Shakespeare's Possible Worlds by Cambridge University Press

Simon Pa lfrey

Shakespeareâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Possible Worlds

Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds New methods are needed to do justice to Shakespeare. His work exceeds conventional models, past and present, for understanding playworlds. In this book, Simon Palfrey goes right to the heart of early modern popular drama, revealing both how it works and why it matters. Unlike his contemporaries, Shakespeare gives independent life to all his instruments, and to every fraction and fragment of the plays. Palfrey terms these particles “formactions” – theatre-speciﬁc forms that move with their own action and passion. Palfrey’s book is critically daring in both substance and format. Its unique mix of imaginative gusto, thoughtexperiments, and virtuosic technique generates piercing close readings of the plays. There is far more to playlife than meets the eye. Inﬂuenced by Leibniz’s visionary original model of possible worlds, Palfrey opens up the multiple worlds of Shakespeare’s language, scenes, and characters as never before. simon palfrey is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the joint founding editor of Shakespeare Now! His books include Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (1997), Doing Shakespeare (2004, 2011 – named a TLS International Book of the Year), Shakespeare in Parts (with Tiffany Stern, 2007 – winner of an AHRC Innovations Award and the MRDS David Bevington Award for best new book on Medieval and Renaissance drama), and Poor Tom: Living “King Lear” (2014).

Shakespeareâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Possible Worlds Simon Palfrey

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107058279 © Simon Palfrey 2014 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Palfrey, Simon. Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds / Simon Palfrey. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-05827-9 (hardback) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Technique. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Dramatic production. 3. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism – Theory, etc. I. Title. PR2995.P35 2014 822.30 3–dc23 2014002510 ISBN 978-1-107-05827-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Jo

Contents

Acknowledgements A note on texts Part I

Entering Playworlds

page ix xii 1

Where is the life?

Purposes

Embryologies

Shakespeare the impossible

Popular theatre and possibility

Shakespeare v. actor

Playing to the plot

Middleton

Jacobean comi-tragedy

Everyman tyrant

Part II

Modelling Playworlds

107

The monadic playworld

109

Formactions

123

The truth of anachronism

147

Possible history: Henry IV

160

Anti-rhetoric

177 vii

viii

Contents

Falstaff

183

Scenes within scenes

187

Strange mimesis

199

How close should we get?

206

Metaphysics and playworlds

213

Pyramids of possible worlds

228

Part III

Suffering Playworlds

243

Perditaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s possible lives

245

A life in scenes

275

Scene as joke: Much Ado

282

Buried lives: Macbeth

286

The rape of Marina

297

Life at the end of the line: Macbeth

316

Dying for life: Desdemona

330

Epilogue: life on the line Bibliography Index

360 364 375

Acknowledgements

This is a book about Shakespearean possibility. Inevitably, I barely scratch the surface of my subject. But there is another smaller reason why I see my book as incomplete. Throughout much of its making, as it was dreamt and researched and drafted and redrafted, I was working towards one particular culminating example: Edgar-Tom in King Lear. But the material on Tom and Edgar started to build and build, and eventually threatened to overwhelm the enterprise, and so I decided to omit it completely and make it the subject of a separate work. This has become Poor Tom: Living “King Lear”, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014, an intensification and extension of my approach in Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds. I hope that anyone stimulated by either one of these books may also find things to enjoy in its partner. In many ways my most important interlocutors have been my students at Brasenose College, Oxford. It was in tutorials and classes with them (and lectures to the wider student body) that I had the chance to test my ideas and find compelling examples; and of course they contributed many of their own. And so I want to thank them all, particularly those of the last three years: Harry Ford, Rob Williams, Alice Gimblett, Georgia Mallin, Richard O’Brien, Katie Carpenter, Jessica Edwards, Celia Berton, Emily Hawes, Brogan Kear, Lucy Fyffe, Saranna Blair, Duncan Morrison, Dani Pearson, Savannah Whaley, Chloe Wicks, Chloe Cornish, Emily Hislop, Amy Lewin, Amy Rollason, Trisha Sircar, Pari Thomson, Christopher Webb, James Fennemore, Maria Fleischer, Josie Mitchell, Joshua Phillips, Namratha Rao, Rachel Rowan-Olive, and Alexandra Sutton. I owe enormous thanks to Joanna Picciotto. A year or so ago I showed her what I took to be the more-or-less finished manuscript. She gave it a fierce and passionate reading, enthusiastic and exacting, and I realised ix

Acknowledgements

how very far I actually was from doing justice to the subject. Subsequent edits and additions have, I hope, brought me just a little closer. Ewan Fernie has read very little of this, but he abides as a soul partner, our efforts always a kind of mutually galvanised tilting at possibilities. Vimala Pasupathi has throughout offered close and trusted counsel. Much of this book builds upon work done in the past with Tiffany Stern. An Oxford MA course we designed and taught together helped me to refine some nascent ideas and dismiss some others; our work remains at once radically different and surprisingly coordinate. And I am indebted to many others across the world who have helped with ideas, encouragement, and criticism. There are too many to recount, but among them are Sylvia Adamson, Jacquelyn Bessell, Graham Bradshaw, Ben Burton, Dermot Cavanagh, Philip Davis, Margreta de Grazia, Elisabeth Dutton, Sos Eltis, Larry Friedlander, John Gillies, Andreas Hoefele, Peter Holbrook, Laurie Johnson, Farah Karim-Cooper, Philippa Kelly, Theresa Krier, Aaron Kunin, Erika Lin, Ruby Lowe, Julia Lupton, Raphael Lyne, Laurie Maguire, Steve Mentz, Paul Menzer, Edward Muir, Eve-Marie Oesterlen, David Parker, Mireille Ravassat, Yasmine Richardson, Kiernan Ryan, David Schalkwyk, Regina Schwartz, Elizabeth ScottBaumann, John Sutton, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Henry Turner, William West, Ramona Wray, Bob White, Michael Witmore, and Paul Yachnin. And then there is Sarah Stanton at Cambridge University Press. She must get tired of authors saluting her professionalism, so I will instead praise her dauntlessness. Two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press produced very engaged, very insightful reports, which I have benefited from hugely in revising. Kate Boothby has been an acute proofreader, and Fleur Jones has helped see the book very efficiently through production. And I must thank Istvan Orosz (Hungary’s successor to Escher) for allowing me to use his poster for the book’s cover image, and for requesting only a couple of copies of the book in return! I am lucky to have been invited to speak at a number of venues where I have tested out bits of the work-in-progress: these include the University of Edinburgh; the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham; the University of Cambridge; the School of Oriental and African Studies and Royal Holloway, University of London; Lancaster University; Queen’s University Belfast; Chinese University of Hong Kong; the

Acknowledgements

University of Melbourne; the University of Queensland; the University of Oxford; Rutgers University; and University of California, Berkeley. I have also tried out parts of it at Shakespeare Association of America meetings in Chicago, Bellevue, and Toronto, the World Shakespeare Congress in Prague, the German Shakespeare Society in Zurich (disastrously . . .), the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) in Turin, the Modern Languages Association in Seattle, and the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon. I am grateful to the various organisers, and to the many thoughtful (and sometimes sceptical) respondents, far too many to list by name. Small portions of the material have appeared elsewhere, either earlier versions when the work was in process, or more recently as tasters for the forthcoming book: some of chapter 27 in “Macbeth and Kierkegaard”, Shakespeare Survey 57, edited by Peter Holland (Cambridge University Press, 2004); some of chapter 26 in “The Rape of Marina”, Shakespeare International Yearbook, edited by Graham Bradshaw and Tom Bishop (Ashgate, 2009); some of the Middleton material in “Middleton’s Presence”, Middleton in Context, edited by Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge University Press, 2012); some of chapter 7 in “Formaction”, Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry Turner (Oxford University Press, 2013); some of chapter 20 in “Strange Mimesis”, edited by Paul Menzer and Jeremy Lopez, The Hare (Online Journal, 2013). I am grateful to all of them for supporting the work (and where necessary for permission to reproduce it). This book is dedicated to Jo. She avoids reading anything I write, a forbearance which I happily construe as faith, sanity, and permission. And which daily reminds me there are worlds elsewhere.

A note on texts

Unless otherwise noted all quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, prepared by Charlton Hinman, second edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996). Line references are to the through-line-number (TLN) of the Folio edition. In the case of Pericles I use the Malone copy of the 1609 Quarto in the Bodleian, edited by W. W. Greg (London, 1940). Likewise, unless otherwise noted all Middleton quotations and references are from Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Clarendon Press, 2007).

xii

Part I

Entering Playworlds

Where is the life?

This book begins with a simple question: where is the life in Shakespeare’s playworlds? What produces it, or counts as it? How small, or brief, can playlife be? How many lives make a world, or worlds a life? These are questions about possibility or potentiality, as much as they are about any palpable, self-consciously articulated actuality. And they are questions that pertain as much to me, the reader or witness of the play-event, as they do to the life or the worlds in motion. What is at stake in my recognitions? Are habitual ways of naming or admitting possibility adequate to the life in playworlds? (Are they adequate to life?) And what if playlife is far more manifoldly possible – has more materials, instruments, locations, layers – than is often presupposed in our frequently theme-driven, commonsensical, or sentimental responses to plays? Playlife need not correspond to an actor’s visible body, or to a named character. There are points of life everywhere. Not organic life, as we usually understand the term; not machinic life either: playlife. To feel out its variations, we mustn’t rush to regularise or naturalise a playworld’s moment-by-moment phenomena, as though all that we witness has to be self-evidently familiar. Instead, we need to take seriously the strange factitiousness of playlife: its synthetic morphology; its intermitted dispersal or disappearance; its assemblage or disassemblage in this or that formal unit; its distribution into ostensible unities which have to be gathered or inferred from quantum assertions of presence. What can it mean to allow such a confection as a measure of human possibility? Our basic understanding of the playevent might have to change – of our complicity in it, our strangeness or intimacy to it. And with this, our understanding of how plays render what it is to be an existing thing. How then to touch the life in plays? 3

Where is the life?

A good start is attending to particulars. The play may be a feast for the eyes, with display abundant, skills and charisma, the centre-stage demand to watch the juggler juggling. But the balls will fall, and should be followed as they roll slowly into corners. The ears may likewise suffer assault. Drums and music, words, words, words, intoned at speed and impossibly self-certain. Allow the noise, let it sweep us somewhere new. But again: stay to listen once the spit and bluster passes. There will be much that belies self-announcement. And so let’s imagine, beyond the clamour, or inside its appeal, that these worlds are also designed for – are designs of – the most delicate hypersensitivity. Anything might flinch at a touch, or describe its own tiny ellipses. There are centres of feeling at every turn, so be careful as we tread. Let’s step out of shared visible continuities, out of evident plot or articulated purpose, and move in less imperative, less brightly lit passages. Or step more deeply inside, collapsing distances, allowing discomforting intimacies. Inside the fidget, an itch that is rarely reached. There is no detail unworthy of our attention. Let us split and magnify, zoom in and zoom out, look intently at the surfaces, discover action where before was emptiness, movement where things seemed still. Imagine that we have never seen these things before (perhaps we haven’t). How else to feel what the possibilities are? Allow them to be new, or strange, or changed. Cast off our daily bodies, the neutralising banality of all of these senses, cancelling each other out, sensing only what we expect to sense. Instead, slow things down, and stretch the spaces in-between matter. Or blow things up – perhaps inflate them so that the air around them breeds; perhaps detonate them, such that we witness the shrapnel they render. Imagine surrendering to entirely different agents of knowledge: say the pressure of fingers, such that we feel a world, and only touch can confer reality; or the most refined touch of all, a world rendered in sound, in which silence is impossible, and the quietest gap, however unspeaking or unheard, is never noiseless. Or find the human by imagining the animal: ear of dog, nose of bear, eye of rat. Imagine yourself a deer, alive to the fact that hearing is vibration, a curtain upon the very possibility of continuing life. Enter the life in anything, however beyond the human, or the pale, or even the visible horizon. After all, this is what Shakespeare does all the time.

Entering Playworlds

Some lines will be so famous as to be difﬁcult to process. But the worlds they make can be alarmingly strange: When shall we three meet againe? In Thunder, Lightning, or in Raine?

(Macbeth, 1. 1. 1–2)

It is tempting to take the three elements as one, assuming that they are, as Frank Kermode has said, “in the same hedgerow; they do not differ so completely as to be presentable as mutually exclusive alternatives”.1 But these are the play’s ﬁrst words: we might say the Macbeth-world’s founding words. Shakespeare is doing much more than setting up false equivocations and parodies of choice (although he is doing this too). In a minute or two we hear of “Cannons over-charged with double-Crackes” (58): this is the kind of world we have entered, where noises crackle and split, where rounded things, like a cloud or a cannon, are at once monstrously self-exceeding and shivered into angles, in which each splintering crack is intensely centred, purposive, a motive unto itself, while also marking a breach out of which who knows what life may tumble. It is a world, remember, in which the earth hath bubbles! We can only conceive of such a thing by imagining prodigies unknown to daylight (TLN 180). The opening couplet discharges into just such an environment. Its principles are in a sense simple enough. The enduring condition is storm. But the storm is not a single blanketing fury, any more than earth is merely solid, air merely gas, or time a rolling continuum (thunder here precedes lightning). We should not instantly reblend what the script so clearly separates. In Thunder – in Lightning – in Rain: each can be entered, one at a time. Each place is simultaneous, and it is separated; each moment too. This world is weirdly quantumised, as though happening in discrete sheets of place or event: a sheet of thunder; a plate of lightning; a bubble of rain. The constituents are spaced apart, as though before the daily joining. The elements really are elements, the substances that constitute a world, reduced to their simplicity for these three alone. How else to slip into one and then the other, be wrapped inside its secrets, unless creation has marvellously resolved into its rudiments? Only

1 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 83.

Where is the life?

the diabolic hand, perhaps, can feel such changes, turn sound into place, open the lightning, enter the raindrop. Only the diabolic eye, perhaps, can so distinguish such parts, each one an epitome of possibility, when the eye of day sees only chaos or conflation. This sort of touch and sight is the witches’: but it is also Shakespeare’s. The world is indeed blown up. Shakespeare’s possible worlds have little or nothing to do with utopias, dreamscapes, fantastical visions of paradise. They have everything to do with travel across space and time – but the travelling does not require displacement to the moon or Atlantis or the Americas. Of course, Shakespeare’s heterocosmic imagination plays its part in larger stories of travel, adventure, and speculation (philosophical, scientific, colonial, economic); in all kinds of ways his work is symptomatic of an age in which worlds and perspectives were multiplying. I take this larger story as a given: one which Shakespeare’s play-forms contribute to, perhaps rival, perhaps explosively concentrate – and perhaps at times exceed. For Shakespeare’s creation is often at odds with customary ideas of lives and worlds, which presume extension in time and space (her life, that world), a communally agreed physical presence (the life can be seen, the place can be entered), and a public name to accord with this essentially single entity (Juliet, Verona).2 There is more to life than this. Think of how impoverished our sense of life must be, if we understood it only as human life, and then only as that element of human life that could be seen, now, like serried commuters at a bus stop, and which could be downloaded in present time to a spectator who instantly understood everything. What would such a world be like? No memory, no confusion, no competing planes, nothing unfinishable; no birdsong, no moss, no germs or bones or smells. Just these more or less finished exemplars, telling us what they are for. The dead plays do pretty much this, the ones that only scholars bother with, for completeness’ sake.

2 For a comprehensive study of early modern “worldmaking” in the more usual sense of the term, see Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999): “In my use of the word ‘world’ I will not . . . imply that for every proposition or axiom or even semantic pattern there is an implied world for which it is true. For my category of ‘worlds’ I would like to retain as an attribute the social concept of the habitable or inhabitable.” But Campbell allows this to include the worlds of a particular novel: “the unspeciﬁed habitability of the ‘innumerable worlds’ of Giordano Bruno’s controversial speculations, and the extension and non-human sentience with which the microscopic ‘world’ is represented in the ﬁrst decades of its accessibility”, 10.

Entering Playworlds

But not the living ones, the ones that remain possible, because they are alive, like any ecology is, with potentiality. Touching such possibilities isn’t only about being super-subtle hermeneuts. We need to combine delicate attendance – probing gaps, attending to silences – with openness, in ourselves, to passion. We have to banish preemptive sentimentalism, which will always tend to serve established shapes and templates. Instead we must be open to anything bearing life. This will certainly not be limited to the actor-character’s body. Here we need to recover more forcibly the early modern age’s predilection for allegory, for all kinds of micro-thinking, and for a dynamic understanding of nature which potentially saw personified emotions or nano-machines everywhere. It is hardly a stretch to give any formal instrument its own conatus, or soulappetite, both in its generic purpose and at each instantiation: so, scenes are animate with desire, a cue is hungry for connection, metalepses house competing endeavours. Perhaps we simply miss existing lives because we are not expecting to find them, or to find them in such form. This proposes something very different from a conventional understanding of playlife, in which our experience hinges upon the sympathetic recognition of named, visible characters. We might fear them or for them, laugh at them or with them, but the basic contract is assumed to be with actor-sized figures, more or less shaped and moved like us. Obviously, such identifications are indispensable to a play’s success. But if playlife is composed and distributed in the cellular or molecular way I am suggesting, then this must substantially modify how we understand the lives at issue. It suggests that we have an insufficient grasp, far too approximate, of the sources of our affects, which will not be so readily attributed to a self-surveying, self-articulating, cognitively centred character; it suggests that we are far too ready to normalise what we witness, leap from a play’s synthetic concatenations to as-though complete, coherent lives; it suggests we need to open up our sense of a playworld’s possible life forms, and of the kinds of activity that may bear, produce, or secrete passion and action.3

3 Compare Bert O. States: “plays, in their fashion, are efﬁcient machines whose parts are characters who are made of actors. All characters in a play are nested together in ‘dynamical communion’, or in what we might call a reciprocating balance of nature: every character

Where is the life?

The path to possible life, then, is a combination of patient, scrupulous, repeated attendance; resistance to those presumptive expectations which, from timidity or conformity or complacency, consign certain matter to non-being; and strategically naive affect, a mode of negative capability, feeling each possibility as though a new-born aspirant for actuality. It means entering spaces which are not presented front-on, and which in the presentation are finished with. Playlife may be attenuated, or interrupted, or prevented, or waiting, or alone. It may exist anachronically, moving simultaneously between spatio-temporal planes, be subvisible as much as visible, virtual as much as concrete. It may move between palpable things, like lines, speeches, referents, or an actor and his character. Often it will seem to be contingent upon recognition, and yet strangely not press its presence into our consciousness. Playlife may be at once exploded and unexploded. The challenge to our experience is potentially huge. Where is the life? Have you recognised it? What can it mean if you haven’t? What Elaine Scarry says of flowers, we might equally say of playlife, and of the fineness and rarity of its materials: Pre-image and after-image, subsentient and supersentient, the plant exposes the shape of a mental process that combines the almost percipient with a kind of transitory exactness. It is as though the very precision required to find the exquisitely poised actuality of the flower’s “vague sentience” manifests itself as a form of acuity.4

Similarly pertinent is what Timothy Morton calls the “ecological thought”: It is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a deﬁnite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise – and how can we so clearly tell the difference?5 ‘contains in itself’ the cause of actions, or determinations, in other characters and the effects of their causality. (Dialogue, by this token, is a continuous oscillation of cause and effect: each line is the effect of the preceding line and the cause of the line to follow.)” Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 146–7. 4 Dreaming by the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 68. 5 Morton continues: “The ecological thought fans out into questions concerning cyborgs, artiﬁcial intelligence, and the irreducible uncertainty over what counts as a person . . . the ethics of the ecological thought is to regard beings as people even when they aren’t people.” And later: “There’s something slightly sizeist about viewing life as squishy, palpable substances, as if all life forms shared our kinds of tissue. This prejudice breaks down at high resolutions. Viruses

Entering Playworlds

This last is the really necessary question. What actually counts as sentience, or sub- or super-sentience, in a playworld? To whom or what does it belong? What exactly generates or houses it? The witness, certainly, as phenomenology demands: but not only that. We might again borrow from biology – perhaps the unit of selection is the gene, or the group, or the ecosystem, or some intra- or supra-subjective organism, as much as any discrete unified individual subject. The existing need not be humansized, or even human; it may be something fugitive, alive only beneath layers, or as unevenly identified potentiality. We may get percipience without accompanying recognition – in Hegelian terms, a kind of incipient or disregarded subject or event, awaiting the founding mirror. This links to the question of the incompossible, the prevented life, or what the ancients often termed privation. If playlife can only be rescued belatedly, after the event; if it can only be glimpsed, snatched or guessed at, or dimly apprehended as the carnival passes by; if only one in a hundred, or in a hundred thousand, feels its occluded potentiality: then what kind of existing is this? If the playlife is fathoms deep, locatable only via rare interpretive whimsy, or stolen affect, or overcurious morbidity – then is it truly possible? Who can say it is not? are large crystals . . . At the base of the daffodil, where it joins the stem, you see traces of how the flower looked when it started to spread upward and outward. You’re looking at a daffodil’s past, as well as at the past development of the flower as a species . . . Material organization turns out to be sets of formal relationships, not squishy stuff.” The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 8, 67–8.

Purposes

To recover Shakespeare’s particularity depends above all upon technically informed imagination. This is crucial for anyone seeking to bring these playworlds alive (student, actor, historian, director, teacher, composer). Without imagination – the willingness to construct things from virtually nothing, to enter into the minds or bodies of never-known others, to sympathise with actions or appetites that we may abhor, or that leave us cold, to feel out the fullness in apparent emptiness, to find adjacencies or connections where the daily mind sees only separation – we risk being no more than number crunchers. But I stress: imagination is of little use without technique; and, more than that, without moment-by-moment alertness to specifically theatrical technique. Everything else follows in its wake. Without such imagination the play is nothing; without it I don’t write a word. This is hardly a novel claim. In fact in many ways it is scrupulously historical. Shakespeare’s period was one of burgeoning self-reflectiveness about method and technique, and about the surest path to knowledge of the world and communication of such knowledge. And whatever the art (oratory, geometry, war, playmaking . . .), imagination and improvisation were repeatedly invoked as essential for good invention.1 Today’s scholarship often runs shy of anything so potentially groundless, rather as it does the modal range, dialogical liberties, and disciplinary compounds of so much Renaissance discourse. One aim of my book is to recover something of this, at least as a permission to think leapingly as well as metonymically, and to adventure out of over-trodden comfort zones. 1 Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Entering Playworlds

Consequently, as well as conventional academic critique, the book features occasional polemical episodes, a few creative apostrophes and thought-experiments, and a number of sustained experiments in superclose reading. I don’t think there is much point in reading Shakespeare in any way other than super-closely; not if we want to discover things we don’t think we know. For my purposes there is no use in staying at a polite distance, content with approximation. But inevitably this kind of attention comes at a price. It means that the readings have to be close; it means that I linger and labour over details. My ﬁndings may at times feel obscure, or simply too ingenious, particularly to the more casual eye. But if I seem to some readers to ﬁnd too much, so be it. It’s a price I am content to pay. I tend to think that there is far more to see and to say than I can ever imagine. But without at least some agreement to imagine possibilities that may not always seem self-evident, and to imagine them closely – at the level of Shakespeare’s most delicate forms, and sometimes at the level of my own sentences as I try to probe these forms – no reader will much enjoy this book. It is by no means a remorseless punishment. A lot of the book, I think, is easy and straightforward enough. But some of it has considerable density or concentration (in line with its subject), which I hope repays attention. My approach to Shakespeare is distinguished by a few intertwining purposes. First, in my abiding interest in how words work, both as instruments in the theatre and as embodiers of meaning. This means that I do not use the playtext as an occasion for exploring other discourses: it is the fundamental occasion. Second, in bringing the same intense close reading to bear on all the materials and instruments of theatre, textual and extratextual: I see every moving unit as a potential mode or node of language. Shakespeare’s habit of concentrating possibilities into single moments has long been recognised. Here is Hypollite Taine: “Behind the word is a whole picture, a long train of reasoning foreshortened, a swarm of ideas. . .These various forms of speech do more than denote ideas, they all suggest images. Every one of them is the concentration of a complete mimic action”;2 and here Peter Brook: “Shakespeare, alone in all playwriting, 2 Hypollite Taine, Romeo and Juliet Variorum, ed., Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874), 441–2.

Purposes

made plays like those sorts of figures, and . . . each word is like a little figurine, vibrating with all these layers of meaning.”3 But it has rarely been recognised how every single one of Shakespeare’s instruments – not only his figures of speech – is potentially endued with multiple “mimic actions”. It is these instruments that I will call “formactions”. This more distributed understanding of theatrical forms means that I approach the playtext in a distinctive way. Many of the things I concentrate upon are beneath or beyond the attention of modern textual editions – things specific to the actor’s part-text, such as cues, cue-spaces, divergent instructions between an actor and a character; the scene as an existential unit, or as a site of numerous hyper-scenes or sub-scenes. Equally, my approach to well-known aspects of Shakespeare’s writing – for instance, his figurative densities – is often much more detailed than the brief notes of editors can ever allow. Every one of my play-readings is generated by the same very basic imperative – to study formactions. This means starting at the cellular level, often “bracketing” much of interest in the same scene, in the same dramatic moment, in the interest of focusing very particularly upon how a form-inaction expresses possibility. I don’t start with themes or contexts, and then try to find symptomatic passages. I positively try not to pre-empt how the particular formaction might contribute to larger stories, because such preemption necessarily prescribes and delimits the possibilities of the part. A basic purpose of mine is to redress the critical bias in the hermeneutic circle, whereby it is almost always some or other putative whole that determines what parts are admitted. Meta-narratives have to be resisted, or at least suspended. The parts are not always determined by a whole, whether the putative organic form of the play, or genre, or theme, or context. The parts can be self-determining; the instruments that make them can have a conation and a morphology that is neither derived from nor resolves into the whole: or at least parts of the part may claim their own unassimilable motive force.4 I want to return some appetite and surprise, some generative purpose, to the bits and pieces. 3 Interview with Peter Brook, in Ralph Berry, ed., On Directing Shakespeare (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), 121–2. 4 Compare Roland Barthes’ distinction, writing about photographs, between the studium – perceptions determined by cultural preparation, “what we know without knowing it, what we

Entering Playworlds

I have consulted only original facsimiles, Folio and Quarto, in developing my readings. I don’t pretend that working from photos of early texts endues my working playtexts with purity, any more than I pretend that constructing actor’s parts from these texts infallibly returns us to what the actors used. Of course it doesn’t. But modern editions cannot but impose their own hermeneutic decorums, their prescriptions and proscriptions, and I prefer to start from the ground up, without guidance or map other than a scrupulous awareness of the numerous instruments at work at every moment. This is really a continuation of the method that Tiffany Stern and I used in Shakespeare in Parts, where the fiction was that these things had never been seen before, as we tried to put ourselves in the minds of their first actors and playmakers.5 The principle of lonely imagining seems a good one for any book whose chief aim is to draw out the sources and generators of dramatic life. There is also the question of the specificity or otherwise of my claims: are they applicable only to Shakespeare, or to drama, or to writing of this period, or might they speak much more widely to literature’s worldmaking capability? I can answer some but not all of this. I do think that Shakespeare’s work is exceptional among his theatre contemporaries. No other playmaker generates worlds and lives in anything like the same fashion – not even Marlowe, despite coining the perfect line for the forms that I am describing: “Infinite riches in a little room”.6 However, this is not so clearly the case with early modern poetry. It may well be that the most skilful poets – Spenser, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Marvell – are open to similar analyses as I offer of Shakespeare’s forms. All experiment with modal shifts, active silences, grammatical recursiveness, unexpected metalepses, serious puns. Some of this, I expect, is actively due to Shakespeare. For instance, Donne was a great frequenter of plays, and who knows how much he learnt about lexical density and rhythmic variation from attending to the labile, endlessly surprising verse-forms of see without seeing it”, and the much rarer punctum, “the wound” made by a “detail”, which “paradoxically, while remaining a “detail”, “fills the whole picture”, a seeming “accident” in which the photograph seems “to annihilate itself as a medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself”: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 26, 45. See States, Great Reckonings, 11–12. 5 Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6 Jew of Malta, 1. 1. 37.

Purposes

mid-1590s plays such as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. (Although even if in some ways as copious as Shakespeare’s, Donne’s conceits tend to be roped back by the libidinally controlling authorial mind, and set fair against unpredictable proliferation.) Likewise, it is obvious that Shakespeare powerfully informs Milton’s developing art – manifest not only in the sensuousness of the early poetry and Comus, but also immanently in the teasing grammar and polyploid temporalities of Paradise Lost. (I dare say Milton ended up wanting to bury this influence – almost literally, in Samson Agonistes.) But clearly it is absurd to pretend that Shakespeare is above all such influence himself, or that he wasn’t foundationally affected by cultural radiation. He was probably familiar with Donne’s songs and sonnets in manuscript – he may have hated their crabbed qualifications and microcosmic conceitedness, but must have recognised a similar prosodic libertytaker. More broadly, all these writers share in the early modern period’s wonderful facility at worldmaking, private, or fantastical, or universal.7 Linked to this is how they all depend upon, indeed believe in, encapsulative metaphor. Again, this is probably less a gift of unique poetic genius than of the culture’s nervous theological hyper-consciousness, putting intense, potentially explosive pressure upon particular chosen signs: perhaps because thinking every moment freighted by all moments (as in original sin thinking); perhaps because thinking life belated, expectant, and raddled by inadequate imitation (as in eschatological or Christological thought); perhaps because believing the body to be a kind of unholy rental, not quite owned, not quite true, and so forever prone to allegory or transformation (as in virtually anyone touched by Christian thought). Whatever the specific orientation, in this mind-world the tiniest node can concentrate historical and spiritual possibility. Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the layers and load in apparent singularity is hardly unique. Indeed one might go further: it may be that much that I diagnose about his formactive methods could be applied, with some modifications, to any writing, perhaps any narrative art, that makes rather than mimics worlds, and that continues to come true beyond its putative originary context. 7

Campbell, Wonder and Science, esp. 111–220.

Entering Playworlds

So it may be; but equally it may not, and the necessary modifications are the nub of the matter. For it is important to recognise that I am not just evoking an artform in which a lot is going on, or which can give the illusion of being full with life. The key here is craft-particularity. Formactions are event-specific. And in Shakespeare’s case this means the event of the play – writing to it, learning for it, acting at it, attending to it, living in it. The event is in time in ways that a poem never is, in space likewise: not one time, or one space, but all the same palpably happening in these dimensions. In such a context, poetic forms – such as shifty syntax, figurative density, the ligatures of dialogue, the simple fact of a rhyme – all work and mean differently than they possibly can in a non-dramatic medium. And if no one else wrote plays like this, it means that no one else wrote like this, tout court (still no one else has written like this). We are no longer talking about poetic forms – but about dramatic formactions. ∞ Part I of the book interweaves introductory explorations of Shakespeare’s methods with a brisk overview of the popular theatre, using summary examples from Greene, Marlowe, Webster, Marston, and Jonson, before a more extended analysis of Middleton, as perhaps the period’s exemplary playmaker. I also compare Shakespeare’s methods with more conventional understandings of rhetoric and mimesis. Shakespeare’s work is embedded in these theatrical and rhetorical worlds, but also radically distinct. It is with sounding out this distinctiveness that the book is primarily concerned. Initially the set-pieces I offer are brief, but they get more extensive as the book develops, culminating in Part III with a sequence of chapterlength readings which try to delve deep into formactive playlife, usually by honing in upon very particular moments or speech-actions. The examples all in different ways complicate simple notions of presence and coherence. I concentrate upon scenes produced by the recesses of metaphor; or reported but not witnessed; or possible but unconfirmable – experiences that are so deep in body that they are impossible to see, or which we have to rely upon the ludic blankness of props to infer; thought-knots that defy or exceed the social animal we see before us. All work against summary-assumptions, pre-empting or post facto, of what

Purposes

counts as (a) life. In all of these readings, I try both to reveal new things about the works at issue, and to assay how theatre itself might model possible worlds: how the artform is alive with its own bespoke physics and metaphysics.8 Part II makes various attempts at newly modelling Shakespearean forms, and articulating my understanding of formactions. It involves an engagement with a number of philosophers, old and new, who to my mind speak particularly revealingly of possibility. By far the most important of these is the astonishing seventeenth century polymath, Gottfried Leibniz: indeed, many of the other thinkers who have inﬂuenced me themselves owe enormous debts to his visionary work. However, with the partial exception of some of David Lewis’s work, I have not found so-called “possible worlds” philosophy (which names Leibniz as its founder but in the main skirts around or generalises his thinking) particularly helpful when it comes to modelling playworlds. It is often too eager to systematise literary forms, and sometimes to reify actuality.9 Usually its focus is far distant from mine, being interested in theorising logical space or stipulative semantics.10 But Leibniz is another matter entirely: there is I think far more for literary criticism to learn from his original model of possible worlds, and the dizzying “monadology” that houses it, than has been recognised. I don’t know of any other body of thought that uses Leibniz to help to theorise theatre, or indeed 8

Also see Michael Witmore, Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007) and Shakespearean Metaphysics (London: Continuum, 2008). 9 Marie Laure Ryan: “We construe the world of fiction and of counterfactuals as being the closest possible to the reality we know. This means that we will project upon the world of the statement everything we know about the real world, and that we will make only those adjustments which we cannot avoid”: “Fiction, Non-factuals and the Principle of Minimal Departure”, Poetics 8:3/4 (1980), 406; for more nuanced accounts, see Laure Ryan, “The Modal Structure of Narrative Universes”, Poetics Today 6:4 (1985), 717–55; “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction”, Poetics Today 12:3 (1991), 553–76. 10 For example, Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972). For a sustained consideration of the useful but limited ways in which such philosophy can speak to “fictional worlds”, see Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Also see Lubomir Dolozel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), which is more optimistic, seeing literary fiction as “probably the most active experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise” (ix), but still avoids identifying the possible worlds of literature with the possible worlds of logic and philosophy (10–20ff).

Entering Playworlds

Shakespeare, but I hope my efforts will encourage others.11 The closest precursor is perhaps the eighteenth century German aesthetician and phenomenologist, Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote only one short essay on Shakespeare, along with scattered comments and tributes elsewhere, but which are informed in many of their details by a view of the world deeply indebted to Leibniz’s dynamic “monad-poem”.12 The old quarrel between poetry and philosophy is surely false and damaging, a jealous superstition. Literary criticism shouldn’t run shy of metaphysics, as though foundational questions of ontology or epistemology have no concourse whatsoever with imaginative narratives. It isn’t that either defers to the other, or that they can harmlessly melt into each others’ arms. I for one will always prefer poetry (including plays) for its power to touch and transform life – and indeed it is often in revealing Shakespeare’s distinctiveness that philosophy is most illuminating. But there is much to gain from a more imaginatively duplex vision. Are the playworlds brought into new focus, new life? Do the results persuade, or move, or reveal? If they do, then no rules of procedure are relevant. Nor are scruples about proximate cause or influence, which isn’t my concern. This isn’t a law court; it is the theatre of possibility. This book is not structured in continuous form but is instead jagged, sometimes self-interrupting, sometimes recursive. I take inspiration here from Montaigne, who when he coined the term “essay” was referring above all to the form’s probing, interrogatory quality, and to the way in which each individual piece is a fragment of a gradually accreting, forward and backward portrait. I haven’t aimed to write a series of watertight reports, the evidence weighed, the conclusions modest and irrefutable. I don’t attempt finality. Instead, each episode should be read as a test, trial, or taste – putting things to the proof in a form that is systemically unfinished. In this I am guided by my core subject. So at times I use drama as a potential model for the shapes that thinking might take. Occasionally a 11 Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) uses Leibniz to help to theorise lyric poetry, riddles, ballads. 12 Herder’s term, in ‘On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul’, in Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 195. Also see ‘Critical Forests: Fourth Grove’ and ‘Shakespeare’ in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). For further discussion of Herder see Chapters 12 and 21.

Purposes

chapter or set-piece might better be understood as a scene, or as spoken in character, offering a particular snapshot, or perspective, or temporal enacting, a thought-experiment which speaks for subjective or experiential possibility more than objective fact. I sometimes follow a trail, or a trace, and see where it takes me, or I allow a temperamental bias, or I bracket certain knowledge or information in order to concentrate more avidly upon the thing at stake. Furthermore, I conceived some segments rather as Leibnizian monads, miniature possible worlds in their own right, alive with refractive action, at once severed from and apperceiving all others (with varying degrees of distinctness). And this entails a further consequence, particularly in the chapters devoted to Shakespeare. They are each in a sense self-sufﬁcient – essayistic polyps instantiating their own predicates and coordinates, implicating the basic motions of Shakespearean creation; they apprehend existing possibility rather than serve a critical or historical teleology; and so they can be experienced in any order (as I think Shakespeare’s plays often are when read, studied, adapted, or simply recollected). Ideally the chapters could revolve, like a bicycle chain or cassette, linked and coterminous, constantly exchanging position, eschewing falsifying spatial hierarchies. As it is, Shakespeare’s own work has been a prime model for my own. Think of the multiple narrative sets and subsets into which his Sonnets can be divided; of the primacy of the single poem; but then of the units within each sonnet, at once discrete and tributary, such that a single word might refract numerous possible worlds at the same time as it contributes to a particular line, or quatrain, or poem. Or think, even more pertinently, of the multiple narrative cells of a playworld, nesting here, shooting there, resisting as much as pursuing resolution. Clearly I cannot hope in a critical work truly to recapitulate such motivic and illocutionary variety. But I have wanted to respect it, and to allow that criticism might be most truthfully performed if it keeps faith and in touch with the often de-familiar processes of plays. Rather than literary historicism, I think of what I am attempting as a form of historical-imaginative recovery: trying to discover what was possible to be done, or thought, or said. Whenever I even sniff the vestiges of past times – if I enter the Duke Humfrey reading room in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, or even open a very old book – I am forcibly reminded how very

Entering Playworlds

little I know about how things were really thought of or spoken about in the past, and moved to think how necessarily approximate our masterful textbook narratives must be. In the interests of expedience we often pretend that past possibilities can be summarised, or that a roughly accurate model, for various things fit for purpose, will allow for, or even account for, the exceptions. In the main they won’t – and it is often the exceptions that are truest to possibility. When we were writing Shakespeare in Parts, we began with a series of general propositions, inferred from all sorts of contemporary evidence, about how theatrical exchange worked, the movement between writers and actors, actors and parts, parts and rehearsal, rehearsal and performance, cues and speeches, and so on. Pretty much every inference was radically modified, qualified, often turned on its head, when it came to bringing the same questions to the Shakespeare part-texts, as we imagined these lost things or non-things into existence, and began to think about how each one might actually have worked. The closer you get, the more things wobble and move out of the shapes that the distant view prescribed. Just imagine what London in 1600 might have sounded like, if only we had ears to hear! And let us not forget that apparently inconsequential things – a rhyme, a suppressed laugh – are as much an event, and can be as potent augurs of possibility, as a statute or an insurrection. Once you go to ground, history changes. In many ways my ambition in this book is no different from any performance of these troubling and exciting works. I don’t so much want to bed them in their contexts as take inspiration from them, the aim being to let them come newly true, in ways perhaps not quite witnessed before. Perhaps my studies will seem the huffings and puffings of critical ego. But all of the readings arise from a genuine passion on my part, in a double sense: I love the plays and want to communicate this love; but I also try to surrender to their forms, lapse my own volition inside them, without coercion, and allow them to move. This posits a mode of strategic passivity.13 Let us risk

13 T.S. Eliot apposes “creative” to “passive” responses to poetry, identifying the latter with “interpretation”, but concludes thus: “poetry is poetry, and the surface is as marvellous as the core. . .The work of Shakespeare is like life itself something to be lived through. If we lived it completely we should need no interpretation; but on our plane of appearances our interpretations themselves are a part of our living.” “Introduction”, G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (Routledge, London and New York, 1930; repr. 2001), xxi–xxii.

Purposes

dwelling in spaces that may seem like ours alone. Invariably they will be shared, but the fact and terms of the sharing may require loneliness to discover. The strange recognitions and comings-to-life that, for me at least, have repeatedly arisen strike me as a good thing. Certainly, much in my daily life, with its carelessness and complacency, feels rebuked by Shakespeareâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s possibilities. And very obviously: the possible worlds I actually visit in this work are the tiniest fraction of what is there, and indeed have seemed to be a smaller and smaller fraction of Shakespeareâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creation the more I have progressed with my studies. As ever, his achievement simply astonishes.

Index

action at a distance, 22, 174, 213, 222 actor: attention of 56–7; body 351, 355–6, 356–7; challenge to 56–66; choices 25, 58–9; and cues 124–5, 353–5; dependent ontology 214, 357–8; doubling 277; ensemble, 64, 350; excluded from knowledge 54–5, 64, 213–14, 352–3; as existential allegory 129, 132, 331, 351; existential pioneer 352–3; experience 58–60, 350–7; manuals 61–2; in Marlowe 72–5; in Middleton, 99; and monads 112; relation to character 12, 59–60, 186, 341–2, 349–50, 355–8; Shakespeare’s intimacy to 61; survived by formactions 129–30, 354–7; visible body 3, 7, 130; writing parts to 56, 330–1 actor’s part, 12, 13, 19, 349–50, 351; opening scenic possibilities 56–60 see also actor; cue; cue-space; repeated cues Adorno, Theodor, 210n12, 234n12 Agamben, Giorgio, 151, 230 allegory: character as 32; particularity of 130–1; predilection for 7; proneness to 14 All’s Well That Ends Well, 214, 276 anachronism: as error 147; necessity of 147–8, 159; Shakespeare’s 174 anachrony, 41, 148–55, 174–5, 256–7 animism, 111n6, 218–19 see also corpuscularism anti-theatricalism, 43–4, 52, 54–5 Antony and Cleopatra, 94, 214 Arden of Faversham, 48 Aristotle, 67, 124, 129, 135, 143, 189, 208–9; actuality v potentiality 213–16; mimesis 199–200 asides: in Marlowe 72, 74; living as 136–7 As You Like It, 276

attention: delicate 4, 7–8, 19, 41–2, 280; ethics of 286–7, 290–4, 310, 314–15; how close 206–7 see also memory; understanding audience: acting before 123; complicity 288–95, 309–10; future 40; individuals in 39–40; Jonson’s, 52–3; layered 40–1; London theatres 44–6; partially alienated 38–40, 54–5; responsibilities 286–7 see also spectator Augustine, 104, 341 autopoeisis, 47, 123, 129 Ax, H., 172–3 Bacon, Francis, 203, 213, 222 Badiou, Alain, 239, 287 Barba, Eugenio, 65–6 Barish, Jonas 51, 52n12, 185n3 Barthes, Roland, 12n4 Barton, Anne, 129, 202n6 Beatrice (Much Ado) 47 Beaumont, Francis, 49 Benjamin, Walter, 151–2, 234n12 Berger Jr., Harry, 333 Bergson, Henri, 150, 239–40, 252n6, 255, 272 Berry, Ralph, 254n8 Blair, Hugh, 209 Blau, Herbert, 294 Bohm, David, 256 Boileau, Nicholas, 67, 189 Booth, Stephen, 40, 277n4, 289n6, 292n8 Booth, Wayne, 286n2 Borges, Jorge Luis, 158 Bradley, A. C., 322 Bristol, Michael D., 304n3 Brook, Peter, 11–12, 192–3 Bruno, Giordano, 6n2, 111, 213, 218, 219 Bruster, Douglas 78n3

375

376

Index

Bryant, Levi R., 131 Budra, Paul, 101n2 Burke, Edmund, 98, 288–9 Byron, Lord, 287–8 Campanella, Tommaso, 213, 219 Campbell, Mary Baine, 6n2 Cassirer, Ernst, 67–8 Cavell, Stanley, 39, 294, 323n9, 349n19, 356 Cavendish, Margaret, 222 Chapman, George, 69, 90n1 character: constitution 32, 316–17, 318, 349–50, 356–7; doesn’t deﬁne playlife 3, 7; embryology 23, 25; graduated arrival 24; human and non-human 316–17; processes of composition 21–3, 27–30; subjective dispossession 328–9; sympathy with, 7; unique temporality 357 see also actor; individuality Charnes, Linda, 172n7 Christological thinking, 14, 167–8 Chubb, Louise, 48 Cicero, 179 Coleridge, S. T., 135, 209, 223, 291, 340n15 comedies: structured for forgetfulness 282–4, 314–15 Comedy of Errors, the 189 Coriolanus, 214, 353 corpuscularism 218–21 counterfactuals 277–8, 304–5 critical methodology 17–18 cues, 7, 12, 56, 57, 59, 124–5, 131, 140 see also cue-space; repeated cues cue-space, 12, 57, 123, 140, 330 dance, 254–5, 257, 272–4 da Vinci, Leonardo, 194, 207, 210 death: impossibility on stage 186, 350; despairing of 324; and repeated cues 353–4; and scenic telepathy 337 de Grazia, Margreta, 147–8 Deleuze, Gilles, 208–9, 239 Democritus, 111n6, 116 Derrida, Jacques, 240 Descartes, Rene, 111n6, 118, 122, 211, 219–22 Desdemona (Othello): actor’s face 331–2; and Barbarie 345, 347; between life and death 334–5, 337, 341; body 338; eyewitness report of dying 331–2, 351; experience of dying 346–7; ﬁnal words 333–4; ghost 342–3, 344–5, 347; logistics

of murder scene 332–3, 338–40, 343; protests 334; relation to actor’s body 342; returning voice 334–5, 346; superpositions 342; travel of dying 338, 343, 345; virtualized 342; wordplay 342 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 155 Dirac, P. A. M., 206–7 disguise 32, 60, 123, 131, 133–4, 138, 214, 247, 329 Dolozel, Lubomir, 16n10, 130n10 Donne, John, 13, 14 Dryden, John, 209 dumb show 57, 68, 194, 278, 298, 302–4, 335 Edmond (Lear): allegory of playlife 32; conception 21–5, 27–30; lack of control over part 32, 63; like Shakespeare 28; meta-theatrical 28, 31–2; psychology 27 Edward II (Marlowe), 50 Einstein, Albert, 341n17 El Greco, 207 Eliot, T. S., 19n13, 90 empirical knowledge: approximate 155–6; artworks separate from 152n20; insufficient 35, 173, 208, 284, 348; and Middleton 106; and monads 116; and the transcendental 349n19, 358 Empson, William 196n15, 198, 209 entrances, 68, 74n7, 138, 187, 334; ambiguated 57, 59, 73, 276, 339 Erasmus, 179 event: ambiguity of 341–2; of experiment 154; of history 154–5; of the play 15, 43–6 exits, 57, 124, 126, 186, 187, 261, 276, 307 Falstaff, 47; embodying formactive historicity 183–6; exceeding plot 185–6 Fenves, Peter 230–1 Fernie, Ewan, 286n1 Ford, John, 90n1 formactions, 3, 32; anachronic 8; autopoetic 123–4, 129; beyond notice 347–8; close attention to 11; contingent on notice 275, 315, 341; craft-specific 15, 124, 125, 128–9, 132–3, 217, 254–5; definition 123–4; distinguished from form/ formalism 144–5; embodied in characters 186, 329; full of action, 11–12, 14, 160; generic 128–9; and hylomorphic thinking 144; hypostasizing 145–6; latent playlife 7, 9,

Index 35, 210–12, 232; measuring possibility 341; monadic 117–21; more than actions 125; not always articulated 330; own conatus 7, 12, 58; as possible subject 131–46, 316; potential for life 33, 55, 123–36, 216, 274, 315, 355–7; prehending political possibility 164, 166, 175–6, 184–5; and repetition 125–6, 254–5; residual characteristics 132–3; suffering possibility 358–9; temporally staggered 125, 127, 256 figurative language see metalepsis; metaphor; wordplay; words Finch Conway, Anne, 111n6 Focillon, Henri, 124, 128, 151 Foerster, Heinz von, 63 forgetting see memory Fracastoro, 219 futurity, 127–8, 217, 237; Plotinian 216; presupposed by dense forms 39–40 gaps: see intervals genre, 46; ethical teleology 304, 309; exceeded 149, 152, 185; morality 309–10; neoclassical 67; permissions 282, 300, 302, 309; pre-emptive 12, 88, 280–1; theory 67–8 grammar: recursive 13, 14, 164, 166, 253 Greene, Robert: Friar Bacon 71–2 Gross, Kenneth, 273n23 Hallyn, Fernand, 219 Hamlet, 54, 60–1, 144, 149, 214, 276, 278, 287, 294; Claudius’s soliloquy 193–7 Harman, Graham, 138–40 Hazlitt, William, 135, 190, 197, 210 hearing, 60, 62, 63, 113, 242, 254; first hearing not enough 182, 330; and touch 4 Hegel, G. W. F., 9, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 138 1 Henry IV, 98; opening scene 163–76, 183 2 Henry IV, 161–2 Henry V, 34, 186 Herbert, George, 13 Herder, Johann Gottfried: hearing over sight 62–3; influenced by Leibniz 17, 234–5; life in everything 134–6; Shakespeare’s dynamism 235–7; resistance to preformation 238–9; world in characters 34n2 Heywood, Thomas, 335n9 historicism: assumptions 149–51; causation 150, 154, 174

377 history: discontinuous 148–51, 157–8, 161–2, 167–70; forward and backward 33, 154–5, 157, 160; getting closer to 19, 154; as latent promise 152–4, 162–3, 167–8; and memory 148; superimposed narratives of 170–3; typological 153, 168–9, 173–4, 184; unﬁnished 186 Hobbes, Thomas, 222 Hope, Jonathan, 81 holographic reality 194, 195–6, 358 Hooke, Robert, 222 Horace, 67, 189 Hutson, Lorna, 50n9, 51, 57n3, 284n1 Huygens, Christiaan, 256n11, 274 imagination: escape from 270; faith in 218; former states of 118; Macbeth’s 299; our 10, 153, 175, 212, 299; as possibility 230; self-visions of 328, 344; Shakespeare’s 6, 10, 37, 56, 187; for Spinoza 224–5; of the subvisible 220–1; technically informed 10 improvisation: essential for invention 10 incompossibles, 9, 90, 203, 211–12, 228–9, 241; codependency with possibles 232 individuality: of audience member 40, 287; Bruno’s ‘minima’ 218; and collective 168, 313, 351; constituted by perceptions 120; discrete substance 114, 265; and ﬁxity of props 130; fraction as 317; and genus/species 68, 216; inferred 318; as mobile event 121, 254; naturalized 3, 318; nested 121, 131, 224, 265–7; pre- 141–2; as potential 46, 92; as privation 226; resistance to concept of 142–3; as shadow 328; shared 9; as singularity 253, 318; supra-subjective 9, 112, 316; trace in pre-consciousness 211; of artwork 234n12 see also character; monad ingeniousness, 148–9 instruments of playlife see formactions intervals: Desdemona’s 346; life in 55, 109, 112, 116, 128, 280, 347; and metalepsis 181; need to enter, 7, 41, 175–6, 271, 279–81; 298–9, 330, 335; in part-text 56, 57–8, 271 Irigiray, Luce, 63 Jackson, Henry, 331–2, 351 Jacobean tragedy, 90–1 Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 50 Johnson, Samuel 209

378

Index

Jones, Emrys, 163n1, 207n4, 276n2 Jonson, Ben, 62, 67, 156, 189, 309; Alchemist, 52, 53; anti-theatricalism, 51–2; Bartholomew Fair, 48, 51, 53; corrective to Shakespeare 53–4, 209; forms, 52–3; scenes 50–1; Sejanus 97 Julius Caesar, 276–7, 353 Kant, Immanuel, 144, 220n16, 238, 288, 306, 309 Keats, John, 37n5, 135 Kermode, Frank, 5 Kerrigan, John, 78n1, 90, 102 Kierkegaard, Soren, 90, 158, 317, 325n11; Fear and Trembling 309–10; fear of the good 327; life as shadow 328; the mimical 321n5; necessity and possibility 322, 326 King Lear, 21–33, 102, 149, 287, 353; EdgarTom 23, 32, 214, 278, 353; opening exchange 21–5 see also Edmond Kleist, Heinrich von, 272–4 Knapp, James A., 222n21 Knight of the Burning Pestle (Beaumont), 49 Koselleck, Reinhart, 153–4 Kottman, Paul, 62n9, 133n13

117–20, 239–40; natural machines 110; no two things the same 109, 253–4; and passion 122; pendulum 274; plenum 110–12, 115; poetry of 237; possibles 110–11, 241–2; preformation 114, 119, 228, 238–40; and Spinoza 223; substance is action 109–11, 120; present big with past and future 116, 119; pyramid of possible worlds 211, 229–32; time and space 116; waves of the sea 242 see also monad Leighton, Angela, 127 Lessing, Gotthold, 233 Levinas, Emmanuel, 148, 295n14, 347n18, 359 Lewis, David 16, 137–8, 278, 304–5 line: end of 123, 143; enjambed 163–5; half-line 175–6; living in-between 318, 324, 360–2 Locke, John, 117–18, 222 Locrine, 48, 49, 170 Longinus, 286 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 14, 180, 283 Lucretius, 63n12, 111 Luther, Martin, 354 Lyne, Raphael, 181n16

Lacan, Jacques, 306 Lady’s Tragedy (Middleton), 80, 91; answerable to plot 92; ethical absolutes 93–7; Lady 95–6, 101–2, 105; magnetized by death 98, 100–2; love 99; politics 96–7; primal scene 103–4, 105; repetitions 93–4, 96, 103; Shakespearean influences 94–5; Tyrant 97, 98–105 Latour, Bruno, 153n22 Leibniz, Gottfried, 16–17, 128, 138, 140, 152, 194, 208–9; aesthetics 118; apperception 117–18, 242; best of all possible worlds 229–32, 241–2, 280; calculus 115n22, 117n28, 150n12; criticisms of 238–40; differences from Shakespeare 228–9; dynamics 122; and embodiment 111–13; energy (kinetic and potential) 274; and field theory 122, 254; fractal creation 109; and God 109, 114, 119, 228; harmony 233; holography 119; and imagination 234; impossibility of death 116; influence on Herder 62, 234–7; law of continuity 114–16; life of 228–30, 233–4; limitations 317; model for critical method 18; model of unconscious 118; monadic playworld 109–11, 116,

Macbeth, 5–6, 36, 40–1, 83, 178, 214, 232, 280–1, 305, 318–29, 335, 353; and Middleton 83, 94–5, 98; Duncan’s killing 276–7; challenge of witnessing 285, 286–96, 315 see also Macbeth Macbeth: captivity to play 318, 328, 358; composition 319–20; couplets 320–1; disintegrity 319–21; formaction man 329; life as rehearsal 322, 325, 328; living antinomies 323–4; living as mime 322–3; and possibility 322, 326–7; subjection to time 325–6; virtuality as actuality 320; simulacra 321–2, 328 machinic life, 3, 7, 53, 58, 63, 136n21, 194, 219, 220–1; character as 316; organic 110, 113, 235 see also puppetry Mack, Maynard, 25 Mack, Peter, 197n16 Mahood, M. M., 274n25 Mallin, Eric 279n8 Marina (Pericles): abduction 299–302; bearing repetitions 312, 313–14; de-individuation 314; and event-erasure 306–7; as Isaac-ﬁgure 310;

Index meta-awareness 312–13; responsibilities 313–14; as sign 311–12; speech 313; vulnerability 306–8 Marion, Jean-Luc, 104–5 Marlowe, Christopher, 13, 48, 49, 50, 190; Edward II 72–3; Faustus 47, 48–9, 80, 83, 84, 287; Jew of Malta 74–5; Tamburlaine 74n1 Marston, John, 69, 70, 90n1 Matisse, Henri, 210 Measure for Measure, 95, 201–5, 214, 271 memory: as apperception 117; and characterisation 25, 99; and cognition 65, 312; in comedy 282; creating place 33; at end of the line 123, 143; as error 225, 227; ethical importance of 263–4, 266, 267, 284, 287, 305, 314, 316, 324, 345; as fancy/imagination 221, 227; forward 93, 175, 258, 284, 345; intrinsic to playworlds 6; irrevocable 335; of materials 205, 257, 270; as nostalgia 321, 324; physical 314; and possibility 324, 327; and props 130, 270, 336; recovered 325n11; scenic connections 260, 269; temporal folds 148, 241; and topology of art 127; of words 23, 70, 225 see also scene Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 39, 222n21, 251n5 metalepsis 7, 13, 141, 180–1, 189, 193–4, 195, 197, 348; characters as metaleptic 32, 37, 318, 324; Middleton’s 86 metaphor, 141, 174, 206; alive with action 14, 23–4, 114, 200, 204–5, 254; entering 123; creative 199–200; and Leibniz 114, 120–1; non-Shakespearean 70; predictive 22–3 see also metalepsis; wordplay metatheatricality 202, 204–5 see also formactions metonym, 23, 141, 181, 188, 195, 335, 348; creation as 197, 318; not distinguished from metaphor 114; self-metonyms 349 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 65 Michelangelo, 194, 207, 210 Middleton, Thomas: and actors 79; allegorical places 82–3, 84–6; and collaboration 79; and genre 77–8; Changeling, 80, 99–100, 103; Chaste Maid in Cheapside 88–90, 95, 103; language 80–1, 84, 86, 324; and Moralities 94, 104; and predestination 77–9, 89–90, 100, 103; Revenger’s Tragedy 77–8, 99; scenic relationships

379 79–80, 83, 85, 101–3; Spanish Gypsy 79; spectacle 78, 102, 105–6; Two Gates of Salvation 79n4; Women Beware Women 78, 80, 96, 103; writing to plots, 77, 79; Yorkshire Tragedy 81–7 see also Lady’s Tragedy Midsummer Night’s Dream, a, 14, 332 Milton, John, 13, 14, 38, 80, 308 mime 60, 65, 83, 124, 126, 127, 157, 197n17, 214, 286, 289, 297, 302–4, 321, 322–3 mimesis: exceeding traditional 129, 199, 330–1, 338; Shakespearean 201–6, 323–4 modalities, 13, 162, 163, 165; imperative 45, 156, 168, 185, 190, 240; intensity of 294; of Middleton 99, 100; modal realism 36, 134, 137, 254; optative 156, 250, 254, 324; simultaneous 171, 191; subjunctive 156, 191, 248, 263, 288, 291, 324; transﬁguring 206 monad, 119–20, 134, 138–9; not anthropomorphic 119; as crystallographic point 116–17; connection to bodies 111–13; expressing events 120; as language 120; isomorphic with God 119; levels of individuality 121; material monads 238; mobile mirror of possibility 119–20; perception as expression as being 117–18, 120, 121; proliferating subjectivity 121, 241–2; repetition of universe 114; as subject 120; as theatrical subject 120–1 Morton, Timothy, 8–9, 128n6, 207n5 Mucedorus, 47, 48, 49, 74 Much Ado About Nothing, 278, 280, 282–5 Nagel, Alexander 127n5, 157n32, 173 nature: made afraid 53–4, 309 Neill, Michael, 335 neoclassicism, 67, 88, 189, 209 neoplatonism see Plotinus Newton, Isaac, 235, 238; calculus 117n28; model of playworld 121–2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 321n4, 323n10 Novarina, Valere, 179, 182n17 object-oriented philosophy 138–40 original sin, 14, 22, 78–9, 80, 84, 92, 96, 103, 196, 203 Othello, 62, 214, 278, 301; curtain 334, 335, 337–8, 348–9; stage materials 337–8; willow scene 344–5 see also Desdemona

380

Index

Paracelsus, 219 Parker, Patricia, 157n31 parts: and whole 220n16; differential reality 349; inside a part 318; moveable 48; not determined by whole 12, 34, 39, 149, 218, 242, 253; not burying 263; play not organic whole 47, 58; self-determining 12, 58, 64, 124, 317; soul in each 234 see also formactions part-text see actor’s part passion: acting of 61–2, 179, 351; action as 61–2, 268; ours, 7, 292, 308; distribution of, 7, 58, 122, 135, 169, 219, 223, 241, 299, 316; drama as 224, 275, 356; of forms/instruments 74, 125, 126, 132, 358–9; individual suffering 32, 34, 73, 90, 169, 248–9, 318, 356; ontological condition 122, 186, 219, 274, 317; beyond passivity 295, 308; of possibility 328; state of projection 197; and rhetoric 179; scenic deﬁnition 79, 170; and sublime 268; submission to the event 292, 317; switches 68; un-freedom 225–7 pastoral, 71–2, 102, 168, 247, 249, 262–3, 266, 283, 313, 315 Perdita (Winter’s Tale) 47; composition 258–62, 268, 271, 274; event erasure 305–6; existential peril 247–8, 273; multiple births 258–9, 260–1; possible lives 245, 249, 256, 260; praise of 248–9, 249–50; responsibilities 259, 265–9, 271, 315, 358; subjection 249, 265–6, 273, 315 Pericles, 278, 281; allegorical mode 297–8, 300; changes from sources 307; complicit witnessing 301–2, 308, 310; ellipses 298–9, 301; mime-like 297, 302, 303; Marina-scenes 297–314; romance teleology 300, 308–9, 311; scenic recapitulations, 310–12; sexual violence 297, 301–2, 306–8; 310–12; substitutions 302–3, 315; textual corruption 298 see also Marina Peters, Julie Stone, 197n17 Phelan, Peggy 127 philosophy: and poetry 17, 317–18 Pinter, Harold, 91 place: of actor’s body 132, 351; anterior 138; of asides 136; compounded 23, 155, 157, 197; deﬁned 35; made by words 22, 36, 188, 189, 191–2, 358; metamorphic 6, 155, 189, 260; metaphysical 5, 33–4,

82–6, 100, 217, 324, 334–8, 342; mobile 160; not uniform 109; object/subject as 36; opened-up 57; primal 103; and props 348; rooted 260; and scenes 126, 128; simultaneous/superimposed 5, 33, 165, 169, 210; of sound 63n12; and space 116; subjective 324–5; virtual 130, 168, 255, 293; of witnessing 295 see also interval; playworld Plato, 111n6, 143, 145, 191 playlife see formactions playworld: beyond the local 91–2; distinctive ecology/ontology 5–7, 8–9, 15, 160, 217, 234–6; dynamic with appetite 240; physics 248, 292; preformed 240–1; temporality 157–9; worlds within worlds 33–5 see also place; temporality plot: backstage 187; exceeding 185; forward and backward 158–9; more than evident 4, 163, 291–2, 294–6 see also plot scenarios plot scenarios: competing formaction 117; inadequate to scene 163; inﬂuence on playmaking 69–70, 88; limited inﬂuence on Shakespeare 187; making of 68–9; and Middleton 77–9; Newtonian model 122; philosophical/theological implications 77; residue of 298; and scenes 70–2; Troilus 149n9 Plotinus 124, 191, 216–17 Poole, Adrian, 293n9, 295 popular theatre, 43–6; formal looseness 47–50; scenic freedom 48–50; socially/ politically proleptic 46, 150–1, 232 possibility, 3, 7; Aristotelian 213–15; as actuality 37, 160; concentration of 11; contra actuality 214–15, 294; contra probability 213; existential 319–22; dynamic specimens 128; as forward memory 284; historical and spiritual 14, 46, 150–5, 159, 211–12; neo-classical 67–8; philosophers of 16 see also potentiality possible worlds philosophy 16 potentiality, 3, 7, 9, 67–9, 215; Aristotelian 140, 214–16; for life 33; of metaphor 199; monadic 121; resistance to concept of 140, 153n22 see also possibility props 15, 335–6 prosody, 163–5, 251–2

Index Proust, Marcel 313n9 puns: see wordplay puppet, 48, 78n1, 105, 136n21, 255, 267, 272–4 Puttenham, George, 157n31, 177–8, 179 Quintilian, 179 quantumised worlds, 5, 277, 324 Rabkin, Norman, 33n1, 42n11, 156n27 Rape of Lucrece, 229, 232 reading: closely 11, 15–16 Rembrandt, 210 repeated cues, 276, 353–4, 356; Falstaff 185–6; in Marlowe 74–5 repetition: differential 253, 254; and graduated reality 309, 312; immanent to theatre 125–6, 289–91; and interconnected life 264–5; our returning to the event 292–6, 304, 314–15; shuttered moments 324–5 Ricoeur, Paul 199–200, 206 Rivere de Carles, Nathalie, 336n11 rhetoric, 177–8; and actors 179; style exceeding deﬁnitions 35–6, 163–5, 181–2, 249–50; diagesis inadequate 167, 169, 177; indebtedness to 179–80 rhyme 15, 19, 31, 32, 117, 123, 131, 138, 320–1 Richard II, 14, 34–5, 163, 165, 169, 172n7, 180, 200–1, 353 Richard III, 75–6, 353 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa, 333 Roach, Joseph R., 61n6, 179, 336n11 Romeo and Juliet, 14, 73, 94, 346, 353 Rowley, William, 79, 80, 90 Ryan, Marie Laure, 16n9 Scarry, Elaine, 8, 249n2 scenes, 7, 126–7; afterlife 47; constructed like language 208; forward and backward 23, 174, 208, 257, 264–5, 269, 326–7, 330; gaps between 123, 128, 202, 278, 280–1, 306, 308, 330; hyper-scenes 12, 57, 126, 208, 323–5; as joke 282–3; living in 276–80, 324–5; produced my metaphor 15, 21–3, 126, 196–7; reported 188–9, 192, 193, 246–7, 290; scenes within scenes 25, 126, 167–8, 171–2, 187, 208; specular 277, 282–3, 310–11 Schiller, Friedrich, 135, 156 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 234n12 Schrodinger, Erwin, 275n1, 341

381 senses: heightened 4; insufﬁcient 4, 6, 35, 62, 155–6, 241–2; contra sentience 8–9 Serres, Michel, 150, 211, 230, 245 Shelley, P. B., 36 Shylock (Merchant of Venice) 75 Sidney, Philip, 67, 88, 319–20; Apology for Poetry 189–92, 245 sight: Cartesian 221–2; co-active with hearing 63; lack of 290; not sufﬁcient 4, 15, 35, 57, 62, 145, 200–1; truth claims 277–8, 284–5 see also subvisible silence: active 13, 24, 124; attending to 7, 63; Edmond’s 24, 32; end of actor’s part 342, 354, 355; end of the line 143; and exits 276; Hero’s 285; impossible 4; leap from 321; Perdita’s 271 simile: illustrative 69; epic 70; Middleton 81; and touch of life 37; Webster 70; Wittgenstein on Shakespeare’s 209 Simondon, Gilbert, 141–2, 144n33 Sloterdijk, Peter, 218, 233n10 sources, 149, 153, 307 Spanish Tragedy, 47 spectator, 6, 40, 61, 62, 65, 92, 145, 158, 179, 207n4, 241, 254, 293, 295, 331, 337, 351; Cartesian 221; passivity 302; separated 357 see also audience Spenser, Edmund, 13, 35, 45, 49, 80, 95, 99, 100, 104, 248, 335 Spinoza, Benedict: and emotions 224; God/ Nature like Shakespeare 223; and imagination 225; and passions 225–7 States, Bert O., 7n3, 129n9, 274n24, 278n7, 318n1 Stern, Tiffany, 13, 68 Stubbes, Philip, 43, 55 subject: distinct or otherwise from object 221–4 see also individuality sublime 98, 104–5, 273, 286, 288–9, 319, 363 subvisible 8, 41, 62, 205, 220, 331 see also empirical knowledge surrogacy, 92, 93, 183, 259, 290, 295 Taine, Hypollite, 11 Telesio, Bernardino, 215 Tempest, The, 189 temporality: frames within frames 166–71, 323–5; shifting 6, 15, 28, 33, 149, 156, 191, 248 see also anachrony; history; playworld

382

Index

theatergrams, 49 Theobald, Lewis, 231 Tiffany, Daniel, 17n11, 119 Timon of Athens, 321 Tribble, Evelyn, 64, 187n1 Troilus and Cressida, 149, 214 Twelfth Night, 133, 188–9 Twine, Laurence, 298, 307 uncertainty principle 275, 341 understanding, ours of playlife: differential 347–8; ethics of 263; in Jonson, 52–3; too naturalising, 7, 156; not in real time 39; resist presumptions 8, 13, 19–20, 308; threatened 38–9 see also attention; memory unities, 189, 192 Venus and Adonis, 36–7 Vickers, Brian, 180, 249 virtuality 8, 25, 100; as actuality 320; of character 316, 342, 347; of craftconsciousness 133; and Leibniz 117, 231; of metaphor 141, 350; of mime 278; of possibles 241; of playlife 55, 57; and repetition 127; scenic gaps 299; staged metaphysics 292; of sympathy 255 vizards, 117, 130 Voltaire, 241 Webster, John, 49, 69–70, 90–2, 324 Wheelwright, Philip, 200 White, Hayden, 147

Whitehead, Alfred North, 211 Wilkins, George, 298, 307 Wilson, Thomas, 177–8, 179 Wilson-Knight, G., 269n13, 285n2 Winter’s Tale: ﬁnal scene 269–72; Florizel’s ‘waves’ speech 250–8; Hermione’s return 279–80; meta-theatrical 245–6, 250–1; Ovidian 248; set-piece narrations 245–7, 259–60, 263; spatio-temporal leaps 245–6, 248; storm scene 259–65; transﬁgurations 248–9 Witmore, Michael 136n21, 188n2, 189n3, 226n34, 268n12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 156, 209, 321 Womersley, David, 36, 164n2, 184n1 Wood, Christopher S., 127n6, 157n32, 173 wordplay, 13, 21–2, 23–4, 28–31, 34–5, 40, 123, 251–3; acting of 64–5; characters subject to 26; Middleton’s 81; resistance to Shakespeare’s 209–10 words: coming true 26–7, 29, 30–1, 123, 196–7, 326, 330; embodying worlds 11, 29–30, 179, 190–1, 196; escaping notice 38, 41; as error 225; as events 194; fractal 197, 200; superimpositions 323–5; telepathic 21–5, 28–9, 38–9, 161–2, 330; theatrical instruments 11 see also metalepsis; metaphor; metonym; wordplay worldmaking: early modern, 6n2, 14, 218–19 Worthen, W. B., 38, 61n5 Wright, Thomas, 61–2 Zizek, Slavoj, 151