I thank Leo Braudy, Helen Deutsch, Carolyn Dewald, Jeffrey Dolven, and Kevis Goodman, whoread this paper in various stages and offered incisive comments on sympathy. They have, in fact, bothexemplified and clarified the reciprocal nature of “attention” in acts of reading. I dedicate this essayto the memory of Jerry D. James, who gave me my first lessons in the sympathetic imagination as wellas in Shakespeare.

1 Unless otherwise specified, all quotations of Shakespeare’s plays follow The Norton Shakespeare,Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997).

Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response

HEATHER JAMES

MIRANDA O, I have sufferèdWith those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel,Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,Dashed all to pieces! O, the cry did knockAgainst my very heart! . . .

PROSPERO Be collected.No more amazement. Tell your piteous heartThere’s no harm done. . . .The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touchedThe very virtue of compassion in thee,I have with such provision in mine artSo safely ordered that there is no soul—No, not so much perdition as an hairBetid to any creature in the vessel,Which thou heard’st cry, which thou saw’st sink. . . .

(1.2.5–9, 13–15, 26–32)1

AFTER OPENING WITH A VIOLENT STORM AND SHIPWRECK and after engagingthe audience in what the ship’s mariners and lords take to be their final prayers,

The Tempest at last introduces Prospero as he assures his anxious daughter that noharm came to the vessel’s “noble creature[s].” When Miranda exclaims, “O, I havesufferèd / With those that I saw suffer!” she draws a strong analogy between the expe-riences of the tempest-tossed men and her own as a helpless spectator. BecauseMiranda plays a double supporting role as her father’s ally and foil, it is tempting toregard her emotional tumult as merely picturesque rather than unruly.Viewed throughthe lens of Victorian sentimentality, her “piteous heart” offers proof of her moral virtuebased on her capacity for humane, or womanly, compassion. Stripped of anachronism,

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 360

DIDO’S EAR 361

however, her sympathetic passions turn out to be surprisingly volatile: they press her,in fact, to ally herself with the shipwrecked men instead of her father, who has, as shesuspects, conjured the storm. Although Miranda has no critical reputation for rebel-liousness, she first enters the stage to insist on her emotions forcibly, not to displaythem decorously; she sees in her own emotions the grounds for dissent, howeverpainful, from her father’s will. For The Tempest’s audiences, the play substitutes onesource of anxiety for another: it is comforting to discover that the storm came by designand lacked fangs; yet it is disconcerting to learn that the sympathetic passions arestrong enough to tug at the most rooted of allegiances, such as Miranda’s to her father.

Miranda’s outcry has intrigued scholars of the moral sentiments far more thanscholars of Renaissance drama. It has drawn the attention of Romanticists, struckby Wordsworth’s characterization of the Wanderer as one who “could afford tosuffer / With those whom he saw suffer.”2 More directly on point, her pitying excla-mation and Prospero’s revelation of the storm’s theatrical nature serve as the firstepigraph to David Marshall’s study of sympathy and theatricality in eighteenth-century narrative.3 It is worth taking up Marshall’s hint about the role of the the-ater in Miranda’s transformative experience. To what extent do such episodes in theperiod’s drama suggest a prehistory for the problem of sympathy familiar in eigh-teenth-century moral philosophy? In his study of antitheatricality Jonas Barishdemonstrates that sympathy figured as a problem—made so by the artifice andmediation that rouse compassion—before Adam Smith formally identified it asone.4 His study of the attacks Renaissance antitheatricalists mounted on the theaterhas paved the way for broad critical recognition of the extent to which early modernLondoners, including playwrights, experienced anxiety about theatrical contagion.

2 William Wordsworth, “The Excursion” in The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. ThomasHutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Oxford UP, 1965), 595 (1.370–71). This referenceto Wordsworth is perhaps the least I owe to Kevis Goodman, whose work has taught me a great dealabout the dynamics of sympathy from Milton to Wordsworth and beyond; see her article “ ‘Wastedlabor’? Milton’s Eve, the Poet’s Work, and the Challenge of Sympathy,” ELH 64 (1997): 415–46; andher unpublished dissertation, Passionate Work: Toward a Georgics of the Feelings (Yale University, 1994).I take Wordsworth’s line to mean that one can afford the luxury of sympathetic identification if oneis not already suffering through grief or hard labor.

3 David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988). In the texts Marshall treats, debates on the moral-ity of plays “turn upon questions of identification, distance, and the ability of both actors and audi-ence to perform acts of sympathy—just as discussions of sympathy turn on the theatrical relationsthat make the possibility of ‘fellow-feeling’ a problem of representation and aesthetic experienceas well as a problem of moral philosophy” (2).

4 Jonas Barish’s The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1981) isthe classic study of antitheatricality from antiquity to Rousseau. See also Laura Levine’s Men inwomen’s clothing: Anti-theatricality and effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994),which suggestively traces antitheatrical sentiment in playwrights themselves.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 361

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY362

Shakespearean tragedy, the focus of this essay, hints at an ironic “fellow-feeling” withthe theater’s self-appointed enemies, who worried about the susceptibility of audi-ences to socially disruptive passions.5

Before turning to the dangerous fascinations of Shakespearean scenes of sympa-thy, I would like to recount an extraordinary testimony to theatrical power recordedby Stephen Gosson, the playwright-turned-antitheatricalist. In a memorable pas-sage of Playes Confuted in fiue Actions, Gosson recalls how theatrical representationonce transformed and magnified Bacchus’s wooing of Ariadne. In Gosson’s accountthe seduction enacted onstage magnetically drew the audience into a strange sceneof erotic and social contracting:

When Bacchus beheld her, expressing in his daunce the passions of loue, heplaced him selfe somewhat neere to her, and embraced her, she with an amorouskind of feare and strangenes, as though shee woulde thruste him away with thelitle finger, and pull him againe with both her handes, somewhat timorously, anddoubtfully entertained him.

At this the beholders [b]eganne to shoute, when Bacchus rose up, tenderlylifting Ariadne from her seate, no small store of curtesie passing betwene them, thebeholders rose up, euery man stoode on tippe toe, and seemed to houer ouer the[payre], when they sware, the company sware, when they departed to bedde; thecompany presently was set on fire, they that were married posted home to theirewiues; they that were single, vowed very solemly, to be wedded.6

The scene of passionate emotions kindled in the audience by theatrical spectacle isall too familiar in an antitheatrical tract. Yet certain features of Gosson’s account areunexpected: once Ariadne and Bacchus depart to bed, the husbands in the audiencedutifully post home to their wives—instead of the stews—while the single menlinger to vow “very solemly” to wed. No rote parable about the rousing of indis-criminate lusts, Gosson’s report testifies to theater’s power to inspire commitmentin its audiences. Behind the passage’s incantatory power is theater’s ability to bringabout reversals of character and to forge or renew social contracts.

What most alarms Gosson is the contagious solicitation of consent that movesfrom actors to audience and out to the social world. The ripples of consent beginwhen Bacchus beholds Ariadne and end when the playgoers first identify with thevows of the staged lovers and then leave the playhouse with newfound resolve.Bacchus transforms himself into a spectacle for Ariadne’s pleasure. After he hasexpressed his passion in dance and drawn near without rebuff, he steps from his

5 For contemporary uses of the terms fellow-feel and fellow-feeling, see the Oxford English Dictionary,2d ed., comp. J. A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

6 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in fiue Actions (London, 1582), sigs. G4v–G5r. Gosson choosesthe scene, which appears in the fifth action, to illustrate “what force there is in the gestures of play-ers” and cites Xenophon as his authority (sig. G4v).

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 362

DIDO’S EAR 363

purely visual field to embrace her. Acting out problems of female agency incourtship, Ariadne in turn exhibits desire mingled with the “feare and strangenes” offeminine daunger.7 As Gosson describes her gestures, she appears ready to thrustBacchus away with her little finger but pull at him with both hands. Such acts ofimaginative translation constitute the first steps leading spectators—the lovers ofthe story and playgoers alike—to spontaneous acts of consent. Although fascinatedby the scene he recounts, Gosson at last recoils from the theater’s magnetic draw andseparates himself from the theatrical company intoning its vows alongside the actors.

Gosson’s theater dangerously excels in the trade of poetry as Sidney defined it inhis Defense of Poesie. Readers of poetry, according to Sidney, move from knowledge topractice by choosing to imitate an exemplar’s actions;8 the theater, however, with itspassionate speeches and dire spectacles, inspires sympathy to the point of interfer-ing with the playgoers’ deliberative exercise of will. The idea that the theater pro-vokes a troubling collusion of sympathy and consent similarly fascinatesShakespeare. Both sympathy (sym-pathos) and consent (con-sensus) denote simultaneityor mingling of feeling: both join feeling to something else, although the disciplinesto which they belong differ. Consent belongs to the lexicon of social contracts, sympa-thy to that of aesthetics and moral philosophy.9 In Shakespeare’s plays, however, theaesthetic and ethical sometimes cross into the domain of politics in ways suggestingtheatricality’s danger to authority and social order. Particularly unnerving is theater’s

7 In an illuminating discussion of the word daunger, which originally relates to “lordship or domin-ion,” C. S. Lewis notes that the word’s meanings have been shaped by gender roles; see his TheAllegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 364–66, esp. 364.Lewis distinguishes its masculine associations with power from its feminine associations with shameor pudor. In Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY,and London: Cornell UP, 1994), however, Frances Dolan views female daunger as a version of theovertly and generally political sense associated with men. Dolan is concerned with the reciprocalshaping of family and state, a relationship that makes greater threats of women who are “ ‘difficult todeal with,’ ‘hard to please,’ and ‘reluctant to comply’ ” (5).

8 Sidney associates poetry with architectonics, which “stands, as I thinke, in the knowledge of amans selfe, in the Ethike and Politique consideration, with the end of well doing, and not of wellknowing onely” (The Defence of Poesie in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat,4 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1922–26], 3:1–46, esp. 11). The poet surpasses the philosopher,for Sidney, in his persuasive powers (normally associated with the orator) to move readers first toknowledge and then from knowledge to practice.“For who will be taught, if hee be not mooved withdesire to be taught?” (19), Sidney asks. A poetic exemplar such as Xenophon’s Cyrus, moreover, whogenerates sympathetic identification, works so “substancially” that it can “bestow a Cyrus upon theworld to make many Cyrusses, if they [the readers] will learne aright, why and how that maker madehim” (8). Sidney insists on the poet’s exclusive agency, which operates through readers who haveturned from the page to the social world. The scene described by Gosson differs in acknowledgingthe power of theater to detach agency from the author and situate it in the intersection of the dra-matic action and audience.

9 The distinction, as I am suggesting, was not always so clear; see Victoria Kahn,“ ‘The Duty to Love’:Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” Representations 68 (Fall 1999): 84–107.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 363

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY364

ability to incline the heart to pity, a feeling separated from intent and action by ahair’s breadth. In plays from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest, Shakespeare exploresantitheatrical anxiety about the destabilizing influence of tragic performance onaudiences: Shakespearean tragedy has the power to communicate sympathetic pas-sions but does not necessarily lead, as Aristotle claims, to a purging of dangerousemotions. Rather, tragedy’s methods for governing the emotions it generates seemconspicuously weak in Shakespeare’s plays; they cannot be relied on, as Aristoteliancatharsis can, to short-circuit praxis. When Shakespeare explores this problem, heturns to a resonant classical figure: not Bacchus and Ariadne but Vergil’s Dido.10

“ ‘WIDOW DIDO’ SAID YOU? YOU MAKE ME STUDY OF THAT”(2.1.80–81)11

Shakespeare is mysteriously attracted to Vergil’s Dido, who sporadically appearsin his plays, often with little apparent relation to plot. Should we, like The Tempest’sAdrian, feel called upon to study her enigmatic presence in Shakespearean drama, wewill find the image of Dido mingled with reflections on audiences who have growndangerously rapt in sympathy over tragic spectacle and story. The scene Shakespearemost commonly evokes is that of Dido listening intently to Aeneas’s tale of Troy’s falland his own suffering. Plays from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest produce a kind of“Vergil Reduced,” chiefly featuring elements from Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid. Whilea deceptive actor (Sinon) and theatrical machine (the Trojan horse) are options, theconstants are a heroic, seductive narrator (Aeneas) and an absorbed audience (Dido)who are drawn together through the tragic narration of regicide (Priam’s death at the

10 The spelling of Vergil's name involves more than prejudices earned by the accidents of one'straining. The choice of "Virgil," the strong favorite in the English-speaking world, comes to us froma long tradition of ideological adaptation. The clearest modern interest served is the poet'sidentification with the literary tradition begun with Dante and canonized by T. S. Eliot, and withthe nationalist tradition of the translatio imperii. The process of converting Vergil into an icon ofimperial authority was facilitated by introducing symmetry to his name: an i for an i hinted atAugustan decorum. In addition, the change strategically linked the poet to the Latin word for a mag-ical wand, virga, used by the god Mercury to convey people from waking to sleep and from life todeath. This connotation mattered particularly in the Middle Ages, when Virgil the necromancer wasas likely to be associated with a virga as with a stylus. The changed spelling brought two furthersources of power to Vergil and all who invoked his name: etymological associations with the Latinwords for a man, vir (as suits the vigor of epic poetry), and for a virgin (in keeping with the purityof the poet's Augustan program and, after his Christianization by medieval commentators, with hismysticism). Quite obviously, modern scholars do not necessarily mean to tap into all, or any, of thisideological content. Yet if a modern critic finds the talismanic charge of the name "Virgil" too muchto conjure with, she can choose, fortunately, to spell his name as he himself did.

11 For an important discussion of the relevance of Dido’s histories to The Tempest, see StephenOrgel’s edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 39–43. I consider the play’s Vergilian allusions inthe contexts of imperialism and constitutionalism in the last chapter of my Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama,Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 364

DIDO’S EAR 365

hands of Pyrrhus).12 Looming on the horizon are two catastrophes, one within thestory and the other within the scene of sympathetic audition: the fall of Troy and theconsummation of Dido and Aeneas’s passion for each other.13

The lovers’ sexual consummation, which fulfills the mutual longing that grewirresistibly during Aeneas’s narration of his past suffering, is also the means bywhich civic destruction passes from Troy to Carthage and ultimately to Rome. Didoand Aeneas’s lovemaking represents, Vergil tells us, “the first day of death, that firstcause of woe.”14 As Vergil presents his story, though, the passions acted out in thecave have less to do with origins than revivals: the lovers’ passions are awakened bya past trauma, the fall of Troy, and the pair’s surrender to their feelings communi-cates that trauma to the future. Aeneas’s tale effectively initiates a translatio calami-tatis, extending first to Dido and Carthage and then potentially to Rome.15 Offeringa cautionary paradigm for audiences, Dido’s avid listening is the means by whichcatastrophe shifts from tale to hearer: she hangs on Aeneas’s tale just as the Trojans,heedless of danger, clung to Sinon’s. Consequently, Dido becomes a synecdoche forone of the most vulnerable orifices of Shakespearean bodies: the ear. As a figure forresponsiveness to tragedy, hers is the queen of sympathetic ears.16

A woman rapidly transformed from regal queen to impassioned lover, Dido hasan entrancing and disconcerting effect in Shakespearean drama. Before Aeneas’s tale,saturated as it is with his pain and emotional need, stirs her desires, Dido exemplifiesprincipled compassion: “Not ignorant of ill do I learn to befriend the unhappy.”17

This famous line testifies to her regal generosity and ability to transform past trau-ma into a force for social good. The sympathetic passions, however, are hard to

12 The Rape of Lucrece presents a sustained scene of reading artwork when Lucrece becomesengrossed in a detailed painting of the Fall of Troy which depicts events from Sinon’s deception toHecuba’s grief. Lucrece oddly focuses her response on Sinon as a double for Tarquin, suggesting hehas deceived rather than seized her.

13 Priam’s death on Troy’s altar appears in both Vergil and Shakespeare as prolepsis of and synec-doche for Troy’s fall. As soon as he is stabbed, Priam becomes monumentalized as a headless figureon the sands, standing for the collapse of the East; see Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols.(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1978–86), 1:331 (2.544–57).

14 Vergil, 1:407 (4.169–70).15 Vergil’s poem memorably juxtaposes the scene of Dido’s collapse into passion and her repeated

requests to hear Aeneas’s tale again with the interruption of all efforts to build the walls of Carthage(1:401 [4.74–89]).

16 For a provocative discussion of the way in which early modern commentators on the theatergendered compassionate audition as female, see Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women:Representing gender and race on the Renaissance stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 139–65.See also Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London and New York:Routledge, 1994), 73–92.

17 The Latin is “non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco” (Vergil, 1:284–85 [1.630]). It is importantthat Dido allows pain a continued but redemptive place in her memory, since the willingness to ren-der oneself vulnerable to past sufferings turns out, in the Aeneid, to be intimately tied to the exercise

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 365

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY366

master. Unpredictable powers, they might at any moment subject the individual totheir full rigors and call for action that undermines rather than strengthens socialorder. In this context, pity, as the mainstay of tragedy, becomes dangerous. An audi-ence of blocks, stones, and worse than senseless things ( Julius Caesar, 1.1.34) may notbe the least of a playwright’s fears, but it is far from Shakespeare’s most nightmarishvision of audience response. More disturbing is the listener who hangs on everyword of a tragic story, willfully conceiving a passion that cannot be lessened orlessoned, bristling with the imminence of action. At the extremes of Shakespeare’simagination is an audience subjected to the revolutionary content of tragedy bymeans of sympathetic identification.

“DIDO’S SAD-ATTENDING EAR”: POLITICAL ATTENTION IN TITUS ANDRONICUS

That Shakespeare’s Dido figures in the romantic comedies, which deal witherotic and domestic upheaval, is no surprise. Comic heroines such as Hermia andJessica are in the habit of citing her example in order to meditate briefly on theresistance each feels she ought to exert against her coaxing lover. Yet Shakespeare’sDido, irreducible to a pliant woman who gives too-credent ear to her lover’s sweettalk, comes more frequently from Vergil’s Aeneid than Ovid’s Heroides. In AMidsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice she presides over the shadowyspaces where comedy explores themes of erotic betrayal and feminine vulnerabili-ty. Less predictably, she appears also in tragedies of state, where it is the bodypolitic that is vulnerable to betrayal. At the end of Titus Andronicus, for example, anallusion to Dido’s longing unexpectedly surfaces in the context of political tumult.

With the corpses of Titus, Lavinia, Tamora, and Saturninus strewn across thestage, Titus’s son Lucius acts quickly to complete the military coup of Rome he hasbeen preparing with the aid of the Goths. Luckily for Lucius, the gruesome specta-cle of bodies moves the stony noblemen of Rome to seek meaning in the bloodshed.Drawing on Rome’s own foundational myth, one of the lords appeals to Marcus:

Speak, Rome’s dear friend, as erst our ancestorWhen with his solemn tongue he did discourseTo lovesick Dido’s sad-attending earThe story of that baleful-burning nightWhen subtle Greeks surprised King Priam’s Troy.Tell us what Sinon hath bewitched our ears,

of clemency. Forgetting traumas or even remembering them without the discipline characteristic ofDido’s compassion may lead to acts of error and violence. The epic ends problematically at themoment Aeneas, enraged by the memory of Pallas, kills Turnus in an act of revenge at best overlaidby the rhetoric of just sacrifice.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 366

DIDO’S EAR 367

Or who hath brought the fatal engine inThat gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound.

(5.3.79–86)18

The ends to which the lord evokes Troy’s fall are not far to seek, for the storyidentifies Rome’s precarious status as a civilization on the cusp of failure or revival:she will fall as a second Troy or rise from her ashes.

Of the mythical figures to which the lord refers, “lovesick Dido” with her “sad-attending ear” is the most evocative.19 Her role as listener to Aeneas’s tale is key,since even the most important of stories is potent only if listeners grant it closeattention. When Marcus asserts that he has no power to “move ye to attend me . . .And force you to commiseration” (ll. 91–92), he suggests that if his tragic speech isto gain performative power, his audience must choose to respond sympathetically tohis oratory, heightened as it is by the dire spectacle of corpses on the scene. Invokingthe example of Aeneas’s influence over Dido, Marcus and the other Romans imitatea paradigm of tragic performance and apt listening in order to rouse themselves. Byentering into what is an essentially theatrical relation of audience to performer, theRomans also model their emerging political contract. Welcoming the coup, thelords give what Lucius would otherwise take: they consent to have commiserationforced out of them.

Aeneas’s tale to Dido is, to put it mildly, an unlikely classical precedent to sub-stitute for a rebel cry. The expected Roman myth is the story of Junius Brutus, whofound the rape and suicide of Lucrece apt to mobilize the Senate, which thenexpelled the Tarquins. Direct invocations of Junius Brutus and Lucrece earlier inthe play (4.1.89–93) prepare audiences to recall that text as a structural allusion atthe play’s end. What does it mean that Aeneas’s tale to Dido might serve as an ana-logue to the myth of republican Rome? Insurrection or consent to it startlinglyappears to be the ideal response to Aeneas’s tale as well as to Lucrece’s. Taken seri-ously, Titus Andronicus’s odd allusion tends to revolutionize what we think “lovesickDido” hears with her “sad-attending ear.”20

The latent eroticism in Dido’s compassionate audition is evidently powerfulenough to fuel an uprising; yet it remains disturbing and somewhat resistant to

18 Quotations from Titus Andronicus follow Jonathan Bate’s Arden3 edition (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1995).

19 The lord’s Sinon and “subtle Greeks” are Aaron the Moor and the Goths who rose to the high-est ranks of Roman society, Tamora and her sons.

20 For the history of humanist fascination with Lucretia, see Stephanie H Jed, Chaste Thinking: TheRape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989). For aresponse to Jed’s argument, see Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (Madison: U of WisconsinP, 1993), 297–312.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 367

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY368

patriarchal adaptation. The conjunction of erotic and political potency in her figure,so manifestly dangerous, can be idealized on extremely limited conditions: her atten-tive counterparts must be Roman senators. Her impassioned response to tragic nar-ration can be redeemed only when her story is transposed onto the master plot ofJunius Brutus’s just rebellion. Although called on to fulfill a narrative of socialrenewal, Dido’s very gender unsettles it. As Catherine Belsey and Frances Dolandemonstrate, Elizabethans responded differently to the “subject of tragedy” when awoman, not a man, felt moved by adversity to rebel.21 In The Tempest and Othello,which expand the vocabulary of erotic and piteous attention in their portrayals ofMiranda and Desdemona, the art of sympathetic listening generates undeniableambivalence in the plays’ authoritative male characters. Serious attention from thepitying heart may lead modest daughters to the threshold of rebellion. Even moresurprisingly, as Prospero and Othello learn in the course of their narratives, pity dis-turbs social hierarchy by shifting authority from the narrator to the listener.

“OPE THINE EAR”: MIRANDA’S PITY

Prospero must interrupt his own plot to quell one rebellion after another. In onecase only does he actively encourage rebellion: for his plot to succeed, Miranda mustresist his sovereign authority just enough to cement her developing bond withFerdinand. Her capacity for disobedience, then, may seem entirely under herfather’s control. Yet Miranda considers disobedience well before she lays eyes onFerdinand. Her compassionate response to the shipwreck leads her to murmuragainst Prospero’s authority, and her protest sets the precedent for the scene’s suc-cessive troublemakers, the plaintive Ariel and cursing Caliban. Emboldened byfellow-feeling with the tempest’s victims, she diplomatically begins her first speechwith a hypothetical that teeters between petition and commandment: “If by yourart, my dearest father, you have / Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them”(1.2.1–2). By the time she concludes, she has considerably amplified her challenge:“Had I been any god of power, I would / Have sunk the sea within the earth, orere / It should the good ship so have swallowed” (ll. 10–12). We may take her utter-ance as either a tacit request that Prospero exercise his godlike powers more judi-ciously or an inchoate fantasy of being a god of power herself. In either case,compassion incites Miranda to swerve from her father’s governing will.

Prospero’s response to Miranda’s pity at first appears to be no more than a mildrebuke: he directs her to “[b]e collected,” subdue her “amazement,” and tell her

21 See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (Londonand New York: Methuen, 1985). Dolan provides illuminating discussions of petty treason, thedomestic version of rebellion in the commonwealth.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 368

DIDO’S EAR 369

“piteous heart / There’s no harm done” (ll. 13–15). Yet his language, which relatesher experience of pity to tragic theory, suggests a far-from-dismissive attitudetoward her emotions. As Stephen Orgel notes in his valuable edition of the play, the“amazement” Prospero requires her to banish refers to “both overwhelming fear(OED 3) and overwhelming wonder (OED 4)”; the two meanings comprise, “withthe piteous heart immediately following, the full Aristotelian response to tragedy.”22

This fullness of response proves tempting to Prospero, who seeks to redirect andenlist her sympathies. “[O]pe thine ear,” he intones as he begins to narrate his ownhistory: “Obey, and be attentive” (ll. 37–38).

Since Prospero must view his tale as a tragedy worthy of the pity Mirandasquandered on mere strangers, we may wonder why he repeatedly falters in its nar-ration. He shifts, in fact, from requiring his daughter’s composure to losing his own.He repeatedly insists that she “mark” him (ll. 67, 88, 117), although she attests to thedepth of her sympathy by calling on the heavens (“O the heavens!” [l. 59]) and herown heart (“O, my heart bleeds” [l. 63]). Dissatisfied, he asks, “Dost thou attendme?” (l. 78); interjects, “Thou attend’st me not!” (l. 86); and asks again, “Dost thouhear?” (l. 106). She assures him that her ear belongs to him—“Your tale, sir, wouldcure deafness” (l. 106)—as do her eyes—“Alack, for pity! . . . it is a hint / Thatwrings my eyes to’t” (ll. 132, 134–35). While there can be no serious question aboutthe quality of her pity, he fears she is insufficiently responsive to his needs as thejoint subject and narrator of his tragic history.

Prospero harps on his daughter’s pity, apparently, because the very act of narra-tion has revealed crucial ambiguities in the relationship of sorrowful narrator tocompassionate listener. Through narration he learns what it means to depend on arapt audience in order to tell his story: her role as listener grows in importance atdirect cost to his as narrator. As Prospero’s tale unfolds, it turns into a dialogue con-cerning Miranda’s relationship to the attention, hints, and inclinations required togenerate momentum in Prospero’s tale. Miranda, who should be her father’s idealaudience, instead raises in Prospero’s mind questions about the agency and author-ity of his own story. To “attend” to Prospero’s tale, she must “direct [her] ear, mind,and energies” (OED, 1) to the nuances of her father’s narrative and prepare herselfto act on what she hears. Attention puts demands on Miranda’s powers of receptionbut it also solicits her willingness to move from knowledge to practice; the ideallistener will respond to the mandate she understands the tale to deliver. The “hint”that “wrings [Miranda’s] eyes” similarly equivocates between a covert sign shereceives from Prospero and an occasion she seizes or grasps. The language of hints

22 Orgel, ed., 102n. On the subject of pathos generally, see Thomas Gould, The Ancient QuarrelBetween Poetry and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990).

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 369

and attention, then, underscores a subtle conflict between father and daughter: doesMiranda exercise her own will or second his?

The language of inclinations is similarly ambiguous. At the end of their dia-logue, Prospero reasserts his authority over both his tale and his daughter when hedenies her an answer to the question “still . . . beating in [her] mind” (l. 176): his rea-son for rousing the tempest. At this moment he might acknowledge that the ship-wrecked men include his enemies and thus force her to choose between objects ofher sympathy. Instead he lulls her to sleep with a spell: “cease more questions. /Thou art inclined to sleep; ’tis a good dulness, / And give it way. I know thou canstnot choose” (ll. 185–87). This inclination quite obviously does not belong toMiranda. Although elsewhere in Shakespeare inclinations occur within subjectswho assent to the unspoken propositions they read in (or into) the narratives ofanother, here Miranda cannot choose.23

By lulling her into an involuntary sleep, Prospero puts an end to a line of ques-tioning that cuts across the grain of his paternal absolutism. It may be difficult forProspero to end his story and explain himself because the very act of narration hascreated in him an unwanted dependency on his daughter; he needs her compassionto support his tale and see it through to a satisfactory conclusion. Her pity holds thekey to his suspenseful and still-unresolved tale of political intrigue and betrayal.Without her support, he cannot disclose or perhaps even determine his intentionsfor the shipwrecked men who betrayed him twelve years earlier. Unable to acknowl-edge his plans, he cuts short her questions and plunges her into sleep. It is the busi-ness of the play, of course, to bring Prospero to face the question of why he raisedthe tempest. He does so at last in 5.1 when the other creature he loves, Ariel, revealsmore compassion for Prospero’s present victims than for his past suffering. Thefellow-feeling both Miranda and Ariel express, at the risk of Prospero’s anger, trans-forms the play generically from a revenge tragedy to a comedy.24 Against the back-drop of the many failed revolts within the play, their sympathetic passions stand outas forces capable of staging a bloodless revolution.

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY370

23 “Inclinations” in Shakespeare generally refer to the political leanings that powerful lords cryp-tically stage for public interpretation. Such men feign neutrality in order to test the sentiments andsupport of the commons or peers; they then have the prerogative to “consent” to the very politicalactivities they have fomented. Examples abound in the history plays; the most famous is to befound in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speculations on the new king, Henry V, who “seemsindifferent, / Or rather swaying more upon our part” (1.2.73–74). The Archbishop, of course, rec-ognizes Henry’s display of mild leaning as solicitous of the Church’s support for his own agenda inFrance.

24 Although not human, Ariel has “a touch, a feeling / Of their [Prospero’s enemies’] afflictions”(5.1.21–22) which Prospero has chosen to deny in himself. The recognition that he lacks fellow-feel-ing effectively scares Prospero into stepping out of his tyrant’s and revenger’s role and seeking a peacehe does not fully believe in.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 370

DIDO’S EAR 371

DESDEMONA’S GREEDY EAR

From “lovesick Dido’s sad-attending ear” and the Dido-like ear Miranda opens tosympathetic audition, we turn to the “greedy ear” that “Devour[s]” Othello’s “dis-course” (Othello, 1.3.149–50). So well known is Desdemona’s position as an avid lis-tener that further commentary seems superfluous. Unfathomably to her father, itpersuades her to revolt against the norms of her “nature, / Of years, of country, credit,everything” (ll. 96–97). Othello’s storytelling first stirred Desdemona’s blood to morethan modest blushes: from “A maiden never bold, / Of spirit so still and quiet thather motion / Blushed at herself ” (ll. 94–96), she became a woman moved to pro-claim—in her words, to “trumpet” before her father and the Venetian senate—the“downright violence” (l. 248) of her passions and spousal rights in Othello. There is,Othello acknowledges, an almost magical power in his tale to bring the tender andreclusive Desdemona to voice her wish either to be or to wed its protagonist: “shewished / That heaven had made her such a man” (ll. 161–62). The name he gives tothis power is “pity”:“She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her thatshe did pity them. / This only is the witchcraft I have used” (ll. 166–68).

Compared with Titus Andronicus, 5.3, and The Tempest, 1.2, Othello’s speech in 1.3more intensively examines pity’s uncertain origins and unlimited potential for trans-formation. Since pity seems to explain Desdemona’s consent, its workings in her areobjects of Othello’s puzzled admiration. In concluding that pity is his “only . . . witch-craft,” Othello defends himself against Brabantio’s charges; yet it cannot be said that heinvokes the power of pity solely to ridicule a superstitious old man (as in:“But all I didwas tell my life’s story, as you yourself often invited me to do”). Othello is filled and per-haps struggling with his sense of wonder at the paradoxical workings of fellow-feeling.He recognizes that his role as narrator does not confer on him pity’s power to link thepair in a union based on her love of his past and his love of her pity (magic does notoriginate in the sorcerer). For this reason his heroic self-narration is, to adapt StephenGreenblatt’s phrase, a tale curious about “the telling of tales” and more specificallyabout the difficulty of tracing pity to its source or forecasting its effects.25

Before exploring the metacritical character of Othello’s tale, it would be wise toacknowledge that he is not alone in his uncertainty about what, precisely,Desdemona’s kind of pity involves. What is to be pitied in Othello’s speech is farmore enigmatic than in Prospero’s. Othello’s tale estranges pity and foregrounds itsstatus as an object of semantic study. It is beyond the limits of this essay to trace theeventful cultural history of pity’s meanings and its relation to the companion terms ofcommiseration, compassion, condolence, mercy, sympathy, and empathy. Yet a brief digres-

25 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London:U of Chicago P, 1980), 237.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 371

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY372

sion may lead to helpful distinctions and surprising confusions among piteoussignifiers. With the obvious exception of empathy, Shakespeare uses the entire cohortof terms, usually in sentences that weight the impact of pity as an emotional burden,one often calling for redress. Unlike Shakespeare, modern speakers distinguishsharply among these terms: condolence for formal and written expressions of grief,commiseration for companionable griping, compassion for grief touching us moredeeply, etc. Also unlike Shakespeare, we retain little of the sense that sympatheticfeelings spontaneously lead from emotional dialogue to social action; where we doretain this sense, it is often to stigmatize (e.g.,“bleeding-heart liberals”).26

One model of sympathy which has strongly influenced Renaissance culturalstudies first appeared in Stephen Greenblatt’s landmark essay on Othello, where heemployed the pointedly anachronistic term empathy to identify and estrange thecelebrated acts of fellow-feeling associated with the Renaissance imagination.27

Arguing that the period’s imagination lacked generosity or willingness to undergoself-loss in the exploration of another, he claimed that Renaissance subjects insteaddirected their powers of empathy toward the “ruthless displacement and absorp-tion of the other.”28 The name Greenblatt famously gives to this species ofidentification is Iago. As invocation of that consummate manipulator implies,Greenblatt is concerned with the European habit of subordinating imaginativeidentification to calculation. From Spanish colonialists to Tudor monarchs, theprivileged and ambitious persons of Greenblatt’s analysis use displays of fellow-feeling to affirm and enlarge their own positions within state power structures.

Rather than pursue the trajectory of intuition and arrive at fellow-feeling,Greenblatt’s subjects recoil from truly understanding what they readily grasp in exter-nal form. I think of this practice as an arrest, not an exercise, of pity: it involves thedeliberate interruption of sympathy’s tendency to move from knowledge to practice.Greenblatt, in short, takes up the counter-story to the one I am (following Othello in)telling, which is the tale of inclinations and intents that do not pause to deliberate.

Of particular use to my study is Greenblatt’s association of empathy with nar-rative’s build-up to a key moment of suspense, from which any number of unfore-seen narrative directions may unfold: “all plots, literary and behavioral, inevitablyhave their origin in a moment prior to formal coherence, a moment of experimen-tal, aleatory impulse in which the available, received materials are curved toward anovel shape.”29 This narrative plateau, according to Greenblatt, offers a point of

26 See Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago and London: Uof Chicago P, 1999).

27 Greenblatt, 222–57.28 Greenblatt, 236.29 Greenblatt, 227.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 372

entry into another’s story and an opportunity to manipulate a given tale’s narrativedirections and its tellers’ fate. The tale-teller’s loss of control over his fiction is pre-cisely what Othello regards with apprehension. If we cast Othello’s anxiety inAristotelian terms, tragedy masterfully rouses pity and fear but cannot guarantee acatharsis that binds the community together and affirms orthodox authority.Othello’s piteous tale clearly rouses Desdemona’s pity and fear to such a degree thatshe wishes she had not heard it—yet she wishes to hear it again. It does not, how-ever, inspire her submission to constituted authority.30 To the contrary.

Fellow-feeling may also be conceptualized as harmonious unanimity. Thenotion that distinct wills can merge so fully that vicarious feeling is indistinguish-able from the original proliferates in utopian fantasies such as Rabelais’s Abbey ofThélème, Spenser’s Garden of Adonis, Gonzalo’s commonwealth, and Helena’snostalgia for her shared maidenhood with Hermia. Part of the golden-age topos,such feeling is free of strife, natural blight, and labor. Shakespeare’s visions of per-fect sympathy appear in the face of opposition: circumstance separates Romeo andJuliet; a failure of vision prevents Lear from feeling what poor wretches feel. Actsof compassion that require effort—such as Lear futilely attempts in 3.4—compelShakespeare’s admiration more than utopian visions. In such cases Shakespeareancharacters perceive themselves as treading—or rather trudging—on moralground; they do not enjoy the “mere compassion” (1 Henry VI, 5.6.125) that spon-taneously and almost miraculously produces succor and redress.31 The version ofsympathy undertaken by Lear is a discipline cultivated to defend oneself againstcomplacence or condescension.

Such social concern leads logically to the final species of sympathy to considerbefore broaching Othello’s conception of pity. For modern audiences the class-conscious variant of sympathy is called up by the word pity, which falls hollowly onmodern ears. Though by far Shakespeare’s favorite term for shared grief, it has cometo invoke, in ways that can only aggravate the critical tendency to view Othello as ourinferior, the most unequal of emotional bonds. It measures distance rather than close-ness between the pitier and the pitied and even confers social superiority on thepitier: a thrifty emotion, pity costs the donor nothing yet indebts and diminishes therecipient. Such a sense, however, is wildly anachronistic in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England.32

DIDO’S EAR 373

30 Greenblatt reads Desdemona’s submission to Othello as paradoxically disruptive: for him, sheunsettles orthodoxy by the excess and eroticism with which she submits to it. He further proposesher example as an analogy to the theater’s and especially Shakespeare’s acquiescence to Tudor power.

31 On Shakespearean characters’ complex relation to the moral high ground, see Harry Berger Jr.,Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997).

32 In the Petrarchan experience of courtship, for example, the lady is aloof until she experiencesthe ruptures of pity and consents to be the lover’s equal. The poets routinely suggest that pity would

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 373

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY374

The idea that pity reflects one’s position in the social hierarchy only takes firm holdin political philosophy with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, where the experience of pityunpleasantly tumbles one down the social ladder instead of ushering one up it. ForHobbes pity is “Griefe [a man feels] for the Calamity of another,” and it arises “from theimagination that the like calamity may befall himselfe; and therefore is called alsoCOMPASSION, and in the phrase of this present time a FELLOW-FEELING.”33 Begun inimagined vulnerability, pity is fancy begot on probability (today we might call it “para-noia”). The cheerily communal tone of “fellow-feeling” is highly disagreeable toHobbes. Far preferable is it to feel nothing at all upon another’s misfortune, sinceexemption from “fellow-feeling” marks one’s moral and social superiority. This is espe-cially true of woes brought on by the sufferer himself: “for the same Calamity arrivingfrom great wickedness,” Hobbes says, “the best men have the least Pitty.”34 Similarly,those who feel morally or socially sacrosanct are disinclined to pity, for they “thinkthemselves least obnoxious to the same” misfortune.35 To lack pity means one is freefrom burdensome fellowship and obligation; to experience it means one joins thesufferer in subordinating himself to “the best men.” The experience and refusal of pityseparate the inferior from the privileged, and social relations are created or reinforced.

The Shakespearean character who comes closest to Hobbes’s sense of pity ashumiliating is Coriolanus, who awkwardly asserts that it is no little thing to make hiseyes “sweat compassion” (5.3.197). Yet even here Coriolanus insists on an un-Hobbesian element of voluntary labor in his experience of compassion. Cuttingagainst the grain of his training, he labors to submit himself to “fellow-feeling” withthe Romans who insulted him and to place himself in reciprocal social relations withthem. In Othello, however, pity’s influence runs exactly counter to the Hobbesianmodel by effortlessly sweeping aside social differences.

Returning to Othello’s piteous tale and its revolutionary effects on Desdemona: inhis speech to the Venetian Senate, Othello seeks to explain his original success withDesdemona rather than attempt to perform the same magic. If he is again persuasive,it is because the senators, in need of Othello’s military leadership, willingly placethemselves in Desdemona’s position as charmed listeners. In this they resemble TitusAndronicus’s senators, who adopt the “sad-attending ear” of “lovesick Dido.” AsElizabethans even slightly familiar with the Aeneid would know, Othello’s storytelling

humble and humanize the lady. See, e.g., Spenser, Amoretti, Sonnets 18 and 54; and Sidney,“Astrophiland Stella,” Sonnet 45. Sidney presents Astrophil’s own transformative experience of pity when herealizes that Stella shares his feelings: “I sighd her sighes, and wailed for her woe: / Yet swamme injoy such love in her was seene. / . . . I had beene vext, if vext I had not beene” (2:277 [87.10–11, 14]).

33 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 43.34 Hobbes, 43.35 Hobbes, 43.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 374

DIDO’S EAR 375

recalls “Aeneas’ tale to Dido”; the connection between the two texts is important.36

Vergil’s epic and Shakespeare’s tragedy share the heroic self-narration that propels(doomed) lovers into a contract based on her love of his past and his love of her pity.

Othello’s defense against charges of witchcraft, it turns out, is also an ambivalentdefense of poetry. As he describes his narrative of “the battles, sieges, fortunes” hepassed from his “boyish days” to the moment of telling the tale, Othello scrupu-lously marks the techniques of his narrative craft:

Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances,Of moving accidents by flood and field,Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach,Of being taken by the insolent foeAnd sold to slavery, of my redemption thence,And portance in my traveller’s history. . . .

(1.3.133–38)

The “disastrous chances” of his boyhood refer obscurely to his past and precisely toan Aristotelian concept of tragedy which closely monitors audience response. The“moving accidents” of his youth similarly privilege the listener’s pity, which grantsnew meaning to Othello’s past. Othello does not quite whisk his audience ofRoman senators into the temporality of his tale. Instead, he highlights the com-pelling force that deictic rhetoric lends to descriptions of the “insolent foe” and“imminent deadly breach,” which he escaped by a hair’s-breadth. Because he refersto stirring narratives that he declines to recount, Othello may justly call his “around unvarnished tale” (l. 90).

Although stirred to curiosity about the effects of his tale, Othello never claimsmastery over them. Like Prospero, who interrupts himself when worried thoughtsof his audience press upon him, Othello falters when he tries to locate his mandateas a narrator.“It was my hint to speak. Such was my process” (l. 141), he irrelevantlyremarks in a line tucked—or rather stranded—between his inventories of place andperson. Othello’s “hint to speak,” situated between evocations of the “Rough quar-ries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven” (l. 139) and the cannibals, raisesquestions. Did he seize or receive the hint, to invoke the paradoxically related mean-ings of “hint” furnished by the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites Othello’s speechto illustrate both the assertive and passive senses? Did the hint come from his ownwill, his audience, or his tragic tale, which bristles with its own affective potential?

36 Stephen Greenblatt, for example, invokes the Vergilian precedent as an instance of compellednarration: “when the Carthaginian queen calls upon her guest to ‘tell us all things from the firstbeginning, Grecian guile, your people’s trials, and then your journeyings,’ Aeneas responds, as hemust, with a narrative of the destiny decreed by the gods” (237).

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 375

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY376

In the act of self-scrutiny, Othello realizes his role as narrator affords him no privi-leged knowledge of how such questions are to be answered.

After describing his narrative technique, Othello turns to the more mysteriousroles of speaker and audience. Observing that Desdemona would “seriously incline”(l. 145) to hear his tale and then “Devour up [his] discourse” (l. 149), Othello says he

Took once a pliant hour, and found good meansTo draw from her a prayer of earnest heartThat I would all my pilgrimage dilate,Whereof by parcels she had something heard,But not intentively. I did consent,And often did beguile her of her tearsWhen I did speak of some distressful strokeThat my youth suffered.

(ll. 150–57)

Othello admits to soliciting Desdemona’s attention when he observes her interest,finds a “pliant hour” (he transfers pliability from Desdemona to the hour) to “draw”a fervent prayer from her, and then “beguile[s]” her of tears. In the same breath, heidentifies the potential of his auditor to uproot the speaker from his own story andplant herself as its heroic protagonist. When the “distressful stroke” Othello sufferedin his youth, for example, is revived in the weeping listener, to whom does the expe-rience belong? Once Desdemona has won Othello’s “consent” to speak, his story thenunfolds according to her mandating will and refers as much to her present experi-ence as rapt listener as to his past suffering. She gives him, for example, “a world ofsighs” (l. 158)37 to communicate her newfound erotic pains and to compensate himfor his past suffering. When she swears “ ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, / ’Twaspitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful” (ll. 159–60) and drops her “hint” (l. 165) about mar-riage, Desdemona reveals how her emotions, through sympathetic audition, havebecome as strange and wondrous as Othello’s tale of heroic suffering.

All told, Othello’s tale enlarges a theory of piteous response to tragedy and, moreintensively than the previously discussed scene from The Tempest, hones a vocabu-lary able to assess the problem of sympathy. Attentive, serious, lovesick, and greedy,the sympathetic audience is ready to leap from representation to action. The sym-pathetic listener is “intentive,” a word that loses the imminence of action if glossedas the more ambiguous adjective attentive. And when Desdemona seriously“incline[s]” to hear Othello’s tale, she does so with none of the passivity imposed onMiranda. As Othello clarifies for himself as well as for the Senate, Desdemona’s

37 The Folio reads “kisses” while the quarto prints “sighs,” presenting editors with one of their greaterinterpretive challenges. Although I depart from the Oxford editors in reading the more modest “sighs,”the interchangeability of passive and assertive expressions of pity in Desdemona is instructive.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 376

DIDO’S EAR 377

powers of listening suggest how close even the most timid-seeming creatures are tounorthodox acts of consent.

WHAT DIDO HEARD:THE PLAYER’S SPEECH, TRAGEDY, AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Tragedie . . . openeth the greatest woundes, and sheweth forth the Ulcers that arecovered with Tissue, that maketh Kings feare to be Tyrants, and Tyrants manifesttheir tyrannicall humours, that with sturring the affects of Admiration andComiseration, teacheth the uncertaintie of this world, and uppon how weak foun-dations guilden roofes are builded.38

As Madeleine Doran reminds us, English Renaissance literary theorists believed“tragedy originated in the necessity of reproving the tyrannous abuse of power.”39

Like Sidney, Doran is careful not to specify the agent and extent of reproof, sincetragic theory needed to conform (outwardly at least) with political theory regardingthe prerogative of kings. If one imagines the audience of Sidney’s version of tragedyas royal, then tragedy serves as moral counsel to the Christian prince. Yet where theaudience is popular, tragedy may threaten tyrants and consequently the theory ofroyal absolutism. Some Elizabethan literary theorists accordingly emphasize Godas the appropriate revenger. According to George Puttenham, for example, tragedycame about after the rise of tyrants, whose “soveraignetie and dominion . . . learnedthem all maner of lusts and licentiousnes of life” and whose lives were later “laydopen to all the world, their wickednes reproched, their follies and extreme insolen-cies derided, and their miserable ends painted out in playes and pageants, to shewthe mutabilitie of fortune, and the just punishment of God in revenge of a viciousand evill life.”40 Those who suffer under tyranny and take their anxieties to the the-ater will find comfort in God’s simultaneous promise and warning, “Vengeance ismine.” They need not and must not take matters into their own hands.

The passive position is notoriously unavailable to Hamlet, who may balk at regicidebut keenly feels the inadequacies of the contemptus mundi topos as a response to tyran-

38 Sidney, A Defence of Poesie, 3:23.39 Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: U Wisconsin

P, 1964), 126.40 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker

(Folcroft, PA.: The Folcroft Press, Inc., 1936, rpt. 1969), 33. I have retained the original spelling butsilently altered u to v and i to j where appropriate. Madeleine Doran also quotes these lines (122).Hamlet quite obviously measures its own version of tragedy against revenge tragedy as well as the decasibus tragedy Puttenham has in mind. I emphasize here Hamlet’s sense that his time is “out of joint”and that he is cursed because he has to “set it right” (1.5.189–90), a lament that sounds as if Hamletbelieves he needs to replace the gods, not act as their factor.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 377

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY378

nical abuse. As Hamlet hopes in the self-chastising soliloquy that follows the Player’srecital, the abuse of tyrants might lead spectators to take action. Because Hamlet can-not count on the gods, he faces a haunting question: on what authority, if not that ofthe gods, can a human agent carry out the just correction of abuse?41 This is the ques-tion Hamlet takes with him to the theater and asks of its “passionate speech” (2.2.414).

The Player’s speech, which Hamlet “chiefly loved” (l. 426), details Pyrrhus’s murderof Priam and Hecuba’s grief.42 It was, Hamlet tells us, “Aeneas’ tale to Dido”(ll. 426–27). This story of murder and lament, he recalls, was unpalatable to the pop-ulace—“caviare to the general” (l. 418). Princes such as Hamlet, in fact, had betterhope the average playgoer does not listen to the Player’s speech in the way Dido lis-tens to Aeneas’s tale, since it solicits action from its audiences. The nearly ekphrasticrepresentation of the scene elaborates the hope, expressed earlier in Titus Andronicus,that the story of Priam’s death might lead to revolt. The speech begins with Pyrrhus,who finds Priam

Striking too short at Greeks. His antique sword,Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls,Repugnant to command. Unequal match,Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide;But with the whiff and wind of his fell swordTh’unnervèd father falls. Then senseless Ilium,Seeming to feel his blow, with flaming topStoops to his base, and with a hideous crashTakes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear. For lo, his sword,Which was declining on the milky headOf reverend Priam, seemed i’th’ air to stick.So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,And, like a neutral to his will and matter,Did nothing.

(ll. 449–62)

The passage describes Priam’s fall, Ilium’s almost simultaneous collapse, and thecrashing sound that arrests Pyrrhus’s ear, coincidentally at the moment of stasis thatprecedes the sword’s violent descent on Priam’s head. It takes more than timing, how-ever, to make Pyrrhus’s mechanical hesitation seem like a suspenseful moment ofdeliberation; it requires the projection of an unspecified witness’s pitying response.

41 In seventeenth-century political philosophy this question was debated by adherents to thesocial contract and absolutists from James I to Robert Filmer.

42 The locus classicus for readings of the Player’s speech is Harry Levin’s brilliant and detailedchapter in his The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford UP, 1959), 138–64. On Shakespeare’simplicit claims for the actors’ political importance to the historical record, see Annabel Patterson,Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 13–31.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 378

DIDO’S EAR 379

The Player’s description of Pyrrhus’s sword constitutes a meditation on therelation of action to pity, felt not by Pyrrhus but by the unknown viewer. This spec-tator can be glimpsed in three response-related adjectives applied to the personsand events described in the speech: “senseless” Ilium, Pyrrhus’s “declining” sword,and Priam’s “milky” head. Ilium figures as the first surrogate spectator, one in suchdeep sympathy with Priam that “he” is first to respond to the imminent threat tothe king’s life. As the Player takes care to emphasize, however, Ilium is insensate:only if we project a viewer’s sympathies onto the citadel can we imagine “senselessIlium / Seeming to feel [the] blow” of Pyrrhus’s fell sword. Under the powerfulsway of sympathy, the citadel comes fully into “his” own as a personification: incompassion for the fallen king, Troy’s citadel is humbled when it “Stoops to hisbase,” and then rises to action when “Tak[ing] prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear.”43 As an alle-gorical personification of sympathy followed by decisive action, the citadel func-tions as a model for imitation.

The responsiveness transferred from the unspecified viewer grows wonderfullycomplex with the appearance of Pyrrhus’s “declining” sword. Decline is a supremelyShakespearean word, carrying a moral sense that the Oxford English Dictionary attrib-utes exclusively to the playwright.44 Technically, however, it is the wrong word forwhat Pyrrhus intends to do with his sword. It is usually glossed as an archaism fordescending, and this meaning is clearly necessary to make the image visually coherent.It is difficult, however, to coax vertical, downward motion from a verb etymologicallyrooted in divergence or swerving. “[D]eclining,” in short, suggests a fundamentalambivalence in the sword itself: Pyrrhus’s sword represents an act of deliberative,ethical judgment that can relate only incongruously to the nonreflective Pyrrhus.Between Pyrrhus’s “will and matter” intrudes ethical resistance to the regicide basedon pity for a man in his declining years, the pathetic monarch of a falling kingdom.

43 The sequence of compassionate response followed by decisive action is familiar in Shakespeare.The First Part of Henry VI offers an analogue in the conflict between Henry VI and the pityingGloucester and the pitiless Winchester. Henry employs his own royal “sighs and tears” (3.1.111) toseek pity in his rebellious lords, while Warwick forcefully orders them to yield, “Except you meanwith obstinate repulse / To slay your sovereign and destroy the realm” (ll. 116–17). Gloucester ismoved by the king’s sighs and tears and quite possibly by the image of himself as a regicide:“Compassion on the King commands me stoop” (l. 122), he says, anticipating the language of volun-tary motion located so oddly in “senseless Ilium.” Winchester, by contrast, looks “stern and tragical”(l. 128), a pale version of the black and blood-drenched Pyrrhus who stalks King Priam. Pity movesGloucester to exchange “Love for . . . love, and hand for hand” (l. 138) and embrace a new “contract”(l. 146) in support of the king’s traditional authority. In the Player’s speech, pity has a similar powerto bring men to “stoop,” but the two political scenarios differ strikingly. Ilium personified allegorizesa movement from pity to retaliation rather than concession.

44 See OED, s.v. decline, v., I, 9, fig.: “To fall morally or in dignity, to sink. . . . (Now only literary, andafter Shakes.).”

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 379

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY380

Because his sword has entered into a sympathetic relationship with the head it isabout to strike, it dissents when Pyrrhus wants it to descend. The sword stands in stub-born opposition to Pyrrhus’s will, refusing its office, swerving from his purpose.

As this account of the tableau suggests, Priam’s sword is not alone in being“Rebellious to his arm” and “Repugnant to command”: Pyrrhus, too, suffers adiminution of his agency, invested in his sword as the instrument of his will.45

Arrested at the height of his power, he is robbed of action, imprisoned in a moralrepresentation quite contrary to his aims. Incongruously appearing as a neutralarbiter between his intent to kill and its fulfillment, Pyrrhus becomes a “painted”tyrant, an aesthetic object representing the alternatives of violence and hesitation—not his own but someone else’s. He is forced, in fact, to represent the alternativesthat Hamlet or humbler spectators face when confronted with a bloody tyrant whois, in the speech’s heraldic terms,“horridly tricked / With blood of fathers, mothers,daughters, sons” (ll. 437–38). What actions might abusive kings, who do not “feareto be Tyrants” (in Sidney’s phrase), expect from spectators who take their “motiveand the cue for passion” (l. 538) from the citadel and the sword?

We come finally to Priam’s “milky” head, the magnetic object at the center of thePlayer’s verbal portrait. Like Troy’s citadel and Pyrrhus’s sword, reverend Priam isundergoing a transformation into an emblem, in his case that of authority pitiablyfallen on paternal, political, and religious levels. His “milky” head, not the bloodyPyrrhus, is the focal point in this tableau of sympathy: if viewed as a painting, thescene leads the spectator’s eye along an imaginary line from Pyrrhus to his swordand finally to Priam’s milky head, which is the unbearably pitiful center of the com-position. The effect of Priam’s head, in short, is apotropaic: all visual lines convergeon his head but are instantaneously deflected to something else in the picture, suchas falling Ilium or the descending sword. Once the eye alights on the surrogateobjects, it transfers sympathies to them, rendering Ilium an active bodyguard andPyrrhus’s sword a forceful dissenter to the regicide. The tableau generates a fantasyof effective succor and redress sprung from a tightening of the sympathetic bond.Ideally, the galvanizing effects of that milky head should extend to the heavens;mediated by the lamentations of Hecuba, Priam’s death would make “milch theburning eyes of heaven, / And passion in the gods” (ll. 497–98). Touched byHecuba’s lament, the gods might weep tears of milk and exact revenge.

Yet it is at the level of the gods that the tableau’s sweeping communication ofsympathy falters. If the gods do not adequately love old men, it is up to the sympa-thetic audience to undertake radical action that would prove the heavens more just.As a metatheatrical exercise the Player’s speech makes the central point that tragic

45 For a provocative study of the hand as a figure for problems of agency, see Katherine A. Rowe,Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999).

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 380

DIDO’S EAR 381

“milch” does not necessarily create pacifism, obedience, or withdrawal from the trou-blesome world. As Hamlet presents the effects of tragedy, the response to a drama-tized regicide might be an actual one: this possibility is, it turns out, the reasonHamlet requests to hear once more a tragic scene that in his present circumstancedoubles for both his father’s murder and his own fantasy of murdering Claudius.46

The revolutionary potential of pity suggests why Hamlet feels at once drawn toand scandalized by the actor’s power to transform his audience. If the player had “themotive and the cue for passion / That I have,” Hamlet remarks,

He would drown the stage with tears,And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,Make mad the guilty and appal the free,Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeedThe very faculty of eyes and ears.

(2.2.538–43)

Were he to identify with his passionate speech enough to solicit intent, the actormight make his particular grief the general cause of his auditors. Even the moralpredisposition and actual histories of the playgoers would, under pressure of theactor’s passion, become irrelevant. As Hamlet imagines them, the responses of thosewho are guilty, free, and ignorant of murderous or regicidal thoughts are oddlyindistinguishable: although these playgoers may feel variously maddened, appalled,and confounded, they are joined together in the figure of a single “cleave[d]” ear,Hamlet’s image for the sympathetic influence of the decapitated Priam. If the Playerhad Hamlet’s cause, he would transform the story of Priam’s slaughter, so slightedby the audience when Hamlet first heard it, into the potent and stirring tale ofHamlet Sr.’s murder by Claudius. In Hamlet’s vision the tragic theater forges a linkbetween commiseration and consent—even, or perhaps especially, to the revolu-tionary content of regicide.

DIDO’S EAR

In the course of this study of Shakespearean pity, I have perhaps strayed ratherfar from the figure of Dido. I have certainly done so if my essay is compared withsource studies as traditionally conceived or—if I might risk a mild polemic—withsource studies as they have been described as ideologically and methodologically

46 The theme of pity leading to civic uprising appears elsewhere in the play. With a nudge fromLaertes, Polonius’s death moves the Danes to pity and revolt. The threat of mob action is closer tothe Player’s speech, in fact, than it may appear. The simile of Pyrrhus as a storm (2.2.463–72) thatfollows in the Player’s speech is itself a revision of the first epic simile in the Aeneid, in which Vergilcompares a storm to a seditious mob.

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 381

SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY382

reactionary.47 In critical practice, studies of allusion have covered the full spectrumfrom positivism to supple speculation. The interpretive model that takes us fromShakespeare’s meditations on sympathetic listening to the image of “Dido’s sad-attending ear” is less concerned with citationality per se than with the discursiveconditions that prompt the allusion to Dido in the first place. In this view, Miranda’sstatus as a pitying audience lays one foundational plank (more are needed) sup-porting the weight of the play’s later allusions to “widow Dido.” Titus Andronicus andHamlet provide concrete allusions to Dido as the original listener to Aeneas’s tale,while Othello leaves uncited the familiar Vergilian scene of Dido as auditor ofAeneas’s heroic tale at that play’s parallel moment. Taken singly, none of these scenestells us much about the significance to Shakespeare of Dido’s “sad-attending ear.”Taken together, however, they direct us to the concerns already on Shakespeare’smind when Dido makes her entrance into a given play’s field of discourses.

When she appears, generally in a static image or tableau, Dido bristles with theimminence of action. A rapt listener, she hangs on a tragic tale in a doubly sus-penseful fashion: she both responds and adds to narrative suspense, bringing theobserver of tragic performance and audition to wonder what will come of the talewhen the spectator translates aesthetic experience into social practice. Dido attendsto performance with self-transforming compassion, following another’s narrative toits suspenseful plateau but then supplying unforeseeable narrative directions andconclusions. Dido’s listening figure instantiates, for Shakespeare, an anti-Aristotelian idea of tragedy: the plot builds up sympathy, frustration, and outragebut effects no catharsis. Political disaster, such as that which passes from Troy toCarthage to Rome, may consequently originate in the way she listens: intent, pliant,yet terrifying, she paradoxically redeems and threatens the performance to whichshe raptly attends. Shakespeare’s Dido consequently evokes the theater’s potentialfor generating a dangerous political agency that leaves the playwright vulnerable tointents he may wish to disown. Dido’s habit of entering into Shakespeare’s medita-tions on tragic sympathy often suggests the uncanny or eccentric forms in which oldstories “live in . . . memory” (l. 428), in Hamlet’s phrase for the continued appeal andresonance of “Aeneas’ tale to Dido.”

47 In the early version of “Shakespeare and the exorcists,” printed in Shakespeare and the Question ofTheory (Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. [New York and London: Methuen, 1985],163–87), Stephen Greenblatt tasked “source studies” with positivism, famously calling it the “elephants’graveyard” of literary criticism. For a later version of the essay, see Stephen Greenblatt, ShakespeareanNegotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U ofCalifornia P, 1988).

james.qxd 09/26/2001 5:00 PM Page 382