The Eating of the Soul Authorfs): Stephen Greenblatt

Source: Representations, No. 48 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 97-116 Published by: University of California Press

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STEPHEN GREENBLATT

The Eating of the Soul

EVER SINCE ANTHROPOLOGISTS BEGAN to speak of the cultures they study as textual, and literary critics began to speak of the texts they study as cultural, one of the dreams of cultural poetics has been to link the text of anthropology and the text of literary criticism. Hence, to cite a single famous example, Clifford Geertz writes that "if, to quote Northrop Frye ... we go to see Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocosm, feels like when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.'" Geertz is an intellectual equilibrist whom others, less endowed with an exquisite sense of balance, have tried unsuccessfully to follow. So it is probably worth acknowledging something right from the start: we will never find an adequate fit between the anthropologist's text and the literary critics', between a contemporary culture that has been the subject of anthropological study and a cultural artifact, let us say, from Renaissance England, or between a "native" practice and a play by Shakespeare.

What do I mean by an adequate fit? I mean the full and resonant correspondence, the mutually constitutive and interanimating meanings, quietly conjured up by the structure of the sentence I have just quoted: "If we go to Macbeth to learn X, Balinese go to cockfights to find out Y." Geertz is too thoughtful and canny a writer to insist dogmatically upon the correspondence, which hovers just beyond reach. He is not really claiming that "we"-whoever we are-are just like Balinese villagers, or that Macbeth has the place in our everyday life that cockfighting has in the lives of the Balinese, or that we even know why we go to Macbeth (it is, after all, Northrop Frye who claims to know that, and the claim is delicately recast in the conditional mode). Rather, Geertz's words have a well-crafted rhetorical effect: because of Shakespeare's exalted place in high culture and because of the centrality, complexity, and greatness of Macbeth within the Shakespearean canon (and, for that matter, because of the authority of Northrop Frye's literary criticism), the parallel implicitly confers a higher significance upon cockfights than they might otherwise appear to an outsider to possess.

I have seen Balinese cockfights, and I can assure you that a resemblance to Shakespeare's work of art is not immediately apparent. No doubt the losing cock, bleeding in the dirt, feels the tragedy of the occasion-and we might remember that Macbeth likens himself to the animal in another blood sport, bear baiting-

REPRESENTATIONS 48 • Fall 1994 © THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 97

but the structure and duration of the cockfight, not to mention the expressive limitations of cocks themselves, preclude the dignity and weight of tragedy. It is, to be sure, the human drama that is the focus of Geertz's interest, but neither the passions of the cock's owner nor the reactions of his neighbors, caught up in the excitement of the gambling and the brief burst of barnyard ferocity, seem remotely comparable, from the perspective of the uninitiated observer, to the professional actor's performance of a Shakespearean tragedy or to the audience's response (whether it be rapt attention, polite interest, or boredom). But that, of course, is the point of Geertz's comparison: Balinese cockfighting and the Shakespearean spectacle of treachery and damnation-apparently so distant from one another in their symbolic stakes and their cultural position-are made to touch and resonate. The immediate result for the anthropologist is an air of dignity conferred upon Balinese cockfighting; that, and a kind of hermeneutical license linked to this dignity: cockfighting is a complex, symbolically charged text that can be profitably read by a gifted interpreter.

This payoff may for Geertz be sufficient; he is careful not to push his analogical exercise any further and may value it finally only for its rhetorical effect. But the textualization of culture has provoked larger ambitions: the search for a deep cross-cultural link between the anthropological subject and the subject of Shakespeare, between the production of meaning in a contemporary society and the production of meaning in the society of Early Modern England, or between a custom practiced by real people (people who may not know that they are part of a "cultural text") and a custom represented by actors playing imaginary people in a playhouse. I confess myself drawn to this search and observe that others at the moment are drawn to it as well. But there are two major problems. First, an anthropologist's interest in a cultural text is not the same as the interest of a literary critic, even when the texts overlap. We are, to use Michael Baxandall's terms, dealing with "un homologous systematic constructions put upon interpenetrating subject matters."? Second, the subject matters, as in the case of Balinese cockfights and Renaissance tragedies, are often so different, so little interpenetrating, that their conjunction can amount to a kind of elaborate mutual insult: on the one hand, a vital contemporary culture is treated as if it were a printed book or a frozen model of our own distant past; on the other hand, a sophisticated, urban, and highly literate cultural formation is treated as if it were best understood by reference to the beliefs and practices of what are often small, rural, and largely unlettered communities.

It might, of course, be worth risking the insult-largely, in any case, a theoretical construct-if there was a powerful hermeneutical payoff, but the problem is more intractable. We can identify certain elements in Tudor and Stuart England that appear to have close parallels in modern societies: Elizabethan royal progresses and American presidential campaigns, for example, or exorcism in Gondar in Ethiopia and in Jacobean London, or gift-giving in Melanesia and at the Stuart

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court, or witchcraft among the Azande and among the inhabitants of Essex. Yet if these conjunctions have often proved illuminating, it is less because of the elements that match than because of those that emphatically do not. Hence it is no particular surprise to learn from Geertz that the royal progresses of Elizabeth I, like those of contemporary Morocco or medieval Java, succeed in "stamping a territory with ritual signs of dominance." It is more interesting, and considerably more relevant to a study of Shakespearean drama, to learn that particular versions of what is supposed to be the same cultural text have very little in common:

"In sixteenth-century England ... the subjects warned, and the queen promised. In ... Java ... the king displayed, and the subjects copied.!"

Now in theory these differences are, as Geertz argues, superficial; we are meant to perceive that "though both the structure and the expressions of social life change, the inner necessities that animate it do not" (Local Knowledge, 143). The problem is that the processes of definition and abstraction that enable us to establish such unchanging inner necessities often do away with exactly what would constitute the interest, both theoretical and practical, of the intertextual connection. For the meaning and function of the texts that concern both literary critics and anthropologists are established only in historically specific relation to other circumambient texts. In any language, it is a particular mode of relation, a circulation or exchange of signs, that constitutes meaning, not an abstract, timeless formal necessity. And while some version of this mode of relation can endure within a particular culture for a surprisingly long time, it is considerably more difficult to establish stable parallels across cultures. If we are to find a suitably dense and nuanced linkage across a vast abyss of cultural estrangement, if we want to locate people who experience aesthetic pleasures and moral confusions roughly analogous to those experienced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we will best look in the mirror.

But this does not mean that literary critics should give up on Balinese cockfighting, Azande witchcraft, and what Bronislaw Malinowski called "the sexual life of savages." It means only that we should know what we can hope to find: not cultural doubles, not even satisfactory homologies, but illuminating alternatives, instructive differences, visions of mutual estrangement. New Historicists are sometimes said to be guilty of "the principle of arbitrary connectedness"; that is, they conjoin what should by rights be kept apart, gluing together in a zany collage pieces that do not properly belong in the same place. But how do we know what is "proper"? Who controls the categories that govern the distinction between the arbitrary and the appropriate? And what exactly are we supposed to see when we look into a mirror?

For the most part, I suppose, we look at the mirror for reassurance, but I cannot believe that I am alone in the world in sometimes making strange faces at myself when no one else is near. Nor do I think that I am the only person who has on occasion caught a glimpse of someone unfamiliar staring back in his own

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reflection. That glimpse can be startling, even terrifying, but it is also one of the things that induce us to stare into the mirror of art and that draw us to try to understand cultures that seem disturbingly different from our own. For the point of difference is not to secure the familiar but to render it too as strange, uncanny, wonderful. Take the Nalumin people of Papua, New Guinea, who are the subject of a fine article by an anthropologist, Eytan Bercovitch." Bercovitch's account has the descriptive thickness, narrative intensity, and slightly novelistic air that we have come to expect in the contemporary genre of ethnographic realism:

On the night of April 15, 1985, I was sitting on a palmwood floor in the settlement of Bomtem, where I had been living and carrying out anthropological research for over two years. Around me was the familiar sight of the small, dark interior space of the house of Katim and his brother-in-law Wengsep. A wood fire burning in the hearth at the center of the floor cast a red glow on almost twenty people crowded close together, some already sleeping. At my side Katim and Wengsep, two men about thirty years old who had become friends of mine, were describing a recent hunting trip they had taken together. In the middle of the account, Wengsep said he had to relieve himself outside. He removed a stick from the fire to light his way and went out through the doorway of the house. (123)

I will not follow the account of Wengsep's nocturnal adventure except to say that it involves the threatened invasion of this tranquil domestic space by what the Nalumin call biis and Bercovitch translates as "witches."? Unlike ordinary assailants who attack the body, biis attack, kill, and then eat their victims' souls. The attack is fatal, of course, for when the soul dies the body dies, and it is all the more effective and terrifying for being invisible. Not only are the malevolent actions of the biis invisible, but they themselves are, if not quite invisible, extremely hard to identify, for they can change their shape into that of animals, fly through the air, travel in the darkness, burrow up through the earth. What is the evidence then that they exist? They are known by the fruits of their malevolence; for the Nalumin there are no natural illnesses or deaths. If you are sick and recover, you have survived an attack by one of the biis; if you die, you have been murdered.

This seems like an implausible view of the world, particularly among people with a high degree of morbidity, but it is corroborated in another recent anthropological study, by Bruce Knauft, of a different New Guinea people, the Gebusi. The Gebusi appear to be the living embodiments of a very old utopian fantasy in the West; they are a gentle and immensely affable people living in longhouse settlements, cultivating their small gardens, and devoting themselves to what they call "good company." Their social life is decentralized and simple: there are no headmen, warrior chiefs, or ritual elders-no rivalrous jostling for status, no competitive exchanges, no dowry or bride price. They prize relaxed, unpretentious camaraderie and friendship that often extends, among young males, to entirely acceptable homosexual relations; heterosexual relations, culminating in marriage, are equally cherished. The couples raise their children with gentleness

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and great good humor, discouraging aggressive behavior and instilling in them the values of communal solidarity and kindness. These remarkable, infinitely agreeable people, Knauft has calculated, have one of the highest homicide rates in the world (683 per 100,000 in the period from 1963 to 1982, as compared with the 1980 figure of 10.7 per 100,000 in the United States, or the estimated 6.3 per 100,000 for late sixteenth-century Middlesex, in England)."

The obvious trick here is that there are not a hundred thousand Gebusi; the statistic is extrapolated from a tiny population and a minuscule record of events. A further trick is that what these figures calculate as Gebusi homicides are what we would in our culture term public executions (though factoring executions into the statistics for the United States would scarcely diminish at all the staggering difference between the homicide rates). What accounts for the high homicide rate is the Gebusis' conviction that virtually every sickness-death, without exception, is caused by sorcery. 7 The sorcerer is a member of the community who has hidden his or her malevolent, irrational hostility and visited it cruelly, in a spirit of "misanthropic spite," upon the unfortunate victim. Such an evil person must obviously be ferreted out if possible and destroyed. In the wake of about sixty percent of Gebusi deaths from illness, a spiritual inquest, conducted in a spirit of scrupulous impartiality in an all-night divinatory seance, results in an indictment. The indictment itself does not settle matters; the suspect is expected to validate or invalidate the charge. To do so, he or she is given the principal task of cooking what Knauft calls "a large divination packet with meat or fish inside"; failure to do this properly-and evidently it is quite easy to fail the cooking test-is taken as a clear, objective sign of guilt. Often the suspect is then clubbed to death immediately, but if there is some ambiguity about the results or if the closest kin of the accused are armed and seem inclined to resist the verdict, the accusers will wait until the tension eases. The Gebusi, after all, detest aggression and strife. Therefore, they may defer action for some time, perhaps weeks or even months, until they find a better moment, a moment when the accused is alone in one of the garden plots perhaps or when the feelings of the nearest kin have cooled. Then, by consensual agreement, they kill the alleged sorcerer and proceed to cut up, cook, and eat the body. There is no cycle of revenge. Everyone, including the sorcerer's kinsfolk, feel relief that the threat to the community has been expunged-or perhaps I should say ingested-and the Gebusi return to their idyllic tranquillity.

A world without natural death: let us take this as our point of entry into Shakespearean tragedy and history or rather as a limit case, a cultural extreme, that may serve to estrange and hence highlight certain features of the imagined world of Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare's England is not the New Guinea of the Nalumin or the Gebusi, and the first thing to say is that natural deaths, by which I mean deaths that have not been deliberately caused by human or supernatural agents, are indeed possible in his culture and are assumed to be possible

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in the tragedies and histories, as they are more emphatically (a point to which I will return) in the comedies. To be sure, there are important and complex differences between our normative conception of natural death (a conception less stable and coherent than we might think) and that of Early Modern England. Most of us conceive of sickness-death as at once morally neutral and biologically determined, an event that confirms the autarchy of the body. There are, of course, significant exceptions: fatal diseases that some elements of the population regard as "punishments" for immoral behavior. The most obvious of these diseases is AI DS, which has excited a singularly repellent current of punitive sanctimoniousness and hostility, but a far more widespread obsession with proper diet and exercise quite easily spills over into the lingering suspicion that most deaths from stroke, heart attack, and cancer could have been avoided. Yet even those who embrace such convictions do so for the most part in the belief that all that lives must eventually die and that in the natural order of things cancer may as easily strike sweet children as armed felons. The response to the apparent moral indifference of biological fate varies widely, but it is not acceptable in our culture to believe that all deaths are caused by the secret malice of sorcerers. People who articulate such a belief and attempt to act upon it are called lunatics.

In Early Modern England, there appears in general to have been a stronger presumption than in our own culture of the hand of God in human destiny and therefore far less of a sense of the moral neutrality of fatal illness. If death was by no means always construed as a divine punishment for specific human sins, it was nonetheless a divinely ordained feature of the human condition and hence in some sense part of the moral meaning of existence. Though every individual death was not directly linked to a particular transgression, it was man's disobedience that first brought death into the world. At the same time Christ's sublime act of self-sacrifice, his willingness to die for man's sins, undid the bitter chastisement of mortality by defeating death itself and restoring the faithful to eternal life. At least once a year, at Easter, all Christians in good standing would partake of Christ's body, eating his flesh and drinking his blood, in grateful remembrance of his sacrifice. The Lord's Supper was not only an individual act but also a deeply social one, a communion that knit together a community whose experience of "good company" had been seriously frayed by conflict, competition for scarce resources, and the harsh realities of sickness and death. Death could continue to be felt as an unspeakable affront-the records of the seventeenth-century Buckinghamshire physician Richard Napier are full of cases of depression in the wake of the deaths of beloved children-but in theory at least, and probably in practice too, the ritual of ingesting the body of God could help to defuse anger, make sense of loss, and restore communal solidarity.

Death in Shakespeare's time, far more than in our own, was generally understood as an intended action; but since this intention was, in the final analysis,

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God's, it was difficult to transform grief into justifiable anger against a suspected agent of malice. On the contrary, a very considerable outpouring of homiletical teachings, in the ars moriendi genre and others, urged the dying-and hence the living as well-to welcome death and to make one's destiny one's choice by merging feeble human will with the divine will.

Faith in the divine will did not preclude belief that sickness-death was part of the natural order of things-it was God, after all, who had created that ordernor did it necessarily inhibit scientific explanations of morbidity. A large number of medical treatises, many of them in translation and available to the general public, analyzed fatal illnesses in wholly naturalistic terms, as the consequence of tumors, humoral imbalance, contagious disease, and so forth. Early Modern Europe was the heir to a long and sophisticated understanding, stretching back through the Middle Ages to classical antiquity, of what we might call agentless death, death that is part of what it means to have-or to be-a body. In the Physics Aristotle observes that in itself perishing is no less natural than becoming; after all, growing old is natural. Indeed, he argues, the very distinction between natural and unnatural, while appropriate for certain kinds of local change such as remaining or moving, seems inapplicable to other changes: "For convalescence is no more natural or unnatural than falling ill, whitening no more natural or unnatural than blackening; so, too, with increase and decrease: these are not contrary to each other in the sense that either of them is natural while the other is unnatural, nor is one increase contrary to another in this sense; and the same account may be given of becoming and perishing." Nevertheless, for Aristotle there is a meaningful category of unnatural death, a category of the greatest importance to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. "If what happens under violence is unnatural," he writes, "then violent perishing is unnatural and as such contrary to natural perishing" (S.6.230al). The opposite of natural death is violent death.

Shakespeare's histories and tragedies are variations on the theme of violent death. Not all of these deaths are strongly marked as unnatural, but a great many are. Indeed, repeatedly it is less death that follows the course of nature than nature that anticipates, accompanies, or follows the course of violent death. "A lioness hath whelped in the streets," the anxious Calpurnia tells Caesar on the night before his assassination, and then proceeds to enumerate the hideous signs and portents of impending disaster. Caesar dismisses these warnings with a fatalism that is also in effect a stoical refusal of the category of unnatural death:

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come."

(julius Caesar, 2.2.34-37)

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In Macbeth there are no comparable warning signs; as they stride unwittingly toward their deaths, Duncan and Banquo both comment on the pleasantness of Macbeth's castle. But the night of the king's murder and the morning after are exceptionally dreadful: in the daylight hours "dark night strangles the travelling lamp," a falcon, circling upward, is killed by a mousing owl, and Duncan's horses begin to eat each other. "'Tis unnatural," says the old man who exchanges with Rosse stories of the hideous disturbances, "Even like the deed that's done" (2.4.10-11). Only the murderer is inclined, not surprisingly, to downplay the horror of it all. When Lenox reports to him the disruptions of the natural orderwinds violent enough to blow down chimneys, lamentings heard in the air, strange screams of death, earthquakes, and the like-Macbeth comments laconically, '''Twas a rough night" (2.3.61). By the play's end he will experience, in the core of his being, just how rough a night it was.

Beyond these deaths by dagger and axe and broadsword, there was a kind of perishing, not necessarily violent in appearance, that was regarded in Early Modern England as particularly unnatural and was understood in terms not unlike those employed by the Nalumin and the Gebusi. Sudden or unusual deaths in particular, deaths that bafRed the medical knowledge of the day, could provoke suspicions of sorcery and could lead to the initiation of legal action against the person charged with employing it. The tenability of this charge, the fact that it could on at least some occasions be officially legitimated, was of considerable significance, not only because it allowed grief to flow more readily into the channel of suspicion, resentment, and rage, but because it subtly affected the conceptual status of natural death, rendering it only one hypothesis among several and making it a challengeable assumption rather than an axiomatic conviction. But, by the same token, the charge of sorcery was also challengeable; what seems so remarkable to us about the New Guinea peoples is their principled consistency in seeing sorcery in every sickness-death. For the Renaissance there were evidently many deaths-no doubt the great majority-in which human malice was not remotely suspected and in which God's hand figured only as a source of consolation, many deaths, in other words, for which agency was not a vexed and tormenting issue. Death was not understood, for the most part, as an unnatural assault, an outrage to the individual and the community, by an enemy whose malice must be answered, but a necessary and natural, if painful, feature of a providential plan.

Natural death then forms a kind of invisible backdrop in Shakespeare's plays, an imagined end that has brought scores of bodies to the family vault in Romeo and Juliet-

an ancient receptacle

Where for this many hundred years the bones Of all my buried ancestors are packed(4.3.38-40)

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and that has swallowed up Olivia's brother in Twelfth Night and the old Count of Rossillion in All's Well That Ends Well, and that draws like a magnet the mind of Prospero, retiring to Milan, "where / Every third thought shall be my grave" (The Tempest, 5.1.311-12).9 There is, in other words, an assumption of ordinary extinction, an assumption that serves to explain, without ever being voiced, the absence of certain characters not simply from the dramatis personae but from the imagined world of the plays.

This absence-especially, as we will see, of certain female characters-was no doubt a theatrical convenience, one facilitated by the fact that, unlike readers, audiences tend to conjure up only what they are directed to conjure up. Plays are not novels; there were a limited number of actors in Shakespeare's company and a still more limited number of actors trained to handle female parts. But we are not speaking simply about theatrical practicality here, for Shakespeare is quite willing to sketch, often in baroque detail, the existence of minor characters who never appear on stage. Think of the Norman gentleman Lamord in Hamlet who has praised Laertes' skill with a rapier, or Marcus Luccicos in Othello who is not in town (he is in Florence) when the Senate needs him, or the perfumed lord whose "holiday and lady terms" have so offended Hotspur in 1 Henry IV. If he had wanted to, Shakespeare could certainly have made comparably passing reference to a remarkable number of women whose nonexistence is simply assumed. It is worth listing a few of these ghostly figures just to remind ourselves of what we scarcely notice that we lack: the mothers of Hotspur, Bolingbroke, Hal, Lavinia, Katherine of France, Katherine of Padua and her sister Bianca, Jessica, Rosalind, Celia, Hermia, Lucentio, Cressida, Hero, Edgar, Florizel, Miranda, Ophelia, Desdemona, and, of course, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. This incomplete list consists only of those missing women whose husbands are palpably present in the plays; to these we may add such nonexistent figures as the mothers of Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Portia in Merchant of Venice, and Helena in All's Well, whose husbands are also absent but are by contrast conspicuously and insistently invoked. In a very few of these cases, there is a fleeting allusion to the lost mother: we know, to mention the most significant instance, that Shylock's wife was named Leah and that she gave a turquoise ring to Shylock when he was a bachelor. 10 But for the most part there is almost complete silence, rufHed only by the nervous joke to which Shakespearean fathers are occasionally drawn: "Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter" (The Tempest, 1.2.56-57).

The absence of such figures as Queen Lear or shrewish Kate's mother is not accounted for; their nonexistence is assumed as part of the unspoken structure of the world. On occasion-Richard II I and Coriolanus are the most striking instances-mothers are powerfully present, but when they are not invoked, they are not conspicuously absent, as if in Shakespearean drama, as in Elizabethan law, the principal conduit of social identity was the name of the father. Not only is

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there no hint whatever of unnaturalness in the absence of so many mothers, but there is scarcely a recognition of their absence and no explanation of it, such as a passing reference to death in childbirth. Of course, exceptions can be found. With a poignant matter-of- factness, Titania recalls the death of the mother of the young page whom she refuses to give up: "But she, being mortal, of that boy did die" (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2.l.135-37). This acknowledgment, however, is unusual in Shakespeare; here it helps to define what it means to be human rather than fairy and serves to explain (and to normalize) Titania's guardianship of the "changeling boy."

I want to propose that the numerous instances of unvoiced, unexplained extinction in Shakespeare serve as what Sir Philip Sidney calls "the imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention," the theatrical enactment of death. II Of course, the missing characters are not "dead," for they were never "alive" even in the theater's most attenuated sense. They are decisively and permanently offstage, outside of the orbit of representation altogether, as if their absence (like the unvoiced, unexplained absence of women actors from Shakespeare's stage) was one of the tacit conditions of this culture's mode of theatrical performance. The missing characters are not missed, or rather, we never quite register them enough to make it possible even to forget them. By the end of Othello, we learn that Desdemona's father, Brabantio, has in effect been killed by his daughter'S elopement with the Moor:

Poor Desdemona, I am glad thy father's dead. Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief Shore his old thread in twain.

(5.2.211-13)

We can say that Desdemona's mother in some sense "existed." Desdemona invokes her to prove to Brabantio that she has a higher duty to her husband Othello than to her father:

And so much duty as my mother showed To you, preferring you before her father, So much I challenge that I may profess Due to the Moor my lord.

(1.3.185-88)

We know too that this mother had a maid named Barbary who was forsaken by the man she loved and died singing a melancholy song about a green willow. But we know nothing at all about Desdemona's mother's death, assuming that she is dead, nor are we invited to reflect on her absence from the stage. She has been made to disappear by a force more powerful, insidious, and secret than anything that the Nalumin could imagine at the hands of the biis, a force that cannot be sensed, tracked down, and defeated. She is part of a huge, unlit mass of the

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nonrepresented, a mass so effectively effaced that it seems almost absurd to invoke her at all, any more than one would invoke the carpenters who hammered together the boards in the stage or the servants who swept up the orange peels and nut shells after the crowd left the playhouse. If he chooses to, Shakespeare can effortlessly call these beings-the carpenter and theatrical impresario Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the servants who clear the plates and quietly filch pieces of marzipan in Romeo and juliet, the missing mothers who miraculously surface in The Comedy of Errors and in Pericles-into the light of representation. But he can also choose to ignore them or to conjure them up only to forget them (as he seems to forget the tinker Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew), or to write them out of the play (as he appears to have done with Leonato's wife "Innogen," mentioned in the stage direction yet never once speaking in Much Ado About Nothing).12 He can make the unexplained absence of certain characters, mothers in particular, seem to signify a nontheatrical, perhaps implicitly antitheatrical extinction. For over against death as a natural feature of the ordinary, everyday world-a feature that does not need to be accounted for, that is the condition of existence itself-are set the deaths to which his art is repeatedly drawn.

We could argue that "natural deaths" are not inherently theatrical, but the example of nineteenth-century opera makes this a hard case to maintain. Moreover, it is rather peculiar that a period that had a significant interest in the ars moriendi, and in which virtually everyone would have personally witnessed scenes of dying, did not wish to see "good deaths" represented as models on stage. Evidently, "good deaths" were viewed more as a textual than a theatrical phenomenon. There are, to be sure, a few representations of natural death in Shakespeare-for example, Edmund Mortimer and the Duke of Bedford in I Henry VI-but almost all of these, on inspection, turn out to be problematical. In 2 Henry VI Cardinal Beaufort falls ill; "suddenly a grievous sickness took him," reports Vaux, "That makes him gasp, and stare, and catch the air" (3.2.370-71). Since the play does not signal any external cause for this illness, the audience can be reasonably certain that in a play full of witchcraft, hidden malevolence, conjuration of spirits, and murder, this one death at least is natural. Yet Shakespeare seems to go out of his way to distance Beaufort's death from what we might call a routine mortal illness. The king, Salisbury, and Warwick together witness the dying man's final moments and are horrified by what they see and hear. Beaufort's ravings clearly intimate that he bears responsibility for the murder of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester:

Bring me unto my trial when you will.

Died he not in his bed? Where should he die? Can I make men live, whe'er they will or no? 0, torture me no more, I will confess.

(3.3.8-11)

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Beaufort and his accomplice, the Duke of Suffolk, had contrived to make Duke Humphrey's murder seem a natural death. The Quarto version of the play, known as The Contention, provides an unusually detailed stage direction: "Then the Curtaines being drawne, Duke Humphrey is discouered in his bed, and two men lying on his brest and smothering him in his bed. And then enter the Duke of Suffolke to them." Suffolk commends the killers for carrying out his wishes so efficiently and instructs them to

see the cloathes laid smooth about him still, That when the King comes, he may perceiue No other, but that he dide of his owne accord. 13

"He died of his own accord"-Suffolk is trying to hide the crime beneath the appearance of ordinary mortality, but his strange phrase suggests an element of acquiescence, of will even, that is very far from our notion of natural death. It is as if on stage Shakespeare invariably associated death with agency, as if he could only fully imagine death as something willed by someone: if you have not been murdered, then you must be dying of your own accord (the way Desdemona claims to die).

In the Folio text of 2 Henry VI, this scene does not appear (possibly for reasons of censorship) and the murder is simply reported to Suffolk. But the Folio and Quarto versions join in representing Warwick's forensic suspicions, when he scrutinizes the body:

See how the blood is settled in his face. Oft have I seen a timely-parted ghost,

Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless, Being all descended to the laboring heart,

Who, in the conflict that it holds with death,

Attracts the same for aidance 'gainst the enemy, Which with the heart there cools and ne'er returneth To blush and beautify the cheek again.

But see, his face is black and full of blood,

His eyeballs further out than when he lived,

Staring full ghastly, like a strangled man;

His hair uprear'd, his nostrils stretch'd with struggling; His hands abroad display'd as one that grasp'd

And tugg'd for life, and was by strength subdu'd .... It cannot be but he was murdered here.

The least of all these signs were probable.

(3.2.160-78)

In this account, even the body of one who is "timely-parted," who has died of his own accord, shows the signs of a fierce, involuntary struggle with an invisible enemy, signs that differ, however, from those on the body of a murdered man.

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On his own deathbed Beaufort's ravings confirm Warwick's reading of Duke Humphrey's corpse. And this reading strangely spills over into Beaufort's own end, not only because it is a bad death, marked by fear and despair, but because it is a death that has about it something of the signs of a murder, indeed of the very murder that has just been described: "Comb down his hair," Beaufort gasps at the end, staring and catching the air and hallucinating that the ghost of Gloucester stands before him;

look, look, it stands upright,

Like lime-twigs set to catch my winged soul. Give me some drink, and bid the apothecary Bring the strong poison that I bought of him.

(3.3.15-18)14

It is as if the Cardinal's natural illness, though perfectly real, were a curtain through which the audience glimpses a set of overlapping forces that are together contriving to destroy him: first, an invisible principle of retributive justice that has made him fall ill immediately after his consummate piece of villainy; second, what the king calls "the busy, meddling fiend IThat lays strong siege unto this wretch's soul"; and third, some murderous impulse in the wretch himself-halfhomicidal, half-suicidal-that calls for poison even as he calls for drink.!"

Where there is death, the Nalumin believe, there is murder. This belief, Bercovitch argues, is the principle of their moral imagination and a key element in the construction of N alumin selfhood. They need biis, for "the figure of the witch reminds people of the significance of their individual actions and forces them to confront aspects of their individual selves they might rather ignore" (152). Something like this process of self-construction through malevolence and victimage seems to be going on in certain Shakespearean genres, but it is crucial to realize that it is going on in relation to competing notions of death (above all, perhaps, to the unrepresented deaths of mothers) and that there is no figure in his plays comparable to the biis.

None of Shakespeare's witches-and there are, after all, very few of thempossesses the direct, murderous power of the Nalumin witch. On the contrary, in Shakespeare there are repeated intimations of strict limits placed on demonic action: "Though his bark cannot be lost, I Yet it shall be tempest-toss'd" (Macbeth, 1.3.24-25). In 1 Henry VI, Joan de Pucelle's powerful witchcraft evidently enables her to overcome and seduce the "Dolphin" Charles and to rally the French forces, but in the end she is forced to confess that her "ancient incantations are too weak" to triumph over the English army (5.3.27). In 2 Henry VI Duke Humphrey's ambitious wife Eleanor, determined to remove the obstacles that keep her husband and herself from the crown, conspires with a witch and a sorcerer to conjure up the demon Asmath. But while Asmath can be used as an oracle, he evidently cannot be used as a murderous agent. Indeed, it turns out that the whole idea of

The Eating of the Soul 109

the conjuration was cunningly planted in her mind by her enemies Beaufort and Suffolk in order to ruin her. Similarly, when Macbeth revisits the witches on the heath, he cannot enlist them to destroy his enemies, but only to give him a glimpse into the future, a glimpse that both misleads and appalls him.

Yet these limits do not, as we have already seen, simply locate us in a disenchanted world of natural causes; the tragic power of Macbeth depends upon our not knowing exactly how far the witches' power extends. The deaths of Duncan and Banquo and Macbeth himself are inflicted by sharp objects penetrating the skin, violence that is already understood to be unnatural, but the play manages to suggest that the spilling of blood is only the proximate cause of death, that there are murky currents of invisible agency beneath the manifest intentions of all of the characters. 16

If the figure of the witch appears in only a few plays and acts under constraint, the metaphorics of witchcraft are everywhere. The power of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies is bound up with the eerie sense of unnatural murder occulted in what appears to be natural death. Thus in Richard III we see King Edward, mortally ill and daily expecting, as he puts it, "an embassage / From my Redeemer to redeem me hence" (2.l.2-3), while in Richard II John of Gaunt speaks from the very verge of the grave to the rash king."? Yet both of these instances of mortality are delicately but unmistakably charged with another character's malevolent designs. King Edward dies just after the villainous Gloucester has brought him word that his brother Clarence was killed, supposedly on Edward's order. The ailing king is consumed with remorse-"O God! I fear thy justice will take hold / On me and you, and mine and yours, for this"-and he leaves the stage groaning under the burden of his guilt: "Come, Hastings, help me to my closet. Ah, poor Clarence!" (2.l.132-34). Like Edward, Gaunt is presumably dying of natural causes, but he tells Richard II that his condition is principally due to the king's banishment of his son Bolingbroke:

The pleasure that some fathers feed upon

Is my strict fast: I mean, my children's looks; And therein fasting, hast thou made me gaunt. Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, Whose hollow womb inherits naught but bones.

(2.1.79-83)

Gaunt then has been starved to death, or so he implies, by shallow, callous Richard.

Neither Edward nor Gaunt is actually murdered, of course, but the plays carefully link their apparently natural deaths to the desires of those who wish them dead. Gloucester has jauntily prayed God to "take King Edward to his mercy,! And leave the world for me to bustle in!" (l.l.151-52), while Richard II has comparably pious thoughts about his uncle Gaunt: "Now put it, God, in the

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physician's mind ITo help him to his grave immediately!" (1.4.59-60). Such thoughts do not kill, even in the imaginary kingdoms of the stage, but they have a peculiar force that goes beyond a simple effect of characterization, a force that is crystallized at the end of Richard II when Bolingbroke manages, in effect, to have Richard murdered merely by twice sighing a thinly disguised wish for his death. We have conventional and more or less satisfactory ways of talking about what goes on in such a case as this; after all, there is nothing magical about the royal sigh. We call the actual murderer "Pierce Exton" and speak of Bolingbroke's hypocritical powers of insinuation and manipulation. But we do not have a very adequate way of characterizing the deaths of Edward and Gaunt, deaths that are formally attributed to the course of nature and yet are part of a murderous design, a structure of human responsibility.

Almost all of the male deaths represented or even alluded to in Shakespearean tragedy and history occur within the general framework of a poetics of answerability. What we have been calling "unnatural" death in Shakespeare is death for which someone is culpable, death that can be assigned a social meaning, that comes from someone in the community, and that has a significance within a shared moral order. In some productions of Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus is given a sword to dispatch himself, but the text registers no cause beyond his own hidden, suicidal sense of shame. IS King Henry IV has been sleepless and unwell through much of 2 Henry IV, but on his deathbed he bitterly complains that Hal's taking of the crown from his bedside "conjoins" with his disease and "helps to end me" (4.3.193-94). To the prince's explanation, "I never thought to hear you speak again," the king replies, in words that come close to the core of the poetics of answerability, "Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought" (4.3.220-21). Hal's murderous power of wish-fulfillment extends to his symbolic father as well. What Falstaff regularly consumed in the tavern should have been more than enough in the ordinary, sober course of nature to bring him to the grave, but it is difficult to resist Mistress Quickly's diagnosis: "The King has kill'd his heart" (Henry V, 2.1.88). The physical symptoms that are later so memorably described-"his nose was as sharp as a pen" and so forth-are only outward manifestations of the fatal injury that has been inflicted inwardly by Hal. As with the Nalumin, the invisible attack, the eating of the soul, is the truly mortal blow.

But this is precisely the moment to stop short and again to disrupt the intertextual, cross-cultural gesture. Hal is not biis and has not, or not quite, killed his father or eaten Falstaff's soul. The play's power depends upon the equivocality of the relation, an equivocality that holds open the possibility of an escape from the nightmare of total answerability even as it refuels the moral imagination with suspicion that someone is, after all, always answerable. And of course in the theater, someone is in fact always answerable; I refer to the invisible agent who has given us the play. It would be a mistake to insist dogmatically upon this agent, to cast the playwright in the role of biis, since Shakespeare is not a sorcerer or a

The Eating of the Soul III

demiurge but a dramatist. If we are invited to imagine his secret hand everywhere, we are encouraged for our pleasure to pretend that the characters on stage have something like a life and a death of their own. Yet there are continual intimations, particularly in the histories and tragedies, that this life is not quite natural and that it cannot end by natural means.

In the comedies, where it is possible to imagine that men and women can live, temporarily at least, at a happy remove from their societies, it is also possible to imagine that men, like women, die precisely because they are mortal: hence the deaths of the princess's father in Love's Labors Lost, Sir Rowland de Boys in As You Like It, old Sebastian of Messaline in Twelfth Night, and the old Count of Rossillion and Gerard de Narbon in All's Well That Ends Well. Such deaths-not theatrically represented, to be sure, but conspicuously mentioned-are not, as is sometimes said, traces of tragedy subtly introduced into the midst of comedy. They are instead a kind of bittersweet comic reassurance; agentless and natural, they take their place alongside the prospective deaths that at the play's close the youthful heroes and heroines, awaiting their inheritance, tacitly anticipate: Baptista and Vincentio, Leonato, and (less tacitly) Shylock.

In his amorous and eminently comic impatience, Theseus complains of the slowness of the moon's waning:

She lingers my desires, Like to a step-dame, or a dowager,

Long withering out a young man's revenue. (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1.1.4-7)

Hippolyta reassures him that the days "will quickly steep themselves in night." This is the benign reassurance of comedy: natural extinction, against which is set the terrible, occult answerability, the obscure spheres of malign influence and moral infection, the radical undermining of natural death in history and tragedy. 19

We have already examined several characteristic forms of this undermining, but before closing I want to glance briefly at two of its supreme instances. The first is Hamlet, which opens with the clearest articulation in Shakespeare of the principle of natural death (a principle later given an unforgettable material emblem, carefully marked out as a comic trace, in Yorick's skull). "Do not for ever with thy vailed lids," Gertrude tells her son,

Seek for thy noble father in the dust.

Thou know'st 'tis common, all that lives must die, Passing through nature to erernity.s"

(1.2.70-73)

Claudius echoes this sentiment and argues that to set oneself against it is

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a fault to heaven,

A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,

To reason most absurd, whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, From the first corpse till he that died today, This must be so.'

(1.2.101-6)

The play is thereafter constructed around the revelation that the death of this father, like that of the "first corpse," was not natural, that it was a murder "most foul, strange, and unnatural." For our purposes, the point is not simply the disclosure of Claudius' secret crime but the confirmation of Hamlet's original resistance to the "common theme," the suspicion from which his mourning and melancholia issue: "0 my prophetic soul!" (l.5.40).21

Old Hamlet did not, to recall the odd locution of The Contention, die "of his own accord," a consummation that at once haunts and eludes the prince throughout the play. Nor was he stung, as the official account gave out, by a serpent. The king's murder, like Duke Humphrey's, is cunningly contrived to conceal the cause of death; hence the strange device of the poison poured in the ear. An article published about a decade ago in the New England Journal of Medicine proposed that Shakespeare knew of the Renaissance anatomist Bartolommeo Eustachio's clinical description of the tubes that bear his name. The authors go so far as to suggest that Old Hamlet must have had "chronic otitis media," a perforation in the tympanum that would allow the poison to pass into the larynx. "A bilateral conductive hearing loss resulting from large subtotal tympanicmembrane perforations," they write, "would explain the ease with which his brother crept up to the king in the orchard to pour a few drops of poison into each ear.'?" We do not have to accept such a diagnosis to see that the murdered king gives an unusually detailed account of his death:

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed hebe non in a vial, And in the porches of mine ears did pour The leperous distilment, whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk,

The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine; And a most instant tetter barked about,

Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body.

(1.5.61-73)

The Eating of the Soul 113

In Old Hamlet's murder the autarchy of the body is shattered by a secret agent, the hidden malice of a usurper who has not only taken his brother's life but rankly abused "the whole ear of Denmark." And yet if Claudius has, like the biis, secretly poisoned an entire community, the play insists that his means were not supernatural. Old Hamlet, who exists in Shakespeare's play only as the ghost of himself, testifies that his death was produced not by the magical power of a malignant will but by the natural effects of hebenon, effects comparable to nothing stranger than the curdling of milk. Natural death gives way to unnatural murder, but the murder is described in scrupulously natural terms.

My second and concluding instance is in some sense an inversion of Hamlet, but it too rests on the suspicion that there is something wrong with the hypothesis of natural death. I refer to the tragedy whose immensely old protagonist declares his intention to shake all cares and business from his age and "Unburdened crawl toward death" (The Tragedy of King Lear, 1.1.41). In the terrible logic of King Lear, this intention is revealed to have been absurdly hopeful, the utopian dream of comedy anticipated with disastrous consequences in the king's attempt to part with his inheritance before his death. For in a world where fathers do not, cannot meet the natural death they crave, it turns out to be immensely difficult to find extinction.F' To be sure, there are murderers, no end of murderers in the play. But for Lear death does not come either through the malevolent power of his enemy children or through the power of the natural fruition the play calls "ripeness." Rather, for Lear, as for Gloucester, it comes through an intense psychic shock that is, as Kent perceives, the equivalent of a mercy killing:

0, let him pass. He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer.

(5.3.289-91)

The secret agent of this death is neither an enemy nor a natural cause; it comes as the fulfillment of a theatrical wish, Shakespeare's and our own.

Notes

1. Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973),450.

2. Michael Baxandall, "Art, Society, and the Bouguer Principle," Representations 12 (Fall 1985): 40.

3. Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), 134.

4. Eytan Bercovitch, "Mortal Insights: Victim and Witch in the Nalumin Imagination,"

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in The Religious Imagination in New Guinea, ed. Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen (New Brunswick, N.J., 1989), 122-59.

5. Actually the term biis can refer to the "witches" themselves, or to the more deadly of the two main techniques used by the witches to kill their enemies, or to the human flesh that the witches eat.

6. Bruce M. Knauft, "Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies: Homicide Among the Gebusi of New Guinea," Current Anthropology 28, no. 4 (August-October 1987): 464. These figures are to be taken with considerable caution, but even adjusting them to minimize the distance, the difference is staggering. (Hence, for example, the 1985 homicide rate for Detroit was 58.2 per 100,000; the 1969-74 rate for Cleveland black males was 142.1 per 100,000.)

7. The ritualized homicides seem to make death volitional, both performatively (by canceling out a nonvolitional death with a volitional one) and symbolically (by insisting that the non volitional death had after all answered to someone's will, namely, the will of the sorcerer).

8. Except where noted, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1986), is the modern text used here.

9. To be sure, we do not know how Olivia's brother or the Count of Rossillion have died and the only corpses we can actually identify in the Capulet tomb are those of Tybalt, Paris, Romeo, and Juliet, none of them a victim of natural death. But the reference to the king's disease in All's Well, along with a comparable hum of ordinary extinction in the other plays, induces the assumption of what I have called a "backdrop" of natural death.

10. Similarly, we know that Imogen's mother had owned a diamond ring that her daughter inherited.

11. The phrase occurs in Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesie, in Allan H. Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Detroit, 1962),439-40.

12. See Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987),374.

13. The First Part of the Contention, sig. E2, in Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, ed. Michael J.

Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley, 1981), 60. This passage from the Quarto is dropped by William Montgomery from the recent Oxford text, even though that text is ostensibly based upon the Quarto. Montgomery does not refer to these lines in particular, but writes, "Since the passage, on the whole, is poorly reported, we are not inclined to accept Q dialogue verbatim." Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion, 186.

14. The subtle links between the two deaths have been noted by Claire Saunders, in "'Dead in His Bed': Shakespeare's Staging of the Death of the Duke of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI," in Review of English Studies 36 (1985): 19-34.

15. Shakespeare developed this last notion in Richard III, where the king, on the eve of the battle in which he will meet his death, succumbs to hideous anxiety at his own being:

What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by. Richard loves Richard, that is, I am l.

Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.

Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why? Lest I revenge. Myself upon myself?

(5.5.136-40)

16. We might note that Lady Macbeth's death, rumored to have come "by self and violent hands," is not assigned any firm cause at all.

The Eating of the Soul 115

17. It is perhaps worth noting that neither Edward nor Gaunt dies onstage. Both are carried off only to die immediately after; but this expedient may simply be a device to keep the action moving rapidly. A successful play can afford only a limited number of corpses ceremoniously hauled offstage.

18. So too, in the same play, Iras is sometimes given her own asp, but in the text she seems to take her death with pleasure from Cleopatra's kiss: "Have I the aspic in my lips?" (5.2.288)

19. It is precisely such a benign reassurance that gives the presence of Yorick's skull in Hamlet its weird poignancy, the trace of the grotesque comedy of ordinary extinction in a play of secret death.

20. Claudius echoes this account:

But you must know your father lost a father, That father lost, lost his: and the survivor bound In filial obligation for some term

To do obsequious sorrow.

( 1.2.89-92)

21. I should, however, note that Hamlet initially expresses astonishment that his father's death was a murder; the words "0 my prophetic soul!" are spoken in response to the revelation that his uncle was the murderer.

22. Avrim Eden and Jeff Opland, "Bartolomrneo Eustachio's De Auditus Organis and the Unique Murder Plot in Shakespeare's Hamlet," New England Journal of Medicine 307 (1982): 260.

23. It is difficult, that is, to find the extinction that is not represented but that simply occurs, outside of representation, in the nonexistence of the wives of both Gloucester and Lear.

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