Abstract
Andrew Brown argues that in Anthony and Cleopatra Shakespeare draws upon humoral psychophysiology to present characters who are defined by radically expansive and generative forms of conscious experience. Perhaps more than any other play, Anthony and Cleopatra embeds its characters in networks of dramatic practice to problematize the distinction between inward reflection and the physical world. Brown illustrates this embeddedness by focusing on Mardian the eunuch and the boy actor who must have played him. Starting with the image of the eunuch’s mutilated body, he parallels the training of boy actors in the early modern professional theater with the actor’s need to assume identity and ties both to the somatic embodiment of consciousness and the distributed cognition required by early modern theatrical practice.
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Notes
- 1.
All parenthetical citations refer to William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
- 2.
Major studies that consider the effect of these complex relationships on the lived experience of early moderns, an approach generally referred to as “historical phenomenology,” include Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan ed., Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Bruce R. Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); and Lowell Gallagher and Shankar Raman ed., Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment and Cognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
- 3.
Schoenfeldt, 10-11, argues that humoral psychology was primarily concerned with offering an empowering “regime of self-discipline” that could allow individuals to stake out a stable selfhood in the shifting world of the passions. Such a claim accords well with traditional assessments of this play, which tend to emphasize how the endless fecundity of Egypt fuels Anthony’s self-destructive excess.
- 4.
Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights have provided a thorough history of such accounts, as well as of more recent challenges to the idea of Shakespearean persons “defined more or less as self-same, capable of autonomy and change, and possessed of some inwardness and inscrutability.” See Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4-5.
- 5.
In The Common Liar: An Essay on Antony and Cleopatra (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 16, Janet Adelman notes that “the only major soliloquy is Enobarbus’s; and the asides are almost exclusively the property of the minor characters.”
- 6.
See Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, The Tragedie of Antonie (London: William Ponsonby, 1592), Samuel Daniel, The Tragedie of Cleopatra (London: Simon Waterson, 1594), and Michael Steppat, “Shakespeare’s Response to Dramatic Tradition in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare, Text, Language, Criticism: Essays in Honour of Marvin Spevack, ed. Marvin Spevack et al. (New York: Olms Weidmann, 1987), 254–79, esp. 271.
- 7.
Critics who challenge the notion that the part of Cleopatra would have demanded a wholly illusionistic performance include Juliet Dusinberre, “Squeaking Cleopatras: Gender and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), 52–63 and Lorraine Helms, “’The High Roman Fashion’”: Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage,” PMLA 107.3 (1992), 556–62.
- 8.
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass ed., Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 206.
- 9.
Leanore Lieblein has similarly suggested that early modern characters emerged from a “personation process” that was understood to depend upon the collaborative imaginative efforts of actors and audiences alike. See “Embodied Intersubjectivity and the Creation of Early Modern Character,” Shakespeare and Character, eds Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 117-35, esp. 125.
- 10.
John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble, “Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies,” Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011), 94–103, esp. 101. In advancing this position, Sutton and Tribble draw closely on recent research in cognitive science that falls under the related rubrics of “distributed cognition” and “extended mind”; useful summaries of these developments include Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) and Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
- 11.
Adelman, 30–52 discusses at length how the surrounding presence of these minor characters serves as a substitute for the speeches and soliloquies that dominate Shakespeare’s other tragedies from this period, working to reinforce the complexity of the play’s protagonists.
- 12.
Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 182–209 observes that early modern authors frequently used the womb as a metaphor for male poetic creativity and imagination. Conversely, in The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 163-215, Gail Kern Paster argues that early modern medicine consistently pathologized both the womb and the female reproductive agency it represented.
- 13.
Michael Neill, “‘Amphitheaters in the Body’: Playing with Hands on the Shakespearian Stage,” Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995), 23–50, esp. 26–8 observes that the hand was thought to be a uniquely direct marker of one’s identity and personality. See also Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 50, on palmistry’s specific and often bawdy associations with “how to discern a woman’s character.”
- 14.
Bart Van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 112-13. It is worth noting that Shakespeare had been a sharer in the company for over ten years at the time of the play’s composition.
- 15.
Gary Taylor, Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (New York: Routledge, 2000), 30. Thomas North’s contemporary translation, which was closely consulted by Shakespeare, reinforces Plutarch’s specific emphasis on the sinister association between Cleopatra and eunuchs: “Caesar sayde furthermore . . . that they that should make warre with them, should be Mardian and Euenuke, Photinus, and Iras, a woman of Cleopatraes bed chamber, that friseled her heare, and dressed her head.” See North, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes (London, 1579), 998.
- 16.
Mario DiGangi, Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 5.
- 17.
Thomas A. King, The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, vol. 2 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 344–400 gives a thorough reading of the cultural influence of, and growing backlash against, the castrati in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.
- 18.
John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: Or, the Artificiall Changling Historically Presented, ed. William Fathorn and Thomas Cross (London, 1653), 363.
- 19.
It is, of course, impossible to determine definitively whether the part of Mardian was played by a boy or an adult male actor. Circumstantial evidence exists in the fact that Shakespeare’s only other “eunuch” is found in Twelfth Night, which repeatedly calls attention to Viola’s feminine vocal register, suggesting that the role belonged to a boy player whose voice had not yet broken; see Keir Elam, “The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of Castration,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47.1 (1996), 1–36. Richard Madelaine, “Material Boys: Apprenticeship and the Boy Actors’ Shakespearean Roles,” Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance, ed. Lloyd Davis (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 225–38, esp. 236, observes that Mardian’s part in this scene resembles the bawdy satirical roles that defined the repertoires of contemporary children’s companies. Similarly, Michael Shapiro, “Boying Her Greatness: Shakespeare’s Use of Coterie Drama in Antony and Cleopatra,” Modern Language Review 77.1 (Jan. 1982), 1–15, esp. 11-12, suggests that Cleopatra’s interrogation of Mardian here may be directly modeled on a scene from the play Blurt, Master Constable, performed by the Children of Paul’s several years earlier. Finally, from a technical standpoint, the relatively undemanding nature of Mardian’s part suggests—as I argue in more detail below—that it would have been ideal for a boy player fresh to the trade.
- 20.
Anthropometamorphosis, 354. For further discussion of Semiramis and her association with eunuchism in the period, see Beth Kowalewski-Wallace, “Shunning the Bearded Kiss: Castrati and the Definition of Female Sexuality,” Prose Studies 15.2 (1992), 153–70 and Taylor, 122.
- 21.
King, 62-3, notes that by the early eighteenth century, this combination of “the mannish woman and the womanish man,” the latter often embodied by an actual castrato, had matured into a well-established theatrical and literary trope.
- 22.
Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), 45.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 25–62, offers a thorough discussion of early modern versions of the “one-sex” model. However, numerous critics have recently argued against assuming the continued dominance of this theory to the neglect of the period’s burgeoning two-sex model of gender; see, for example, Christian M. Billing, Masculinity, Corporality and the English Stage, 1580–1635 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 4–12, and Michael Stolberg, “A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Isis 94.2 (2003), 274–99. Crooke himself reports Galen’s theory alongside contemporary alternatives, ultimately concurring with the two-sex model propounded by Vesalian anatomy; see especially Crooke, 270-1.
- 23.
Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000), 66. This psychoanalytically oriented study explores early modern representations of “castration anxiety,” but like Freud’s own account it occasionally conflates castration—in specific surgical terms, the removal of the testicles—with the complete disabling of the penis or phallus and its attendant sexual function. In fact, the castrato was both celebrated and vilified due to the perception that his alteration might in fact make him a superior lover, a belief supported by medical and philosophical treatises which observed that some eunuchs could remain fully capable of erections, emissions, and sexual enjoyment; see Taylor, 16 and King, 386.
- 24.
King, 369–71.
- 25.
Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors (London, 1607), 16. David D. Swain, “’Not Lernyd in Physicke’: Thomas Elyot, the Medical Humanists, and Vernacular Medical Literature,” Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney, ed. Arthur F. Kinney, James M. Dutcher, and Anne L. Prescott (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 54-68 discusses how Renaissance anatomists and physicians were forced to contend with a thriving trade in these treatises, which explicitly championed individual education over the attention of medical professionals. For instance, the title page of Thomas Elyot’s influential The Castle of Helth (London, 1534)—which was regularly reprinted into the seventeenth century—stoutly advises his reader “to instructe welle his physytion in syckenes that he be not deceyued,” while Walkington, 21, wishes for even “the meanest, if possible, to haue an insight into their bodily estate . . . more fit not onely to liue, but to liue well.”
- 26.
On Pyrrhonist skepticism in early modern literature more generally, see Raman and Gallagher, 10–16.
- 27.
Raleigh, Sceptick, or Speculations (London, 1651), 3–5, 20. A similar topos is found in Michel de Montaigne’s “Apologie of Raymond Sebond,” Essayes, trans. John Florio (London, 1603), 242-341, esp. 332-3, which notes that such arguments are ultimately derived from the writings of Chrysippus.
- 28.
Quoted in Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 137.
- 29.
Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 86.
- 30.
Michael Witmore, “Shakespeare, Sensation, and Renaissance Existentialism,” Criticism 54.3 (Summer 2012), 419–26, esp. 421; this essay draws liberally on Daniel Heller-Roazen’s The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007). On how such strains of thought contributed to the seventeenth-century consolidation of “consciousness” as a relatively discrete philosophical concept, see Sara Heinämaa et al. ed., Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 6–10.
- 31.
Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 120, notes that this trope derives from Plutarch’s Moralia.
- 32.
Bulwer, 363.
- 33.
Crooke, 278; Bulwer, 363.
- 34.
Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 192. Simons’ account marshals an impressive range of contemporary evidence to counter earlier critical claims, discussed most fully by Laqueur, 38-41, that female seed was understood to be mostly inert.
- 35.
Oxford English Dictionary, “seminary,” n. 1., records that the term was used in the seventeenth century to refer to institutions like Eton and Oxford, as well as to Jesuit schools like the English College at Douai. To my knowledge, the only critical discussions of Shakespeare’s coining of the term “unseminared” are found in Ellis Hanson, “Antony and Cleopatra: Aught an Eunuch Has,” Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 48–54, esp. 50; D. S. McGovern, “’Tempus’ in ‘The Tempest’,” 1 English 32 (1983), 204; and Terttu Nevalainen, “Shakespeare’s New Words,” Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide, ed. Sylvia Adamson et al. (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), 237–55, esp. 248-9.
- 36.
Crooke, 296.
- 37.
Efforts to determine whether it was in fact typical for boy players to transition to adult parts have long been plagued by a lack of documentary evidence for the professional lives of those child actors who did not go on to take leading roles or become sharers in their respective companies. However, David Kathman has recently mapped the careers of several former apprentices associated with Shakespeare’s fellow player and sharer John Heminges, suggesting that the King’s Men may have been unusually consistent in fulfilling the nominal obligations of the apprenticeship contract; see “Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.1 (2004), 1–49 and “How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?,” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005), 220–46.
- 38.
Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 115, 137.
- 39.
Tribble, 140.
- 40.
Madelaine, “Cleopatra and the Apprentice Hierarchy,” QWERTY 10 (2000), 33–8, esp. 34-5. Structurally speaking, the part of Cleopatra resembles those written for adults more closely than those normally written for boys; as Scott McMillin notes, Cleopatra engages in dialogue with an unusually large number of characters, many of whom are subordinate to her in the world of the play, and she is disproportionately likely to be the first character to speak at the opening of a scene, demanding a dramatic agency independent of the type of cognitive scaffolding described by Tribble. See McMillin, “The Sharer and His Boy: Rehearsing Shakespeare’s Women,” From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, eds Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 231–45, esp. 237.
- 41.
On the possibility that Shakespeare may have written Cleopatra’s part with a specific boy player in mind—in the same way that the role of Anthony appears to have been created for Burbage—see Dusinberre, 51–3 and Madelaine, “Material Boys,” 226. Scholars remain divided on the extent to which theatrical apprenticeship involved the exploitation of child actors. An able summary is provided by Robert Barrie in “Elizabethan Play-Boys in the Adult London Companies,” SEL 48.2 (2008), 237–57, which observes that several boy players associated with the London companies seem to have been employed under conditions that little resembled the long-term bonds of traditional guild apprenticeships, instead taking on shorter-term employment more closely resembling that of covenant servants or parish apprentices; these forms of labor were less strictly regulated, allowing boys to be rented out for fixed wages to be received by their guardian and thus making them more susceptible to abuse.
- 42.
Tribble, 116.
- 43.
Raymond B. Waddington similarly notes that “In I.v Mardian thinks what Venus did with Mars; in II.v Cleopatra tells us.” See “Antony and Cleopatra: ‘What Venus Did With Mars,’” Shakespeare Studies 2 (1966), 210–277, esp. 219.
- 44.
Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 31.
- 45.
Ibid., 25.
- 46.
John Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 103, argues that a well-trained adolescent actor would have possessed not only greater technical ability than his younger peers but also “a good deal more subtlety and range in the portrayal of character, mental reflection, and emotional states,” derived in part from his own preparation for adult life; this process, Astington suggests, would necessarily entail a certain degree of identification between the player’s own experiences and those of his most demanding roles.
- 47.
Enterline, 63, similarly argues that the character of Venus in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis serves as a version of the Ovidian figure of the praeceptor amoris (“love’s teacher”), encouraging Adonis to dwell on the amatory example established by his own “lusty” steed.
- 48.
Compare Anthony’s firmly expressed declaration, “Here is my space” (1.1.36). We might, however, note that Alexas’ report that Anthony has promised to “piece” the queen’s “opulent throne with kingdoms” (1.5.45-6) diverges markedly from his own earlier claim that “Kingdoms are clay” (1.1.37), suggesting that Cleopatra’s servant has taken some liberty in adapting his part to please the audience at hand.
- 49.
Bulwer, 355.
- 50.
John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84, 200-1 notes that theories relating to the “maternal imagination,” which suggested fundamental similarities between memory and pregnancy, enjoyed sustained popularity throughout the period.
- 51.
Skepticism of whether the role of Cleopatra could have been played by a boy actor is discussed by Marvin Rosenberg in “The Myth of Shakespeare’s Squeaking Boy Actor; or, Who Played Cleopatra?,” Shakespeare Bulletin 19.2 (2001), 5-6. In contrast, Tribble’s emphasis on the potent cognitive abilities supported by the training regimes of professional playing companies leads her to a conclusion similar to my own; see Tribble, 135-6.
- 52.
Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 56.
- 53.
Enterline, 137.
- 54.
Taylor, 233.
- 55.
Hanson, 54, observes that the Folio stage direction for this scene has Mardian appear as a “ghost character,” which most editors have taken as the result of a textual error. While Hanson intriguingly suggests that the eunuch’s presence at his mistress’ death might have subtly registered his final deference to her performative power, Mardian’s increasing independence from the queen’s influence over the preceding scenes makes such an appearance unlikely.
- 56.
See Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 243-4, on the specifically medical resonances of this scene.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Paul Yachnin, Maggie Kilgour, and the members of the Shakespeare and Performance Research Team at McGill University for their incisive and thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this study.
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Brown, A. (2016). “Being Unseminared”: Pleasure, Instruction, and Playing the Queen in Anthony and Cleopatra . In: Budra, P., Werier, C. (eds) Shakespeare and Consciousness. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59541-6_8
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