Studying Shakespeare's Contemporaries E-Book

Lars Engle

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 539

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries is an accessible guide to non-Shakespearian English drama of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Featuring works of prestigious playwrights such as Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and Middleton, Lars Engle describes the conditions under which Renaissance plays were commissioned, written, licensed, staged, and published. Plays are organized by theme and explored individually, creating a text that can be read as a complete overview of English Renaissance drama or used as an indexed reference resource.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Preface: How to Use This Book

Part 1: Inwardness

1.1 The Inward Self

1.2 The Inward Self in Soliloquy: The Jew of Malta

1.3 The Inward Self in Aside: The Changeling

1.4 A Digression: The Inner Life of Modernized Texts

1.5 The Christian/Stoic Soul Under Duress: The Duchess of Malfi

1.6 How to Behave When You Have a Soul Always Already Damned: Doctor Faustus

1.7 Obsession and Delusion: Comic Inwardness in Every Man in His Humor

1.8 Epicene

1.9 Tamburlaine the Great 1 and 2: Interior Strength, External Weakness

1.10 Disguise and Honor in The Malcontent

1.11 Conclusion: A Drama of Interiority?

Part 2: Intimacy, Rivalry, Family

2.1 Rivalry and Intimacy in A Trick to Catch the Old One

2.2 The Tragedy of Mariam: Intimacy, Tyranny, and Ambivalence

2.3 Domestic Tragedy and Moral Commentary: Arden of Faversham

2.4 The Battle of the Sexes: The Woman's Prize

2.5 Intimacy, Rivalry, Family: Women Beware Women

2.6 Familiar and Familial: Incest in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Part 3: Society, Politics, the City, and the State

3.1 Dreaming Up the Free City: The Roaring Girl

3.2 The Shoemaker's Holiday

3.3 A New Way to Pay Old Debts

3.4 The Knight of the Burning Pestle

3.5 The State at War in The Spanish Tragedy

3.6 Two Bodies: State and Self in Edward II

3.7 Resistance to Tyranny in The Maid's Tragedy

3.8 Tyranny as a Boundary Condition for a Subject's Violence: The Duchess of Malfi and The Revenger's Tragedy

3.9 Republic and Tyranny in Sejanus

Part 4: Not Shakespeare—Lives of the Theater Poets

4.1 “Non-Shakespearean”: The Dire Privative

4.2 Christopher Marlowe

4.3 Ben Jonson

4.4 Thomas Middleton

4.5 Thomas Kyd

4.6 Thomas Dekker

4.7 Francis Beaumont

4.8 John Fletcher

4.9 John Ford

4.10 John Marston

4.11 Philip Massinger

4.12 Elizabeth Cary

Appendix: Performance History

Francis Beaumont

Elizabeth Cary

Thomas Dekker

John Fletcher

John Ford

Ben Jonson

Thomas Kyd

Christopher Marlowe

John Marston

Philip Massinger

Thomas Middleton

William Rowley and Thomas Middleton

John Webster

Uncertain Authorship

Bibliography

Index

This edition first published 2014

© 2014 Lars Engle and Eric Rasmussen

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Cover image: Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, c.1594. © 2012 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas / Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence

Cover design by www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

For Holly, Carl, and Sage

LDE

Acknowledgments

Parts of this book, in revised forms, have appeared as Lars Engle, “Watching Shakespeare Learn from Marlowe” in Peter Kanelos and Matt Kuzusko, eds., Thunder at a Playhouse (Susquehanna 2010), and as Lars Engle, “The Self,” in Emily Bartels and Emma Smith, eds., Marlowe in Context (Cambridge 2013). Several pages from the book appeared in Lars Engle, “Oedipal Marlowe, Mimetic Middleton,” Modern Philology 105:3. I am grateful for permission to reprint here. Parts have also been given as lectures or papers at MLA, SAA, OVSC, Texas A&M, and the University of Queensland, and have benefited from audience questions and comments. The entire text was carefully annotated by Mark Rideout, of the University of Tulsa, and James Mardock, of the University of Nevada, to its great benefit. Holly Laird has also read parts of the book and has encouraged its author. My work on the project was supported by a grant from the University of Tulsa's Research Office, for which my thanks.

This book is in many ways a companion to English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. I worked on that project with David Bevington and Katharine Eisaman Maus as well as my present coauthor, and I incurred many debts of gratitude and understanding to all three of them.

This book was first commissioned from Lars Engle by Emma Bennett, then of Blackwell, and Emma and Ben Thatcher, now at Wiley-Blackwell, have shown consistent interest, patience, and persistence in bringing it in to being. My thanks to them both and to all at Wiley Blackwell. I also wish to thank Eric Rasmussen for his characteristic generosity and energy in stepping in to coauthor this book and helping mightily to complete it. Collaboration can in fact be an extremely pleasant activity with the right coauthor, and for me, Eric has been that.

Lars Engle

For my part, I am enormously grateful to Mark Farnsworth, Jennifer Forsyth, and Dee Anna Phares for helping to draft several sections of the book, and to Sarah Stewart for compiling the stage history appendix. Allston James read an early draft of the manuscript and provided invaluable notes from his perspective as a theater practitioner. James Mardock read multiple versions of the manuscript, virtually every page of which has been improved by his trenchant readings. Ashley Marshall offered both insight and encouragement. To these friends and colleagues, I say thanks, and thanks, and thanks again.

Collaborating with Lars Engle has long been one of the great joys of my professional life. Work on this project, which was begun while sitting courtside at a Lakers versus Thunder basketball game, has been particularly joyous.

Eric Rasmussen

Preface

How to Use This Book

Shakespeare's preeminent importance has both sustained and deformed the study of the drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England. As the title of this book suggests, the other playwrights who wrote at the same time and for the same players and public as Shakespeare are always in danger of being relegated to the background: treated as part of Shakespeare's context. There are of course worse things than being part of Shakespeare's background. Serious students of Shakespeare need to know the work of Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, Middleton, and their many contemporaries and collaborators. In the process, they usually come to care deeply about these authors. In another way, however, Shakespeare is part of the background for study of other English Renaissance dramatists, as one almost invariably comes to their plays after having studied some of his. The expectations that Shakespeare's most-studied plays arouse – expectations about depth and complexity of characterization, about density of brilliant metaphor in language, about intellectual coherence and social insight – are sometimes fully gratified by the works of other dramatists (though not often all at once). Masterpieces like The Duchess of Malfi, The Changeling, The Alchemist, or Doctor Faustus resemble Shakespeare in a number of kinds of excellence. But English Renaissance drama is also full of plays that are wonderful in ways that are quite un-Shakespearean: for example, in the hilarious literary spoofing in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, or the savagely funny satire of The Revenger's Tragedy, or the unsentimental generosity about women's sexual lives in the city comedies of Middleton. Studying Shakespeare's Contemporaries works on the assumption that the privative term “non-Shakespearean” need not be a deterrent to pleasure or profit. We might wish to substitute the less negative “para-Shakespearean” in the minds of our readers. The book aims to accompany students who have embarked on first readings of major plays, illustrating the ways the plays take up issues that we care about, and opening them up as sites for pleasure in reading or performance as well as for reflection on important aspects of life.

The book proceeds by brief individual treatments of major non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays organized according to a movement outward from psychological interiority to large social and political structures. From the perspective of beginning students, there is nothing more frustrating than an argument that uses as evidence a series of brief references to plays they have never read. Studying Shakespeare's Contemporaries avoids this by handling each play in a discrete, independently readable section, under the assumption that some of its users may well open the book to the sections on the particular play they are reading. At the same time, it offers a developing overview of major issues in the field of study. Some of these issues are indicated by section topics and subtopics in the table of contents. The book also, in discussions of some of the most widely taught plays (e.g., Doctor Faustus, The Changeling, The Duchess of Malfi), describes the conditions under which plays were commissioned, written (often collaboratively), licensed, staged, and published. The final section offers brief descriptions of the careers of Shakespeare's most important contemporaries, discussing their lives in the theater alongside Shakespeare's. Throughout, the goal has been to provide a brisk, appreciative, and accessible guide to what keeps these plays alive for readers. Plays are quoted from English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology unless otherwise noted.

Part 1

Inwardness

Twenty-first century readers are used to the idea that the cultivation and exploration of an inner self is both a predominant literary concern and one of the rewards of literary study. Their central experience of serious literature is usually the novel, which features narrative description of the contents of the minds of characters, or internal monologs in which those minds are revealed, or both. Their predominant experience of drama comes from television and film, which feature revelatory close-ups of expressive faces and occasional voice-overs of thought. As an assumption to bring to Early Modern drama, the idea that inner selves are being explored is both helpful and misleading. It is helpful in that theatre consists of unusually self-revealing action, and Renaissance theatre is no exception to this. But it is somewhat misleading in that Early Modern ideas about what selves consist of differ from twenty-first century ideas, often in significant ways. This part of Studying Shakespeare's Contemporaries will discuss personal inwardness as it is presented in the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries, beginning with techniques for the dramatic representation of inner states and moving on to discuss key features of the inner self. As the preface suggested, Shakespeare excels in evoking human inwardness, so much so that he is sometimes credited with inventing it (see Fineman, Bloom) and with exercising a critical influence on later mapmakers of modern inwardness like Freud. In the following sections, we will discuss a play that influenced Shakespeare in his representation of inwardness, Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and then a play that is influenced in turn by Shakespeare's representation of inward disturbance in Macbeth and Othello, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling.

1.1 The Inward Self

What makes you think you have an inner life? What makes you believe that other people do? Surely, one major constituent of these linked beliefs is your own capacity to talk to yourself, to maintain a discursive existence when not directly prompted by others, and your experience (which may well be more literary than it is personal) of overhearing other people talking to themselves. Of course, most such discourse is private and never rises to the level of audible speech. Part of its interest, indeed, derives from its variance in tone and intention from public speech. Honesty and candor may keep this variance from reaching the level of complete contradiction; the vice of hypocrisy consists in allowing one's public discourse to overtly contradict one's private internal discourse, and may include taking private pleasure in that contradiction. But even in honest, candid people there is substantial variance between internal and external discourse, and relations with particular others will be as it were measured for intimacy by how great that variance is.

This raises a question. Is there internal discourse that is not, in some way, a response, perhaps even a reply, to an external prompt or gesture? Is internal life private in the sense that it is entirely separate from a social matrix, from the outer world of others speaking and writing and exerting authority that conditions all of the life most adults can remember (given that few can remember anything from before they were speakers and understanders)? Twentieth-century theorists have, on the whole, answered “no” to this question. To cite two famous examples among many that could be offered, Ludwig Wittgenstein denies that there could be such a thing as a private language, and Mikhail Bakhtin claims that every utterance is a reply, part of an always already ongoing dialogic exchange (Wittgenstein, 1974: 94–102, Schalkwyk, 2004: 120, Bakhtin, 1981: 276, Bakhtin, 1986: 121, Clark and Holquist, 1984: 348). Do such claims compromise the idea of inwardness? They certainly cast in question absolute claims about individual autonomy, and they point to the complexity surrounding the ideas of free choice and free will, but they do not in fact do much to undermine the less complex idea that human beings have inner lives that are in large part concealed from those around them, and that those inner lives are objects of the curiosity, and sometimes of the urgent or violent inquiries, of others. These observations, in their generality, do not seem located in any particular historical moment. They seem likely to be true of any culture that shares the moral vocabulary in which lying and hypocrisy are (at least officially) bad and honesty and candor, good. Although strong claims have been made in discussions of Renaissance culture about the emptiness or nullity of the inward self in the Renaissance (see e.g., Belsey, 1985: 48), these claims often seem based on twentieth-century thinking about the social and linguistic imbeddedness of inward mental life rather than directly on readings of Renaissance texts. As Katharine Eisaman Maus remarks of critics who deny interior life to Renaissance subjects, “such critics characteristically work from philosophical positions that reject as illusory the possibility of a subjectivity prior to or exempt from social determination. That is, they are making a claim not only about English Renaissance subjectivity, but about subjectivity tout court” (Maus, 1995: 26). She suggests that hostility to the idea of Renaissance inwardness may derive from “a false sense of what is necessitated by the premises of cultural-materialist and new-historicist criticism” (Maus, 1995: 26, see also 2–3 for a set of quotations of cultural materialist and new-historicist critics on interiority).

New historicism and cultural materialism are the names of related schools of historically oriented literary criticism that arose in the 1980s—the first on the whole in the United States and the second on the whole in Britain—and have deeply influenced the way literature is read in universities since. Both emphasize the ways works of literature are properly to be seen as documents in larger social processes involving conflict and domination. Not only literary works, but human lives, are elements in such processes, obviously, and both movements question the independence of the self at the same time that they dispute the autonomy of the literary work seen as a self-sufficient aesthetic whole. Thus these movements work against a cherished idea about literary reading that used to be central to the declared purposes of literary education—the idea of a modern self becoming “deeper” and “richer” by gaining a satisfactory experience of the rich self-sufficient wholeness of a literary masterpiece. Clearly, the issue of Renaissance inwardness has a number of contentious political dimensions, dimensions that may be an aspect of the difficulty of understanding works from a different historical period, or may be an aspect of the philosophical problem of other minds. These are hard and important issues, and it may be better to approach them more simply by asking yet another question. Do questions about inner selves arise differently in the Renaissance, or at any rate in Renaissance drama, from the way they do now? This is the question this part will attempt to answer, first by looking at the direct ways Renaissance dramatists represent human inwardness, then by moving on to discuss religious dimensions of English Renaissance inwardness, the treatment of psychological obsession in Renaissance drama, and, finally, inner strength and personal honor, inward characteristics that empower or condition the ways characters can act, or can feel obliged to act, on others. As is suggested by its part titles, this book as a whole moves outward from the psyche to the social and political order, so that by its later parts it will be promoting ways of looking at drama which differ from the intentionally individualistic focus of this part.

1.2 The Inward Self in Soliloquy: The Jew of Malta

Drama has two powerful techniques for making inward discourse directly available: the soliloquy, where a character speaks his or her thoughts alone on the stage, and the aside, where a character turns away from the action and speaks a thought that is unheard by some or all of the other onstage characters. By discussing soliloquy first in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, this section approaches an inwardness technique in a play that is emphatically not prized for its successful evocation of stable, deep selfhood. Moreover, as Jews in sixteenth-century Europe and the Near East were people with limited political rights, tolerated in some Christian and Islamic states and officially expelled from others (from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492), they had fewer communal resources for self-stabilization than citizens or subjects whose religious and ethnic affiliations were those of the dominant culture. The Jews who appear on the Renaissance English stage are usually isolated. As we shall see in later parts, however, English Renaissance drama was profoundly interested in outsiders, and many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Londoners were aliens, criminals, Catholics, or Puritans, and some were Jews, black Africans, transvestites, sodomites, or atheists. Any person in these categories could easily identify him or herself as a persecuted member of a disempowered group, and all except black Africans and Puritans might well be involved in forms of self-concealment that distorted firm, stable identity. Barabas, Marlowe's Maltese Jew, is at any rate no exemplar of consistency; as Emily Bartels points out, he “appears in so many postures that his character seems to consist more of what he is not than of what he is” (Bartels, 1993: 97). Close readings of a series of soliloquies might seem a more natural way to approach a play like Hamlet, preoccupied with the inadequacy of outer life to inward experience, than Marlowe's “farce of the…serious even savage comic humour” (Eliot, 1932: 16), which moves from rapid action at the start to frenzied action at the end. Nonetheless, as we shall see, Barabas's inward life is strongly represented.

Marlowe's The Jew of Malta begins with a prologue by “Machiavel” followed by a soliloquy by Barabas. One of the aspects of Machiavelli's 1513 book The Prince that made it notorious in sixteenth-century Europe was its recommendation that leaders be able to dissimulate their intentions, to lie, when it is expedient to do so. That is, Machiavelli disputes the idea that lying is in all circumstances bad and that honesty is invariably good. This strategic rationing of one's inward thought for purposes of control and safety was one of many ways in which Marlowe found Machiavelli provocative. As Maus remarks, “Marlowe…keeps returning to the implications of a personal inwardness withheld or withholdable from others” (Maus, 1995: 210). The Machiavel of Marlowe's prologue expects those who read him to dissimulate their indebtedness to his advice, “such as love me guard me from their tongues, /…/Admired I am of those that hate me most” (Prologue 6–9). His comments prepare audiences for two important aspects of The Jew of Malta: deceptive self-presentation (set off by private self-revelation), and ambivalence toward a figure who presents a strong but amoral version of the reality of human economic and political life. The first is established early on by soliloquy and aside.

Barabas's first soliloquy, “in his countinghouse, with heaps of gold before him,” as the stage direction has it, seems at the outset impersonal, the talking to himself of a merchant reckoning his accounts: “So that of thus much that return was made; / And of the third part of the Persian ships, / There was the venture summed and satisfied” (1.1.1–3). But the soliloquy soon becomes more expressive, although it remains focused on the wealth in front of him. He reveals impatience at having to account for small sums: “Fie, what a trouble 'tis to count this trash!”, contrasting himself with “The needy groom that never fingered groat” who would wonder at “thus much coin” (1.1.7–14). As he proceeds to an approving account of the hoards of “the wealthy Moor” (1.1.21), he seems enthralled by the way objects of enormous economic value concentrate beauty and power in tangible form:

Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, And seld-seen costly stones of so great price As one of them, indifferently rated And of a caret of this quantity, May serve, in peril of calamity, To ransom great kings from captivity.

(1.1.25–32)

As an exposure of inwardness, this does not seem very inward. It represents Barabas's participation in the thrill of possessing what others desire, and an awareness that such objects also represent the resources others may desperately need. The neediness of those who do not have his resources—the groatless groom, the captive king—is a major component of the resources themselves, from Barabas's viewpoint. Although Barabas is talking in part about others, he is also placing himself among them, at the same time registering his own difference as a disenfranchised Jew who has no home ground from which wealth can be directly extracted. The “wealthy Moor” can, in Barabas's fantasy at least, simply “pick his riches up” from the “Eastern rocks” where precious stones abound, but Barabas's own more laborious work as a merchant achieves the same kind of concentrated potential by separation of wealth from the ordinary people who are enmeshed in a market-world they cannot control:

This is the ware wherein consists my wealth; And thus, methinks, should men of judgment frame Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade, And, as their wealth increaseth, so enclose Infinite riches in a little room.

(1.1.33–37)

“Judgment,” for Barabas, consists of concentrating the world-spanning reach of human transactions in a private space: the “little room” of his countinghouse, or the privacy of his intentions, unavailable to the “vulgar.” The idea that this is, potentially, a king's ransom suggests that it represents security and even power as well as accomplishment. Machiavel promises us “the tragedy of a Jew / Who smiles to see how full his bags are crammed” (Prologue 30–31), and Barabas's soliloquy demonstrates how much more interesting and complex the situation of such a Jew seems from inside his own consciousness than when looked on unsympathetically from the outside. At the same time, Machiavel's comment warns us that Barabas will not smile for long.

What, then, does this soliloquy accomplish in terms of the representation or evocation of inwardness? It establishes a kind of baseline for Barabas's later frenzy, in that his complacent account of his own success is shot through with expressions of impatience at the life he has led to achieve “thus much coin,” “wearying his fingers' ends with telling it” (1.1.16). He clearly prefers to think of his achievement in terms of the solidity and brilliance of hidden gems, “seld-seen costly stones” (1.1.28), rather than as a pile of coins that have passed through many hands and may at any time return to promiscuous negotiation. Moreover, when the soliloquy resumes after an interruption in 1.1, it also sets the terms on which he finds his adversarial relation to the dominant Christians of Malta tolerable:

Who hateth me but for my happiness? Or who is honored now but for his wealth? Rather had, I, a Jew, be hated thus Than pitied in a Christian poverty; For I can see no fruits in all their faith But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride, Which methinks fits not their profession.

(1.1.111–118)

Barabas sees his relation to the Christians as a struggle lightly masked by hypocritical professions of charity on the Christian side and the systematic forgoing of political authority on the side of the Jews:

They say we are a scattered nation; I cannot tell, but we have scambled up More wealth by far than those that brag of faith. … I must confess we come not to be kings. That's not our fault. Alas, our number's few, And crowns come either by succession Or urged by force; and nothing violent, Oft have I heard tell, can be permanent.

(1.1.120–132)

We moderns think of the inner self as prone to ambivalence and contradiction. So far—and in this Marlowe typifies Renaissance norms—Barabas's soliloquy has been marked by a high level of rhetorical consistency and formality; except in its frankness, his speech to himself does not seem that different from a speech he might deliver to an assembly. Nonetheless, as suggested already by our account of Barabas's impatience discussed earlier, the “alas” and the “not our fault” register Barabas's distress at the denial of political power to match the economic accumulation the greatest Jews have achieved. Clearly, it is faute de mieux, suppressing his own distress, that Barabas concludes “Give us a peaceful rule; make Christians kings, / That thirst so much for principality” (1.1.133–34). His reference to Abigail, his “one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear / As Agamemnon did his Iphigen; / And all I have is hers” (1.1.136–8), both ominously foreshadows a sacrifice and suggests that Barabas is in his imagination a man who would be king. The punctuated soliloquy of 1.1, then, establishes both Barabas's precarious complacency and his awareness that it is endangered by the collective vulnerability of the Jews. Indeed, the soliloquy locates in Barabas's psyche the social thought-experiment that is at the center of the play: what are the consequences when economic power is concentrated in the hands of the politically powerless?

The first consequence is that when they really need it, the politically powerful will grab the money of the powerless rich. In 1.2 Barabas is, in rapid, plausible succession, summoned to the senate house, told by the Christian governor, Ferneze, that the Turks have demanded payment of 10-years' neglected Maltese tribute, and asked to contribute half his wealth on penalty of forced conversion to Christianity and total dispossession if he refuses. When Barabas declines to be christened and says (in an echo of his opening soliloquy) “Half of my substance is a city's wealth. / Governor, it was not got so easily; / Nor will I part so slightly therewithal” (1.2.86–8), he is held to have “denied the articles” and thus to forfeit all possessions to the state. When his fellow Jews (who have quickly submitted to the expropriation of half their goods, and have so escaped Barabas's total loss) attempt to console him, Barabas rejects their consolations in terms that remind us of the foregone aspirations to power in his first soliloquy. Here his lost money becomes a general's defeated army and reminds us of the way he likened himself earlier to Agamemnon (see Shepard, 1998: 119):

You that Were ne'er possessed of wealth are pleased with want. But give him liberty at least to mourn That in a field amidst his enemies Doth see his soldiers slain, himself disarmed, And knows no means of his recovery.

(1.2.201–6)

When they leave him alone, he springs up and in a wonderful brief soliloquy reveals his sense that he is harder and more resistant to dissolution than ordinary men:

See the simplicity of these base slaves, Who, for the villains have no wit themselves, Think me to be a senseless lump of clay That will with every water wash to dirt!

(1.2.216–19)

This resistance to the suddenly fluid nature of his experience carries on even after Barabas's daughter Abigail brings the distressing news that Barabas's emergency reserve of gold and jewels (“stones infinite” [1.2.247]) is inaccessible. Barabas's house has been turned into a convent, and Barabas as a male Jew is of course forbidden to enter it. Barabas briefly considers despair and suicide, representing them as an even more radical form of dissolution:

What, will you thus oppose me, luckless stars, To make me desperate in my poverty, And, knowing me impatient in distress, Think me so mad as I will hang myself, That I may vanish o'er the earth in air And leave no memory that e'er I was?

(1.2.260–265)

Rather than thus allow himself to dissipate, Barabas embraces uncertainty:

No! I will live, nor loathe I this my life. And since you leave me in the ocean thus To sink or swim, and put me to my shifts, I'll rouse my senses and awake myself.

(1.2.266–9)

Neither a stone to sink nor a clod to wash to dirt, Barabas will be a swimmer and a shape-shifter. Much of the inconsistency and manic variety of the rest of the play derives from this resolution, as once Barabas leaves the precarious truce with Christian power he articulates in his opening soliloquy, he never achieves a position of stability, and indeed he dies at the end trying to reestablish something approximating the accommodation he started with.

In his first “shift,” he responds to his exile from his own house by asking his daughter Abigail to pretend conversion to Christianity so that she can enter the nunnery and recover Barabas's rainy-day fund. After some natural hesitation, Abigail, persuaded, turns to the Abbess who is proceeding conveniently across the stage to take up her new residence and begs admission as a novice. While apparently cursing Abigail for her apostasy, Barabas arranges, in a series of hilarious asides, to come early in the morning to the new convent to receive the restolen goods. But when he arrives “with a light” before his house, his confidence in the arrangement appears to have given way to vengeful self-pity. The soliloquy with which Barabas opens the second act differs markedly in tone from his first.

Thus, like the sad presaging raven that tolls The sick man's passport in her hollow beak, And in the shadow of the silent night Doth shake contagion from her sable wings, Vexed and tormented runs poor Barabas With fatal curses towards these Christians.

(2.1.1–6)

As in his earlier soliloquy, this one at first seems to show Barabas's mental life as quite instrumental, focusing on powerful rhetorical presentation of his activities and intentions. At the same time, it mixes a myth of doom for his enemies with a somewhat comic sense of his own movements: no fatal bird of the air but instead a distracted earthbound creature trying with difficulty to hurry in the dark. Night has brought torment and self-doubt, as is seen in the way the raven's flight immediately becomes the flight away from him of everything he has counted and counted on:

The incertain pleasures of swift-footed time Have ta'en their flight and left me in despair; And of my former riches rests no more But bare remembrance, like a soldier's scar, That has no further comfort for his maim.

(2.1.6–11)

No longer an angry general on the field of his defeat, Barabas is now a poor soldier with only his scars to show for his losses. Lines 9–11 gain some of their poetic power—which derives partly from the sequential off-rhymes “air,” “or,” “er,” “ore,” “are,” “ar,” “ur,” and “er” and the intense alliteration of the initial consonants “m,” “b,” and “r”, and partly also from the way the pause after “remembrance” breaks the iambic pattern so dominant in Marlowe's pentameter line—from a subdued pun on “member” in “remembrance”: the mutilated soldier can “remember” what he had, but he cannot regain the member he has lost.

The outdoor public Renaissance theatres—The Jew of Malta played mainly at the Rose, Philip Henslowe's venue, in the 1590s (see Gurr, 1996: 69–77)—tended to feature a curtained recess at back center stage that probably was the site of Barabas's countinghouse in 1.1, and also had an upper playing space above that recess with a windowlike opening. In this upper stage, while Barabas paces back and forth on the bare main stage carrying his lantern, Abigail appears, unheard by her father and searching for his treasure. Their soliloquies cross each other in one of the more brilliant Marlovian scenes, and one that, as suggested earlier, Shakespeare took note of. Square brackets around stage directions (which are always in italics) indicate that the directions are supplied by a modern editor for the reader's convenience rather than appearing in the early printed text or texts on which the modern edition is based.

Abigail [to herself] Now have I happily espied a time To search the plank my father did appoint. [Finding riches] And here, behold, unseen, where I have found The gold, the pearls, and jewels which he hid! Barabas [to himself] Now I remember those old women's words Who in my wealth would tell me winter's tales And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night About the place where treasure hath been hid And now methinks that I am one of those. For, whilst I live, here lives my soul's sole hope And when I die, here shall my spirit walk.

(2.1.20–30)

Barabas's words are, as we say, overdetermined—they have more than one appropriate and indeed necessary meaning. His “soul's sole hope” is his treasure, and the lost house in which he originally amassed it, and the daughter who might be expected to carry his inheritance into the future. Barabas's memory now associates his treasure with the spiritual traces of others who lost it before he gained it (or hid it before he found it). In his extremity, he also begins populating his inner self with voices from the past, old women who told him stories that undermine the confident account of the meaning and origins of wealth he gave in his first soliloquy. After all, the “spirits and ghosts” haunting hoarded treasure stand for the restless need for vengeance of those from whom it has been taken, and more generally touch on the social resentment of poor Christians for rich Jews that has turned on and victimized Barabas as well as on Barabas's own anger at dispossession. And as Barabas thus voices this line of inner thought, he is unheard by one of the objects of that thought who is herself recovering another object of it—the double soliloquy thus has an uncanny connection to the winter's tale of disembodied connection to lost possessions that Barabas remembers. Abigail too feels a mixed sense of elation and loss:

Now that my father's fortune were so good As but to be about this happy place! 'Tis not so happy; yet when we parted last, He said he would attend me in the morn. Then, gentle sleep, where'er his body rests, Give charge to Morpheus that he may dream A golden dream, and of the sudden wake, Come, and receive the treasure I have found.

(2.1.31–38)

Barabas, the unhearing object of Abigail's spoken thought, has meanwhile given up: “As good go on as sit so sadly thus” (2.1.41). Then he suddenly spies his daughter above him: “But stay! What star shines yonder in the east? / The lodestar of my life, if Abigail!”(2.1.42–3). If the title of The Winter's Tale is not a sufficient indication that this scene stuck in Shakespeare's memory—The Jew of Malta was first performed in 1589 or 1590, just before or simultaneously with Shakespeare's first plays (Hunter, 1997: 554), and Marlowe was the dominant dramatist in London from Tamburlaine in 1587 until his death by stabbing in 1593, so his then-less-prominent contemporary Shakespeare surely saw and perhaps read or even acted in his work—the way this moment of recognition of Abigail on the upper stage is recast at a key moment in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet 4 to 6 years later surely clinches it. Romeo dismisses Benvolio with a line that reworks Barabas's comments on scars and maims and then paraphrases Barabas's line as he looks up and sees a candle in the upper playing space: “He jests at scars, that never felt a wound. / [A light appears above, as at Juliet's window.] But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun” (2.2.1–3). I will return to the way the rest of this scene affected Shakespeare in the following. What follows, although no longer in the mode of simultaneous soliloquy, remains remarkable for intensity:

Barabas [He calls] Who's there? Abigail Who's that? Barabas Peace, Abigail. 'Tis I. Abigail Then, father, here receive thy happiness. Barabas Hast thou 't? Abigail Here. (Throws down bags.) Hast thou 't? There's more, and more, and more. Barabas O my girl My gold, my fortune, my felicity Strength to my soul, death to mine enemy! Welcome, the first beginner of my bliss! Oh, Abigail, Abigail, that I had thee here too! Then my desires were fully satisfied. But I will practice thy enlargement thence. Oh, girl, oh, gold, oh, beauty, oh, my bliss! (Hugs his bags)

(2.1.44–53)

Again, readers of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's play about Jews and Christians from around 1596, will notice how closely several key moments in that play are modeled on this scene from Marlowe: Jessica throwing her father Shylock's bags of ducats out of his window to her lover Lorenzo in 2.6, and, more importantly, Solanio's description of Shylock's confused grief and rage after Jessica and Lorenzo have eloped: “My daughter! O, my ducats! O, my daughter! / Fled with a Christian! O, my Christian ducats! / Justice! The law! My ducats, and my daughter!” (2.8.15–18).

The influence of Marlowe on Shakespeare, despite the connection between Barabas's memory and the title of The Winter's Tale (1610–11), one of Shakespeare's last plays, is usually held to extend up to midcareer, to Hamlet (1599–1601) and basically no further. There are good reasons for this; blustering martial characters whose verse reminds us of Marlowe's heroes, especially of Tamburlaine, basically disappear from Shakespeare at the end of the 1590s, and the seventeenth-century Shakespeare seems to have moved beyond imitating Marlowe's style. Nonetheless, the combination of brilliant stage and psychological effects in this scene—most notably the two family members hearing things in the dark, operating on different stage levels as they try to reach each other, the way their interaction, here so collaborative, will shortly after be broken so that they will be mutually destructive, and the way the dark itself is rendered emblematic of oncoming death and destruction by Barabas's initial speech—serves as a model for one of Shakespeare's more remarkable scenes in Macbeth (1606). In Act 2 scene 2, Lady Macbeth is waiting by torchlight for Macbeth to return from the upstairs chamber where he has gone to murder Duncan.

Lady Macbeth Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman Which gives the stern'st good-night. He is about it. … Macbeth [within] Who's there? What, ho! Lady Macbeth Alack, I am afraid they have awaked And 'tis not done. Th' attempt and not the deed Confounds us. Hark! I laid their daggers ready He could not miss 'em. Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done't. Enter Macbeth, [bearing bloody daggers] My husband! Macbeth I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise? Lady Macbeth I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did not you speak? Macbeth When? Lady Macbeth Now. Macbeth As I descended? Lady Macbeth Ay. Macbeth Hark! Who lies i' the second chamber? Lady Macbeth Donalbain.

(2.2.2–20)

There is clearly a further development of the uncanny in the scene from Macbeth, but it reworks elements of this scene in The Jew of Malta that we know from three other Shakespearean plays imprinted itself on Shakespeare's mind. The Marlovian scene shares the sense of family feeling struggling against aggressive violence that we get in Lady Macbeth's comment about Duncan's resemblance to her father: “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done 't”(2.2.12–13). It is, incidentally, interesting that all the Shakespearean scenes with apparent echoes of Marlowe from Merchant, Romeo, and Macbeth occur early in second acts, as does the source-scene in The Jew of Malta.

Barabas's reception of his bags, his recovery of his happiness, is both exultant and sinister—he identifies them as “Strength to my soul, death to mine enemy” (2.2.48), and Abigail sometimes seems central to his felicity, sometimes a secondary adjunct to his vengeance. Of course, from the very earliest literature, personal happiness has been seen in part as the unhappiness it brings to one's enemies. Odysseus, stormbeaten, naked, and salty, clad only with a branch he holds before his private parts, praises marriage to the picnicking princess Nausicaa in book six of The Odyssey, as

The blessing of a harmonious life. For nothing is greater or finer than this, When a man and woman live together With one heart and mind, bringing joy To their friends and grief to their foes.

(Homer 2000, 6:185–89)

But here Barabas's exclamatory rhapsody is chillingly consistent with the way Abigail was invoked at the end of his soliloquy in 1.1., where he expressed his willingness to remain under Christian control in Malta in terms of his relatively slender connections to the state:

Give us a peaceful rule; make Christians kings, That thirst so much for principality. I have no charge, nor many children, But one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear As Agamemnon did his Iphigen; And all I have is hers.

(1.1.133–8)

Agamemnon, of course, sacrificed Iphigenia for fair winds to blow the becalmed Greek host to Troy. Winds are both of real and metaphoric concern in the play: after celebrating “Infinite riches in a little room” Barabas asks “But now, how stands the wind?”(1.1.36–7). And the Turkish pasha Callapine, asked what brings him to Malta, replies with the frankness that characterizes Turks much more than Christians or Jews in this play: “The wind that bloweth all the world besides: / Desire of gold”(3.5.3–4).

Barabas will use this desire repeatedly to betray his opponents, but he also uses their other desires, including the desire of Ferneze's son Lodowick for Abigail. Abigail, like many beautiful Jewish daughters in medieval and Renaissance stories about Jews, has fallen in love with a Christian, Mathias. As James Shapiro points out, Jewish women in Renaissance drama and fiction “are always depicted as young and desirable,” unlike Jewish men, and their plot role is frequently that of alliance with male Christians (Shapiro, 1996: 132). When Mathias tells Lodowick about how struck he is with Abigail's beauty, Lodowick begins to pursue her (nothing so quickly arouses desire for another person than seeing a rival desiring her or him), and Barabas promptly exploits this mimetic rivalry, urging Abigail to pretend love for Lodowick and thus tricking the two young men into killing each other in a duel. But when Abigail learns that her father has sacrificed her beloved in his vengeance against Christians, she converts in earnest with a soliloquy of her own:

Hard-hearted father, unkind Barabas, Was this the pursuit of thy policy, To make me show them favor severally, That by my favor they should both be slain? Admit thou loved'st not Lodowick for his sire, Yet Don Mathias ne'er offended thee. But thou wert set upon extreme revenge.

(3.3.39–47)

How extreme emerges when Barabas reacts to the news that Abigail has now entered the convent as a genuine convert. He enters “reading a letter” (3.4.0 s.d.):

What, Abigail become a nun again? False and unkind! What, hast thou lost thy father, And, all unknown and unconstrained of me, Art thou again got to the nunnery?

(3.4.1–4)

Abigail and Barabas call each other “unkind,” and both mean more than the modern sense of “hurtful” or “cruel” by the word: they also mean “unnatural, false to one's own kind.” But for Abigail, her “kind” does not oblige her to shun Christians—rather Barabas's family link to her should make him welcome her lover, whatever his religion or race. For Barabas, Abigail, by repudiating her father's faith and cutting herself off from all communication with him, has turned her back on her own “kind,” her faith, and family. This leads him to yet more “extreme revenge”

Now here she writes, and wills me to repent. Repentance? Spurca! What pretendeth this? I fear she knows—'tis so!—of my device In Don Mathias' and Lodovico's deaths. If so, 'tis time that it be seen into, For she that varies from me in belief Gives great presumption that she loves me not, Or, loving, doth dislike of something done.

(3.4.5–12)

Barabas “sees into” the matter by poisoning the whole convent of nuns, including his daughter. In part, this serves a gangster's logic of wiping out all who might be able to testify about one's past crimes. This logic will in fact govern a great deal of the action in the rest of the play, as Barabas energetically but unsuccessfully tries to contain the spread of information by murdering the friar to whom the dying Abigail confessed, the servant who helped him murder the friar, and the pimp and prostitute who seduced the servant, got him to talk, and attempted to blackmail Barabas—a containment strategy that seems to be working until the dying courtesan reveals Barabas's guilt to the Christian governor Ferneze. But Barabas's destruction of Abigail also underlines the point this section's exploration of his interiority as revealed in his soliloquies has made clear: Barabas's strong selfhood includes a repudiation of any ties that might impede his freedom of action. “Ego mihimet sum semper proximus” (1.1.188), “my own affairs are my chief concern,” seems a relatively innocuous although not conspicuously moral principle when Barabas first enunciates it, but it becomes considerably more disturbing as it exfoliates.

One of our fears about the interiorities of others is that they will be filled with desires that make them dangerous to us: desires to dominate us, hurt us, or take what is ours. In Barabas, we get a tour of such an interior space that, in making it credible, also makes it temporarily attractive. The soliloquies of many villains—including Shakespearean villains like Richard III, Claudius, and Iago—serve a similar dramatic purpose: so, as we shall see later, do those of revengers about whom it is harder to form a terminal moral judgment, like Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy or Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi. As a tool for the exploration of inwardness, it is clear, the soliloquy does not always aim at the illustration of a mysterious or unconscious set of motives. Barabas's motives are very present to him and are cogently expressed. At the same time, his soliloquies, as this analysis of them has shown, offer a complex insight into the psyche of an able, ambitious, successful, but categorically reviled and excluded other.

1.3 The Inward Self in Aside: The Changeling

What kinds of inner thought do you most routinely conceal or dissimulate? Whatever your response—and who are we to tell you about your own interiority?—it seems not unlikely that sexual impulses, fantasies, or memories feature on your list in a fairly prominent position. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling uses “asides”—moments when characters break the flow of conversation in order to express a private commentary on it, audible to the audience but not to the other person in the conversation—in order to expose the decorum of conversation for what it often is, a mask for unavowable intentions, in this play usually sexual or aggressive ones. The play's double plot, half of it concerned with a madhouse where the insane act and speak out their inner lives without decorum, the other half with the breakdown of decorum in the household of an honorable Spanish governor whose fifteen-year-old daughter is about to be married, preoccupies itself with boundary-crossing and the intensities it exposes. The most important and memorable characters, the daughter Beatrice-Joanna, and the governor's ugly servant, De Flores, are both people of strong sexual impulses and few moral scruples who model a kind of extremity that may lie just below the surface of apparently quite civilized people. Thus the play offers a demystifying realism about human motives that is also a scary reflection on the fragility of the social conventions that usually mask them. As William Empson comments, linking the madhouse plot to the main plot by way of the title, “the idea of the changeling…makes you feel that the shock of seeing into a mad mind is dangerous; it may snatch you to itself. This shock is in all the discoveries of the play” (Empson, 1974: 50). Asides open minds so that we can see into them.

Most asides are brief. A typical example from The Jew of Malta—typical also in that it reveals an essential aspect of the speaker's inner being—is just two words. Barabas is responding to the concern of his fellow Jews at their summons to the senate house:

Why, then, let every man Provide him, and be there for fashion sake. If anything shall there concern our state, Assure yourselves I'll look (aside) unto myself.

(1.1.169–172)

In The Changeling, by contrast, asides tend to be quite long. This section will first illustrate the way the technique introduces us to a discrepancy between inner thought and public expression, then move on to a close description of a scene in which that discrepancy disappears, with shattering results.

De Flores has just overheard Beatrice, engaged to Alonzo de Piracquo, setting up a meeting with Alsemero, the man she has abruptly fallen in love with. De Flores begins the play sexually obsessed by Beatrice, and she in turn hates him and wishes to avoid his presence without knowing exactly why. Beatrice has just realized that, in refusing to allow Alsemero to attempt to kill Alonzo in a duel, she might call on De Flores for help with this. De Flores, in turn, sees Beatrice's movement toward betrayal of Alonzo as an opportunity for himself. He is reflecting on this in an extended aside as Beatrice, in another extended aside, considers her strategy for dealing with him. De Flores has a disfiguring rash on his face that comes up in their exchange:

Beatrice [aside] Why, put case I loathed him As much as youth and beauty hates a sepulchre, Must I needs show it? Cannot I keep that secret, And serve my turn upon him? --See, he's here. [To him] De Flores! De Flores [aside] Ha, I shall run mad with joy! She called me fairly by my name, De Flores, And neither “rogue” nor “rascal.” Beatrice What ha' you done To your face alate? You've met with some good physician. You've pruned yourself, methinks; you were not wont To look so amorously. De Flores [aside] Not I; 'Tis the same physnomy, to a hair and pimple, Which she called scurvy scarce an hour ago. How is this? Beatrice Come hither. Nearer, man. De Flores [aside] I'm up to the chin in heaven.

(2.2.66–79)

De Flores, unlike many, entertains no illusions about his own appearance. At the same time, as we know from previous asides, he does not let his ugliness deter him from hoping for sexual satisfaction with Beatrice: “I'll despair the less / Because there's daily precedents of bad faces / Beloved beyond all reason”(2.1.83–85). As he comments in soliloquy at the end of the scene,

Hunger and pleasure, they'll commend sometimes Slovenly dishes, and feed heartily on 'em – Nay, which is stranger, refuse daintier for 'em. Some women are odd feeders.

(2.2.154–57)

Yeats's comment on the mates Helen and Aphrodite chose (and, implicitly, on the men Maud Gonne preferred to Yeats) comes to mind: “It's certain that fine women eat / A crazy salad with their meat” (Yeats, 1921: ll. 30–31).

So far there's a kind of comedy in these asides; they often evoke nervous laughter in performance. But because of these asides, readers and audiences know that Beatrice plays with fire when she tries to flirt with De Flores to get him to do her will. Because of the differences in class and appearance and age between them, she does not recognize in him the sexual attraction to her that she is delighted to arouse in Alsemero. His speeches, rich in sexual double meanings, convey only eagerness for money to her, as her asides (themselves unintentionally sexy) make clear when she delivers her charge to De Flores. De Flores is kneeling before her. Note that De Flores consistently addresses Beatrice as “you,” the singular second person pronoun used with social superiors; Beatrice “thous” De Flores. This Renaissance English pronoun, lost in Modern English, is equivalent to “tu” in modern French and “du” in modern German; it has a full range of pronoun forms: “thou” as grammatical subject, “thee” as direct or indirect object, “thy” or “thine” as possessive, and its own set of verb forms as well: “thou art” or “thou hast,” for instance, are the “thou” forms of “you are” and “you have” in Renaissance English. The “thou” form is used to address social inferiors, children, and intimates.

De Flores If you knew How sweet it were to me to be employed In any act of yours, you would say then I failed and used not reverence enough When I receive the charge on't. Beatrice [aside] This is much, methinks; Belike his wants are greedy, and to such Gold tastes like angels' food. [To him] Rise. De Flores I'll have the work first. Beatrice [aside] Possible his need Is strong upon him. [She gives him money.] There's to encourage thee: As thou art forward and thy service dangerous, Thy reward shall be precious. De Flores That I have thought on. I have assured myself of that beforehand, And know it will be precious; the thought ravishes. Beatrice Then take him to thy fury. De Flores I thirst for him. Beatrice Alonzo de Piracquo. De Flores His end's upon him. He shall be seen no more. Beatrice How lovely now dost thou appear to me!

(2.2.122–138)

When De Flores returns with Piracquo's severed finger as a token of his completion of the task, Beatrice, delighted at the disappearance of Piracquo but disgusted by the finger, tries to get rid of De Flores as quickly as she can: “Look you, sir, here's three thousand golden florins; / I have not meanly thought upon thy merit” (3.4.60–61). But the result is not what she expects:

De Flores What, salary? Now you move me. Beatrice How, De Flores? … De Flores I could ha' hired A journeyman in murder at this rate, And mine own conscience might have slept at ease, And have had the work brought home.

(3.4.62–71)

This is, of course, what Beatrice believes that she has done, but the work is being brought home to her in another sense. Beatrice's asides now make clear her confusion, naivety, and unwillingness to recognize the desire De Flores has been rather clear about all along:

Beatrice [aside] I'm in a labyrinth. What will content him? I would fain be rid of him. [To him] I'll double the sum, sir. De Flores You take a course To double my vexation, that's the good you do. Beatrice [aside] Bless me! I am now in worse plight than I was; I know not what will please him. [To him] For my fear's sake, I prithee make away with all speed possible. And if thou be'st so modest not to name The sum that will content thee, paper blushes not; Send thy demand in writing, it shall follow thee. But prithee take thy flight.

(3.4.71–80)

Along with her suggestion that De Flores is inhibited by modesty, Beatrice's “bless me!” is, in the circumstances, remarkable. In Macbeth, a play that, along with Othello, has a clear influence on The Changeling, “amen” sticks in Macbeth's throat when he hears Malcolm or Donalbain say “God bless us” as he descends from the bedchamber carrying the bloody knives with which he murdered their father Duncan, his guest and king (2.2.30–33). Beatrice, however, has no difficulty asking for blessing in the presence of the severed finger holding the ring she first gave to her guest and fiancé Piracquo. She really believes that the deed belongs to De Flores, her “journeyman in murder,” but he soon disabuses her of the idea: “Why, are not you as guilty, in (I'm sure) / As deep as I? And we should stick together”(3.4.83–84). “Stick together” is a wonderful expression, as it encompasses the shared blood guilt in which they are “deep” and the sexual intimacy De Flores intends and the mutual dependence in evading detection that gives him his primary hold on Beatrice, all in one down-to-earth phrase. As he attempts to kiss her, she urges him to remember his place, as, if he seems overly familiar with her, it will be a suspicious sign:

Beatrice: Take heed, De Flores, of forgetfulness 'Twill soon betray us. De Flores Take you heed first. Faith, you're grown much forgetful; you're to blame in't. Beatrice [aside] He's bold, and I am blamed for't!

(3.4.94–97)

The asides are much briefer now, as De Flores grows more direct, and the masks that have been (barely) covering their intentions from each other are being pulled off. De Flores is still using double meanings, but even Beatrice can now only with enormous effort misunderstand them:

De Flores I have eased you Of your trouble; think on't. I'm in pain, And must be eased of you; 'tis a charity. Justice invites your blood to understand me.

(3.4.97–100)

The peculiar combination of moral force and transgressive sexual invitation is brought out by line 100. “Your blood” is both “your sexual being” and “the blood you are soaked in by our crime.” Beatrice has been unjust, not only to Alonzo, whom she has murdered, but also to De Flores, whom she has tried to turn into a tool for the satisfaction of her desires. It is only just, he suggests, that she use him sexually as well as criminally, given that he has desires too. Beatrice, now at last understanding, needs to feel that understanding is impossible:

De Flores Justice invites your blood to understand me. Beatrice I dare not. De Flores Quickly! Beatrice Oh, I never shall! Speak it yet further off, that I may lose What has been spoken and no sound remain on't. I would not hear so much offense again For such another deed.

(3.4.101–105)

Now De Flores can enjoy an open presentation of his own intentions and feelings, the sort of expression that before has only occurred in asides. This is partly because Beatrice still has not understood the “justice” of his position, but it is also because she has now begun to take his feelings and intentions seriously, although she manifests this by being appalled by them.

De Flores Soft, lady, soft. The last is not yet paid for. Oh, this act Has put me into spirit! I was as greedy on't As the parched earth for moisture when the clouds weep. Did you not mark? I wrought myself into't, Nay, sued and kneeled for't. Why was all that pains took?

(3.4.105–110)

Not for money, De Flores says, although he of course needs money and intends to have it, but for a sexual reward:

For I place wealth after the heels of pleasure, And, were I not resolved in my belief That thy virginity were perfect in thee, I should but take my recompense with grudging, As if I had but half my hopes I agreed for.

(3.4.115–119)