Renaissance Porn

David Christopher
Dr. Erin Campbell
HA 545
December 2009

Gentileschi’s Lucretia: Visible and Covert Sexuality in Art for the Domestic Space

The role and pervasive presence of didactic imagery within the domestic space of Renaissance Italy has been well documented. Objects within the domestic space were heavily focused on marital ritual, childbirth and childrearing. But what happens in between? Moving from marriage to childbirth is a definitively sexual activity that ostensibly occurred within the domestic space. Artemisia Gentileschi’s circa 1621 Lucretia is an artwork that provides a clear voice to the silent narrativisation of Renaissance sexuality. Beyond its didactic exterior, the painting is rich with meaning in several of its aspects. The sexualized reputation of the author was widespread. The ontological piety of the myth was saturated with sexual ambiguity. The image itself is visibly sensual. The painting is pregnant with erotic energy! It would have been pivotal in defining a space as erotic, whether it was a bedchamber or a common room, as long as there was a settee handy. A locus of multiple meanings and influences conflate in the painting to give meaning to a space: an holistic ideology of sensuality. In defining the space, it may have acted as both an aphrodisiac and a sensual reminder to both the husband and wife of her sexual duty. In this paper I will argue that Gentileschi’s Lucretia was teeming with sexual meaning that directly prompted a call to perform sexual activity.
William Shakespeare, during the closures of the theatres in the late sixteenth century, took to writing epic poetry. He only wrote a handful of poems and on this short-list was the Rape of Lucrece. Evidently, the myth was powerful enough in romantic energy and mythical status to have commanded the bard’s attention. In her article Virtuous Model / Voluptuous Martyr, Carol Schuler states that Renaissance “texts are nearly unanimous in their admiration of Lucretia’s moral rectitude” (Schuler 7). “By the Renaissance, the name of Lucretia was virtually synonymous with the idea of female chastity” (Schuler 7). The story suggests that Lucretia's suicide brought down the Roman monarchy, circa 508 BCE. Lucretia had proven superior in virtue and beauty. Thus inflamed, the Roman prince Tarquinius stole into her chamber and raped her at knife-point under the threat of murdering her and a servant and falsely reporting their adultery. The next day she committed suicide after telling her story to her father and her husband, Collatine. Accompanied by Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius, they vowed to kill Tarquinius and exile the ruling Tarquin family. Their story was met with acclamation by the people to change from the tyranny of monarchy to rule by consuls.
But Gentileschi's Lucretia has a sexual, power connotation that might not be so ontologically evident in the connotation invoked by the famous story. Ajmar states "awareness of the symbolic meanings associated with the domestic space in the Renaissance is only now beginning to dawn among historians" (Ajmar 75). In this way historians are being invited to explore meanings that may have little extant voice. On the surface the didactic virtue of a woman who takes her life after being raped seems obvious. However, the meaning hidden within the myth is ambiguous. Lucretia was a virtuous wife whose beauty caused the sexual advances of her rapist. Inherent to the story is the suggestion of some causality between her virtue and her rape. Was she too virtuous and is this the lesson intended for the image to invoke? Is it intended to invoke the myth of power-drunk patriarchy that resulted in her assault and act as a warning against tempting the lusty power of the structure with virtue and beauty? If it is a warning that feminine sexuality is dangerous to the welfare of women and the security of the patriarchy, why is the image so provocative? The "awareness of symbolic meanings" that Ajmar is encouraging cannot ignore the blatantly sexualized image presented of Lucretia, nor the power of a woman to bring an empire to its knees with only an ultimate sacrifice.
The piety of the surface myth is openly complicated in the Renaissance period. Schuler states that Augustine cast doubt based on “the Christian view of suicide as sinful rather than heroic, and questions why, if Lucretia remained chaste and blameless, she needed to take her own life” (Schuler 7). Schuler boldly introduces speculation about the myth. “Lucretia’s decision to commit suicide may have resulted from an inadvertent pleasurable physical response at the time of her rape” (Schuler 7). Looking to tangible artworks rather than social sensibility, Schuler notes that “fidelity to the details of the story, as well as the straightforward interpretation of Lucretia as a paragon of virtue, are characteristics notably absent from artworks produced during the early sixteenth century. This period witnessed a virtual explosion of artistic interest in the suicide of Lucretia, concomitant with an increasingly eroticized interpretation of the subject” (Schuler 8). Nevertheless, “most philosophic inquiry debated Lucretia’s response to her rape, not her complicity in causing it” leaving her pious image relatively untainted (Schuler 7). But other renaissance images of Lucretia variously depict her being raped, or committing suicide, or both. So, the myth is filled with sexual ambiguity and the artist’s reputation coincides in her story of rape and ambiguous complicity.
Recent scholarship has tended to shy away from biographical interpretations of art and has relegated the artist nearly to irrelevance. Feminist criticism has made the interpretation of a female artist’s sexual persona virtually criminal to discuss. However, without any need to ascribe artistic motives to Gentileschi herself, it is the public reception of her reputation as it was associated with her artwork that is relevant. In Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art, R. Ward Bissell refreshingly argues that “the reconstruction of an artist’s oeuvre must privilege considerations of style over interpretive strategies, without at all discounting the latter’s potential, when solidly grounded, for informing connoisseurship” (Bissell xxi). In Gentileschi’s Lucretia, it is difficult to overlook a biological read of the artist’s life in the provenance of the painting as it lends itself to a psychoanalytical exploration of the repressed sexuality, lust, and desire for sexual domination inherent to the image and the story it invokes. Echoing the myth within the painting is the substantial meaning of the artist’s own life which informed its reception. Many researchers into the life and times of Artemisia have been heavily preoccupied with the coincidence of the myth and the painter.
Artemisia’s rape trial was highly publicized and the social identity ascribed to her was irrevocably sexualized. Bissell reports that “it is highly unlikely that this case, although conducted in semiprivate, escaped the court of public opinion” (Bissell 14). Bissell quotes George Hersey as stating “personal tragedies of other artists have not conditioned their work but their art is not usually seen as a specific restaging of those tragedies. It seems that Artemisia’s pictures were admired in just this way” (Bissell i). The reception of her pictures discussed by Hersey is not ascribed to an audience of a particular era, but given the public nature of her reputation it is reasonable to include the audience of the period in which the painting emerged. In Mann’s book she includes an article by Elizabeth S. Cohen entitled, What’s in a Name? Artemisia Gentileschi and the Politics of Reputation. Cohen and Mann both reiterate a likely public reputation, if only from her artwork alone. “[T]hese women’s accomplishments were celebrated in their own time” (Mann 123). “The arts became a domain in which some numbers of women began to emerge in the limelight” (Cohen 123). Although Cohen argues that, “after Artemisia left Rome in 1612 after the trial, she was not haunted for the rest of her days with unusual sexual notoriety” (Mann 121), she also points out that “Artemisia’s assertive testimony and judgment against Tassi, sufficiently mended the blemish to her reputation” (Cohen 121). The fact that her reputation needed mending and that it called her to the unusual task of publicly speaking on her own behalf is clear evidence that the knowledge of her sexual transgression was widespread enough to require public defense. “Artemisia testified to resistance [which] in effect succeeded in making Artemisia’s virtue a central issue (Bissell 14). Artemisia complicates the rape dynamic with her own ambiguous complicity. “Artemisia kept hopes alive of marrying Tassi – certainly so that she might reclaim her honor […], but also, it seems, because of positive feelings towards him” (Bissell 15). Bissell paints a highly sexualized public reputation, richly ambiguous with her complicity in the rape. “The very fact that she remained unwed for several years after Roman culture would have deemed her sexually mature, more likely than ever to let her female passions rule, and fully ready for a husband would have set tongues wagging” (Bissell 17).
Whether or not the trial was staged by her father to protect the reputation of her virtue is unclear. What is clear, however, are common themes in Gentileschi's art. She tends towards hyper-sensualized depictions of women, themes of sexual assault by powerful men, violent revenge against tyrannical men, suicide and sacrifice. Cohen dismisses her trend as simply the work of “a woman artist who specialized in strong religious subjects as well as classical narratives and nudes” (Cohen 122). Bissell categorizes Lucretia in a population of early works that followed the success of her Susanna (image 1), which include both of her depictions of Judith (one of them displayed in image 2). The biographical psychology that might be psychoanalytically interpreted from this population would regard sexual conquest and feminine vengeance. The Lucretia myth is laden with both. One might be strongly inclined to think that Artemisia was using her art as a therapeutic outlet for emotional turmoil and guilt. Overtly, the painting depicts a strong, independent woman making the ultimate sacrifice after her rape and is popularly painted by a strong independent rape victim who has boldly chosen to pursue and challenge an entirely male-dominated profession.
“[T]he painter’s identity, like that of all human beings, [was] an amalgam of the social and the individual” (Cohen 122). Whether or not Gentileschi was complicit in her rape is not at stake. All that is relevant is that her public reputation was tainted with the idea. “In the calculus of reputation, rank and sexual propriety certainly mattered” (Cohen 123). In defense of the biographical interpretation, Bissell notes that “as a woman she was singularly able to project herself into the stories” (Bissell 14). The sexual ambiguity which imbued her life’s story was specifically and perfectly reflected in the Lucretia myth.
In her book, Sexuality in Medieval Europe : doing unto others, Ruth Karras states that "Medieval people […] did not see suggestive or explicit images glaring out at them from newsstands, billboards and computer screens" (Karras 150). I do not entirely agree. Although Karras is referring to an earlier medieval period, she describes it as "an era without photography, video and the internet" (Karras 150). This definition is also true of the early modern era but suggestive images were ubiquitous. They were not on billboards and computer screens but they were on cassones and in paintings. Bissell suggests that the Lucretia “painting is not beautiful by orthodox standards […] while not disallowing the erotic and sexually allusive which patrons had been conditioned to find in pictorializations of these themes. Certainly Lucretia’s right hand, for all its poignancy within the story, calls attention to her very full breast, and her bare leg crowds the picture plane. That the bed on which Lucretia was raped becomes now the site of her suicide imparts sensuality by implication” (Bissell 13).
The association of death with sexuality was an old trope, already established by a medieval preoccupation with corporeal needs. "Caroline Bynum suggests "while we may think today of bodies primarily in sexual terms, for medieval people other concerns were paramount [...] food, and the status of the body after death" (151). Jumping forward to the "Late medieval" period, she notes that "The relation between sex and death [...] is even more complex but equally ubiquitous" (153). As such, there is an elusive erotic connection between death and sexuality that is perfectly embedded in the erotic images of Lucretia at the moment of her suicide.
Have a good look at the face of Gentileschi's Lucretia (image 3). It ambiguously invokes as much of a sense of guilt and perhaps even ecstasy, as it does sacrifice. Bissell describes the image as “a figure frozen in the anticipation of guidance from beyond” (Bissell 12). Relegating the image to a strictly religious anguish and/or ecstasy seriously overlooks “the expressive range (from the reflective to the startlingly dramatic) of which Artemisia was capable” (Bissell xxii). “Works of art, speaking across the centuries, hold new meanings for successive generations but it can be hazardous to ascribe these meanings to the artist or period under review” (Bissell 10). However, I argue that some images hold meanings and generate physiological reactions that are more biologically fundamental, and have been present over a vast stretch of human history. Sexual imagery that appeals to the male mind and libido has changed very little. The poses and depictions of Gentileschi’s Lucretia and Cleopatra (images 3 and 4) are identical to those contrived poses of women in such current erotic magazines as Playboy and Penthouse. Furthermore, these paintings by Gentileschi, when compared to other nudes of her genre, and when compared against other depictions of the subjects, are extremely and unnecessarily erotic. There is no specific need to represent Cleopatra or Lucretia so blatantly sexually, nor to have the sexuality supersede the less noticeable accoutrements of suicide.
The sensuality of the image is obvious. “In a gesture clearly reminiscent of nursing, Lucretia proffers her left breast as if to the suspended dagger” (Bissell 11). The connection to breastfeeding may well have prompted a Freudian sexual response in its male viewers. Lucretia sensually elevates and presents her own breast, as if for viewing. Mann’s book also includes an article by Ann Sutherland Harris called Artemisia and Orazio: Drawing Conclusions in which she posits that “Women’s breasts are regularly placed too high in Renaissance and seventeenth-century […] images of nude and dressed women, apparently as a matter of male taste” (Harris 137). Bissell poetically unpacks the image of Lucretia. “No wound yet marring her flesh nor blood tinging her weapon, she teeters on a bed of turbulent drapery, trussed by her shift and gripped by psychic anxiety” (Bissell 11). The undamaged flesh maintains a specifically sexual image not yet marred by the didacticism of her suicide; that her trussed shift is evidence of a dramatic or performative invocation, as is her “psychic anxiety”, which I suggest may also be interpreted as sexual ecstasy. At least the image may have been unconsciously received that way.
Bissell specifically disagrees. “Although not devoid of sexual appeal, [Artemisia’s depictions of Lucretia, Judith] do not explicitly spur fantasies of sexual availability, nor does eroticism prevail over meaning. All of these women have minds” (Bissell 13). Here, I firmly disagree with Bissell. Juan Luis Vives’ works inherently recognize a female intelligence and I posit that, even in Renaissance Italy, it was part of the social dynamic of sexual attraction, even if it was ignored or unknown. The fact that these women have minds actually empowers the already sexualized images of them to spur sexual fantasies with greater potency.
Historians, feminists and aestheticists are unanimous in reporting that the expropriation of sex from women was celebrated in art of patriarchal Renaissance Italy. Geraldine A. Johnson, in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, outlines the public sensibility held by men towards nude female statuary. “[T]he focus of this chapter will be primarily on the responses of male viewers to female public statuary” (Johnson 223). Although Johnson is exclusive to public and sculpture, from her observations on the male reception of these artworks, we can extrapolate and idea of the general ideology and reception that would have inevitably informed their private reception in the domestic space. “These female figures, which derived from the Bible as well as from allegory and myth, elicited responses from contemporary viewers that ranged from devotion and admiration to suspicion and outright fear. Such a variety of reactions suggests that the meanings of such works could be ambiguous” (Johnson 222). Piety was not singular in its interpreted authority. Johnson describes the dismantling of pagan nude statues of Venus and Judith. “In both situations, public images of women – the one an alluring idol, the other a dangerously triumphant heroine – were believed by at least some male viewers to be the cause of civic misfortune” (Johnson 232). “[T]he Venus’s aesthetic beauty, which had initially caused the Sienese to lavish so much praise on the statue, was apparently not enough to prevent its subsequent talismanic dismemberment and disposal” (Johnson 233). Clearly the sculpted images were perceived as sexual, so much so that they were dangerous!
Johnson quotes the words of “an early seventeenth-century visitor who observed that “in Florence women are more enclosed than in any other part of Italy; they see the world only from the small openings in their windows”” (Johnson 234). If the Lucretia was indeed housed in Florence, and women lived such tyrannically domestic lives, what motive would there be to adorn the domestic space with such a lascivious depiction as the Lucretia? In describing Giambologna’s sculpture, The Rape of Sabine, Johnson states, “Like the figure of Perseus, who proudly presents the head of Medusa, the young Roman man who abducts the Sabine woman demonstrates his power and virility by literally holding up a conquered female body as his trophy (Johnson 240). “According to Borghini, the abduction of the Sabines marked the historic beginnings of the institution of marriage in the Italian peninsula, an institution that was seemingly based from the start on men’s violent oppression of the opposite sex” (Johnson 241/42). As she proceeds to describe the male ideology, Johnson suggests that the entire professional identity of men may have been predicated on their domination of women. “This conclusion is telling, for it clearly links female sexual subjugation not only to the institution of marriage, but also to success in the wider historical political arena” (Johnson 243). Admittedly, there are differences in the reception and perception of a painting in the domestic space as compared against public statuary, but the male ego tied up with a need to sexually conquer women as Johnson describes it and the sensuality and nudity of an image would certainly not have been neutralized in the domestic space.
Moving from broad public male perception to focus more on erotic painting, Linda Wolk-Simon surveys Rapture to the Greedy Eyes: Profane Love in the Renaissance in which she identifies a “base lust […] that the vision of a naked goddess had the power to incite” (Bayer 48). In her article she offers a graphic of Giulio Romano’s Two Lovers (image 5). Both the presence of the voyeur at the door, and their positioning on the bed is very similar to Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia (image 6). Even more striking is Romano’s Olympia is Seduced by Jupiter (image 7). The image of the two lovers is overtly sexual. Audiences could not have been able to overlook the bold similarity in other depictions of Lucretia. Johnson argues that “the seductiveness of the female form [was] implicitly linked in texts and images throughout medieval and early modern Europe” (Johnson 232). In this way, similar images informed the myth, which in turn informed other images, like Gentileschi’s, in a cycle of mythical-sexual reciprocity.
Based on the impossibility of painting from certain postures and the availability of mirrors, Harris argues that “Artemisia must have had a model and the model must have posed for her away from Orazio’s studio with its male comings and goings” (Harris 143). Turner argues that though “the Platonist Ficino taught that lovers should communicate through gazing alone, he recognized that the soul imprints images while men and women are “making babies”, and describes eyesight in quite sexual terms: a stream of “sanguine spirits” penetrates the heart like sperm” (Turner 179). However, the image that exemplifies this sexual gaze provided by Turner is a ca. 1523-24 painting called Diana Transforming Actaeon into a Stag which depicts the naked goddess gazing into the eyes of the naked woman. These three ideas (Artemisia as a female artist imbued with sexuality, the sexualized myth of Lucretia, and the feminine sexual gaze) converge and lend themselves to a lusty image of the male patron of Gentileschi’s Lucretia lasciviously fantasizing about Artemisia gazing steadily at the nudity of her model and further impregnate the image with a sexual narrative.
Conflating Artemisia’s reputation with the sexually ambiguous narrative of the myth and the sensuality of the image itself, we reach a point of intersection that cannot deny the sexuality of the image beyond its mere aesthetics. Bissell even suggests that Artemisia may have taken professional advantage of her compromised reputation and the meaning she knew would be attached to her art. Orazio’s “daughter’s now public vulnerability began to be exploited” (Bissell 18). “[T]he conception of Artemisia Gentileschi as a woman of dubious rectitude […] was to have an effect on the nature of the commissions she was awarded and upon how her pictures were to be received” (Bissell 18). Men surely viewed the Lucretia as sexualized.
But who were these men? Patronage data surrounding the Lucretia is scant. Bissell places the Lucretia in Venice in 1627 and suggests “Gianfrancesco Loredan, famous-surnamed literary man-about-Venice” as “the patron of the Lucretia and the Susanna” (Bissell 42). What Bissell lays down as fact is that “Gentileschi supplied paintings to rulers” (Bissell 42). It is well documented that male members of the ruling elite were substantially bolder in their sexual conquests and rakishness, almost to the point of pride. In light of Johnson’s suggestion of rape and sexuality being a matter of male ego, Tarquinius may well have been their secret hero.
Feminist theory has been preoccupied with the expropriation of sex from women by men. We learn from Juan Luis Vives’ works that the reputation of chastity and piety was paramount for women. His treatise, On the Education of the Christian Woman delineates the role of the woman into stages of her life entirely in relation to the husband: the first anticipating her marriage and remaining chaste, the second describing her marriage and role as a wife, and the third outlining appropriate Christian behaviour for the widow. Vives, quoting the words of Paul, describes the first two of these phases in the following way. "Unmarried women are occupied with things that pertain to the lord, how they may please him; married women are concerned with the things of the world, how to please their spouse". He states that a “married woman ought to be of greater chastity than an unmarried. For if that thou then pollute and defile thy chastity, as God forbid thou shouldest, hark, I pray thee, how many thou shalt offend and displease at once with one wicked deed” (Kaplan 324). His work is an openly didactic piece that is designed to put forth a Christian paradigm of the perfectly educated woman and her exemplary behaviour. Inherent to the text are examples of behaviour that must have been common enough to merit chastisement and remediation. Goldthwaite suggests that the Renaissance domestic space was social and professional to the point of being public. Therefore, there would be a real need for women to be covert in their sexuality.
In her article entitled, Toys for Girls: Objects, Women and Memory in the Renaissance Household, Marta Ajmar states her thesis clearly. "I shall attempt to show that [Renaissance women and domestic objects] informed each other and that they were mutually influenced by their individual changes of status" (Ajmar 76). Ajmar goes on to introduce both theoretical and artefactual evidence to give voice to the often-silenced role, authority, and vested interest women had in domestic art and objects. She points out that the "'ideology' of domesticity has traditionally associated the 'domestic woman' with values imposed by men, with a 'passive feminine conformity'" (Ajmar 80). She immediately challenges the dogma by asking, "Is Margherita's reaction, as depicted by Vasari, just a projection of the male Florentine writer, determined to depict her as a worthy example of civic pride, or should we take at face value her emotional involvement in something in which she does not possess? And if so, why?" (Ajmar 77). Ajmar offers answers in the rhetoric of her following question. "Was it for reasons of family pride, personal virtue or 'professional' identity, as a housewife?" (Ajmar 77). "During the sixteenth century I would like to suggest, domestic memory was constructed along increasingly matriarchal lines" (Ajmar 78). In this way the role in object-display that women may have needed to disguise in their patriarchal abjection is perfectly served in Gentileschi's Lucretia. It represents the style and taste of refined Baroque art and superficially invokes the notion of high virtue in a sensual image of a woman (both of which would appeal to the male mind) while simultaneously, and perhaps covertly, invoking meaning surrounding the strength of women on behalf of the household matriarch.
The didacticism intended by the patriarchal society is ostensibly reflected in treatises that "promoted an image of the mulier economica - the housewife - as someone who was in charge of the moral and material identity of the household" (Ajmar 83). "[T]he house was therefore proactive in creating and fulfilling the demand for a new 'professional' figure: the housewife" (Ajmar 87). When examined against other research into the symbolic meaning and deployment of space and objects within the domestic space, a more complete view of its potential meaning, especially within a potentially domestic space, takes on broader possibilities. Judith Butler argues that women voluntarily participate in the social ritual of their culture. There is no evidence to suggest that women did not wholly concur with Vives’ views and welcome the conquest sexuality of their male counterparts. Beds stood in public areas of the house and sleeping occurred simultaneously with social activities which included individuals outside of the family. Given the notion of women as professionals within the domestic space who informed and had agency in that region, participation in the sexual ritual, and a social need to hide sexuality behind piety, it seems very likely that women would be complicit with men in the sexual interpretation of the image.
So powerfully imbued with sexuality, it is inevitable that the Lucretia defined whatever space in which it was housed. The University of Victoria DIDO database lists the Lucretia painting as having dimensions measuring 137 x 130 cm. Certainly that is sizeable enough to overpower pithy images on spalliere and cassone, and to contend with other larger paintings within a space. In Richard Goldthwaite’s Wealth and Demand for the Art in Italy 1300-1600, he describes how the earlier years of this Renaissance period suggest a domestic decor that included the patriarchal chamber as “the intimate core of the household” around which the entire space was organized (Goldthwaite 225). The space was multi-functional with most furniture and valuables concentrated there while the rest of the house was “sparsely furnished” (Goldthwaite 225). Even more interesting, for a culture stereotypified by its rich and lavish baroque renaissance art, is the fact that the “typology of furniture does not extend beyond basic functions of eating, sitting, sleeping and storage (Goldthwaite 225). Finally, the evolution of these household goods brought about interesting cultural corollaries. “[G]oods evolved into more complicated forms” (Goldthwaite 225). These more complicated forms resulted in the redefinition of the household spaces in which they were housed.
While “commerce was seen to have infected nearly every aspect of modern life, the realm of art was deemed free of its contagion” (Bermingham 5). At least it was free to maintain sexual meaning in the new household of the young married couple. In Hareven’s article The Home and Family in Historical Perspective, the “nuclear household structure has predominated in England and Italy since the twelfth century” (Hareven). Two major social characteristics of these archaic homes were that marriage “meant the establishment of a separate household by the new couple” and that the space served for domestic activities such as eating, sleeping and childrearing, as well as more social functions such as production, welfare agency, correctional institution and religious worship.
In Mary Douglas’ article, The Idea of Home a Kind of Space, she suggests that “home starts by bringing some space under control.” “[T]he home is the realization of ideas.” She focuses on art in the house and how it interacts with the perception of time and space. In Henri Lefebvre’s article The Production of Space, he describes the sociological notion of space as being “produced” rather than merely appropriated and filled with things (Lefebvre). He considers that “If space is a product [...] The ‘object’ of interest must be expected to shift from things in space to the actual production of space” (Lefebvre). He admits that in certain historical era/economic dichotomies, “the active groups did not ‘produce’ space in the sense in which a vase, a piece of furniture, a house, or a fruit tree is produced” but that space is produced in a less tangible and more perception-based way (Lefebvre).
In The Madonna and Child, a host of saints, and domestic devotion in Renaissance Florence, Jacqueline Musacchio states that "Dominici discussed what he considered the only justification for having art in the home: to aid in the education of children" (Musacchio 147). In the passage that follows she lists examples of art for that purpose. What is obviously lacking is the inclusion of pagan icons, or any of the images that might have the suspect sexuality so obvious in the depictions of Lucretia. Dominici did not include Lucretia in what he deemed suitable for children. Furthermore, Musacchio notes, "many of the paintings and sculptures associated with the domestic environment had intimate iconography” (Musacchio). When she notes that "the estate of Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici contained seven Madonna images as well as nine other sacred paintings and sculpture", the reader cannot help but be inclined to ask what these 'others' were (Musacchio 149). Were any of them pagan icons? Might any of them have been Lucretia? If such is the case, and Lucretia was not considered appropriate for children, then what iconographic purpose could such an image have had? The inherent sensuality of Lucretia’s likeness is the only verifiable evidence. "As Kent Lydecker has observed, marriage prompted extensive purchases of all types of domestic art to outfit the personal chamber" (Musacchio 148). Not only does this statement relate to the accoutrements of marriage and marital gifts discussed in Randolph's article, it is reasonable to assume that the "personal chamber" may include some more sexualized images like that of Lucretia: "Marriage [...] focused attention on the continuation of the lineage through the conception [...] of children" (148). Once again, marriage and conception are linked through art for the bedchamber.
In James Grantham Turner’s article entitled Profane Love: The Challenge of Sexuality, he quotes Leonardo da Vinci as saying, “Painting moves the senses more readily than poetry does. . . . Painters have depicted libidinous acts, so lustful that they have incited the spectators to play the same party game” (Bayer 178). In Ian Woodward's The Material as Culture, he provides examples of "how apparently inanimate things within the environment act on people and are acted on by people, for the purposes of carrying out social functions, regulating social relations and giving symbolic meaning to human activity" (Woodward 3). Any room decorated with Gentileschi’s Lucretia would be overpowered by its sexual message and the energy, or at least the purpose of the room would be clear. According to da Vinci, the call to action would be equally clear.
In Bill Brown's article Thing Theory, he introduces the idea of “actants”, objects designed to perform some human function on behalf of humans. Although he is referring specifically to objects such as cellular telephones that conduct some specific action, if we consider that art defines a space, surely it must perform some semiotic function on behalf of the human occupants "They are questions that ask not whether things are but what work they perform" (Brown 142). The work of an image to prompt sexual interaction is globally ubiquitous.
Bissell describes four of Artemisia’s paintings as “marked by a heightened theatricality, of which a new conception of the viewer-painting relationship is the first indisputable sign” (Bissell 69). Although these four postdate the Lucretia and Bissell does not include it amongst them, I suggest that it was an obvious progenitor to this recognizable characteristic. Theatricality is already apparent in Gentileschi’s image of Lucretia and is preceded and proceeded by a theatrical history of the myth’s presentation. “The viewer now becomes the member of an audience, rather than someone who finds him/herself confronted one-on-one with reality” (Bissell 70). Bissell is careful to include both male and female viewers. Where it might seem that the intimacy of one-on-one sexuality is compromised by the perception of a larger audience, it is important to note that the audience perception was not tangible. In Artemisia’s work, “human drama is reduced to the core and presented close up, where idealization is rejected in favour of truth, where frankness counts more than beauty” (Bissell 10). The viewer took part with an absent audience in appreciating the art, but individuals were confronted by its sexual realism within the potentially intimate privacy of the space it defined. The perception of an audience by the viewer inherently suggests a theatricality which would have specifically resulted in a call for acting. The participation of the audience with the performer is a common tenet of theatrical performance.
In terms of the domestic space, Adrian Randolph’s position on the performance of the bridal body might be extended to that of the wife in general. His article follows a Marxist slant in an economic perspective that views marital gift-giving (especially of jewellery to women) as an equation that needs balancing. "[T]he exchange of women is a conversation between men and is the basis of all symbolic exchange". The article suggests that often a woman's only ability to balance the equation was by 'owing' her body to the marriage bed, and indeed how the system may have been biased in its design to require women to unconsciously recognize this debt and to ensure that it was in place. "I would like to question whether equilibrium was returned to this system of presentations or whether, instead, the balance was left skewed". "[T]he extralegal presentations to the bride from the bridegroom (and his family) functioned, unofficially, as a Maussian counter-gift, returning equilibrium to an unbalanced economy of exchange". "A gift results in a debt which must be repaid, repayment returning equilibrium to the system". "The mancia was a traditional payment made to the bride after consummation of the marriage [which] emphasized the conjugal pair and the sexual act". "The jewels functioned, too, in a symbolic sexual economy, one in which --despite the reciprocity of the Pauline notion of mutual corporeal authority of husband and wife -- the bride was sexually subjected". "In this Florentine 'potlatch' the bride loses. She cannot return the gifts; or rather, she pays for them with her body". The sensuality and iconography of Lucretia may have acted as a reminder to the wife of what is 'owed' to the husband: sexuality (in her suggestive posing and nudity), loyalty (in the invocation of her story), and morality (in the invocation of the requirement of death (or suicide) if another man enjoys her sexually, which is a debt of ownership belonging to the husband).
Ajmar outlines “new possibilities for the interpretation and meaning that […] objects may have represented”. In this way, exciting new meaning may be interpolated into Gentileschi’s Lucretia. Theory and fact conflate to present an undeniably sexualized depiction of the Lucretia. The public nature of Artemisia’s trial and the sexual stigma which was attached to her reputation are largely accepted as historical truth. Changing Renaissance perceptions of the Lucretia myth further impregnated the painting with sexual meaning that was amplified by dramatic coincidences with Gentileschi’s life. The sexual sensibilities of men and their inevitable perception of the painting must have been seconded by a complicit female population participating in the sexual culture. The definition of space, call to action of the painting, and motivating nature of sexual images would all have worked in concert to define a space endowed with the Lucretia as highly erotic and called to action the sexuality that a wife owed her husband.


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The Question is the Question

David Christopher
THEA 500
Dr. J. Wise
December 2009

From Provenance to Bardolatry: A Survey of the Motives for the Authorship Question.

Dozens of papers and books have been written on the subject of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Calling into question the probability or even the possibility of the man named Shakespeare being the true author, 'anti-stratfordians' have made the case for such authorship candidates as Christopher Marlowe, Sir Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth I, and Edward de Vere the Earl of Oxford. The body of evidence supporting Shakespeare's authorship is convincing but not conclusive and the question continues to produce passionate responses from both pro- and anti-Shakespearean supporters. The doubter’s motives within the ongoing debate have only been explored incidentally as a function of discrediting the argument against Shakespeare. If the answer to the question is unprovable, why has it continued to be asked? The Shakespeare Authorship Question has been motivated by elitist sensibilities, personal ambition, academic insecurity, and a form of worship called bardolatry.
In her lectures at the University of Victoria, Dr. Jennifer Wise insists that Shakespeare wrote the texts. Yet, she concedes that “[m]any scholarly scandals have emerged out of a lack of due diligence in determining authentic external criteria” (Wise). In Nina Baym's 1996 article in the New England Quarterly, entitled History's Odd Woman Out, Baym had already agreed with Wise regarding Delia Bacon, the first author to become infamous for her anti-stratfordian text. Baym finds fault with Delia Bacon's naive belief that good interpretation could substitute for historical research and reveals a pattern of personal ambition couched in political beliefs she felt she could foster under the banner of Shakespeare's plays. In his preface to Delia Bacon's book, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, Nathanial Hawthorne states that “External evidence, of course, will not be wanting; there will be enough and to spare, if the demonstration here be correct” (The Philosophy 7). Hawthorne's insecurity regarding the correctness of the demonstration was well founded. Baym points out that Delia Bacon's 'research' was seriously lacking in external evidence, and was based almost exclusively on a political interpretation of Shakespeare's original texts. Baym quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne's description of Delia Bacon's “magnum opus, The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays Unfolded” as a text which “fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public and [which] has never been picked up” (Baym 223). Sadly, for Delia Bacon, Hawthorne's contention proved untrue. The text was picked up by many critics as a paradigm example of the ulterior motives and poor scholarship which they found characteristic of the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
Baym’s article is effused with the ulterior motives ascribed to a somewhat troubled mind. Nevertheless, Baym tries to paint a picture of Delia Bacon not so heavily coloured by her later insanity and her attempts to posit Francis Bacon as the candidate for Shakespearean authorship. In the essay, Baym depicts a woman afflicted by a string of publication failures and with a deep need to prove herself academically and acquire “the approval of the people whose applause she coveted” (Baym 224). “These dreams were significantly underwritten by her conviction that she was a genius” (Baym 226) and “an ambition to excel in literature that it was bound to frustrate and an eventual belief in her own divine mission” (Baym 224). Unfortunately, she failed utterly. “Delia Bacon’s [...] repeated attempts to forge a literary career were just as repeatedly rebuffed during her lifetime” (Baym 223).
It is easy to ascribe questionable ulterior motives to Delia Bacon. Her family was suffering from social and financial slippage. They “had slid far down the social scale” (Baym 225). “Restoring Francis Bacon to his imagined place at the forefront of historical progress, Delia Bacon laid claim to a similar place for herself in her own time” (Baym 248). One might be inclined to interpret a personal ambition to elevate her family name by appropriating the glory of Shakespeare on to her descendants. Trosman quotes “Jones” - in the theory of Delia Bacon, [who] “suspected a vested interest” based on the coincidence of her name with Francis Bacon’s (Trosman 475). If Baym is to be taken at her word, then Delia Bacon sought the most likely candidate for a popular response as a topic for her “opus” to fulfill her dream of critical acclaim.
Hawthorne also says that Bacon “chose her readings over her religion - indeed, she made her readings into her religion. Shakespeare's plays as she read them were nothing less than a new gospel which she had been appointed to make known” (Baym 225). In her article, Print Culture as an Archive of Dissent: Or, Delia Bacon and the Case of the Missing Hamlet, Glazener commends Bacon’s rhetorical attack of Shakespeare worship. “Bacon’s debunking of Shakespearian hagiography was astute” (Glazener 3). Bacon sarcastically takes on the voice of those loyal to Shakespeare who had come to fully identify their British culture with him. “If you dissolve him do you not dissolve us with him? If you take him to pieces, do you not undo us also?” (An Inquiry 5). What Glazener fails to recognize is that Bacon was equally guilty. Baym indicates that in Bacon's mind, Shakespeare's plays “implied the perfection of the deity, who was the cause of it all” (Baym 236). Baym is unclear whether she ascribes Shakespeare or God as the cause inspiration but clearly, Baym locates Delia Bacon squarely in the arena of religious worship of Shakespeare's texts.
In Bacon’s own 1856 article in Putnam’s Magazine, William Shakespeare and his Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them, she deploys a religious language to describe the author and his texts. She calls the author “superhuman genius” (An Inquiry 3), “enthroned king of thought” (An Inquiry 4), and “master spirit” (An Inquiry 5). She refers to his texts as “miraculous inspiration” (An Inquiry 5) and “the monuments of a genius” (An Inquiry 1). She even suggests a similarity between the mysterious life of Jesus and the bard. Like Jesus, she notes that Shakespeare left us with only a text for our greatest critics (she names Pope and Johnson) “to waste their golden hours, year after year, in groping after and guessing out his hidden meanings” (An Inquiry 7). Her language becomes increasingly biblical. “He, at whose feet all men else are proud to sit” (An Inquiry 8), “whose name is, of mortal names, the most awe-inspiring” and who has “the blood of a new Adam bubbling in his veins” (An Inquiry 9). Bacon was attempting to suggest that Shakespeare worship had been the cause of unquestioning loyalty to the myth of the man as it stood. However, the language she uses is one of complicity and in so doing she reveals her own worship of the texts and a deeper need to reconcile their worship with a worthy author-god.
Glazener claims that Bacon “got the authorship wrong partly because of her elitist prejudices” (Glazener 3), but in her need to reconcile the author-god with the texts she worshipped, Delia Bacon was guilty of severe elitism. Bacon boldly refers to the man from Stratford as “that wretched player” (An Inquiry 14) and “a stupid, ignorant, illiterate, third-rate play-actor” (An Inquiry 19). Bacon suggests that it would be impossible to fully appreciate the glory of his text if we are confined in our thinking to define the author as this “vulgar, illiterate man” (An Inquiry 13). “[H]ow could any one dare to see what is really in [the texts]?” (An Inquiry 13). To mitigate these claims, she attempts to soothe readers with words obviously intended to garner complicity. She states that “we all know that to the last hour of his life, this fellow cared never a farthing for [the plays], but only for his gains at their hands” (An Inquiry 4). What “we all know” is not indisputable. In her book, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time, Knutson describes commercial motives in the Elizabethan era and claims that “the exigencies of making a living” fostered “company affiliation” rather than the popular notion of quarrelling theatre companies (Knutson 39). These exigencies may well have been the primary motivation of Shakespeare’s muse, as unappealing and unpoetic as that may seem. In her reasoning, Bacon requires Shakespeare to be more poetically god-like in his knowledge. She assumes Shakespeare’s behaviour based on knowledge he could not have had. Considering Hamlet’s speech to the players advising them on their performing, Bacon claims that Shakespeare “would, at least, know enough of the value of his own works to avail himself of the printing press, for their preservation” (An Inquiry 6). In order for this statement to be true, Shakespeare would have had to pursue a printing practice entirely uncommon for commercial playwrights, anticipate the date of his own death, and the canonized status his texts would attain.
In her elitism, Bacon attempts to gain the complicity of her reader. Calling on a sense of civic pride, she refers to Shakespeare as “our” poet and his loss as a loss to “us” (An Inquiry 5). She uses the genitive “her” to describe the British Isle’s ownership of the poet (An Inquiry 12). She was setting the stage for her imminent book release and attempting to establish a sensibility that the man from Stratford is a ridiculous candidate that is both anti-critical and anti-British to accept. But she doesn’t stop there. She goes on to claim that “there were men in England, in the age of Elizabeth, who had mastered the Greek and Roman history” (An Inquiry 16). Although she never submits a candidate in this article, her book, which came out the following year focuses exclusively on Francis Bacon as her champion.
Delia Bacon suffered from a need to reconcile her religious worship of the texts with a candidate that satisfied her sensibilities. She reiterates a need to discover, on behalf of Shakespeare’s texts, their “sources, beginning and end – for the modern critic, that is surely now the question” (An Inquiry 1). But her fanatical 582-page volume is almost entirely void of any verifiable research. Her endless poetic musings emulate Shakespeare more than debunk him. Much to Bacon’s chagrin, Hawthorne rationalizes the inconclusive nature of Bacon's book in its preface. He states that “the author of the discovery was not willing to rob the world of this great question; but wished rather to share with it the benefit which the true solution of the Problem offers - the solution prescribed by those who propounded it to the future” (An Inquiry 7). Inherent to his statements is both the admission that the “solution” provided by Delia Bacon requires further research, and that the entire value of Bacon's book is to continue the life of the question.
Bacon was also strongly motivated by a need to make a critical name for herself, and to demonstrate her genius, which required her to maintain some mystery about her answer to the question: “here in this daylight of our modern criticism, in its noontide glare, has he not contrived to hide himself in the profoundest depths of that stuff that myths are made of?” (An Inquiry 4). Baym suggests that “Bacon became quite secretive about her ideas - not because she doubted them but because she was afraid of being scooped” (Baym 238). Her fear of losing her claim to Shakespeare was an ulterior motive she shared with Mr. Thomas Looney.
Thomas Looney wrote a 536-page volume entitled Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere. Admittedly, a man with such a moniker is truly dedicated to take a position that has resulted in his name being identified as both “unfortunate” and “significant” (McRea, Lester, Hurst). As with Delia Bacon’s book, the sheer volume of the text indicates a fanatical obsession with proving Edward de Vere was the man responsible for the plays that we ascribe to Shakespeare. Almost every scholar that mentions the case for Edward de Vere since the publication of Looney's book identifies it as the definitive text on the subject. Criticism has taken aim at Looney’s arguments and evidence. However, it appears that no-one has bothered to examine the text specifically in an effort to justify his dedicated motivation.
In the preface of the book, there are subtle indications of his personal ambition that are similar to Delia Bacon’s ‘scoop’. He eagerly states that “steps had to be taken to ensure that the results achieved should not be lost, and also to safeguard what I believed to be my priority of discovery”. The “results” he refers to represent the investment of research he had made and dedicated to producing his lengthy text. Even more obvious is his self-protectionism. Like a school-boy with a precious secret or a competing inventor rushing to the patent office with some new idea, he is evidently eager to reveal his “discovery” as quickly as possible in order to protect his “priority” before it is credited to someone else. Like Delia Bacon’s argument for Francis Bacon, Looney’s desire to posit Edward de Vere as the real author comes two hundred years after his death. Looney’s motives can only be ascribed to personal ambition and not some noble quest to champion the poor unaccredited Earl of Oxford.
Looney also demonstrates a Freudian insecurity in his attempts at self-validation. He begins his book with a short 'dedication' which is actually a list of people whom he has convinced, complete with their inscrutable academic accreditation, against an active admission that many might not be. He posits the “complete acceptance of my solution” by his “brother-in-law, Mr. M. Gompertz, B.A., Head Master of the County High School, Leystone” and to one “Mr. W. T. Thorn” (Looney 5). He lists the publisher, a “Mr. Cecil Palmer” as having “adopted its conclusions with enthusiasm” (Looney 5-6). Looney then states that he has “not the slightest doubt” as to the success of his plans to prove Oxford the author. His voice, however, reads as not much but self-assurance against an insecurity about which he notes it will be “another matter” to “present the case as to establish an equally strong conviction in the minds of others” (Looney 17).
Looney’s new candidate represents a recurrence of elitist thinking so evident with Delia Bacon. The entire argument is imbued with a strong desire for Shakespeare to be more than a mere peasant. The only reasonable basis for this desire is that it is uncomfortable that a low-bred candidate be the locus of worship and genius. Unfortunately, as with all the arguments founded on this discomfort, Looney's book relies heavily on conjecture and evidence of what is not there as 'proof'. The lack of evidence regarding Shakespeare is tantamount to the lacking evidence for all Elizabethan writers, with the exception of Ben Jonson who was a man “much concerned with his historical reputation and took efforts to make his memory known” (Trosman 487). What is left, then, are the fantastical desires to make a normal life of reasonable explanation legendary to align with the worship his texts have projected on to the man.
In Roland Barthes' text The Death of the Author, he refers to the misconception of the “Author-God” (Leitch 1468). Theories posited by Barthes' and Foucault were amongst several in the critical discourse of the twentieth century that threatened to marginalize the importance of the author. The fanatical backlash was inevitable. When generations had come to worship the idea of the author Shakespeare, the threat to his divine position called for nothing shy of open revolt. Ironically, by taking part in this very discourse to try and discredit Shakespeare, the anti-Stratfordians achieved two results against the death of the author. First, they demonstrated the very problem Barthes was observing, that the importance of the author is not central. Anti-Stratfordians were simply displacing authorship into another candidate. Secondly, that by questioning Shakespeare, they ensured his continued relevance within the new critical framework. So much for the death of the author.
The name of the author thus works to confuse the texts with the person. Roland Barthes notes that “The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the man. [...] The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it” (Leitch 1466). Foucault expands the discourse and states that “a number of texts were attached to a single name [which] implies that relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentification, or of common utilization were established amongst them. Finally, the author's name characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse” (Leitch 1627). Al Pacino, in his movie, Looking for Richard, demonstrates this use of the name of the author. He states, “It has always been a dream of mine to share with others how I feel about Shakespeare” (Pacino 11:39). However, there is nothing in the movie to even hint that Pacino has any knowledge of the man named Shakespeare at all. The movie focuses on the thrilling process surrounding the decoding of Shakespeare’s text Richard III in anticipation of staging it. Clearly, Pacino uses the word Shakespeare to refer to the works ascribed to that man. The name ‘Shakespeare’ is therefore an idea which ostensibly refers to a man but effectively refers to a specific canon of texts in a specific era in a specific cultural setting ascribed to the genius of one man.
Looney conveniently overlooks the impossibility of his own claim and the agency given to the idea of authorship. The name Shakespeare, whether accurate or not, cannot simply be erased from a worshipped canon of texts. Foucault quite accurately hypothesizes that “[d]iscourse that possesses an author's name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten” (Leitch 1627). Even in the event that Looney's 'proof' were conclusive to the point of being undisputable, it would inevitably result in the name of Oxford being transferred into the idea of Shakespeare and not the name of Shakespeare being universally replaced with that of Oxford. Prince became the-artist-formerly-known-as-Prince as would Edward de Vere become the Earl formerly known as Shakespeare. Looney attempts to address this problem with modesty. “[I]t will be impossible ever totally to dissociate from the work and personality of the great one, the figure and name of his helper” (Trosman 486). His modesty, however, is only overshadowed by the obvious fact that his 'definitive volume' has done little to prove anything, but has successfully injected his own name into the history of the Shakespeare myth for all time.
One need not even read his exhaustively detailed academic arguments on Oxford's behalf to discover hidden motive in his publication. In his introduction he self-aggrandizes and fantasizes about a legendary contribution to the literary canon of critical works. “The transference of honour of writing the immortal Shakespeare dramas from one man to another, if definitely effected, becomes not merely a national or contemporary event, but a world event of permanent importance, destined to leave a mark as enduring as human literature and the human race itself” (Looney 13). At some point, Looney seems to have confused the act of ascribing Shakespeare's work to another man with the discovery of fire. The remainder of the introduction reads like the false-modest musings of a man who has volunteered to take on the most momentous self-sacrificing literary excursion that has ever been undertaken. He proposes that the “greater responsibility had to be incurred” (Looney 14) and that if he can see the “truth prevail”, he “shall be content” (Looney 6). Looney uses epic poetic language such as “judgment” and “imperil” as he fully envisions himself being sacrificed to the critical gods and that “he is bound to implicate himself so deeply as to stake publicly his reputation for sane and sober judgment, and thus to imperil the credit of his opinion on every other subject” (Looney 13). At least he got that right.
Thomas Looney and Delia Bacon are both easy targets out of which critics could make 'straw-men'. The coincidence of her actual insanity with his unfortunate name is rhetorically and emphatically repeated within the discourse. Each of the major candidates for alternate authorship, Bacon and Oxford, now had singular identifiable champions in Delia Bacon and Looney respectively. The ensuing criticism focused on weaknesses in their arguments, rather than original document proof and the question of Shakespeare's authorship moved even farther away from the source. The expected result is that the discourse would lose momentum, which is exactly what it did until Freud's loyalty to Looney's thesis caused a disruption in psychoanalytical theory that brought the question back to the discursive foreground.
In the newspaper article entitled, We’re Not a Lot of Mad People, Hurst quotes Freud as echoing both Looney and Bacon. “The man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything” (Hurst). Trosman quotes Freud in his 1930 Goethe Prize acceptance speech. Freud reports doubts that “the untutored son of a provincial citizen of Stratford” was the true author “or whether it was, rather, the nobly-born and highly cultivated, passionately wayward, to some extent declasse aristocrat, Edward de Vere, hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England” (Trosman 477). Three things are immediately obvious in this statement. First, that Freud had doubts. Second, that he considered de Vere as the only other acceptable candidate. Third, and most important, is the language which demonstrates a pre-occupation with Shakespeare's low-breeding and Edward de Vere's aristocracy, with particular mention of their father's stations in both cases. Freud becomes his own example of the oedipal complex. He is pre-occupied with the fathers of long-dead icons to the point of personal anxiety which he appears to need to resolve conclusively.
Freud is a problematic Pandora’s Box. He had partly used the life of William Shakespeare, specifically the death of his father and of his son Hamnet, to explain oedipal phenomena in Hamlet. In An Autobiographical Study, Trosman quotes Freud as having written “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet very soon after his father's death” (Trosman 478). Hamlet is the pivotal textual example that Freud employs in his Oedipal Theory. “The issue of the Shakespearean authorship controversy appears to be a long-standing unresolved preoccupation with doubts concerning rightful paternity” (Trosman 495). The 'fathership' of the texts, so to speak, was a locus of anxiety for Freud. “He responded to the poor historical documentation as a challenge to his psychological skill” (Trosman 479). As such, he seems guilty of a sort of oedipal bardolatry. Now, having convinced himself of another candidate, he needed to make the life of de Vere fit into his oedipal model, or abandon his life's work as evidentially flawed. Trosman reports that Freud transferred biographical evidence from de Vere's life into the model to replace the Shakespeare example. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, “he related Hamlet's Oedipus complex to the fact that the Earl of Oxford's father died when the presumed author was a boy and shortly thereafter his mother whom he repudiated remarried” (Trosman 479). Although this biographical coincidence is more similar to the story in the text of Hamlet, it is actually a less convincing argument for the Oedipal Theory as Freud presents it in the Oedipus Complex section of his The Interpretation of Dreams (Leitch 922-3). The coincidence of greater relevance, however, is Freud's actions of fatherly pre-occupation, especially projected into the lives of long-dead icons, and his transference of their biographies into his theory.
Looney uses Shakespeare's texts as a point of departure and in them makes efforts to provide evidence that what can be read as necessary biographical knowledge on the part of the author coincides most specifically with the life of Edward de Vere. The interpretation of text as a sort of psychological mystery to be solved was a method that must have appealed to Sigmund Freud (Trosman 493). It coincides with the methodology of psychoanalysis that Freud writes about in many of his texts, and its use of interpretation of text is highly reminiscent of the theory in The Interpretation of Dreams. “Jones observes of Freud that two of the great mysteries that had 'always perplexed him to distraction' were telepathy & the Shakespeare authorship controversy” (Lester 4 – footnotes). “Freud did not settle on any one claimant until 1923, when he was sixty-seven years old” (Trosman 475). Lester claims that “Mr. Looney's intervention therefore came as a welcome relief to him” (Lester 5 - column 2). In Looney's book, Freud had found a relief to his own longstanding oedipal anxiety, and a published practitioner of his methodology to soothe his ego further.
I found Lester's interpretation to be a little too convenient. But in his vein of thinking, I discovered that Freud's language sounds much like the rhetoric of a person trying to convince themselves of a convenient solution to an irksome problem, which they know to be otherwise untrue. In his Goethe prize speech, he demonstrates an awkward uncertainty. He uses the phrase “whether it was in fact” and “or whether it was rather” (Trosman 477). He follows both of these phrases with descriptions of the candidates aimed at questioning the one and propagating for the other. He includes the phrase “It is undeniably painful to all of us” in an attempt to gain complicity. Trosman quotes a 1930 letter to a German translator regarding the sonnets in which Freud says, “I am indeed almost convinced that none but this aristocrat was our Shakespeare” (Trosman 478). The phrase “almost convinced” resounds with uncertainty. In the 1935 second edition of An Autobiographical Study, he adds a footnote that repeats the phrase “almost convinced” of his belief in Edward de Vere. It all sounds like a man seeking to gain external support to alleviate the anxiety of his own doubt.
There is a clear pattern of anxiety amongst the anti-Stratfordians pertaining to evidence that is not there. Early in his book, Smith presents a one-page second chapter that insists “William Shakespeare is indeed a negative history” followed by three sentences about Shakespeare. Each begins with, “We do not know...” (Smith 2). Specifically Smith targets a suspicious lack of knowledge pertaining to Shakespeare’s birth, death, education, marriage, and dates of textual production. Delia Bacon and Thomas Looney are both guilty of academic anxiety based on what we do not know and what feels as though it is missing. They chose to reveal what they deemed ‘proof of identity’ based on their own interpretations of Shakespeare’s texts. Freud needed to relieve an oedipal anxiety that stemmed from a lack of information regarding the father-author-god.
Lester argues that “Realism” is the movement that has caused the question to remain. “There was as a consequence a quest - which was a prominent motive in the Shakespearean author-as-source debate - to re-write history & re-read literature in realist, & essentially 'consumerist' terms” (Lester 1 - column 1). “[W]ith it was enshrined a particular conception of 'the author' & his properties” (Lester 1 - column 1). Lester suggests that in examining the texts, many academics had a “need to apply to a concrete situation before their meaning can be securely determined” (Lester 2 - column 2). The concrete situation could be found in “the author whose genius lies behind [the text]” (Lester 2 - column 2). “References to knowledge or events or places or people [are] picked out from throughout the text & then the chosen candidate is shown to have known about or been at these things, known or been with these people” (Lester 2 – column 2). “This reductive criticism & detective quest that services it needs not only a source, the fixed author or fixity of authors, but a reason for the text” (Lester 4 - column 2). The texts are then a mere source for the detectives to construct a more plausible picture of the author as source” (Lester 3 - column 1). A pattern emerges in which, it appears, that many academic writers attempt to pin down a definitive identity for Shakespeare from which their academic integrity and authority on the subject is impervious to future re-evaluation. “Everything is locked into a safe place - the mystique of authorship, the consumerisation of readership, and language itself” (Lester 4 - column 2). Once the author is stable, the meaning of the texts could be “securely determined” and presented to students with confidence.
Lester also suggests that academics were aware that the “discourse of the Shakespeare authorship debate [was] regularly fortified by the multiplication of possible authorship candidates” (Lester 1 - column 1). He states that new candidates, enigmas, and interpretations were regularly emerging. The inability to locate the authorship definitively had a twofold effect on the academic community. Not only did it fortify the academic insecurity caused by a lack of authoritative Shakespearian evidence, it also ensured the ongoing production of academic text around a self-perpetuating question. “From the Freudian perspective it may be postulated that the literary detectives - most frustrated authors themselves - are trying to [...] atone for orthodoxy's literary parricide” (Lester 2 - column 2). Never in history has a single author garnered the passionate debate and published comment that Shakespeare has. Never before have texts been revered so wholly as to merit the debate.
Lester introduces bardolatry as both a source and a result of the ongoing debate. He sees amongst academics an “unquestioning, unproblematical worship of the accredited 'source' that has [...] helped provoke the excesses of the self-styled literary detectives” (Lester 1 - column 2). Lester draws a specific bridge between worshipping an author and the enigma that it inevitably creates. “We have what little we know of the supposed 'great author' - a gnawing & irritating enigma” (Lester 1 - column 2). In order to fill the void and satisfy the itching of the enigma, the “literary detectives [...] marshal all the biographic evidence for their particular candidate to the exclusion of all evidence to the contrary” (Lester 2 - column 1). Lester reiterates what he deems to be the fundamental rationale for the authorship debate. “The author cannot be the Stratford man because he could not have been literate enough” (Lester 2 - column 1). “The author of Shakespeare's works could not just be a country yokel or litigious bumkin or a ham actor from Stratford; he must, as it were, justify his consummate literary genius by his royalty or nobility” (Lester 2 - column 1 & 2). The words of academic writers are replete with comments regarding the desire to mould Shakespeare into the myth we would like him to be. Cyril Connoly states that “[e]verything we know about William Shakespeare contributes little or nothing to the image we should like to form of Europe's greatest writer” (McManaway 1). For anti-stratfordians, the perceived disparity between the Stratford man and the literary legend creates a problem already seen in the elitism of Bacon, Looney and Freud.
When one is seeking to establish a pattern of idolatry towards a literary 'god' it is difficult to overlook very obvious similarities with deeply entrenched religious myths. The similarities between the myth and enigma of Shakespeare and those of Jesus are too strong to ignore. Whereas Jesus was the character in the book associated with him (i.e. the New Testament), Shakespeare was the author of his texts. Nevertheless, those whom I accuse of bardolatry have been nothing if not guilty of attempting to locate Shakespeare in his texts. Looney himself states “The personality which seems to run through the pages of the drama I felt altogether out of relationship with what was taught of the reputed author and the ascertained facts of his career” (Looney 14). Finding the messiah within the text, or failing to, relegates the interpreter to one of two camps. With Jesus you either have faith or you are an atheist. Likewise, with Shakespeare you are either a 'Stratfordian' or an 'anti-Stratfordian', the heresy of those in the latter category becomes a matter of risible folly to those in the former and/or vice versa. Strong atheists find it necessary to disprove Jesus and have 'identified' a disparity between the man of Nazareth who was a mere carpenter and a deity who was crucified and resurrected. Similarly, anti-Stratfordians are loyal to an idea that the likely uneducated lower-class man from Stratford could not possibly be responsible for the literary genius that manifests itself in the Shakespearean texts. Ironically, atheists seem to take the route of requiring verifiable evidence before they will have faith whereas the Stratfordians need it to lose theirs. Nevertheless, I daresay that to atheists who feel it necessary to disprove Jesus as a messiah, Jesus has become as important to them as to those who believe. As such, they are guilty of a certain type of Jesus-worship themselves. Similarly, the identity of Shakespeare has become a locus of anxiety to both Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians alike and so I categorize them together under the same worship umbrella known as bardolatry.
Historically, bardolatry has been evident. Delia Bacon tipped her hand by using biblical, or at least religious, language. The magnitude of Looney’s research in order to locate the life of Oxford within the canon of Shakespeare's work must have been immense. Looney openly calls the texts “the immortal Shakespeare dramas” (Looney 13). Like Delia Bacon, he deems his exposure to Shakespeare’s texts to empower him to authoritatively question their provenance. “This continued familiarity with the contents of one play induced a peculiar sense of intimacy with the mind and disposition of its author and his outlook upon life” (Looney 13). Another obvious bardolator who has not questioned Shakespeare’s authorship is George Bernard Shaw. For a man who claimed to have despised Shakespeare, Shaw wrote exhaustively about the man and his works, almost to the exclusion of all other playwrights. Shaw proudly made personal comparisons to Shakespeare and staged a festival called Shak vs. Shav. The unsaid worship inherent in such exclusionary attention is textbook psychoanalytical repressed hero worship.
Presently, bardolatry is as pervasive as ever. In his documentary, Looking for Richard, filmed in the early 1990’s, Pacino makes several excursions to the streets to ask the ‘average’ person about their exposure to ‘Shakespeare’. He laments at one point that “no-one does!” (I.e. knows Shakespeare). The worship of the idea appears to have lost momentum in popular culture as ‘Shakespeare’ became more and more academically and artistically stigmatized. It appears that a fear of Shakespeare becoming less revered manifests itself in apparent bardolators. They seem to believe that if the texts are deemed too inaccessible for worship, refocusing on the man, via controversial questioning, will suffice. The texts and the man are confused under the idea of authorship posed by Foucault. Therefore, using either one as a focus of popular worship meets the needs of the bardolator.
Derek Jacobi makes use of the Shakespeare Authorship Question in an attempt to rejuvenate bardolatry for personal gain, and perhaps out of the fear of Shakespeare losing popularity. Sir Derek Jacobi has appeared in many film and stage productions of Shakespeare’s plays. His career is typically Shakespearean and he has associations with such famous Shakespeareans as Ian McKellan and Kenneth Branagh. His professional career was built on Shakespeare’s back so to speak. Recently Jacobi “unveiled a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” as to the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. Again, preoccupied with evidence that is not there, the “document says that there are no records that any William Shakespeare received payment or secured patronage for a writing” (Thespians). Rylance unveiled with Jacobi and is the former artistic director of the new Globe theatre in London. The article quotes him as saying, “You get more of a rise if you say Shakespeare didn’t write the work than if you say there isn’t a God” (Hurst). The word unveiled suggests intent for a public audience. Whether the play will be remounted remains to be seen, but the article intimates that “the attackers [who are] saying the dramatist was Somebody Else entirely or a Front Man for a group of writers, [are] all trying to make a living in the frantic world of Elizabethan theatre” (Hurst). Jacobi’s public unveiling suspiciously followed “the final matinee of “I am Shakespeare,” a play investigating the bard’s identity” (Thespians). Whether or not Jacobi cashes in on a remounting of the production remains to be seen. Either way, his ‘coming out’ on the authorship question was clearly part of the overall marketing for his production: an attempt to capitalize on the authorship question and the bardolatrous emotional reactions it creates.
Trosman refers to bardolatry as the “unqualified supremacy attached to the work” (Trosman 490). While Shakespeare's works are arguably superior, ultimately that is a matter of critical opinion and cultural perspective. But “Looney's reference to the dramatic work as the best in the English language is typical for the anti-Stratfordian point of view” (Trosman 490). Having been indoctrinated to revere his works, like atheists who find Jesus important, there falls out a need to reconcile the god with his miracles. Ultimately, all doubters appear guilty of this bardolatry in a Freudian style. The religious belief in the supremacy of the work is transferred to the author-god as its source and reconciliation must be made with the miracle of the text and the man-who-would-be-god who created them. The truth, however, is that the author-god responsible for their worship is only a projection from the minds of those who have become psychologically dependent on the legendary status ascribed to the man and a fanatical loyalty to the supremacy of the texts. However, the incredible quality of Shakespeare’s works is only miraculous to those who have chosen to worship. To the factual historian, they are acceptably attached to a mere man from Stratford.
What is not absolutely certain is that the man named William Shakespeare from Stratford wrote the plays. What is nearly conclusive is that the man who wrote the plays was named William Shakespeare. What is highly likely is that they are the same man. Arguments against this likelihood are all based on what is not known and what can be interpreted as biographical evidence within the texts. The little evidence we do have strongly favours the one man named Shakespeare and any position to the contrary is a losing argument. “William Leahy, […] is shortly to risk academic scorn, if not suicide, by convening the first-ever graduate course on the subject at London’s Brunel University” (Hurst). In surveying the most influential doubters of Shakespeare’s authorship, three distinct patterns emerge: personal ambition, academic insecurity, and the leviathan phenomenon of bardolatry in which stratfordians and anti-stratfordians alike have come to worship the text and choose to continue the debate so that Shakespeare never becomes stationary; to proliferate a state of perpetual controversy about which to continue the Shakespearian discourse.






Bibliography:

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Bacon, Delia Salter. “William Shakespeare and his Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them.”
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Fields, Bertram. “Did Shakespeare Really Write Those Plays?” Edmonton Journal Aug 7
2005: E.12.

Glazener, Nancy. “Print Culture as an Archive of Dissent: Or, Delia Bacon and the Case
of the Missing Hamlet.” American Literary History 19.2 (2007): 329-49.

Halliday, F. E. Shakespeare and His Critics. London: G. Duckworth, 1958.

Hurst, Lynda. “'We're Not a Lot of Mad People” We have Nothing Against the Man from
Stratford-upon-Avon, but ...'.” Toronto Star Sep 16 2007: ID.1.

Knutson, Roslyn Lander. Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time.
Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001.
Lester, Paul. The Author in Shakespeare. Birmingham: P. Lester, 1981.

Looney, J. Thomas. “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward De Vere, the Seventeenth Earl
of Oxford. London: C. Palmer, 1920.

McManaway, James Gilmer. The Authorship of Shakespeare. Washington, D.C: Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1962.

McCrea, Scott. The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question.
Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005.

Pacino, Al. Looking for Richard. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 1996

Parsons, John Denham. Sir Sidney Lee & Absolute Proof : Being the Case for an
Exhaustive Inquiry as to the Full Extent, and Correct Interpretation, of the Sub
Surface Signalling about the Poet Shakespeare shown by the Author's Four
Letters in the Athenaeum to have Come Down to Us on at Least One Page of the
First Folio. London: Published by the author, 1920.

The Shakespeare Controversy: A Digest of Comment in Recently Published Books on
Stratford and the Shakespeare Controversy. -----. London: Francis Carr
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Plays and Production of Shakespeare. [1st ed.] New York: Dutton, 1961.

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Touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth.
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“Thespians Challenge the Bard.” Prince George Citizen Sep 10 2007: 2.

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the American Psychoanalytic Association 13 (1965): 475-98.

Wise, Jennifer. Theatre 500: Methods and Materials of Theatre Research. University of
Victoria. Phoenix rm. 141, Victoria, BC. 19 November 2009. classroom lecture.

Evil is the Root of All Money

David Christopher
ENGL 521
Dr. Janelle Jenstad
December 2009

Homosocial Credit vs. Usury in the Age of Shakespeare

Elizabethan and Jacobean usury plays bear witness to an evolving sensibility regarding usury, money, and social relations. A survey of plays reveals a tendency to villainize the usurer in an increasingly comic way until he becomes a trope or stock character type void of any deep critical characterization. Framing the cycle of plays are The Merchant of Venice circa 1597 and A New Way to Pay Old Debts in 1625. These two plays present a higher level of tension or anxiety in the characterization and plight of the usurer in less comic terms than many contemporary plays. The monetary commerce of the usurer is polarized against a network of homosocial credit which the usurer is barred from entering in a binary opposition. There seems to be an anxiety that monetary increase poses a threat to the aristocratic birthright. If the exchange of money and social credit are closely followed in The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, and A New Way to Pay Old Debts, homosocial credit is aligned with virtue while monetary credit is depicted as a rising threat worthy of risibility or punishment.
The social and credit economy of early modern England was suffering from a lingering sensibility of the medieval guild. In his essay, Interpreting the market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England, Craig Muldrew states that “In general, early modern markets constituted a moral economy” (Muldrew 169). Furthermore, the biblical perspective of usury put it in direct conflict with an underlying moral sensibility.
Moral sensibilities were vast and various. Certainly the mercantile playing companies were dependent upon, and paid regular homage to an aristocratic benefactor clearly visible in the dedicatory epistles published at the beginning of most plays. These benefactors were almost certainly participants in the male-oriented homosocial economy of the gentry. It only makes sense then, that the all-male playing companies would portray any threat to the necessary social trade-trust in a negative light.
Muldrew clearly states that "The linguistic distinction between economic and social credit had not yet arisen" (Muldrew 177). They had not been distinguished because they were the same thing. As we see in the plays, there is no distinction made, in any example, between social credit and economic credit. Even the vile usurer Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta uses his reputation to secure credit at the beginning of the play. Economic and social credit function as a singular phenomenon within the mutually social and economic dynamics of the plays. Muldrew states, “Almost all … marketing and trade was done on credit” (Muldrew 171) and "to be a creditor in an economic sense still had a strong ethical meaning" (Muldrew 177). Both Shylock and Overreach have what were considered unethical motives: one to kill Antonio (an established member of the homosocial gentry), the other to exact interest and to purchase an elevated social station.
There is a negative stigma attached to the exchange of physical ‘cash’ (especially by usurers) that is reflected in the plays. “The amount of actual gold and silver currency in circulation in the early modern period was small, and full and direct payment in cash was unusual except in the smallest transactions, or in cases where the buyer’s credit was weak or unknown” (Muldrew 171). In Merchant, “Antonio's bond with Bassanio renders economic rationalization invisible. It is instead based in a quintessentially Christian ethos--one of faith rather than the cold logic of economic calculation" (Rich 28). Antonio's bond is only "constitutively economic" based on a social fraternity. Members see no exchange of money nor gain profit from a mutual member. Shylock depicts his offer of a bond to Antonio, after Antonio's otherwise deplorable treatment of Shylock, as the extension of friendship. Aside from the ethnic delineations that Shakespeare presents to classify Shylock as an 'other’, it is the offer of calculated cash, especially at interest, that bars Shylock from entering the network of friendship. By the end of the play he has replaced the debt of money with that of Antonio's flesh. However, where Bassanio desires the living flesh of Antonio's personality, Shylock wishes for the dead flesh of his person.
No money changes hands between Antonio and Bassanio. Antonio offers only his reputation. “Try what my credit can in Venice do” (1.1.179). He openly states that the credit he offers is based on a trust with his creditors and extended to Bassanio. “Where money is and I no question make / To have it of my trust or for my sake” (1.1.183). Are we to assume then that in the homosocial society in which they lived, there was no other place to turn for cash except the usurer? It is more likely that the usurer was introduced as a structural convenience for the plot to specifically explore the social/monetary dynamic and delineate the moneylender as a clear antagonist.
In The Merchant of Venice, much is made of Shylock’s Jewishness and it is flagged obviously in the play through both religious allusion and a contrast against Christianity. Conversely, in Englishmen for my Money, for example, which was staged in 1598, not much is made of the usurer Pisaro’s ethnicity and he is simply identified as a “Portingale“. Not only is Pisaro not a vividly identified ethnic other, he is simultaneously a merchant and a usurer. Evidently, the sensibility towards usury was evolving. Usury was slowly being integrated to the economy of the day even if it was excluded from the homosocial gentry’s sensibility of virtue. CHART – increasingly comic depictions:
Play: Date: Depiction of Usurer:
Three Ladies of London 1581 severely anti-usury
Jew of Malta 1592 horribly vile / just ending
Merchant of Venice 1596-7 locus of anxiety - ambiguously sympathetic
Englishmen for my Money 1598 comic trope / comic ending
Eastward Ho! 1605 highly comic trope
Trick to Catch the Old One 1605-7 comic trope / severe ending for usurer
Timon of Athens 1607-9 misanthrope against the gentry / gift-giving is obsolete / usury is peripheral
Hog Hath Lost His Pearl 1613 comic trope
A Woman Never Vex't 1614-15 almost irrelevant / severe ending for non-homosocial
Rule a Wife and Have a Wife 1624 comic trope / severe ending for usurer
A New Way to Pay Old Debts 1625 return to severe anti-usury / writing's on the wall for gentry
By the time Timon of Athens was staged circa 1609, a new set of observations had emerged as the homosocial order grappled with ongoing changes in the financial economy. Alcibiades represents perhaps the strongest evidence of homosocial credit. In the trial of his fellow soldier, he states, "I'll pawn my victories, all my honour to you / Upon his good returns" (3.6.80). He asks for no money to change hands but calls for a return of favour within the homosocial credit structure. He is willing to forfeit their debt to him for his worthy service. When he is denied, the fall of the city becomes imminent.
The homosocial brotherhood within the gentry needed usury and the system of friendship modified its rules to accommodate the new necessary evil. Timon editorializes severely on the decline and loss of the homosocial credit system, and its severe effect on those who still trust in it. Timon gave too much away within the system for free, while paying interest for it at the other end. Eventually, his debts overwhelmed his generosity. Timon ends up entirely removed from all society, having squandered his membership in both the internal system of generosity and the external system of usury, and he is never returned to it. Reflecting the changing social sensibility, Timon observes that a lack of money will surely get one kicked out of the homosocial brotherhood, but seeking money (in the form of charity), will not get you back in. Generosity within the brotherhood at a peer level is a tenet that only holds if it is not charitable.
John Jowett, in his article Middleton and Debt in Timon of Athens, focused on the "representations of money" as affected by collaborative authorship (Jowett 219). However, he incidentally provides some relevant comment to the argument at hand. "[T]he scenes Middleton wrote do not simply represent the networks of credit and trust that Muldrew describes; they show those networks in a disturbing state of collapse" (Jowett 219), which would be all the more reason for the homosocial gentry to react with defensive panic. A New Way to Pay Old Debts reflects a fear of financially purchasing membership into the gentry, a practice from which King James profited to offset his mounting debts.
As in Merchant, in Massinger’s A New Way, the rules of favour exchange exercised by Welborne within the homosocial order exclude cash. Often A New Way to Pay Old Debts is touted as a misnomer because the use of social credit by Welborne is actually an old methodology in a play that comes towards the end of the heightened usury discourse. By the time it was staged, however, the increasingly laissez-faire attitude to usury had those loyal to an archaic system feeling genuinely uncomfortable. Michael Neill, among several critics, touts A New Way to Pay Old Debts as the violently defensive manifestation of an author (Massinger) culturally and emotionally loyal to the hierarchy of the gentry. In his essay Massinger's Patriarchy: The Social Vision of A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Neill states that "Massinger, though he came of minor gentry, was born into service" (Neill 188). Ironically, Shakespeare seems to have worked his way into the gentry, but through hard sales of his stagecraft, not by usury (although a colleague has recently informed me that it is likely Shakespeare likely practiced usuty himself, it was not the means by which he entered the gentry, and only acts to strengthen my argument tha Shakespeare saw the usurer as more complicated than simply evil). If these two individuals take up the cause of the gentry, then clearly the sensibility of noble birthright and the proud arrogance assigned to hoarding your way in with usury was ubiquitous.
In A New Way, the boundary between the usurer and the honourable gentry is most boldly drawn. Welborne refuses the offers of money from Tapwell (if he becomes an overseer of the poor), Allworth, the Lady Allworth, and Marrall. He seems to refuse to enter the commerce of social credit, but remains within the context of charity and gentry delineated in Timon. The trajectory of charity can only go down the social hierarchy. Once this dynamic is compromised there is no hope of returning to the ostensibly superior homosocial order of the gentry. Overreach is clearly outside of it and willing to pawn his honour to avarice as a matter of religion.
Welborne shows patterns that are distinctly opposite to Timon. Where Timon gives all of his wealth away in generosity, it appears that Welborne lost it all in bad debts and drinking. Where Timon is refused credit in his hour of need, Welborne refuses charity in his. The delineation of social credit and financial credit in the play is specific. No money passes between peer members of the gentry.
But Muldrew claims that in the face of financial conflict, peers would step “in to solve differences and to keep the peace when loans were disputed or unpaid" (Muldrew 179). Muldrew provides reasons that Welborne could not accept charity. Muldrew specifically uses the word “solve”, and not the word ‘pay’. There is no evidence that paying a peer's debts was appropriate or a part of the understood homosocial order, at least not by giving them cash to do so – perhaps in cash on their behalf. In order to re-enter the homosocial economy, Welborne can allow his friends to help solve his insolvency but not with cash. It is obviously important to Massinger that Welborne remain a peer in his social standing with the aristocrats who will become his peers.
{Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta is another powerful example of the usurer’s inability to enter any homosocial order. After having acted against it by orchestrating the duel between Don Lodowick and Don Mathias, he attempts to create a bond between himself and Ithamore. However, like Shylock and Tubal in Merchant, they are denied the fruits of such a pact perhaps because they are Jews or usurers, but certainly because they are both avaricious and treacherous. As a depiction of usury, Barabas is problematic because he does not actually practice any usury in the play. He mentions, with villainous relish, the plight of those that have suffered at the hands of his interest, but these anecdotes represent the plot’s past. He is already evil at the beginning of the play because he is already a Jew and a usurer. Moreover, he is most certainly the lead character and the play seems to align more closely with Shakespeare’s Othello in this way. That is to say that both plays place an unforgivable villain in the lead role, both of whom are depicted as irrationally and irredeemably avaricious, jealous, and vile.}
These plays, especially A New Way preconceive a changing notion (which became a modern cliché) that borrowing from a friend will kill the friendship but from an enemy there is no love lost in the case of default. CLIP FROM I LOVE YOU MAN – Asks for a loan and it threatens their ‘bromance’. The homosocial rules of friendship are regulatory in maintaining its membership. Those who do not follow its tenets are excluded from it. For example, Overreach is "contemptuous of the obligations of friendship" (Neill 198).
'tis enough I keep
Greedy at my devotion: so he serve
My purposes, let him hang, or damn him, I care not.
Friendship is but a word (2.1.19)
Welborne further excludes Overreach from the homosocial order by accepting physical cash from him, locating them in a similar dynamic to that of Antonio and Shylock. As soon as money exchanges hands in the dynamic established to date, at least one of them must be excluded from the peerage.
In his essay Social Change and Philip Massinger, Alan Gross states that the birthright of the gentry was still viewed as a divine right ordained by God. Neill claims that "Welborne, whose only obvious "right" to the restoration of the fortune he has squandered is that indicated by his name: the birthright of the idealized "true gentry" of the play" (Neill 186). In contrast, Gross replies that "Massinger analyses the increasing power of the trading class as an outward manifestation of individual moral perversion" (Gross 329). Accordingly, Overreach is aligned with atheism and heresy. He states that "wisdom / That does prescribe us a well-govern'd life / And to do right to others, as ourselves, / I value not an atom" (2.1.23). He instructs his daughter to "Learn anything, / And from any creature that may make thee great; / From the devil himself" (3.2.120). In response, she characterizes him such: "[Y]ou could dispense / With your own honour; cast aside religion, / The hopes of heaven, or fear of hell" (3.2.129). Overreach admits "not the hate of all mankind here, / Nor the fear of what can fall hereafter, / Shall make me study aught but your advancement" (4.1.141). Lovell is therefore prompted to call him a "blasphemous beast" (4.1.152). The dynamic here seems to play into the canonization of true honour against purchased social station that the play represents.
Referring to Overreach, Neill states, "the glamour of his conspicuous consumption links him with Jonsonian anti-heroes like Volpone" (Neill 194). Here I think Neill has somewhat missed the mark. Neill quotes a speech from Furnace that he defines as admiration. I interpret the passage to be one of condemnation. Overreach's conspicuous consumption is actually an example of pride that borders on hubris, and there is no glamour attached to it by Massinger. Muldrew points out that mercantile profit was ubiquitous and acceptable as “profit was the benefit of good husbandry. Of course, as Tawney stressed, profit earned through usury, […] deceit or by other means directly harmful to others was condemned” (Muldrew 176). Overreach is guilty of all three: usury, deceit, and directly harming others. When Welborne uses deceit, he gains no profit but merely recoups his losses to start at a financial ‘zero-balance’ to begin regaining his honour. “Rising in the world, or ‘improvement’, was considered the moral reward of honest living and dealing” and profit that is “covetously hoarded” was condemned (Muldrew 176?). Again, Overreach is guilty. He attempts to rise in the world with dishonest dealing and hoarding.
Muldrew extends the moral economy beyond the gentry to all levels of society which was “shared by both poor and wealthier tradesmen alike” (Muldrew 169). There are many scenes involving servants in this play. The behaviour of servants and the treatment they are due does not seem to follow a singular pattern in the play. Welborne, when first refused an audience with Lady Alworth, tells her servants "why you slaves...that have not souls" (1.3). But Welborne does not view servants as slaves. In the scene he calls them such, it is important to note that 'slave' was a pejorative slander commonly used against those who demonstrate insubordination. These servants were socially beneath Welborne and duly disobedient. Moreover, at the end of the scene, Massinger feels it necessary to reconcile the servants with him. At the behest of Lady Alworth, they agree to subordinate to him and he says, "Nay, all's forgotten // And for a lucky omen to my project, // Shake hands, and end all quarrels in the cellar" (I.iii.130). The servants reply with a flourish of "Agreed, agreed. Still merry Master Welborne" (1.3.133). Lady Alworth is compelled to placate Furnace in the face of his insubordinate ranting over her refusal to eat his culinary creations. His complaint, however, is actually couched in love and loyalty. Furnace simply wishes recognition for the hard work he offers her and in her request for his patience and her promise that she will have an appetite again soon, she does placate him. In 4.1.176, she goes so far as to praise the kind obedience of her underlings by saying that "'twill become your breeding". The mention of their breeding, considering hers, is emphatic. With the same servants, her stepson exemplifies the tenor of love between master and servant further. Neill describes a "comically touching affection between the servants and "Our late young master" (1.2 and 2.2)" (Neill 200-1). In 2.2, Alworth can scarcely leave the room for the love offered to him. Alworth is charitable to his servants because they were part of the larger membership of the homosocial gentry. Friendship was extended to those who abided by the hierarchical rules and maintained their servitude. Muldrew agrees that "Although society was divided by hierarchical graduations of status and wealth, it was still bound together by credit relationships made all over the social scale" (Muldrew 178).
Playwrights made clear efforts to garner complicity for the gentry cause with all members of an audience of varying class distinctions in Elizabethan/Jacobean London. Perhaps the most obvious performative example comes in Fletcher’s To Rule a Wife and have a Wife. Cacafogo is an acceptable dumping ground for all losses within a play that is specifically concerned with not offending the audience (according to the prologue). There is a clear effort to gain complicity with the audience from the sheer number of asides aimed towards them. Including situational ones and ones marked only by dashes in addition to those overtly stage-directed, I counted 51! Asides are not always merely a narrative tool to demonstrate the otherwise inner thoughts of a staged character. Rather, they can also be used as a method of participating with the audience directly and covertly establishing protagonistic ties, similar to the way an apostrophe to the reader works in written text. DEMONSTRATE ASIDE PERFORMANCE: {Take your dirty cash!? NEVER! –We’re better than that aren’t we?-}. Chronologically, the rising tension seems to be reflected by the number of asides (in the latter category of audience complicity and establishing protagonism) throughout a survey of the plays:

Merchant: 8

A Trick to Catch The Old One: 86 (but the asides are in both categories – expressing the vile thoughts of the antagonist and garnering complicity with the protagonists)

Rule a Wife and have a Wife: 51

A New Way to Pay Old Debts: 20

{As late as 1675, William Wycherly was still rendering the usurer a pathetic breed. In The Country Wife, in the context of false appearances, one of his rake-heroes calls, "The usurer, a poor rogue possessed of mouldy bonds and mortgages" (Wycherly in Wise 558). Wycherly makes a second reference in the play which demonstrates the establishment of the trope and the ubiquity of usury within the economy. "Our sisters and daughters, like usurers' money, are safest when put out" (Wycherly in Wise 596). The play has a staggering 118 asides but as with A Trick, they are ambiguously aimed at the audience, and have nothing to do with usury. Even later drama continues the convention across Europe. In August Strindberg’s 1908 symbolist drama, The Ghost Sonata, one of the chracaters makes a disparaging reference to the profession of usury in an attack against the old man.}
In A New Way, in conjunction with these asides, is the performance of violence. Both tension and slapstick are powerful performative devices. This play is particularly violent in terms of how the characters act and threaten each other. Violence revolves around Sir Giles Overreach and Welborne in particular. The repercussions of this violence, for instance Overreach's threat of murdering Margaret, are high. The cause for the violence is not directly addressed by any of the characters in speech, so its source/purpose can only be interpreted from patterns. I posit three: 1.) to raise the tension and anxiety of the play, 2.) to demonstrate the dangers of driving a person to desperation, and 3.) to punish those who are of no honour. Massinger was not as skilled a poet as Shakespeare but wanted to create some of the emotional concern that pervades Merchant. The similarity to Merchant in the role of the usurer is evident: they both lose their daughters to the homosocial gentry, they both lose their entire estate, they are both pathetic in their closing rants.
The scenes in A New Way that threaten the most violence are the opening scene and 5.1 when Overreach storms the widow's home while beating Marrall. It appears that only lower-classed sycophants who have compromised their honour to follow the avarice of Overreach ever take a physical beating: Tapwell and Froth in the first scene (we later learn that they actually had it coming), and Marrall throughout from Overreach.
The usurer had been established as a comic villain trope and usury itself was questionably questionable. The "gentry" was defending their claim to nobility and purchasing it with true honour, while foiling the avaricious usurer at his own game of deception. However, the gentry had no desire to eliminate the usurer from society. He was quite a necessary evil as is seen in Merchant when there is no ready cash to be had. Muldrew quotes Thomas Tusser as asking “Who Living but lends? And be lent they must; else buieng and selling might lie in the dust” (Muldrew 171). Under the “1571 Usury Act, which tolerated interest rates of up to 10 percent” (Korda 132), the difference "betweene reserving and taking Usury" is noted. The latter is identified as the more punishable crime and speaks almost directly to the actions of the character Shylock. Reading more into the social dynamic than a play allows is anachronistic. We are dealing with theatre and with character types. Other plays, such as Englishmen for my Money, A Trick to Catch the Old One, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife reflected the homosocial sensibility with more levity and accept the usurer as a comic trope worthy of risibility and ridicule. In Rule A Wife, the usurer Cacafogo is characterized as short, fat, and easily swayed. It appears that the 'buffoon usurer' character had become a convention. (Cacafogo as a buffoon (1.5.30) and as a drunk at the end). Audiences had seen it before: Pisaro in Englishmen for my Money, Hoard in A Trick to Catch the Old One, and especially Hog in The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl. It is the practice of almost every character-type in the play (whether their integrity is questionable or not) to ridicule poor Cacafogo.
It appears that the purpose of the plays is threefold – to canonize male camaraderie, to celebrate romance and marriage, and to chastise usury, or at least relegate it to a dishonourable position outside of the male gentry. The homosocial sensibility delineates specific rules for the exchange of monetary credit and social credit. While the former is aligned with evil (albeit, a necessary one), the latter is aligned with virtue. The usurer is necessary, but the usurer’s wealthy increase threatens the homosocial credit structure. Inevitably the gentry would dissolve under the power of wealth; therefore the anxiety for those who clung to it as part of their cultural identity was well founded. There is a fear of a collapsing social order that blames the very economy it deems necessary. This dialectic plays itself out on stage and the plays demonstrate efforts to maintain complicity with all members of the audience to uphold the dying sensibility.
In Merchant, Timon, and New Way we see higher levels of tension/anxiety regarding usury, often depicted through the threat of violence. In Merchant it is threatened; in Timon it is exercised socially; in New Way it is exercised physically. New Way comes at the end of the era and it seems that the social acceptance of the usurer (reflected in increasingly comic or sympathetic characterization) finally threatened the gentry in such a way that Massinger, an admitted social conservative, lashed back with a return to violent disdain against usury. Not since before Merchant (In The Three Ladies) has usury been depicted so abominably and it seems that the cycle of anxiety began strongly against usury (Three Ladies), then questioned it deeply (Merchant), then attacked the homosocial economy of the gentry (Timon), then became accepted as necessary (comic tropes), then became a real threat to the gentry and returned to a stronger anxiety (New Way). i.e. the cycle came full circle before the homosocial gentry was toppled by new money in the seventeenth century (aided by James), and followed by the rise of the middle-class and melodrama (to meet their tastes in the theatres).
If you are interested in looking at the original essay or the works cited, I have copies available. Thank you for your time and attention.















Works Cited and Referenced

Burckhardt, Sigurd. "The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond." ELH 29.3 (1962): 239-62. Print.
Chorost, Michael. "Biological Finance in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens." English Literary Renaissance 21.3 (1991): 349-70. Print.
An exhaustive exploration of the metaphor of flesh as it is used to symbolize economic trade in Timon of Athens. The article posits that there is no existing economy of friendship evn though Timon believes it exists. The fundamental question aimed at the linguistic overlap between finance and the body regards the ubiquitous belief that the former should breed no increase (but
does under usury) while the latter should breed increase (but is barred from doing so with the presence of usury).

Cohen, Walter. "The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism." ELH 49.4 (1982): 765-89. Print.
Conte, Carolina Siqueira. "Bonds: A Theory of Appropriation for Shakespeare's 'the Merchant of Venice' Realized in Film." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences 66.4 (2005): 1216-. Print.
Death of Usury or The Disgrace of Usurers. 29 October 2009
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Originally printed in 1594, the text entitled Death of Usury or The Disgrace of Usurers occurs within the very beginning of the period of drama we have examined and might well have been amongst the causal texts that fed the discourse. There is no specific evidence to suggest it was part of a pamphlet or response war, but it participates with a number of similar texts discursive towards usury. The graphic book cover depicts "the various proceedings applicable to usurers that take place in the nether regions" (Seligman 665). Certainly it's title echoes the 'medieval' view of usury. However, although the title claims to report "The Disgrace of Usurers", the text is ambiguous in maintaining this perspective. What is presented is a factual survey of definitions, practises, observations, laws and quotations regarding usury. The EEBO database shows that the text was reprinted in 1634 suggesting it was as relevant to the discourse well into the emergence of the early modern perspective of usury. In sharp contrast to the medieval piety inherent to the title, the title page also reads that it includes "an Explanation of the Statutes now in force concerning Usury, very profitable for this present Age" (cover). The genre of the text would most readily be identified as a legal dissertation, or at least as close as one might get in the period.


Engle, Lars. ""Thrift is Blessing": Exchange and Explanation in the Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare Quarterly 37.1 (1986): 20-37. Print.
Fletcher, John, and Francis Beaumont. Rule a Wife and have a Wife : A Comedy. London: Printed for J. and R. Tonson,
1767. Print.

Fly, Richard D. "The Ending of Timon of Athens: A Reconsideration." Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 15
(1973): 242-52. Print.

Gross, Alan Gerald. "Social Change and Philip Massinger." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 7.2 (1967): 329-42. Print.
An article that specifically explores two of Massinger's plays: The City Madam and A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Within these two plays, Gross outlines patterns that suggest Massinger had a deeply entrenched loyalty to the hierarchical gentry. Gross points out that he was born to service and that the violent faith he has in the system must have been ubiquitous.

I Love You Man. Dir. John Hamburg. Dreamworks Pictures, 2009. DVD.
Kermode, Lloyd Edward. Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.
Kitch, Aaron. "Shylock's Sacred Nation." Shakespeare Quarterly 59.2 (2008): 131-55. Print.
Korda, Natasha. "Dame Usury: Gender, Credit, and (Ac)Counting in the Sonnets and the Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare Quarterly 60.2 (2009): 129-53. Print.
An article that examines the sociological reality in which the usury plays emerged. Korda discusses the ambiguity of the female usurer in terms of the christian ethic against it, and the rise of women within the legal system, as exemplified by Portia in the Merchant of Venice, as a function of their usury. Korda ascribes substantial agency to women who, although subject to a patriarchal society, knew full well how to manipulate it to their ends.

Lawrence, Sean. "'to Give and to Receive': Performing Exchanges in the Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance. Eds. Paul Yachnin, Patricia Badir, and Edward Pechter. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008. 41-51. Print.
Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st ed ed. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.
Speicifically examining Judith Butler's work within the text, she argues that the performance of gender is part of an ongoing social sensibility into which individuals are born. She suggests that women are unconsciously complicit to the guiding rules of gender display within the structure of their society. She also delineates how longstanding institutions such as heterosexual marriage and the family will defend themselves against perceived social threats such as homosexuality, and how individual members of the institution may manifest the defensiveness with violence.

Leonard, Nancy S. "Overreach at Bay: Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts." Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment. Ed. Douglas Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 171-192. Print.
Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/901/901-h/901-h.htm. 1 October 2010.
Massinger, Philip, and T. W. Craik. A New Way to Pay Old Debts. London: E. Benn, 1964. Print.
Middleton, Thomas,d.1627, et al. The Works of Thomas Middleton. New York: AMS Press, 1964. Print.
Muldrew, Craig. Interpreting the market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England. Social History 18.2 (May 1993): 163-183.
An essay that takes a historical look at the early modern English economy from a sociological perspective. Muldrew ascribes a social sensibility that was driven by relationships of friendship in direct contrast to the emerging finacial economy. He criticizes neo-economists that have ascribed Smithian or Marxian motives of self-interest retroactively in their depictions of economic
dealings of the era.

Neill, Michael. "Massinger's Patriarchy: The Social Vision of A New Way to Pay Old Debts." Renaissance Drama 10 (1979): 185-213. Print.
Beginning by reporting that the character of Overreach was an allegory for one Sir Giles Mompesson, Neill carefully traces the behaviour of the character in the play and how he demonstrates an anti-patriarchal behaviour which is his defining characteristic as the antagonist. Neill makes several comparisons to historical society to argue that the entire Elizabethan/Jacobean economy was predicated on a patriarchal hierarchy and sensibility which he sees variously reflected in the play.

Newman, Karen. "Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in the Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare Quarterly 38.1 (1987): 19-33. Print.
Pequigney, J. "The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and the Merchant of Venice." English literary renaissance 22.2 (1992): 201. Print.
An article that explores the nature of homosocial and homoerotic relationships that may have exited in early modern England based on the Shakespearean play Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice. It appears she chooses these two plays merely from the coincidence in the name of the character Antonio in each play. In fact, the article shows that both Antonio's are conspicuously involved in homosocial exchanges. Pequigney comes to separate conclusions for each play, that Twelfth Night represents homoerotic male love while Merchant does not. Nevertheless, the article strongly points to a society in which male male bonding and love was prevalent.

Rensley, Penelope Jane Howell. "Androgyny in the Merchant of Venice : Towards a Feminist Ideal." 1992. Print.
Rich, Jennifer. "The Merchant Formerly Known as Jew: Redefining the Rhetoric of Merchantry in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice." Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature 13.3 (2008): 2.1. Print.
Jennifer Rich presents a somewhat colloquial look at the Jew as other in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The article is heavily laden with obsolete notions of Shakespeare's antisemitism, but provides insight into a cultuer that defensively defined 'us' and 'them' by any ethnic or social barriers available to it.

Rivers, Bryan. "'Unnaturally Drawn': Harriette Wilson's Criticism of Shakespeare's Shylock (1811)." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 21.4 (2008): 34-6. Print.
Rosenshield, Gary. "Deconstructing the Christian Merchant: Antonio and the Merchant of Venice." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 20.2 (2002): 28-51. Print.
Seligman, Edwin R. A. "Curiosities of Early Economic Literature: An Address to His
Fellow Members of the Hobby Club of New York", ed. Luca Fiorito. History of Political Economy 32 (2000): 659-91. Project Muse. 31 October
2009

Shakespeare, William, and M. Lindsay Kaplan. The Merchant of Venice : Texts and Contexts. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2002. Print.
Trimble, Rufus James. "The Law Merchant and the Letter of Credit." Harvard law review 61.6 (1948): 981-1008. Print.
Vagios, Vassilis. "Beyond T's and V's: Towards a Study of the Language of Social Relations in the Merchant of Venice." NTU Studies in Language and Literature 10 (2001): 75-104. Print.
Woodbridge, Linda. "Payback Time: On the Economic Rhetoric of Revenge in the Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance. Eds. Paul Yachnin, Patricia Badir, and Edward Pechter. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008. 29-40. Print.
Wycherly, William. "The Country Wife." The Broadview anthology of drama : plays from the Western theatre. Ed. Wise, Jennifer and Craig S. Walker. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003. Print.

Once Was Here

It's funny how things look different when you are saying goodbye. I had walked into that club a thousand times without so much as a spark of emotion or recognition. But as I walked out on Sunday evening after saying an official goodbye to anybody that was working that day, I was struck with a need to take pause. I turned and looked at the building, the huge Fox Pub logo, the large wooden doors, the cigarette butts littering the ground. It was a sunny day, a perspective I rarely got on the club, and the sublime feeling of a strong, dry wind melodramatically blew over me as I whispered to myself, "goodbye, old friend". I was really saying goodbye to a personality known as DJ Dave, a.k.a. Friday!. He was cool, savvy, sexy, sharp, witty, and untouchable, but it was time for him to go. A tear came to my eye, and I turned and walked away. I had been DJ Dave for twenty years, . . . and I was gooooooooood! I had been a mainstay of the Fox Pub (the premiere exotic dance location on Vancouver Island) for ten of those years, almost to the day. On Saturday, January 9th, 2010, I told my boss, Loran Werrun, that I was taking an indefinite leave of absence. The first time I had set foot in that club was in January 2000. I didn't start working there until March of that year, but close enough.

I heard a piece of wisdom in the movie Hoffa once. It suggested that every conflict has casualties but what must be considered is what has been lost and what has been gained. I extend that to my decision to leave. My reasons for doing so had become far more in number than those for staying. Nevertheless, I find myself filled with melancholy. It had become part of my identity, my ego, my security blanket. As I write this I can hear my infant daughter cooing in her mother's arms behind me and understand that although all change is invasive and painful, and so I have every right to my melancholy, my reasons for change are far more important than my efforts to avoid it.

I was never famous. I was never internationally renowned. But when I switched on the microphone, the world came alive. Like no-one else, I was spectacular. I made people laugh. I was entertainment. I could escape the prison of being just Dave with a mic and a drink and a room full of listeners. But I never really socialized much after hours. After all, I had delusions of being an academic, a family man, something better, something superior. And if no-one ever remembers me, or my persona on the mic, for anybody bothering to read this, please know that once I was here.

See you in hell,
Shakes.

RE: Years gone by - with many a smile

From: "COLLEEN MACKENZIE"
To: "David Christopher"

Young David:
I have read some of your blogs. You are very talented and your joy in writing shows. I am so happy that you have found what brings you that joy, telling the stories of those that you love and the ones that love you.
I am working on a scrapbook of memories and photos with our Blair, stories I hope his nephews will come to love. It is not easy. I hope it will show his love for life and those who were a big part of it. He lived just a year longer in Canada and in two years time his memory and love will have lived longer in us, than he walked this earth. The pain of loss changes but never lessens.
I have some great photos of the haunted house back in the eighties along with the days building our cottage on Taylor Lake. The BMX bike jumping over stacked bodies (I smile to think of those times). Thank you for being the encourager and friend to our Blair. I watched the two of you searching and developing those creative abilities.
Reading your 'Canadian Adventures' blog answers a lot of my ?. Unfortunately, my reading on-line is limited with the progression of the Parkinson's.
I love the name Lilian. I know she will be a treasured challenge.
I would love a signed copy of your book when published.

Love and Prayers Always,
Colleen.


From: "David Christopher"
To: "COLLEEN MACKENZIE"

Dear Colleen:
I did not know that you were suffering from Parkinson's and I am terribly saddened to learn it. I am glad that you have read some of my blog and want to express to you that you always have been, and always will be one of the most important people that have been in my life. I know that I have been distant for many years but want you to know that in so many ways I am not the little brat that you once knew, and in so many ways I still am. I miss Blair as much today as I did when we first lost him, and no matter how much time passes, his time with me will always be longer in my heart than the time he has been gone. I never had any faith, and I still don't, but if ever I believed in anything, I believe that he watches over me every day. And I'm sure he laughs at me for being exactly what he always knew I would be. Blair Mackenzie lives on in my son in so much more than just his name, and I truly feel he is in Blair Christopher as much as I am. I wish I could be closer so that you could know him better. I love you dearly and hope to be home to see you some time. Remember for as long as you can, and after that, I will do my best to remember for you.

727 Singalong

An e-mail I sent to Marianne on my second day in Mexico on my fifth trip to that country:

"The Mexican people efface their own cliche with a bold buoyancy from which the rest of the world could learn a much needed lesson. Notwithstanding, their risibility is still well earned as their social rituals are sometimes naively proud, and comically loud.
While boarding my evening flight from Monterrey to Mexico, it came to my attention that the population of this flight exemplified the cliche a little more than usual. The passengers were visibly stereotypical, complete with a sombrero here, a pancho there, a mustachio in the back, and I think I saw a goat running across the aisle. I chuckled and took my seat when the pilot promptly announced over the intercom that "air traffic at our destination in Mexico City was quite heavy so we will delay our departure by twenty minutes to allow the congestion to subside." Pretty good English, I thought to myself as I reclined back into my seat and let my heavy eyelids ease shut.
My condescending appreciation was abruptly interrupted. Seated somewhere behind me, a typically gregarious young fellow pulled out a guitar-like instrument that I'm guessing was a mariachi. He began playing and singing a bouncy little Mexican ditty so that all could hear. Within a few seconds, not finding it the least bit disruptive, some of, and then most of the other passengers quite willingly began singing along with him until I was regaled with a full chorus Mexican serenade, of which all members were otherwise utter strangers singing along to this obviously well known song. It was a little gauche and a lot humourous, and it made me stop and think how unlikely it would be to have any such sociable liberty occur on a flight originating from Canada. By the time they started into the encore-hailed second song, the plane began to move and the singalong slowly faded to quiet. I thought that I had been blessed with yet another singular anecdotal blog entry but I had 'spoken' too soon, for the flight was not yet over.
Some twenty minutes later, I had had my nose buried in an History of Opera book and was distracted from the moment. The flight attendant approached me, what felt like 'out of the blue', and said, "Would ju like-a some penis?"
"Uh. Excuse me?"
"Some penis. Some penis. Ju are want some penis? For put in jour mouth. Penis for jour mouth."
I was dumbfounded and it caused her some impatient frustration. She pulled a small package from the cart and dangled it in my face. "Oooooooh! Some PEANUTS. Right, right. No, thank you." Even if I had wanted them, I doubt they would have settled properly after that little interaction. The plane landed uneventfully in a rain-soaked Mexico city and I alighted with laughter."

See you in hell,
Shakes.