The Tragedy of Nobility on the Seventeenth-Century Stage
David Quint
The rise in the 1980's of criticism intent on restoring
historical meaning to the literary text has raised concerns
about its capacity to recognize the text as literary.
If we
read the text as another document of a given historical moment,
as another historical document tout court in the "archive" -- we
may forget, and forget to teach our students, its identifying
marks as a literature: its formal features, conventions, and
place within a literary history.
Literary criticism risks
losing its object of study and its distinctiveness as a
discipline.1
It is easier to throw the baby out with the
bathwater, when one can no longer tell the baby from the
bathwater.
To dwell upon genre is one way to resist such disciplinary
amnesia.
Genres contain their own explicit and implicit
conventions and meanings: they block themselves off from other
non-literary forms of writing in the system of culture as well
as from other genres within a literary system.
Some of the most
advanced critical models and practices of the last decades
1
(Jameson, Moretti) have turned to genre in order to effect a
criticism responsible both to literature as a separate cultural
domain and to its changing relationship in history to the
culture that surrounds it.2
Genres persist in Western literary history in part because of
inertia: they offer templates for the writer working in the
larger literary system, and it is easier to continue a genre
than invent a new one.
The classical patrimony was especially
rich and offered the modern writer a myriad of choices: epic,
tragedy, comedy, romance novel, novella, pastoral, love lyric,
ode, satire, drinking song, etc.3
Genres also persist because
they give voice to enduring -- let us not call them universal,
nor essential -- areas of human experience and feeling.4
At the
same time, the circumstances of a given period shape the
tendencies of a genre, lending both its form and its content of
feeling a historical and social inflection.5
These are simple
enough axioms for the literary scholar and interpreter.
It may
be more difficult in practice to account both for a core of
affective response that a particular instantiation of the genre
may produce for the present-day reader -- Aristotle's pity and
terror in the examples of tragedy that will follow below -- and
for the sociohistorical meaning one can read out of it.
2
The two
are ideally inseparable, and we hope to arrive at the former
(our experiential, emotional recognition) through the latter
(our enriched historical understanding).
The excursion to the
contextual archive, largely directed by the text's own topical
reference, is a critical means rather than end.
What can this archive suggest about one period of the genre
of tragedy -- Renaissance and neoclassical -- that arose in the
seventeenth century and seemed to have run its course by the
century's end?
We may posit that at the basis of tragic
experience lies the prospect that death will destroy the
identity and consciousness of the human individual: tragic plots
offer variously displaced versions of this root experience of
forfeiting the place one occupies in the world.6
A defining
strain of seventeenth century tragedy -- something larger than a
subgenre -- dramatizes the loss of a particular, high
aristocratic identity, and focuses the genre upon the travails
of a nobility imperilled and disempowered by the centralizing
projects of a newly powerful monarchy.7
Conflict between king
and noble vassal, between royal court and local grandee had
provided a political issue and literary theme throughout the
middle ages.
It becomes a nucleus of tragedy at the moment when
this conflict was, in fact, nearing its end, decided in favor of
3
the monarch, and when a style of noble independence and selfassertion was already the object of nostalgia.8
The tragedy of
the age treats the disappearance of this noble way of being in
the world as its subject and, at the same time, as the reason
why tragedy itself is ceasing to be possible.
It is at the end
of the century of tragedy that we accordingly begin.
1. Racine and Corneille
The scene is set at Versailles, which is called Trézène, the
palace with its nearby woods and hunting grounds.
Thésée, has gone missing and is presumed dead.
The King, one
In his absence,
three possible heirs to the throne do what aristocrats do best:
they make love to one another, and use the kingdom and its
succession as pretexts for courtship, rather than seek to
possess it.
Hippolyte even proposes to Aricie that the realm be
divided into thirds so that he can gallantly give his portion to
her (II.2.474-508).
The final political verdict is delivered,
however, not by these noble characters at all.
The city of
Paris, here called Athens, puts the matter to a vote (II.6.721728).
The city, thought to support the native-born Aricie,
makes a surpising decision in favor of the son of Phèdre.
4
It is the more suprising because it reverses the recent
history of the Fronde, when Paris sent packing the regent Anne
of Austria and her eleven year old son, Louis XIV.
In 1652, the
Parlement of Paris had made the radical claim to have the right
to vest royal authority on whomever it chose.9
This devolution
of power to the city and its people would be the situation of
Racine's Phèdre (1677) did not Thésée now return, setting into
motion the play's tragic catastrophe.
If the alternative is popular sovereignty, the noble
characters may welcome the return of the king, even a tyrannical
absolutist king, as the guarantor of aristocratic society.
Hippolyte and Aricie exhibit a peculiar and ultimately selfdestructive piety in the lengths to which they go to spare the
feelings and dignity of Thésée.
Hippolyte refuses to let his
father know of Phèdre's incestuous love for him and asks,
Devais-je, en lui faisant un récit trop sincère
D'un indigne rougeur couvrir le front d'un père?10
(V.1.1341-1342)
(Should I, in making too unvarnished an account of the
matter, cover a father's brow with a blush unworthy of him?)
5
This piety towards father and king corresponds in the double
plot of Phèdre -- for even this most classical of plays has a
characteristically modern double plot -- to the piety that
Phèdre, in the immediately preceding scene, has herself
expressed towards the gods against the blasphemy of Oenone
(IV.6.1307).
Phédre upholds the theological order that destroys
her as Hippolyte upholds the paternal and political one that
will similarly destroy him, and the two orders are, of course,
closely connected by the play.11
Like Louis, Thésée is a sacred
king, and he indeed can summon the monstrous violence of the
gods -- or of the State -- to annhilate his son.
But the
alternative to such a king is the rule of the people and the
city.12
The sacrifice of Hippolyte to this royal and paternal
authority suggests that Phèdre is no less a tragedy of the noble
subject living under the absolutist French monarchy that
succeeded the Fronde than is Suréna, the last play of the aged
Corneille, performed only three years earlier in 1674.
Suréna,
as critics have pointed out, depicts the collapse of the
compromise between monarch and mighty -- even overmighty -subject worked out in Corneille's earlier tragedies that had
6
allowed the two to co-exist in a relation of mutual respect and
loyalty.13
Suréna, the Parthian general, has grown so great in
reputation and power that he is mistrusted by Orode, the king
whom he has put on the throne -- "Un service au-dessus de toute
recompense" (III.1.705).14 The hero proudly simplifies the issues
of the play:
Mon crime véritable est d'avoir aujourd'hui
Plus de nom que mon Roi, plus de vertu que lui,
(V.2.1511-1512)
(My true crime is to have today a greater renown than my
King, more virtue than he has.)
Suréna goes offstage -- "A peine du palais il sortait dans la
rue. . ." (V.v.1713) -- to be cut down by three arrows by an
unknown hand.
Both Suréna and Phèdre depict tyrannical royal
power crushing a noble and innocent victim.
Suréna goes
defiantly to his death, breathing a last Corneillian affirmation
of the independence and individual glory (V.3.1659-1662) of the
greathearted nobleman.15
But Hippolyte, the royal subject
transposed into royal son, is governed, in the words of Aricie,
7
by the "respect," both political deference and filial piety, he
wishes to preserve for Thésée (V.3.1447): in some sense
Hippolyte colludes in his own destruction.
As if by inverse
recompense, the death of Suréna is shockingly bathetic in the
brevity of the five verses that report it, in the ignominy of
falling in the street to the Parthians' proverbially cowardly
weapon of choice, and in the way that its royal origin is hidden
behind assassination, a "mystery of state."
16
In contrast,
Racine's Hippolyte goes off to a heroic offstage death -- "A
peine nous sortions des portes de Trézène. . ." (V.6.1498) -his combat against the monster from the sea reported in the long
récit of Théramène: it is as if the playwright rewards him for
his reverence towards his king and father, for a kind of selfsacrifice.
Phèdre and Suréna each represent their respective
dramatist's farewell to secular tragedy; twelve years would pass
before Racine would turn to sacred drama.
Together, they
suggest that absolutism has now made untellable the central
political story of French neoclassical tragedy, the struggle of
the great aristocrat to preserve an older identity of feudal
independence and self-asserting honor -- his or her "gloire" -in relation to a centralizing monarchy.
8
This story had been
defined by the terms of Corneille's drama, whose themes, Paul
Bénichou observes, both anticipated the aristocratic revolt of
the Fronde and in plays like Nicomède (1651) appeared to comment
on them.17
But it is precisely the memory of the Fronde in
Phèdre that accounts for its difference in tone from Suréna.
The revolt of the nobles had been accompanied by the revolt of
Paris, and Racine's play suggests that the city could have made
itself the master of the situation.
Caught between the spectre
of popular rule from below and the absolute monarch above them,
Racine's aristocrats may have no choice but to defer and cling
to their fatherly king in the interests of their aristocractic
order, even if it means the loss of their autonomy of action and
even their own individual demise.18
Suréna ends bitterly, but in
the last line of Phèdre Thésée takes Aricie under his protection
as his adoptive daughter, preserving the rights of this princess
of the blood.
As the French aristocracy, the prisoners of
Versailles like Aricie at Trézène, depended on Louis XIV and
ceased to be political actors, the national tragic stage lost
its central protagonists and its great period came to an end.
2. Shakespeare
9
The French theater offers the clearest case of how the
"crisis of the aristocracy," the conflict between the European
nobility and the institutions of the modern state, provided the
predominant subject of early modern tragedy.
The case may not
seem so obvious at first glance in the more multifaceted English
theater, especially when we look at the four great Shakespearean
tragedies -- though the threefold division of the kingdom in
King Lear seems to offer a dystopian return to feudal
independence, though we feel a transition from the open heroism
of Old Hamlet killing old Fortinbras in single combat to the
indirection and claustrophobia of the court of Claudius, though
Macbeth offers a case of the overmighty subject making himself
king.19
Coleridge made a marginal note suggesting that Macbeth's
reaction to Duncan's investiture of Malcolm (I.4.35-42) was the
model for the revolt of Satan in Paradise Lost (5.576f.) against
the elevation of God's Son.
Milton's devil is perhaps the age's
greatest tragic representative of the aristocrat in crisis.20
Shakespeare's Roman plays, however, suggest a schematic
treatment of a nobility losing its status before the pressure of
new historical forces.
In Coriolanus, it is the urban populace
which, as in Phèdre, dictates new conditions to the patricians.
In Julius Caesar, Brutus, the noblest Roman of them all, and his
10
co-conspirators find themselves dwarfed beneath the colossal
Caesar, the absolute ruler, and, here, too, at the mercy of the
city mob that Antony, literally taking up Caesar's mantle,
incites against those "honorable men."21
Antony and Cleopatra is
the most complex example, for beneath its fall of princes plot
it suggests that it is in the larger-than-life Antony that the
last vestiges of noble generosity, chivalry, and risk-taking
persist, while Octavius Caesar represents the modern
Machiavellian monarch, a calculating and far less glamorous
figure ruling over a world of reduced possiblity.
Antony and Cleopatra represents, in fact, a case of
Shakespearean rewriting.
It redistributes the terms and recasts
the characters of Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare's most
explicit treatment of the struggle of the great feudal magnate
against the crown.
The earlier history play maintains a careful
balance among its three sets of characters: King Henry and his
court, Prince Hal rioting with Falstaff in the tavern, Hotspur
and the other noble rebels, rebels who would themselves divide
the realm into three parts as the playwright does.
The tragedy
of the impetuous but unfeigned Hotspur -- who would leap to the
moon and dive beneath the sea for the sake of honor and who at
his death laments equally the loss of his "titles" as a noble
11
fighting man and the loss of consciousness itself, his thoughts
that "Must have a stop," (V.4.77-82) -- has a pathos that can
almost outweigh the comic plot of Prince Hal's coming of age.22
Nonetheless, it is Hal who is the central figure of the play,
capable not only of drinking with any tinker in his own
language, but of taking all the parts, of being as Machiavellian
as his father, as gallant as and more successful on the
battlefield than Hotspur.
In the tavern scene of Act II, Hal,
in fact, plays his father in the tavern, at one point
impersonates and proposes to play Hotspur, and of course, plays
-- as he is always playing -- himself.
Antony and Cleopatra rewrites the struggle between monarch,
Prince Hal and his father on one side, and feudal noble, Hotspur
and his confederates on the other, into the conflict between
Octavius Caesar, the "universal landlord" (III.13.72), and Mark
Antony and Cleopatra, would-be world-rulers in their own turn,
who nonetheless seem to embody outmoded noble values and modes
of behavior.
The balance has shifted drastically in favor of
the expansive Hotspur figure, Antony, and the play is largely
told from the perspective of the glamorous historical loser.
was the rebel nobleman Hotspur who, as a kind of complement to
his chivalry, enjoyed a bantering sexual relationship with his
12
It
wife, Lady Percy -- "Come, wilt thou see me ride?" he asks her
(II.3.100) -- an erotic relationship that is doubled in
Mortimer's marriage to the Welsh daughter of Glendower.
As the
double title of Antony and Cleopatra suggests, the love between
the Roman general and Egyptian queen dominates the tragedy, and
Cleopatra herself associates horsemanship and sexual play -- "Or
is he on his horse? / O happy horse, to bear the weight of
Antony!" (I.5.20-21).
If excluded from such erotic fulfillment,
Prince Hal by way of compensation had the pleasures of drink and
the companionship of Falstaff -- at least until the rejection of
the fat knight at the end of the sequel play.
But in Antony and
Cleopatra, these, too, belong to Antony, for it is Antony who is
the great drinker and feaster in Alexandria, who, in the words
of the censorious Octavius Caesar is wont to "keep the turn of
tippling with a slave / To reel the streets at noon, and stand
the buffet / With knaves that smells of sweat." (I.4.19-21) as
Hal had slummed with Falstaff and the lowlifes of the tavern -while Caesar himself, the "boy" (4.1.1) into which the politic
Prince Hal has been transformed, is abstemious and unable to
hold his liquor.
Moreover, the campy Cleopatra is the closest
that Shakespeare came to a rewriting of Falstaff:23 it is as if
she combined the roles of Lady Percy and Falstaff, and we may
13
remember that Prince Hal had proposed that Falstaff play Lady
Percy -- "Dame Mortimer his wife" (II.4.110) -- to his Hotspur
in the tavern scene.
Nor does Caesar, a Prince Hal whose character as well as role
is much reduced in the Roman play, retain any of Hal's chivalry;
he is no soldier and, as Antony bitterly recalls, "kept / his
sword e'en as a dancer" at Philippi (III.11.35-36).
In Henry
IV, Part One, it had been Hal who challenged Hotspur to single
combat (V.1.96-100), while in Antony and Cleopatra Antony, both
before and after the defeat at Actium, sends a challenge to
Octavian to fight him "sword against sword, / "Ourselves alone"
(III.13.27-28; see also III.7.30).
It is a futile gesture, as
Enobarbus immediately observes, for an empire that had been
divided among the "three world-sharers" (II.7.72) of the second
triumvirate is about to become one beneath a single prince, and
in this new political order individual honor and martial prowess
no longer have any place.
This lesson, which Hotspur, the "king
of honor," had learned with his death, is already apparent to
Antony's own general Ventidius, who at the beginning of Act III,
declines to follow up his victory against the Parthians lest he
become "his captain's captain; and ambition / (The soldier's
virtue) rather makes choice of loss / Than gain which darkens
14
him"
(III.i.22.24).
It is a lesson which Ventidius's Parthian
adversary, Suréna, would have been wise to have learned.
Greatness must curb itself in the monarchical state, and a
mediocre deference becomes the new style: at Antony's death
Cleopatra claims that "Young boys and girls / Are level now with
men.
The odds is gone, / And there is nothing left remarkable /
Beneath the visiting moon" (IV.15.65-69).
she tells Dolabella in the next act,
All that is left now,
is to dream of such an
Antony -- "His face was as the heav'ns, and therein stuck / A
sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted / The little
O, th'earth" (V.2.79-81).
So Lady Percy looks back in Henry IV,
Part Two and laments the dead Hotspur, whose honor "stuck upon
him as the sun / In the grey vault of heaven, and by his light /
Did all the chivalry of England move" (II.3.18-20).
Shakespeare's echoing of himself is telling, and in the tragedy
and fall of the charismatic Antony and Cleopatra he seems to
chronicle again the loss of a nobility closer to his own times:
the demise of a feudal aristocratic order and of its style of
greatness.
3. Daniel and Chapman
15
Outside of the Shakespearean corpus, the English tragic
stage responded still more explicitly to the conflict between
nobleman and king and to actual, recent dramas of aristocratic
revolt.
In 1601 the Earl of Essex conspired against Elizabeth
in 1601, and in the following year Marshall Biron conspired
against Henry IV in France; both conspiracies failed and the two
great magnates were condemned by their monarchs and beheaded.
Samuel Daniel claimed to have written the first three acts of
The Tragedy of Philotas, the lieutenant of Alexander the Great
whom Alexander and his ministers tortured into an admission of
treasonous conspiracy, and to have read it to Essex before the
earl's own ill-fated revolt; this story of monarchical tyranny
might have been meant to appeal to the earl's resentment of
Elizabeth.
Daniel says that he finished the play and the scenes
of the trial of Philotas in the aftermath of the earl's trial
and execution, and they now would have commented retrospectively
on the affair; the play was put on and published after
Elizabeth's death in 1605.24
George Chapman wrote the two part
Byron plays in 1608, The Conspiracy of Byron, which ends with
Henry's pardon of Byron, and its sequel, The Tragedy of Byron,
where Byron, having imperfectly learned his lesson in the first
play, is tried and put to death; Byron himself refers to "The
16
matchless Earl of Essex, whom some make, / In their most sure
divinings of my death, / A parallel with me in life and fortune"
(Tragedy IV.2.33-135), and Chapman uses the French case to
meditate on his own country's recent events.25
Both plays were
put on by the Children of Blackfriars, a company that featured
avant-garde and politically sensitive materials, and both got
their playwrights into trouble with censors.
Daniel was called
before the Privy Council, and he wrote an Apology that was
appended to subsequent editions of the play, excusing any
"resemblance that thorough the ignorance of the History may be
applied to the late Earle of Essex."26
The French ambassador
objected to a scene that featured a quarrel between Henry's
Queen and his mistress, Madame d'Entragues, and it and several
other scenes were cut and rewritten in the published quarto in
1608.
Merwyn James has analyzed the failure of the revolt of Essex
as a failure of the system and code of honor in the name of
which it was waged.
Shakespeare's Hotspur and Antony might
still be living holdovers from a society of chivalry and honor,
but by 1601, that honor system was an anachronism.
Essex and
his followers were already the products of the new monarchical
order.
James writes that
17
the appeal to honour, as conferring moral coherence and a
motive for action on an excluded political group, revealed
a contradiction within honour itself.
For, as the leaders
of a court faction, Southampton, Blount, Mountjoy, Essex
himself were all inseparable from the court; their
influence, their resources, their mode of wielding power,
their capacity to translate aspiration into the pattern of
a career, even their inherited status, were all unthinkable
apart from the organs of the monarchical state, and the
loyalties which the latter imposed.
For them the source of
honour could no longer be conceived as inherent in locally
orientated communities of honour centring on a lord, after
the old medieval pattern.
For their experience of honour
was of that dispensed by the state, with the queen as its
source.
How then could honour subsist apart from her, stil
less against her?27
James sees in this shift of the source of honor to the monarch
from the nobleman's own local power and self-authentication the
reasons not only for the failure of Essex's rebellion, but for
his sudden about-face in its aftermath: his repentance,
18
admission that he had dishonorably lied at his trial, and his
religious death.
As would be the case of the French nobility in
the wake of the Fronde, the English magnates could not dispense
with the monarch and the court, on whom their own identity -their very sense of honor -- already depended.
Of course Essex was not entirely aware of this contradiction
in the idea of honor that James describes: had he been, he would
not have rebelled in the name of honor in the first place.
And
if Daniel and Chapman grasp the difficulty that their noble
characters Philotas and Byron run up against when they affirm
their own martial honor and individual greatness in monarchical
states heading towards absolutism, they do not make these
characters relent or abandon their sense of honorable
entitlement: in the Conspiracy, Byron may kneel before Henry and
be forgiven; in the Tragedy, he goes to his death still engaged
in self-assertion.
The laws of genre might have it so: Philotas
and Byron are tragic characters while the real-life Essex
forswore such dramatic grandeur for a pious death.
But both
playwrights express their sympathy, in Daniel's case perhaps
even his complicity, with the magnate's assessment of his own
self-worth, precisely as a form of resistance to royal power
that can, in the case of Daniel's Alexander, veer towards
19
tyranny.
The struggle for some kind of autonomous noble
identity becomes a condition for tragedy in their age.
Philotas is advised at the opening of Daniel's play by his
father, the general Parmenio, to "Make thy selfe lesse Philotas
then thou art."
It is a logic that the hero cannot understand.
Less than I am? in what? How can that be?
Must I be then set vnderneath my hart?
Shall I let goe that hold I haue of grace,
Gain'd with so hard aduentures of my blood,
And suffer others mount into my place,
And from below, looke vp to where I stood?
Shall I degrade th'opinion of my worth?
By putting off imployment; as vndonne
In spirit or grace: whilst other men set forth
To get that start of action I haue wonne?
(I.3-12)
Philotas is less preoccupied with becoming too great in the eyes
of his king than he is that other noble competitors will take
his place and its rhyming "grace" -- a key term in the play.
Yet one of those rivals, the counsellor Ephestion, reminds him
in Act IV that this grace properly belongs to Alexander, who is
20
called "your Grace" throughout the play: "By grace he made you
greater than you were/ By nature" (IV.21661-1662).
Honor -- and
the opposite of "grace" is "disgrace" -- is a the gift of royal
"grace" or favor, a grace that can be, as Ullrich Langer has
pointed out in discussing this term in Castiglione's Book of the
Courtier, as arbitrary as divine grace.28
Ephestion accuses of
Philotas of pursuing his own glory rather than duty to his king:
You tide still your atchievements to the head
Of your owne honour, when it had been meet
You had them layd downe at your Souereigne's feet.
God giues to Kings the honour to command,
The subiects all their glory to obay...
(IV.2.1652-1656)
In response, Philotas claims to be able to have it both ways, to
serve the king and his own honor.
Alas, though grace of Kings all greatness giues,
It cannot giue vs vertue, that's our owne.
Though all be theirs our hearts and hands can do,
Yes that by which we do is only ours.
21
(IV.2.1689-192)
The hero clings to a sense of his own worth, and in the same
speech claims not to fear the loss of life he knows awaits him
but the loss of his honor.
Alexander will consent to let him
retain neither the one nor the other.
In the ensuing act he has
Philotas tortured, an offstage event that is reported by a
messenger to the chorus.
For a while, Philotas resisted, as if
his mind were separated from his body and "Wholy tide / To
honour" (V.ii.2004-2005), and the Chorus metadramatically
comments "let the Tragedy here end / Let not the least act now
of his, at last / Marre all his act of life and glories past."
(V.ii.2015-2017).
But the play does not conclude with the
affirmation of heroic autonomy that Philotas sought: he is at
last broken and made to confess to plotting against Alexander,
implicating as well his father Parmenio, to whose camp, in the
preceding scene, the king has sent a messenger with orders to
have Parmenio killed.
Philotas is stoned to death, disgraced,
and, as the Chorus concludes, "unpitied of his friends"
(V.ii.2095).
Like Essex, Philotas ends us stripped of his
honor, but this ignominy is not the result of a volontary
Christian self-humiliation by a repentant conspirator.
Philotas
succumbs to physical pain, and he is probably innocent of the
charge brought against him. He is the victim of the tyrannical
22
Alexander, who is adopting a Persian-style absolutism; the
Chorus has earlier spelled out the political sententia that is
the play's grim moral: "Where Kings are so like gods, there
subiects are not men" (V.1.1815).
Such absolutism -- as the
final plays of Racine and Corneille will also suggest -- both
creates the circumstances for, and would nevertheless deny the
possibility of the tragedy of the noble subject.
Daniel's play
seems to want to have it both ways, investing Philotas with a
tragic dignity that the torturers will strip away from him.
Chapman's Byron is guilty of conspiring against his king,
not once but twice, and when his plays echo Philotas by taking
up the same figure of the megalomaniac Alexander, the classical
analogy is more complicated.
In the climactic scene that seals
Byron's doom in Act IV, scene 2 of The Tragedy of Byron, the
counsellors of Henry IV urge him to deal with the aspiring
magnate and "execute/ Like Alexander with Parmenio," but it is
Byron's praise for Henry's rival, Phillip II of Spain, as a new
Alexander who sought to spread a uniform Catholic religion
throughout his world empire as Alexander had spread Greek mores
through his (IV.1.123-155), that immediately precedes the King's
decision to arrest him.
What Byron sees in the world-conquering
Phillip is the mirror of his own aspiring ambition, for earlier
23
in Act III, Scene 2 of The Conspiracy of Byron he had boasted
that he would carry out a project similar to the one Alexander
had planned for Mount Athos, and transform the Burgundian
mountain Oros into a giant image of himself:
Yet shall it clearly bear my counterfeit,
Both in my face and all my lineaments;
And every man shall say, this is Byron.
Within my left hand I will hold a city,
Which is the city Amiens, at whose siege
I served so memorably; from my right
I'll pour an endless flood into a sea
Raging beneath me, which shall intimate
My ceaseless service drunk up by the king,
As the ocean drinks up the rivers and makes all
Bear his proud title.
(Conspiracy III.2.164-174)
There is no religious justification for this desire to imitate
the greatness of Alexander.
It is sheer self-assertion, and its
claim of "ceaseless service" to a king who makes everything his
own becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of the royal ingratitude
alleged against Henry as justification for Byron's "relapse" in
24
the opening lines of The Tragedy.29
Byron makes it impossible,
at least in his mind, for Henry adequately to reward him: "I did
deserve too much," (Tragedy V.2.184) the obtuse hero proclaims
to be his real crime at his trial.
So Corneille's Suréna will
later declare, though with more justification.30
Such limitless Alexander-like aspirations belong not to an
aristocratic subject, but to the monarch, to the Phillip whom
Byron admires above his own sovereign; otherwise the subject
must inevitably collide with his king.
The point is comically
brought home in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, when the noble Sir
Epicure Mammon, carried away by the dreams of riches he will
possess thanks to the Philosopher's Stone, promises to cloak Dol
Common in jewels and to outdo the grandeur of an empress:
"Nero's Poppaea may be lost in story" (IV.1.145).
Dol demurely
replies,
Dol Common.
I could well consent, sir.
But in a a monarchy, how will this be?
The prince will soon take notice, and both seize
You and your stone, it being a wealth unfit
For any private subject.
Mammon.
If he knew it.
25
Dol Common.
Yourself do boast it, sir.31
(IV.1.145-151)
Chapman's and Jonson's boasting Byron and Mammon, and
Shakespeare's boasting Hotspur, too, are all inheritors of
Marlowe's overreaching heroes, Tamburlaine above all: heroes of
an expansive sense of self that would know no confines.
But
where the aspiring Tamburlaine rose from shepherd to conqueror
of the East in the mold of Alexander, these noble subjects meet
the limits of their ambition in a political world firmly
dominated by kings and modern nation states.
In the great final
verses of The Tragedy of Byron, Chapman's hero expresses the
universal experience of tragedy -- that the cycle of generation
will continue without the dying individual who loses his place
and identity in the world.
Such is the endless exile of dead men.
Summer succeeds the spring; autumn the summer;
The frosts of winter the fall'n leaves of autumn;
All these and all fruits in them yearly fade,
And every year return; but cursèd man
Shall never more renew his vanished face.
26
(V.4.248-253)
But it is through the loss of Byron's particular social place,
his martial and aristocratic greatness -- "were I dead / I know
that they cannot all supply my place" (V.3.36-37) he says of his
judges -- that the play and the tragedy of the period focus this
experience of individual extinction.
A whole class felt that it
had lost its defining identity and political role in the world,
and discovered an emptiness in its place.
4. Tirso de Molina
The degradation of this expansive and all-conquering
aristocratic hero when he becomes, in fact, the dependent of his
king, is depicted in El Burlador de Sevilla, Tirso de Molina's
Don Juan play.
As Carmen Martín Gaite has observed, Don Juan
belongs to a noble class that the state's "professional armies
have left without a role in warfare, and the newly minted
letrados, created by the universities, have deprived of a role
in the administration of power."32
The project of infinite
conquest turns, in the case of this indolent nobleman, into the
conquest of women -- and therefore suggests Don Juan's
effeminization in a society that gives him no outlet and that
juvenilizes him.
His excuse for his pranks, but also, his
27
situation is that he is a "mozo." (I.62).33
But Don Juan depends
for his immunity on royal favor; his father Don Diego is the
"privado" (III. 2827) or first minister of the king, and this
probable satirical slap at Olivares argues for a late date for
the play, shortly after 1624. To the complaining Duke Octavio,
the King proclaims that Don Juan is a gentleman of his bedchamer
and his creature -- "hechura mía" (III.2575).
In the double
ending of the play, the king, in fact, first proposes the comic
solution of marrying Don Juan off and promoting him to "Conde,"
making Octavio's beloved Isabela exchange a "Duque" for a
"Conde" -- "Ya que ha perdido un Duque, gane un Conde' (2500) -perhaps another glance at the Conde-Duque Olivares.34 In the next
scene, the ending turns tragic, as Don Gonzalo, the statue,
comes to dinner and effects divine justice on Don Juan, whom he
carries off to his death and damnation.
In the play's last
scene that immediately follows, the truth of Don Juan's crimes
finally reaches the king, and he belatedly is ready to make him
pay for them, as Don Diego himself now requests -- "Haz que le
prendan y pague / Sus culpas" (III.2823-24).
The implication,
however, is that it takes supernatural intervention to punish
Don Juan and make him pay up in this society where the nobility
lives under royal protection.
28
Don Juan thinks he has all the time in the world to pay up.
His repeated refrain, "Tan largo me lo fiáis" or "¡Qué largo me
lo fiáis!," is the most celebrated line in Spanish Golden Age
theater and it provided the alternate title to a later edition
and version of the play.
"What a long term of credit you give
me," might be a translation, and the play depicts how Don Juan
runs out of time with a divine justice which he plans to
circumvent by a last-minute, deathbed repentance, before he runs
out of credit with his king.
The kings of seventeenth century Castile were, in fact,
accustomed to extending credit to their nobility as a way of
keeping them under their control.
Charles Jago has shown how
the crown could step in to grant land-rich but cash-poor nobles
the right to create censos or mortgages on entailed family
property, to stop creditors from embargoing rents from noble
estates in order to collect debts owed to them, and even to
restructure existing censos at lower rates of interest.
Beginning about the middle of the sixteenth century the
crown intervened, first to guarantee nobles a reliable
source of credit, and subsequently to provide them with a
measure of debt relief.
By its intervention, the monarchy
29
helped nobles adapt to a changing economic environment;
but, more importantly, it also increased their subservience
to the crown.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, the
king added to his prerogative powers and the amount of
patronage at his command: he acquired new means to reward
political loyalty and reduce the nobility to obedience.35
The Spanish monarch enabled the aristocrat he favored both to
obtain a line of credit and to avoid paying back its debts.
I
would suggest that El Burlador refers to these practices in its
famous tag: it depicts Don Juan living on royal credit.
His
king, the language of the play insists, allows the hero to
maintain his credit in society and to escape paying the debt he
owes to justice and God.
In fact, getting away scot-free seems
to be the point of Don Juan's "burlas," which he refers to as
"perros muertos" (II.1251) a term that specifically refers to
visiting a prostitute and then refusing to pay; Martín Gaite
points out that Don Juan's seductions of women do much the same
thing.36
"The only day I'll call unlucky, evil, and hateful is
the one on which I do not have money" -- "Solo aquel llamo mal
día,/ Acïago y detestable/ En que no tengo dineros" (III.265557) -- Don Juan pronounces just before he enters the church in
30
Act III, only to find there the statue who demands immediate
payment of a more precious kind than cash.
To the extent that El Burlador is a tragic play, it makes its
hero learn that he does not have all the time in the world -and that each of us owes God a death.
Yet, in contrast to the
noble tragic heroes in the other plays we have considered,
holdovers from a outmoded feudal order who assert the
independence of their individual and class identity from the
control of absolutists kings, Don Juan has less identity and
individuality to lose when death comes for him.
In the play's
satirical vision, he and his fellow Spanish nobles have already
made themselves dependent on royal favor and lowered themselves
to juvenile pranksters.
The reduced nature of Don Juan's
identity is measured in the roster of classical heroes to which
Don Juan is compared -- Aeneas, Hector, Jason, and, the greatest
trickster of all, Ulysses -- and by the fact that his tricks
twice involve his taking on the identities of others, of Duke
Octavio and the Marquis de Mota. In the dark, men are as
exchangeable as the succession of women Don Juan seduces.
When
asked who he is at the beginning of the play, Don Juan famously
replies that he is a man without a name -- "¿Quién soy? Un
hombre sin nombre" (I.15).
An identity as a non-entity: that
31
may be the real tragedy of Don Juan and of the nobility on the
early modern stage.
The sense of belatedness that haunts seventeenth century
tragedy may have less to do with modern anxiety towards the
giant authors of classical tragedy than with the perceived
demise of an earlier social order and of the freer, more selfassertive mode of personal grandeur it permitted and fostered.
Hippolyte the horse trainer and chaste lover is already a
diminished version of Theseus, the monster-slayer and
philanderer.37
Antony and Cleopatra look back on salad days. "We
that are young," says the Edgar of King Lear, "Shall never see
so much, nor live so long."
These are tragic worlds that
repeatedly see history foreclosing upon the possibility of
tragedy itself: as if each play marked the end of the genre.
Byron, Antony, Suréna, Philotas are the last of their kind, the
great soldier and independent nobleman who no longer has any
place in the world of absolutism, their place taken by our first
example, Hippolyte, who sacrifices himself willlingly to king
and father and by our last, Don Juan, his king's creature and
debtor.
Tragic effect is redoubled by this nostalgia.
32
In a recent
study, Terry Eagleton has justly censured as anti-democratic and
anti-modern the views of critics such as George Steiner and C.S.
Lewis that tragedy ended in western culture with Racine.38
The
critics, however, may have responded to a message transmitted by
seventeenth century tragedy itself.
The noble protagonist of
this tragedy cannot fully feel the greatness of his identity
until it is threatened and finally crushed by his tyrant-king.
This implacable monarch is the displaced figure of the death
that destroys that identity we each in the audience hold most
dear -- our own.
Yet these plays wish us to believe that, try
as we may, our imagination of our own absence from -- and,
hence, importance in -- the world can never achieve the
intensity possible to an earlier, feudal-aristocratic society.
It is a violent society and an exploitative political order that
we are well rid of; some of these plays may even concede as
much, but they also suggest that in a world where the nobility
has been disempowered and tamed by the state, the individual has
less sense of identity to lose: as historical latecomers, we may
be tragic, but not as tragic.
The genre of tragedy itself in
the seventeenth century perceived the historical moment of its
possibility when that moment was already passing it by.
33
NOTES
1.. Peter Brooks raises a version of these concerns in "Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened
to Poetics?" Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 509-523.
2.. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp.
17-102; Franco Moretti's studies of the bildungroman, The Way of the World (London: Verso,
1987) and of a Modern Epic (London and New York: Verso, 1996) have been succeeded by his
editorship of the vast collaborative project on the history of the novel, Il Romanzo (Torino:
Einaudi, 2001-2003).
3.. For genre and the literary system, see Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory
in the Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1973),
1-31; Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 235-255.
4.. Northrop Frye prefers to think of such enduring literary preoccupations in terms of myths in
The Anatonomy of Criticism (1957; New York: Atheneum, 1966); he treats genre itself as a
primarily formal category. Nonetheless, he seems to combine both strategies when he surveys
"specific forms" of larger genres, pp. 282-312. Frye acknowleges his debts to psychoanalyis,
34
perhaps especially to Jung and the theory of archetypes, but he pointedly, p.p. 111-12, does
without the idea of a collective unconscious.
5.. Jameson, The Political Unconscious offers in its first chapter, pp. 17-102, an important
theoretical alignment of history and genre -- the latter largely conceived in Frye's terms.
6.. I begin with this working hypothesis and critical hunch. It is a position generally shared by
Robert N. Watson in "Tragedy," in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama,
ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
pp. 301-351. Whether it applies generally to tragedy, or rather to the tragedy of the Early
Modern period -- and hence whether it is a specific historical crisis (including a "crisis of the
aristocracy") that conditions its tragic vision of individual extinction -- would require a longer
discussion. See Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakepeare's Tragedies (Princeton, 1979),
pp. 9-14, and the comments of Susanne K.Langer, "The Great Dramatic Forms: The Tragic
Rhythmn," in Tragedy, ed. John Drakakis and Naomi Cohn Liebler (London and New York:
Longman, 1998), pp. 323-336, and . But see also, colllected in the latter volume, pp. 147-179,
the remarks of Raymond Williams, from Modern Tragedy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966)
that reject a universalist idea of tragedy and of death itself. Terry Eagleton, a close follower of
Williams, nonetheless acknowledges, "It is not only that tragic figures reveal value by
strenuously defying their doom (some do and some do not), but that the very fact of their passing
recalls us to their inestimability, estranges for a moment our too taken-for-granted sense of their
35
uniqueness. The richness which dies along with a single human being is beyond our fathoming,
though tragedy may furnish a hint of it." Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p.27.
7.. Franco Moretti presents a different construction of the fate of Elizabethan and Jacobean
tragedy in the nascent absolutist state in "The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form and the
Deconsecration of Sovereignty," in Signs Taken for Wonders, Revised Edition (London and
New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 43-82. Focussing on the figure of the monarch -- Lear is Exhibit A
-- Moretti locates tragedy in a post-Machiavellian world in which it is no longer possible to find
a cultural foundation for power, and in which action and reason no longer coincide: tragedy
already as theater of the absurd. It is a powerful critical formulation from which the modest
proposal of this essay dissents by focussing rather on the outmoded feudal magnate who is the
monarch's victim. Our arguments come closer in Moretti's discussion, pp. 72-82, of the Jacobean
tragic heroes -- De Flores, Flaminio, Bosola -- who are noblemen fallen into the role of servants
to petty lords and who negotiate life in princely courts.
8.. For this transformation of noble culture, see the classic works of Norbert Elias, The
Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; English trans. New York: Pantheon Books,
1982), 2 vol., The Court Society trans. Edmund Jephcott (1969; English trans. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1983), and Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (1965;
abr. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
36
9.. The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. IV: The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years
War 1609-48/59, ed. J. P. Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 121. For a
careful discussion of the Parlement's generally mediating position, pro-monarchy but antiMazarin, that never quite arrogated royal authority to itself, see Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the
Judges (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 316-354.
10.. Citations of Phèdre are taken from Jean Racine, Oeuvres complètes, Preface by Pierre
Clarac (Paris: l'Intégrale, 1962).
11.. The political issues of Phèdre are lacking in Racine's sources in Euripides and Seneca. That
the behavior of Hippolyte requires some explanation is suggested by the way that Dryden singles
it out as an example of the excessive politeness of French theater in his preface to All for Love
(1678): "Thus their Hippolytus is so scrupulous in point of decency, that he will rather expose
himself to death than accuse his stepmother to his father; but we of grosser apprehension are apt
to think that this excess of generosity is not practicable but with fools and madmen. This was
good manners with a vengeance; and the audience is like to be much concerned at the
misfortunes of this admirable hero; but take Hippolytus out of his poetic fit, and I suppose he
would think it a wiser part to set the saddle on the right horse, and choose rather to live with the
reputation of a plain-spoken, honest man, than to die with the infamy of an incestuous villain."
37
Eight Famous Restoration Plays, ed. Brice Harris (New York, 1953), p. 248. I am grateful to
Professor Blair Hoxby of Yale University for pointing out this passage to me.
12.. Such popular rule may be the ultimate "repressed" whose return and possible attraction the
play wishes us to entertain; see the masterful reading of Phèdre by Francesco Orlando in Toward
a Freudian Theory of Literature with an Analysis of Racine's "Phèdre", trans. Charmaine Lee
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
13.. The classic critical account is in chapter 2 of Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle (Paris:
Gallimard, 1948), pp. 80-120; for the case of Suréna, see David M. Posner, The Performance of
Nobility in Early Modern European Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
pp. 171-180.
14.. Citations from Suréna are taken from Pierre Corneille, Oeuvres complètes, preface by
Raymond Lebègue, ed. André Stegmann (Paris: L'Intégrale, 1963).
15.. Moretti, 69-71, distinguishes the Corneillian hero's perfect consciousness "of the values
between which he is rent" from the Shakespearean tragic hero, whose soliloquy is less an
exercise in reason and self-persuasion than a "site of doubt and irresolution." The imperfect selfknowledge and blurred motives of Racine's heroes may place them between these two models.
38
For another important critical discrimination between the Corneillian and Shakespearean tragic
paradigms, see Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Sencan Tradition: Anger's
Privilege (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).
16.. See the brief remarks of Thomas Pavel on Suréna's leaving the stage in relationship to the
conventional palace setting of the tragedy in L'art de l'éloignement: Essai sur l'imagination
classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 180-181.
17.. Bénichou, pp. 102-109.
18.. See the comments of Bénichou, pp. 106-108, on the disdain with which the aristocratic
heroes of Corneille and Mlle. de Scudery regard popular revolt, even when it supports their cause
against the king.
19.. Richard Halpern presents an acute reading of King Lear in terms of historical regression in
The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp.
215-69.
20.. Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare, ed. Terence Hawkes (New York: G. P. Putnam's
39
Sons, 1959), p. 192.
21.. Wayne Rebhorn, "The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar, Renaissance Quarterly 43
(1990): 75-111.
22.. Citations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.
Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974).
23.. Harold Bloom remarks on the affinities of Cleopatra and Falstaff in Shakespeare: The
Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), pp. 550-51.
24.. Daniel defends himself in "The Apology" he appended to the printed text of the play; see
The Tragedy of Philotas, ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp.
156-57; all citations are taken from this edition. For Michel's discussion of the play and the
Essex affair, see pp. 36-66.
25.. See also Tragedy V.3.139-147, where Byron declares
The Queen of England
40
Told me that if the wilful Earl of Essex
Had used submission, and but asked her mercy,
She would have given it, past resumption;
She like a gracious princess did desire
To pardon him, even as she prayed to God
He would let down a pardon unto her;
He yet was guilty, I am innocent:
He still refused grace, I importune it.
All citations are taken from George Chapman, The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron, ed. John
Margeson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
26. The Tragedy of Philotas, p. 157. Still another tragedy associated with the Essex revolt has
not survived. Fulke Greville tells us in A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney that he destroyed his
drama, Antony and Cleopatra, after the fall of Essex: “this sudden descent of such a greatness,
together with the quality of the actors in every scene, stirred up the author’s second thoughts to
be careful, in his own case, of leaving fair weather behind him.” The Prose Works of Fulke
Greville, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 93. Whether or not Greville’s
Cleopatra contained an unflattering portrait of Queen Elizabeth, it is clear that his Antony was to
an extent a reflection of Essex. See Ronald A. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1971), pp. 131-32. While one cannot draw further conclusions about this lost play, it
41
provides intriguing support for the connection this essay draws between Shakespeare’s Antony
and Cleopatra as a tragedy reflecting aristocratic crisis and the plays of Daniel and Chapman
directly linked to the Essex affair.
27.. James, Society, Politics, and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 442.
28.. Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature
in France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 51-65.
29.. The figure of Alexander, megalomaniac projector of Mount Athos and conqueror who
would impose uniformity of custom on the world he subjugates is found in Castiglione's Book of
the Courtier, where he is made an ambivalent model of the absolute prince. See David Quint,
"Bragging Rights: Honor and Courtesy in Shakespeare and Spenser," in Creative Imitation: New
Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. D. Quint, M. Ferguson, et.
al. (Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), 391-430, pp.
392-405.
30.. In light of the likeness this essay draws between the English and French stages, and
42
particularly in light of these English plays inspired by the Essex rebellion, it is worth noting that
Thomas Corneille wrote a tragedy, Le Comte d'Essex in 1678. From his opening speech, Essex
speaks in the conventional Cornelian accents of the nobleman hero who has, like Suréna, been
the bulwark of his sovereign, and who is confident of receiving Elizabeth's pardon.
Mais enfin cent exploits et sur mer et sur terre
M'ont fait connoitre assez á toute l'Angleterre,
Et j'ai trop bien servi, pour pouvoir redouter
Ce que mes ennemis ont osé m'imputer.
Ainsi, quand l'imposture auroit surpris la reine,
L'intérèt de l'état rend ma grâce certaine;
Et l'on sait que trop, par ce qu'a fait mon bras,
Que qui perd mes pareils ne les retrouve pas. (I.1.9-16)
Oeuvres des deux Corneille, ed. Charles Louandre (Paris: Charpentier, 1860) 2:473.
31.. Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1974), p. 133.
32.. Mártin Gaite, "La salvación de Don Juan," in Breve biblioteca de autores españoles, ed.
Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990), pp. 239-268, p. 248.
43
33.. All citations are taken from the text of El burlador de Sevilla, collected in Diez comdias del
siglo de oro, ed. Hymen Alpern and José Martel (New York and London: Harper and Brothers,
1939), pp. 239-319.
34.. Olivares was similarly transformed from Count to Duke in 1625. In the same year, Tirso
was banished from Madrid and from the stage, presumably because of his satirical sallies at the
new regime; see J. H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1986), pp. 187, 311. El burlador de Sevilla was printed in 1630; for the dating
and textual problems of the play, which has a rival version published later in the century, see the
succinct discussion in The Theatre of Don Juan, ed. Oscar Mandel (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 37-40.
35.. Jago, "The Influence of Debt on the Relations between Crown and Aristocracy in
Seventeenth-Century Castile," Economic History Review 26 (1973): 218-36, p. 219. See also
Jago, "The 'Crisis of the Aristocracy' in Seventeenth-Century Castile," Past & Present 84 (1979):
60-90.
36.. Mártin Gaite, pp. 249-50.
44
37.. Orlando, p. 37.
38.. Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 16:, "It is not 'real life,' but a certain post-classical, postaristocratic species of it, which is the true target of the Bradleys, Lewises, and Steiners."
Eagleton, p. 20, links such criticism to the right-wing, anti-rationalist positions of Nietzsche's
Birth of Tragedy, and he correctly insists that tragedy has continued after Racine.
45