less attention to Shakespeare and VIPs and more to the ordinary lives of players; records of theatrical activity in the provinces; playhouses and other theatrical venues where the Chamberlain’s / King’s men did not play; plays not by Shakespeare; and (self-servingly) lost plays. These pursuits have changed the elitist paradigm by which theater history was designed, and the necessary result is that old markers of significance such as a given year (1594), a given playwright (Shakespeare), and a given political agent (the Privy Council) are not still significant in the same way. To put it another way, the conflict is between the sort of history historians used to tell that focused on kings and laws versus a more modern focus on ordinary people and the practicalities of everyday life. Everything—especially interpretations of the past—is a matter of perspective.

It’s interesting that the “elitist paradigm” that we would comfortably associate with the bad old past has been overtaken by equally top-down emphases on those in power.

Yes, despite the recent fashion of New Historicism that appeared to (and sometimes did) redirect our attention to commoners and their pursuits, there has remained a stubborn strain in theatrical narratives that privileges the court over the marketplace. (Oxfordians rely on a similar elitism.) In the roundtable, there was an exchange about a company’s dominance at court. It is important to narratives that depend on hierarchies, but there is no explicit link between a company’s appearance at court and its complementary improvement in market share.

The players themselves perpetuated the fiction, though. In 1584, civic authorities complained that in the previous year the Queen’s men only had had the Privy Council’s permission to play, yet “all the places of playing were filled with men calling themselues the Quenes players” (Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:302). Everyone knew the fiction that commercial playing was tolerated under the guise of players’ being prepared to perform for the queen, but even in this snapshot of complaint it is obvious that having one authorized company did not dampen the commerce of other troupes.

Your essay draws on primary archival research—for example, records of London plague deaths. You also draw attention to the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project and how its activities are expanding—even overturning—our assumptions about the types of theatrical activity and the working habits of theatrical companies in Shakespeare’s time. Could you address the importance of archival research as it’s impacted your own work? Do you have recommendations for the place it should have in others’ work?

I’m not sufficiently trained as a historian to speak cogently about discrepancies between sets of records. I do know that the Privy Council feared an increase in plague in London and its surrounding counties in January 1593. I have not compared the number of deaths in every parish in London for each month of 1592–94, so I cannot say for a fact that the council’s fears were premature. What moves me about these parish records are the family tragedies they reveal, and no other records can tell these stories quite so starkly. In St. Leonard Eastcheap in 1593, for example, deaths in four families account for fifteen of the twenty-eight burials from August to November: one family lost six members in less than a month.

For a few years back in the 1990s, I spent a lot of time reading London parish registers. It served as a kind of reality check, in that there was virtually nothing that hinted at the larger stage of royalty and parliament. In one memorable exception, the parish clerk of St. Botoph Algate entered a note in his memoranda books about the ringing of the bells on 9 February 1586/7 “ffor Ioye that the Queene of Skottes that Eennemye to ower most noble Queenes Majesties and ower contrie Was Beheaded.”

But the clerk’s books are full of ordinary deaths (one of my favorites is a man who died “of a thought”—take that, Hamlet). In 1590, there is a report of a coroner’s jury, which finds that a woman named Amy Stokes had intentionally hanged herself, and it is ordered that she be buried at “some Cross way neare the townes end” with a stake through her heart so that passersby “might take heede” against similarly committing suicide. This insignificant tragedy bespeaks volumes about daily life as the players and playwrights knew it, even though it has no apparent relevance to theatrical commerce.

In terms of the players themselves, we now have an enormous body of information (largely, but not entirely) from parish registers. It is easy to use this information to confirm our anxiety that all those antitheatrical critics in the 1500s were right about the moral character of players and, by association, the danger of playing to public morality. I think, for example, of the entry in the register of St. Giles Cripplegate (10 February 1586/7) of a child named “Comedia,” daughter of William Johnson, a player with the Queen’s Men; the entry continues: “Base born of Alyce Booker.” But on the whole this information has taught us that players generally were upstanding members of the community with unremarkable lives. Had they been wilder, we’d have records of their behavior from the law courts.

REED research has brought about a similar revolution in terms of companies no one had heard of or cared about until a compilation of provincial records showed their activity to be the norm in villages and country estates all across England. If only we had the texts of some of the plays these local companies performed! It is very easy to assume that provincial activity was rough and amateurish without textual evidence to illustrate otherwise (and even with that evidence, we might “read” what we see with little understanding). But the very fact that we know there was so much provincial activity forces us to concede that ordinary people had a means to develop theatrical tastes, and that alone contributed to the professionalism of the most successful companies over time, in London and on the road.

At some point, every scholar has to work back to original documents. Not all of us will develop the expertise in secretary hand and Elizabethan legal Latin to move about as freely in the archives as we might like, but nothing compares to the thrill of holding in hand a document no one except an archivist might have touched in 400 years.

In the roundtable, Holger Syme remarked that Harbage’s Annals were “about the least reliable source of theater-historical evidence in existence.” Has Harbage (and Schoenbaum’s supplements) been superseded by REED, other sources, or simply the necessity to slog through the archives?

I agree that the Annals by Harbage and his successors are virtually useless as documents of anything. And after Schoenbaum’s supplement, errors were introduced that deceive the unwary. All Harbage did was troll through standard references such as F. G. Fleay, W. W. Greg, and E. K. Chambers and attempt a chronology. The Annals is a convenient guide, and we use it for the Lost Plays Database for that reason (and because Harbage is now out of copyright). But we’ve repeatedly found that entries in the Lost Plays Database revise and refine Harbage’s guesses on dating and genre—even, in some cases, on company, venue, and authorship. But that is what scholarship is supposed to do. In Harbage’s defense, he trusted his sources. We all do that too, until our own research forces us to raise questions.

So much attention is devoted to the Chamberlain’s Men, some to the Admiral’s Men. We’re awaiting Sally-Beth Maclean and Lawrence Manly’s book on Strange’s Men. But your essay reminds us that we need to make our assumptions about lesser-studied (even understudied) companies more nuanced. Specifically, you note that scholars misinterpret the breakup of Pembroke’s Men in the summer of 1593 as a sign of the wider collapse of the “business of playing,” and that too little attention has been paid to Sussex’s Men, who demonstrate the very “expertise” and professionalism that theories such as that of the duopoly deny actors and other “theatrical professionals.”

Among the great liabilities of working with theatrical companies is our inability to make lists of company sharers over time and lists of plays in performance. Due to Henslowe’s Diary, we do have a lot of information on these topics for Strange’s Men (1592–93) and the Admiral’s Men (1594–1603). But even then, neither company has quite been given its due in commercial terms. The desire to make Shakespeare and his company the premier combination is just too powerful.

However (and here I step up on my soap box), I believe that one way to speed the reassessment of company repertories is to pay more attention to lost plays. Henslowe’s Diary alone provides the titles of well over two hundred lost plays, most of which have been invisible in arguments about company commerce. Or the titles have been misidentified as plays we do have. Working with the title of a lost play, I cannot say what the text would have been like, but I can suggest story materials it might have relied on. In some cases, those story materials suggest details of costuming and staging that dramatists might have used. This is all guesswork, and no one is required to perceive it as true, but it nonetheless broadens a perception of the daily fare at a playing venue at a given time.

Could you address further the intriguing possibility raised in your essay that Shakespeare was not “fully [committed]” to the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594?

I would love to know in even one case whether Shakespeare chose a theatrical subject for himself or his company did. And are we to suppose he sold his plays to the company or just offered them as part of his professional engagement with their commerce? Did he get the same price for a Love’s Labor’s Lost as a King Lear? And what about piecework? Did he get 40s. for mending some play for the court, as dramatists did at the Rose? Scholars have gotten it into their heads that Shakespeare was tight with his money. I don’t know what the evidence of that belief is. But what I really don’t know is what was considered prudent business finances in Shakespeare’s time and what “tight” would have meant. I am repeatedly confounded, working with Henslowe’s Diary, in finding that the Admiral’s Men (for example) didn’t make the choices in repertorial scheduling that make sense to me. I am thus reminded that I need to evaluate their business as the records suggest, not warp them to my preferences.

Could you tell us something about your current projects?

I have two research projects underway. One is a repertory study of the commercial marketplace over the years when Christopher Marlowe was writing new plays (1587–93). I see this as a series of articles. Although many of my colleagues will disagree, I do not want to write another book (books require too much coherence!). I’d much rather have the freedom to focus on a particular question and write that up. I have one such article in progress on the topic of Marlovian imitation. In it, I react to the notion that Marlowe’s influence produced “weak sons,” and I argue rather that these plays had successful commercial careers.

The other project is the Lost Plays Database that I co-edit with David McInnis. It is a wiki-style database, and we welcome contributors. As I indicate above, I have become convinced that one factor in the narratives we tell about playing companies and commerce is our incomplete appreciation of the spread and diversity of companies’ repertories. The gaping hole in our knowledge of those repertories is the lost plays. The LPD is a gathering of documentary and narrative information about lost plays, as well as a guide to extant criticism. Each entry is a little essay (sometimes not so little). To the curious, I recommend checking out entries on the following: “Henry the Una,” “The Conquest of the West Indies,” “Oldcastle,” and “Galiaso.”

Mimi Godfrey
Managing Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly

I’d like to invite our authors to step forward in the blogosphere and tell us a little about yourself—your name, affiliation, and the title of your essay.

Bart van Es

Just to do the introduction bit. I’m Bart van Es, from the University of Oxford. My essay, “‘Johannes fac Totum ?’: Shakespeare’s First Contact with the Acting Companies,” questions the orthodoxy that Shakespeare started out as a player.

Holger Syme

Hi all,

To do Mimi’s bidding—I’m Holger Syme; I teach at the University of Toronto (a couple of doors down the corridor from Leslie); and my essay (“The Meaning of Success: Stories of 1594 and Its Aftermath”) concerned itself with the mismatch between what many theater historians have told us about who succeeded when and how in the theater world of the 1590s and what the archival record actually has to say about the issue.

I agree with Leslie: evidence and its (ab)uses is very much a core concern of my essay, and does seem to be a common theme across most, if not all, of the essays in this volume.

Leslie Thomson

As Holger has indicated, I’m at the University of Toronto. In my article, “Staging on the Road, 1586–1594: A New Look at Some Old Assumptions,” I tried to assemble enough material[em]playing companies, extant plays (probably) belonging to those companies, and some certainty that those companies were performing in the provinces between 1586 and 1594—in order to call into question the idea that provincial performances were necessarily, or even typically, short and brutish. Did I succeed? Time will tell, I suppose.

Although the announced focus for this forum is “1594,” that year is not a concern of my article—or of Bart van Es’s, for that matter. What all of the articles in this issue do have in common, however, is that they attempt to interpret evidence that is often minimal at best, or to fill gaps in that evidence with guesses. Moreover, we are all engaged in calling into question previous interpretations of evidence or absences. And because all the articles show these kinds of analyses in action, they seem to me to provide “case studies” that raise questions about what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Bart van Es

Hello, Leslie—
It is true that my article is not about 1594, but I do believe that year is important (and wrote about it some time back in the TLS). I think Ros’s and Holger’s work in these essays is amazing, but I’d still like to make the case for the importance of the year.

Holger Syme

I agree that the year is important, though I think what Ros and I would say is that it’s not necessarily important for the reasons that have traditionally—or in the past decades—been suggested. The coming into being of the Chamberlain’s Men was certainly a key event (even if they may not have settled into their near-final shape immediately), though it may have been more significant for literary history than for theater history.

Mimi Godfrey

Bart, a good deal of your work lies in your careful unpicking of that familiar quotation from Green’s Groatsworth of Wit—the reference to “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Tell us more about what we didn’t know, or didn’t understand, about this mocking allusion to Shakespeare.

Bart van Es

What I’m trying to do is contextualize that quotation in various ways:
1) highlighting that it is the sole basis of the orthodox idea that Shakespeare started out as a player;
2) picking apart the meaning of key phrases in it (such as “fac totum” itself, which is generally used of servants and turncoats and never for a “universal genius”);
3) painting a picture of the world around that quotation, which I suggest shows Shakespeare no different from other poet-playwrights who acted, like Heywood and Jonson.

Mimi Godfrey

Does this take Shakespeare off the pedestal of Bardolatry to some extent? (Or are we simply reluctant to let go of our more romantic picture of Shakespeare being swept up into the world of the theater, and only later turning to writing?)

Holger Syme

I thought the critique of the orthodoxy in your essay was very sharp and long overdue. But I was wondering about your point about Jonson, and particularly Heywood. How much do we really know about their career paths? How do we know they were playwrights/poets first? Certainly historically, it would have been unexceptional, wouldn’t it, for actors to also write plays (though few reached print).

Bart van Es

Well, we certainly know that both Jonson and Heywood acted. If people are happy to concede that Shakespeare was a player in the same sense that Jonson was a player, then I’ll certainly accept that. But they were very different from those who were players first and then occasional writers (such as Kemp). I think Shakespeare’s poetry and education puts him in a very different camp from the conventional player.

Holger Syme

I agree, Bart, that Shakespeare was a better poet than Kemp. We really know too little about most other actors’ education to make that distinction, though.

What I’m primarily concerned with is the issue of sequence in your argument. I don’t mind the idea that Shakespeare was always more of a writer than a player. The evidence can be read either way, I think. But I’d like to see more evidence that anyone else started out as a poet and then became an actor. Why make Shakespeare play at all, if his job is to write? (Heywood, notably, bound himself to Henslowe as a player; only his playwriting isn’t mentioned in the contract.)

Bart van Es

The contract is for Heywood to be a covenant servant, a hired man, and probably primarily an actor. That is what I suggest may have happened with Shakespeare in 1592. In 1594 he became a sharer. Like Heywood in 1600, he thereafter writes only for one company.

Holger Syme

Heywood, Richard Alleyn, Charles Massey, and Samuel Rowley are treated in identical terms in the 1598 contracts. All they say is that they cannot act for anyone else. But how do those documents tell us anything about Heywood’s “primary” identity? Was he a player first, a poet first, primarily a player initially while writing on the side (or vice versa), et cetera?

The connection between being a sharer and authorial exclusivity seems compelling to me, but also commonsensical: a sharer-author could obviously make more money writing for his own company than selling his plays, for a one-time fee only, to a competing company. A mere hired player, even if on a long-term contract, doesn’t have the same financial incentive to be faithful.

Bart van Es

Sure. Again, if you think of Shakespeare in the same way as you think of Heywood, then I’m happy. This is a humanist educated writer of learned plays and not a “common player.” What I’m objecting to is exactly that romantic phantom that Mimi mentioned: the traveling player who was somehow a remarkable upstart, very different from other writers, in 1592 when he is called an “upstart crow.” That kind of thing was said of Kyd, Munday, and Jonson, so it’s not a marker of some remarkable outsider status.

I don’t really agree that we know too little. The moralities and reports about them give us a pretty good sense of the output of the companies, as opposed to the material they imported from poets.

Holger Syme

Oh, yes. That part I agree with: Shakespeare was no more of an outsider than many others, poets or players. But he was also not necessarily less of an outsider than some of his fellow players who didn’t become writers. The “common player” image could clearly be employed strategically by people like Greene in order to suggest social and intellectual divisions that often simply didn’t exist.

Leslie Thomson

Sorry, folks. My dog’s not in this fight.

Bart van Es

But I guess the “dog” might be the larger question of how we read evidence (as you and Holger have been saying). I guess a lot of this is a matter of how far you take your skepticism. Of course, Andrew’s famous account of the establishment of a duopoly is a theory rather than a hard fact of history. But, whatever the underlying mechanism, taking the long view, 1594 would prove pivotal. From that point on, a duopoly of some sort was certainly the official position for many years. The February 1598 letter to the Master of the Revels and the Justices of Peace for Middlesex and Surrey confirms that the Admiral’s and the Chamberlain’s were the only authorized performers in London: all other companies were to be suppressed. Those companies were also linked to official theaters. This is clear from the June 1600 Privy Council order to the Lord Mayor and the Justices that all but the two licensed playhouses should be closed. At this point these were the Globe (for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) and the Fortune (“now in hand to be builte” by Edward Alleyn).

Of course it’s absolutely right that those orders were not implemented. But they did set a baseline that accorded privilege to London’s preeminent companies. Other things confirm this change in the marketplace. As Holger says, 1594 saw the virtual invention of the printed play. Suddenly, a large body of dramatic manuscripts came into publishers’ possession. While companies’ attitudes to the publication of their playtexts were more variable than we sometimes imagined, it remains highly likely that manuscripts were sold because troupes of players were under pressure and beginning to leave London. Henslowe’s reports about Pembroke’s Men have to count for something. Sure, survival of evidence is very piecemeal, but the companies left without a court commission do not appear to have purchased new plays after the creation of the duopoly: in the Annals of English Drama, there are no new plays listed for outfits other than the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s. With the exception of Pembroke’s short-lived venture at the Swan, this remains true until the reemergence of the boy players in 1599. The pattern of play distribution across companies is thus very different after 1594 from that which existed earlier. At court, the dominance of the two companies is likewise total. So in major ways the year did involve a reshaping of the theatrical map.

Andrew Gurr

Andy Gurr, here. I’m keen to hear what folk think about the 1594 date. After browsing through Roslyn’s article about the spread so far beyond 1594, I still suspect that the key question in many people’s minds must be what happened in May 1594, when the Bard had his fellow-Stratfordian Richard Field publish his second long poem, dedicated to Southampton, and then found himself pushed into the new company with his plays. Henslowe noted the new company performing his older plays in that month. How benign was the Bard over this transfer of his plays and probably his role as a player into the new company? This is a part of what lies behind the emphasis on 1594 as a key date for theater history. I’d welcome anything that challenges and speculates about what was going on in that time.

Mimi Godfrey

Welcome, Andy.

Andrew Gurr’s essay is “Venues on the Verges: Londons Theater Government between 1594 and 1614.” He has published several books on the early acting companies and has edited two Shakespeare plays and others by Beaumont and Fletcher. Currently, he is helping to complete the New Variorum edition of The Tempest.

Bart van Es

Hello, Andrew—
For me, the most crucial thing is Shakespeare’s appearance as a sharer. As you know, I’m very skeptical about his having started out as a player. So for me this is the moment where (like Heywood in 1600) he makes a crucial decision about where affiliations lie. I think this changes the way he works as a writer. Most obviously (in spite of Lucas Erne’s thesis), I think Shakespeare ceased to take a primary interest in print. Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) had been printed to the highest standards by one of London’s foremost literary publishers. These were authorial publications for which Shakespeare provided a personal dedication to his patron. After joining the Chamberlain’s, Shakespeare would never bring out poetry in this way again and quite possibly he ceased to play any part in the print publication of his work. This was a pattern of career development quite different from that of his contemporaries: poets such as Drayton and Chapman continued to publish poetry even as they worked as playwrights. For Shakespeare the common features of the life of the poet-playwright that he had hitherto shared (print publication, the search for patronage, co-authorship, composition for multiple companies) dropped away. They were replaced by a more intense concentration upon the interaction of characters upon the stage. I think Shakespeare also changed the way in which he wrote drama, but that’s a bigger claim that I’m currently trying to substantiate in a book.

Holger Syme

Hi, Andy—
I think before we can talk about how Shakespeare felt or reacted to events (which we may not be able to do in any meaningful way at all anyway), we need to question what those events were. How do we know anyone was “pushed”? How do we know the plays were “his”? How do we know that they all became part of the new company’s repertory? I’m not aware of any evidence concerning agency or details about any of this.

Mimi Godfrey

Bart, could you talk some more about how Shakespeare “changed the way in which he wrote drama”?

Bart van Es

Dear Mimi—
Yes, though that is not something easy to do within the space limits of a blog forum. I think that for the first time Shakespeare has certainty about the identity of the actors for whom his writing—not just for the first performance but for many years in the repertory. The kind of distinctiveness you get in post-1594 plays: the tall Helena, the dwarfish Hermia, the diminutive Snug; the whole fact of the farce rehearsal. These are signs of a closeness to the actors that we do not have in Shakespeare’s earlier plays.

Holger Syme

I disagree on multiple counts, Bart.

1594 can only become pivotal—in retrospect—if we assume the 1598 order to reflect a four-year old policy. There’s no evidence for this. On the other hand, it follows on the heels of the upheavals of summer 1597, which might actually have produced a desire to control playing in London more tightly. I don’t know of any evidence for such a desire on the part of the Privy Council in or around 1594.

We have no evidence that links company failure to an increased volume of publication. That’s a historiographical assumption. We don’t know that the Queen’s Men failed (at all). We don’t know what happened to Pembroke’s Men—they were alive and well a year later, after all.

Court success is one thing, and obviously important, but it’s not evidence for anything that happened in London. There were at least three and, soon after 1594, four playhouses up and running: what did they stage (how could they operate) if there were only two companies?

The Annals is about the least reliable source of theater-historical evidence in existence. We’ve lost so many of the plays in Henslowe, and there’s such a steady trickle of unattributed plays being published throughout our period that it’s simply impossible to say that “other companies” didn’t commission plays.

Bart van Es

You make many convincing points. Playhouses, though, were used for other purposes: fencing, baiting, clowning, archery competitions, et cetera, et cetera. And there is a difference between playhouses that accommodate traveling companies and those that involve permanent residence. There’s a big change there with the Rose after 1594, surely?

Holger Syme

Well, that’s the orthodox view. I’d say that we really, truly, don’t know that to be the case. For all we know, if the plague hadn’t interrupted them, Strange’s Men would have continued on at the Rose for years after 1592/3. And since we have no records, we also have no idea what was going on at the Curtain and the Theatre, let alone the Inns (or Newington Butts). Obviously other entertainments also took place in the theaters, but I find it hard to believe that they could have sustained themselves on a diet of fencing and dancing on a regular basis.

Bart van Es

Very interesting, Holger. I remember finding your paper revelatory at the SAA. My view now is that there were, after 1594, two dominant London companies but that, as before, other companies drifted into the capital and used its theaters (which might at other times be used for other activities). London in this way was a destination for traveling players. Sometimes those companies stuck, as did the partially newly formed Worcester’s in 1600 or Lady Elizabeth’s thereafter. Government action to stop these things, certainly, was often weak.

Holger Syme

I’d argue that Pembroke’s may have “stuck,” too, in the mid-nineties.

But yes, you’re right: we don’t know if there were other residential companies, though it seems to me that there’s at least some evidence. The way the Admiral’s Men’s takings decline quickly after 1594 says something. Langley’s idea to build a particularly opulent theater sits oddly with the notion that it would be a venue for whoever happens to come along.

The main bee in my hive-like bonnet is the tendency to read what goes on at court as evidence for what goes on in London, and I just don’t see why we should trust that connection. I’m happy to buy the story that Carey and Howard set up their companies as the providers of Christmas entertainments. But that’s a totally different narrative than one that posits the wholesale reorganization of troupes, including the reassignment of things that were people’s properties (not the Crown’s and not those of individual Councillors).

Mimi Godfrey

Hi, Leslie—
I’m a medievalist, so I found your essay tremendously interesting because of your use of REED work and your own analyses of play texts to look at provincial touring by London companies. As with much of the work in this issue of SQ, you’re deconstructing a lot of long-held attitudes about theatrical activity at the end of this century—down to the micro level of how we understand words like scaffold or stage.

Leslie Thomson

Looking through Harbage’s Annals and seeing “Lost,” “Lost,” “Lost,” is truly dispiriting. As Holger says in his article, “What has survived may be neither the most popular drama nor representative of what has vanished.” For someone like me who relies primarily on stage directions to draw inferences about staging practices and possibilities, it is necessary to hope that the extant plays provide a reasonably accurate picture. But even the term “stage direction” is not contemporary. As to the physical space, while the Fortune plans and other documents tell us some things about the buildings, we know much less about the stage itself—although the Rose excavation told us some useful things. One of my main interests is discovery scenes, but the only evidence for a so-called discovery space (another term not used in Shakespeare’s day) is stage directions and dialogue that theater historians have interpreted in different ways. I envy Andy, Holger, and Bart—all those documents and records!

Mimi Godfrey

A question for Andy—
How different was James and Richard Burbage’s involvement with creditors than was that of other playwright-builders or anyone doing construction in this period? I wondered if the consciousness of “venture capitalists,” as you call them at one point, or “loan sharks” at another, was all that unique to the Burbages?

Andrew Gurr

A comment on Holger’s comment about sequence. True, we have only the patches of evidence, but it’s also true that we know almost nothing about what Shakespeare was up to, as a player, before May 1594, and that he was pushing himself as a poet with his two epyllions. So it seems right to try guessing not only what was in his mind when he joined the Chamberlain’s, but what outside pressures, especially from the two Privy Councillors, he might have been subjected to when he joined them. And there is that curiously neat divide of the plays between the Admiral’s and the Chamberlain’s, all of Marlowe’s (well, almost all) going to Henslowe, and all of the Bard’s to the other company. I like the idea, and that’s all it can be, that Tilney was the instrumental figure in all the reshuffle. But why did Shakespeare allow himself to be pushed?

That raises Mimi’s question, too. Like everyone else at the time, the Burbages as a family were regular, or irregular, users of loan sharks for their building projects. And that involved heavy rates of repayment, as other plays (Englishmen for My Money, for instance) did testify. So why did they turn instead in 1599 to their fellow players for the necessary cash? I do find the timing of The Merchant of Venice and Shylock a remarkable coincidence in its match with the loss of use for the Blackfriars.

Holger Syme

Does it matter that four of Marlowe’s plays became part of the Admiral’s Men’s repertory? In terms of revenue, they became practically negligible within a year or so. And what do we really know about the plays Shakespeare wrote before the Chamberlain’s Men came into being? Did they ever perform the Henry VI plays? How do we know that? And again, how do we know anyone pushed Shakespeare anywhere? Why would we even assume that?

Mimi Godfrey

Our time is nearly up, but I’d like to ask you all to tell us what your next projects are—or if you’re expanding on the researches in these essays (as I believe Bart is).

Bart van Es

It’s been fun, Mimi.
Yes, as you say, mine is part of a larger project: a book called Shakespeare in Company that should be out in 2012 with Oxford University Press. It looks at the implications of Shakespeare’s position as sharer through the whole of his association with the Chamberlain’s / King’s men and compares his position (financially and artistically) with his contemporaries. It’s a history of Shakespeare’s plays through his material circumstances (really a book-length attempt to answer the question you asked earlier). I should say that I’m being very generously funded by a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Leslie Thomson

With my term as department chair finally over in June (Holger will be succeeding me), I’m planning to return to my project on staged “discoveries”—of disguises and scenes—in plays of the period. But before that there’s the SAA meeting, at which I find myself leading a double seminar on—guess what?—“Lacunae in Theater History,” and what we do with them.

Holger Syme

I have an essay forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey next year (or the year after?) that addresses in a bit more detail how little we know about the early years of the Chamberlain’s Men and the fortunes of Shakespeare’s plays originally written for other companies. The essay suggests that there is as much evidence for the argument that Pembroke’s Men continued performing some of the early histories as there is for the notion that all those plays became the Chamberlain’s Men’s property.

Beyond that, I’m working on a book-length project on the 1590s, partly trying to develop an alternative view of London’s theater world (a rethinking of London through the perspective provided by REED, as a place inhabited by three or four, possibly more, playing companies, fecund and varied); partly trying to think about usually marginalized playwrights (especially Chapman and Dekker) as pioneers in the print market for plays.

Andrew Gurr

I have a piece coming out in the International Shakespeare Yearbook that tries to relate the non-English characterization of Shylock to the collapse of the Burbage Blackfriars project, and the possible local applications of his money-lending business to what happened to the Chamberlain’s Men’s Burbage financiers in 1596. More idle speculation, of course.

Leslie Thomson

Thanks Mimi et al., for all the work this must have involved.

Holger Syme

Thank you, Mimi and the team! This was fun.

Mimi Godfrey

That’s all the time we have for today!

Many thanks to our authors, who were so generous with their time and energy. It’s been a great pleasure to read your comments and learn more about your work. I’m delighted that we could bring you all together today—it’s been a great way to keep the conversation going.

We welcome your comments and questions! If you can’t join us this afternoon, send us your comments and we’ll present them to our panelists during the roundtable.