DMSIONS OF LABOUR:

PERFORMATIVE LANGUAGE AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

OF BRITISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

Alexander J. Dick

Graduate Program in

English

Submitted in partial fblfilrnent of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Graduate Studies The University of Western Ontario

London, Ontario August, 1999

0 Alexander J. Dick 1999

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Abstract

This study argues that the tension in Romantic drama between its use of theatrical

forms and conventions and its "anti-theatrical" mistrust of institutional behaviour

constitutes a critique of political economy. The critical apparatus for this study,

developed in chapter 1, is J. L. Austin's concept of the "performative." Austin showed

that such speech acts as promises, contracts, bequests, and oaths perform actions rather

than descn'be mental or physid phenomena. In contrast to standard readings of Austin,

this study focuses on the material act of utterance: speech as a contingent instance of

"labou?' that evades normative classification. Austin's polemical attention to the

materiality of speech provides the basis for a uniquely Romantic critique of economic

theory.

The remaining chapters offer three case studies of this performative critique as it

applies to the economic thematics of Romantic plays. Chapter 2 examines Sheridan's

parody of contract-making in 77ie School for S&Z (1777). While the play seems to

align itself with enlightenment conceptions of a "sentimental" economy--the idea that

exchange practices are naturally regulated by self-interest and social respect, evident in the

political economics of Hume and Smith and the Common-Sense philosophy of Reid-- it

posits incidents of this sentimental negotiation within spoken justifications for their

acceptability. Chapter 3 similarly reads Wordsworth's The Borderers (1 797-99) as a

critique of the economics of poverty. Written in conjunction with the attempt by Godwin,

Burke, and Malthus to discover self-regulating utilitarian principles to alleviate human

suffering with political intervention, the play adapts the performative foundations of

conventional dramaturgical forms to expose the mechanistic orientation of that

utilitarianism. Chapter 4 reads Shelley's Be Cenci (1 8 19) as a contribution to the

Bullionist Controversy in monetary economics. The concern with financial control in the

... lll

.

play parallels the manipulation of incest-a common metaphor for the credit system-as the

contest for domestic power and the theatricality o f legal power in its attempt to determine

the causality and vdue o f criminal acts.

Acknowledgments

First, I must thank my supervisor, Professor Angela Esterhammer. Her patience,

intelligence, and generosity have not simply guided this project, but inspired it. Thanks

also to my reader, Professor Allan Gedalof, for his critical acumen, for his attention to

detail, and for never allowing me to take myself too seriously. The faculty and staff at the

Department of English of the University of Western Ontario have been nothing but

encouraging, and to them I am grateful. Above all, thank you to my wife, Alison, who has

seen this thesis through from its conception and who is the reason for its completion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of Examination

Abstract

Acknowledgments

Table of Contents

Introduction: Divisions of Labour

Page

.. 11

.-- Ill

v

vi

1 The Economics of Anti-theatricality or Is There an niocution in the House?

Towards a Speech-Act Theory of Romantic Drama 29

Austin's Polemic 33

Polemics of Performative Language in Byron's Mmied 38

Speech Acts and Drama: A Critical Overview 45

The Occasion of Theatre in Romantic Drama Criticism 53

Phenomenologies of Performance 63

Economies and Excuses: Speech Acts at Work and Play 79

Exclusion and Etiolation: Austin's Theatre 97

Disclosing Romantic Performance 107

2 Excuses for Enlightenment:

The Sentimental Economy and me School for S c d l

Accounts of Scandal

Annuity Acts

vi

Scottish Economics and Social Acts

Marriage Contracts

Pictures and Presents

The Sentimental Economy

3 ''this strange aversion": the Economics of Poverty in rite Borderers

"a man by men deserted"

Theoretical Vagrancy: Smith, Burke, Godwin

Deixis: Managing the Economic Scene

The Economics of Enjoyment in the Theatre of the 1790s

I Revolutionary Properties

II Gothic Spectacles

ILI Wordsworth and The Gamester

Pleasures of the Independent Intellect

4 Controversies of Bullion: Mcney, Language, and Gold in The Cenci

Speech Acts, History, and the Money Form

Builionism and the Signs of Labour

Cenci's Gold

Shelley's Cursed Stage

Bibliography

Vita

vii

Introduction

Divisions of Labour

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of

Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of

almost any other dramatist whatsoever. Their distinguishing excellence is a

reason that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not

under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have

nothing to do.

Charles Lamb, "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with

Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation" (18 1 1)

The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like

that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or

realize itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which

endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour

could afterwards be procured.. .. In the same class must be ranked, some

both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous

professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds;

players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, &c. The labour

of the meanest of these has a certain value, regulated by the very same

principles which regulate that of every other sort of labour; and that of the

noblest and most usefkl, produces nothing which could afterwards

purchase or procure an equal quantity of labour. Like the declamation of

the actor, the harangue of the orator, or the tune of the musician, the work

of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production.

Adam Smith, WeuIfh of Natons

... a performative utterance will, for example, be in upemliar wqv hollow

or void if said by an actor on the stage.

I. L. Austin, Haw to Do Things with Words

Divisions of Labour examines the way certain plays of the period between 1776

and 18 19 dramatize the problem of theatre in enlightenment political economy. In part,

this study will consider the way these plays are concerned with certain facets of what we

would now call the economy: forms of contracts, the role of poverty, and the nature of

money. But the overall link between Romantic theatre and political economy to be

established here derives fkom their mutual conception of theatre as, in Adam Smith's

words, "unproductive labour." Certainly theatre has value: Smith includes it among the

"publick diversionsy' which alleviate the mind-numbing drudgery of the labourer's working

day, just as laws and government provide order in society. To this extent, theatre, art, and

literature, along with religion and philosophy contribute to the positive flow of capital and

thus to the maintenance of the economy. But Smith also realizes that religion, law,

medicine, and philosophy-all of which undergird the science of political economy-are in

essence as frivolous as theatrical buffoonery because they do not make anything in a

material sense. You can't eat laws; you can't wear ideas. In fact most late-eighteenth- and

early-nineteenth-century political economy makes clear an awareness that its systematic

theorization of human labour into rules, laws, and doctrines, being a form of intellectual or

linguistic activity, produces no 'trendible commodity" but "perishes in the very instant of

its production." Emerging contemporaneously with political economy, this study argues,

Romantic drama, and particularly its own enigmatic but quintessential distrust of theatre,

restages this unproductivity as the internal condition of economic theory.

The theoretical apparatus for this study is the "performative" ianguage or "speech-

act" theory first developed by the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin and subsequently

incorporated into a number of schools of literary criticism and social research. Austin

distinguishes two sorts of utterances: '%onstative utterances," which describe the world,

and "performative utterances," which act in the world. By uttering a certain set of words

such as "I promise" or "I claim," I perform an action; I do not simply signify a mental

state. Speech-act theory is we1 suited to the analysis of economic phenomena; many of

the examples Austin gives in his best known work, the collection of lectures now known

as How to Do E n g s with Word, are economic: making bets, performing marriages,

declaring ownership, negotiating contracts. Bringing performative language into contact

with economic theory suggests, quite straightforwardly, that the kinds of acts that

determine the course of economic distribution are essentially linguistic. But Austin also

makes a more provocative claim: not only certain words but in fact a l l language has this

active dimension. With this discovery, Austin challenges the basic philosophical premise

that understanding ordinary experience, especially speech, must restrict itself to a

consideration of what appears to be "true" or "red." The study of linguistic performance

thus addresses the mass of complex and for the most part undeterminable perspectives,

desires, conventions, powers, and authorities underlying verbal interaction, including

philosophy itself.

In as much as Austin's theory of speech acts participates in the "linguistic turn"

which has been so influential in the social and human sciences for the last thirty years, it is

possible t o recognize the basic premises of his theory in the concern with language central

to literary analysis, and in the recent interest in the dynamics of rhetoric and expression in

political economy, and thus clarify important connections between these disciplines.

Economists such as Deirdre McCloskey and Fermccio Rossi-Landi have retraced the

history of economic thought in the twentieth century to re-establish, respectively, the

"rhetorical" and "semiotic" grounding of its claims to empirical certainty.' Economic

anthropologists such as Stephen Gudeman and Richard R Wilk have suggested that

economics helps to create the standards by which cultures come to understand and extend

themselves by "modeling7' theoretical versions of their society and then insisting that these

theoretical models are exemplified by the very data which was accumulated to construct

theme2 Marc Shell and Kurt Heinzelman have employed the techniques of literary analysis

to trace the narrative and rhetorical impulses of political economy in its attempt to

construct an explanation of the relations of the social world; both, moreover, usefblly

clarifjt the historical resonance of economic rhetoric by comparing it to the economic

subtext of contemporary Literature, including, prominently, the literature of the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries.

In treating Austin's initial exclusion of literary speech acts as a symbol of the

In the first chapter of his h g u a g e as Work and Trade, Rossi-Landi attributes the origin of this comparison to the influence of the Italian Mandst economist Piero Sraffa (who edited the works of David Ricardo) on Ludwig Wittgenstein's decision to revise his own position on language before writing Philosophical I~~~esfigafiom, a work known to anticipate many of the principal philosophical implications of speech-act theory (1 3 4 ) . McCloskey's argument that even the most mathematically inclined areas of economic research comprise a rhetorical and persuasive justification of some position in a "conversation" regarding economic data and not substantial truths has proved quite controversial. For a debate on the merits and drawbacks of McCloskey's position see the essays collected in Consequences of Economic Rhetoric.

?Economic anthropology offers an intriguing paradigm for any critical examination of the assumptions of political economy. It refuses, as Wilk insists, "to take mry model of innate human nature as fact'" and instead encourages scholarship to "make ... choices about human motives by studying the ideas and behaviour of real human beings" (40). Certainly, economic anthropology makes assumptions of its own when it proclaims that it can analyse "real human beings"; economic anthropologists are not interested in probing the limitations of social scientific empiricism, nor are they particularly engaged with the internal dynamics of economic theory as such. But Gudernan does provide a compelling account of the problematics of representation inherent in the idea of the "model" as it emerged during the Romantic period, particularly in the writings of David Ricardo (48- 70).

5

reliance in literary interpretation on such arcane concepts as subjectivity, nature, causality,

and tnrth, which language and literature are supposed to represent, the branch of literary

criticism which has emerged from Austin's theory of speech acts has helped accomplish

the major shifts in literary thought toward the post-modern critique of those normatively

held beliefs. As adapted by a range of literary critics fiom both sides of the Atlantic,

including Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, Shoshana Felman, Sandy Petrey, Charles AItieri,

Wolfgang Iser, and J. Hillis Miller, Austin's paradoxical theory is seen to hypothesize the

strategic adaptation of rhetorical ploys and figurative tropes in normal communication

which authors and critics alike employ in the creation, management, distribution, and

exchange of poetry and fiction. A whole range of philosophers with widely differing

perspectives and methods, fiom John Searle, to Jiirgen Habennas, to Jean-Fran~ois

Lyotard, have adapted Austin's theory of the speech act to relate the formative influence

of language on the way society fbnctions to such specifically economic issues as the nature

of money and capital and such philosophical questions as the extent to which human

economies can be conceived as a rational entity. My decision to bring performative

language theory to a consideration of political economy in dramatic performance was

inspired by the realization that economists and literary critics ask similar questions about

their discourses and disciplines.

There is a more direct reason, however, why I adapt Austin's speech-act theory in

particular to interpret the dramatic works of the Romantic period. The rhetorical

condition of discourse is often referred to as ''theatricality," or more tellingly,

"performativity": what was thought to be rational truth is understood to be the action of

competing powers and authorities at play in a scene of social construction. This approach

has been especially effective in the interpretation of Romantic literature, since the poetry

and prose of Romanticism is remarkable for its insistence on the foundational primacy of

subjective agency in literary creation. As will be examined in detail in chapter 1, the

6

philosophical implications of performative language for the study of literary creativity are

apparent in Austin's enigmatic methodology. Austin rarely makes a claim without also

considering all of the contingencies which could help refute its viability. One of these

claims is the suggestion that an utterance spoken "on the stage or. .. in a poem" is strictly

non-serious, "in ways parasitic upon its normal use-ways which f d under the doctrine of

the etiolafiom of language" (22), diseased or corrupted imitations of genuine social

behaviour. They are therefore irrelevant to the discussion of the ways speakers and hearers

interact in normal conversation.' By the end of the lectures, however, Austin has

thoroughly demonstrated the impracticality, bordering on the impossibility, of ever finding

the means to succes&lIy comprehend that conversation, for the simple reason that speech

acts do not correlate to standards of seriousness which could fit into theoretical patterns.

Romantic drama is conspicuous in this context because while its authors and critics

repeatedly claim that subjectivity is its central issue, they are also obsessed with questions

of public value and critical legitimacy. The well-known proposition is that Romantic

drama as a genre represents a collective rejection of popular theatre. In its place, Romantic

drama posits a concept of poetic drama or "mental theatre" built around a nostalgia for the

intellectual density of Renaissance dramatic forms and a corresponding advocacy of

emerging concepts of autonomous subjectivity. But, by putting that subject on the stage,

so to speak, Romantic drama also dramatizes the confrontation between an idea of the

subject and its concrete social, historical, and even theatrical formation.

Just as speech-act theorists must cope with the practical impossibility of

determining all of the contextual influences on an act of speech, the study of Romantic

drama must contend with a remarkable collusion of inconsistent and irregular aesthetic

trends, historical developments, and political interests attendant on theatrical performance

at the turn of the nineteenth century. The study of the paradoxical theatricality of

Romantic anti-theatricality has thus been predominantly historical in its outlook. Major

studies of the drama of the period such as Joseph Donohue's Drdc Character in the

Romantic Age and JefEey Cox's in the Shadows of Romance, and the symposium on

Romantic theatre edited by Richard Men Cave have proved not only that all of the

Romantic poets wrote for a theatrical audience but also that what we understand to be the

essentially Romantic themes of individual struggle and failed autonomy were formulated in

direct response to the institutionalism and conventionality of the theatres. Extending this

realization to the political dynamics of the period, Jane Moody, Terence Hoagwood, Mary

Jacobus, Madean Purinton, and Daniel Watkins have argued that the tragedies of the

major Romantics and their sympathetic contemporaries are primarily concerned with the

paradoxes of class struggle: the plays depict the complex tensions within bourgeois

notions of individual emancipation fiom political and economic oppression even as they

express more ostensible anxieties about the threat of revolutionary violence and social

change.' Reorienting the politicat intricacies within the texts to the cultural politics of the

' This move was inspired in large part by Raymond Williams' suggestion in The Long Revolution that the demise of drama in the Romantic period is the result of a combination of pretensions to the aristocratic sensibility of Renaissance drama, especially Shakespeare, and the emerging bourgeois repudiation of that sensibility in the name of rational truth (263-4). Beginning with Richard Fletcher's survey, English Romantic Drama: A Critical History, criticism in this area represents an intensely detailed expansion of Williams' position. Thus Hoagwood, in his Trolegomena to a Theory ofRomantic Drama.," contends that Romantic period theatre can be colleaively theorized by showing that its struggles with the censors are dramatized in the plays themselves: scenes of oppression and revolution are set in the safely historical past. Purinton has persuasively demonstrated the extent to which these plays engage with the political debates and controversies being played out in the newspapers and pamphlets of their own time. Watkins has brought this historical research back under the umbrella of Wiiams' ideological critique in remarkably convincing illustrations of his original thesis:

Burdened by the crisis of social class, Romantic drama is inextricably and peculiarly entangled in the radical, disruptive changes of the period, displaying at various levels extreme anxiety that is most l l ly explained in historical terms. This anxiety is evidenced not only in the omnipresent references to class and social status but also in the fact that, at the level of plot, many Romantic dramas partray (as dramas had done since the Renaissance) the actions of an aristocratic class, while, at another, deeper level, they betray (to a much greater extent than Renaissance drama) an

Romantic stage, feminist critics, notably Julie Carlson and Catherine Burroughs, have

shown that Romantic anti-theatricality is a "feminizing" gesture by which playwrights,

acting theorists, actors, and reviewers, many of them women, sought to hamess and

protect emerging notions of the privately composed subjective and national consciousness

&om the erratic and frequently violent generations of power and subversion on the public

stage-

The identification ofthese public and social determinants of the character of

Romantic drama and its theatre has significantly expanded our awareness of the voices and

views eequently displaced in the violent and suppressive development of British culture

during the Romantic period. If there were more anti-Jacobin than Jacobin sympathies

apparent in dramatizations of French RepubliMnism in the 1790s, or if the conflict

between capital interest and popular discontent during the Old Price Riots of 1809 was

hyped by government and the press as a distraction from more pressing political problems,

or if the substantial military presence on stage and off throughout the period of the

Napoleonic War represented a conservative dynamic which challenged but also

compromised the political subversiveness of the media of this period, then it is perhaps

impossible to say what constitutes the political standard which legitimated the drama or

whether it is a cause or an effect of social, political, and cultural change or if the label

bXomantic's is even loosely appr~priate.~ This view employs an archeological method of

analysis: the political and social discourses of any historical period are seen to clash and

antagonistic consciousness that is necessarily and powerfblly bourgeois. (Maferialist Critique 7)

' For dramatizations of the revolution see Cox, "Ideology and Genre." For militarism on the stage and the theatricality of the military and its propaganda see Russell, Theatres of War. The best and most thorough account of the relations between theatre politics and audience discontent, focusing on the Old Price Riots of 1 80% 10 is Baer, neatre of Disorder, but see also Hadley; "Old Price Wars" and Russell, Tlaying at Revolution."

subordinate one another rather than blend into a tidy narrative of progressive

development. Practitioners of this method nevertheless face, and all too often ignore, the

danger that the historicized subject will simply replace the old idea of the intentional

"subject" with a broader conceptual but equally totalizing nexus of competitive interests.

By concluding that this historid development is riddled with ambivalences and anxieties

and that the plays of the period embody those anxieties, critical interpretation lends to the

Literature of the past a comprehensive and readable unity even as that unity is considered

to be utterly discordant.'

I submit that a solution to this conundrum, or at least a deferential alternative, can

be found in the engagement of Romantic theatre with the two scholarly discourses to be

addressed in this study: political economy and performative language. From the meta-

critical perspective of the philosophy of language, two general trends in economic theory

can be identified. These trends correspond to Austin's distinction between constative and

performative language. In its constative guise, economics is largely a theory of practice, a

The distinction between the two major modes of historicist criticism in Romantic studies, new-historicism and cultural materialism, must be maintained. The mode of analysis practised by Purinton, Watkins, Carlson and other scholars of the Romantic period, rooted in the contingencies of theatre history, tends to be more materialist in its strategies, isolating the sites of the potential subversion of political hegemony within its ideological delineation. The new-historicism practised by McGann, Levinson, and Siskin is indebted to Foucauldian discourse analysis rather than Williams' Mandsm, and tends to see the various converging discourses and contexts of a work as competing and circulating rhetorics and voices within a highly ambivalent "text" called histoy. For a clarification of the problems of this method, see Liu's critique of new-historicism in T h e Power of Formalism." Liu's contention that what literary historicism needs is a theory of "action qua action" as opposed to "identities and their coercive representationsy' (735) is the starting point for Jewett's recent study of Romantic drama, Fatal Autonomy. I am indebted to Jewett's reading for clarifying the importance of agency in these plays, though I agree with Michael Simpson's hesitation in Closet Per$ommces that Jewett's insistence on reinstating agency as the primary object of interpretation risks re-submerging the real problems of representation and form into the critically prescribed intricacies of content (20-1). For a psycho-analytical alternative of the historical interpretation of Romantic drama which also confronts questions of history and ideology see Kubiak, "The Body's Revision in the Theater of Mind" in Stages of Terror, 95- 1 19.

10

"social science7' of the way human and material resources are distributed. As Jiirgen

Habermas argues, this empirical mode of observation makes "statements about the

covariance of observable events" which, ''given a set of initial conditions, ... make

predictions possible. EmpiricaZunulytic knowledge is thus possible predictive

knowledgey' (fiowledge 308). Habemas goes on to suggest that there is an alternative

mode of "hisforicaZ-hemeneulic sciences" which analyses the "validity" of philosophical

or empirical claims according to the standards of their intellectual milieu and the

intersection of those standards with other ethical and political perspectives. "A critical

social science," Habermas contends, 'W ... determine when theoretical statements grasp

invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen

relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed" (309-10). What Habermas

offers is a critical analysis of the economy of philosophy, its systems of intellectual

distribution and the extent of their viability and flexibility. In a performative sense-and

Habermas has since adapted Austin's theory of the performative as the ground for his

critical social science--economics can be seen to theorize the practice of theory, the way

individuals distribute and docate, observe and philosophize. Sensitive to that fact,

economics can uncover not simply the logic of universal social relations in the world but

the logic inherent in the verbal utterances, including theory, which go into creating that

social world. That is, the rhetoric of economic theory self-reflexively becomes the basis

for an understanding of how agents perform economic acts in language, the very tool of

theory. W~th this self-reflexivity in mind, it is possible to recognize attempts to suppress

perfonnativity in classical empirical economics and distinguish fiom it economic theory

sensitive to the logic of petformative language.

Properly speaking, I am offering an interpretation of Romantic drama and

economics as opposed to political economy since the former denotes the examination and

management of specific modes of distribution and exchange while the latter presents and

elaborates these in the context of historical and political trends. Nevertheless, an

awareness of linguistic action that changes our conception of how certain modes of

distribution and exchange take place is, I wiU argue, already apparent in the political

economy of the Romantic period. Smith, for one, believed that philosophers, kings,

lawyers, soldiers, clowns, economists, and workers have Little, ifanything, in common.

How then is it possible for an economist or a philosopher to identifl with the realities of

work of which he has no experience? Given that such intellectual tasks are unproductive,

how can they, in themselves, have any social value? Attention to such dficulties

foregrounds important aberrations ig the rationally prescribed vision of behaviour t

understood, but also avoided, by political economists. Related problems include the

validity of negotiated contracts-how can I trust that what is promised to me today for

what I give will actually be given to me in exchange?-and the fictionality of monetary

exchange-how can I tma that the signified value of this unit of exchange is actually

encompassed by that signification? Equally important, largely neglected, and seemingly

non-linguistic issues such as the presence of poverty and the nature of unproductive labour

also appear in economic terms as objects of exclusion because they tend to be classified by

political economics as negations of real or substantial entities like wealth and produced

commodities. This troubled concern for the difference between the language of

observation and the language of speculation is apparent in some of the most significant

contributions to political economy and its philosophical basis at the turn of the nineteenth

century such as Malthus' Essay on Populution, Godwin's PoliticuZJustice, and the

writings of Burke, Thornton, and Ricardo.

That this concern with language could be used as a critique of the utilitarianism

propounded in one way or another in all of these works and as the basis for an alternate

conception of economics altogether, is, I submit, a significant suggestion of certain

contributors to the Romantic movement in English literature contemporary with the rise of

22

classical political economy. The working definition of Romanticism offered in this study is

not rooted in a canonized selection of literary works and authors working and living at a

certain time and in a certain place. On the contrary, I view such strictures of canonicity

and periodization to be part of an effort to economize "Romanticism" in ways complicit

with a political economy of usefiess7 self-interest, and productivity of which many

Romantic literary works are highly suspicious. This does not mean that Romanticism

should be associated with the naive cornmunitananism of Coleridge's and Southey's

Pantisorracy or with the notion of "indolence" which Willard Spiegelman traces through

the poetics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. Rather, I adopt the idea of

unproductivity because it intimates an energy or power latent within theories of use and

production. This power is a creative force, but it is also potentially destructive; in

foregrounding that dialectic of productivity and unproductivity in the social economy and

in the Literary, philosophical, and scientific discourses which interpret and create that

economy, Romanticism offers a self-reflexive and thus truly critical economics. This

dialectic can be observed in many aspects of Romantic thought from Kant's aesthetics of

the sublime, to Wollstonecraft's feminist insurgency, to Wordsworth's reformulation of

pleasure, to Coleridge's concept of the logos, to Shelley's skeptical materialism, to

Byron's disinterested heroism. In choosing to locate this energy in Romantic theatre, and

its troubling confirontation of the mental energy of poetic reflection with the political

energy of the popular crowd, I want to enhance the dialecticism of Romanticism generally.

Romanticism is here defined as an attitzit& of insistent critical scrutiny regarding the

assumption that an act of imaginative and verbal generation can and does become a

universally recognizable truth and, at the same time, an acceptance of that problem not as

a limitation to be overcome, but as an inherent condition of human thought and social

interaction.

What I am calling a theory of Romantic economics begins with Austin's initial

13

premise tha t language acts. The language of economic theory produced by bourgeois

thinkers and adopted by capitatist employers does not simply describe some force or

object called "the economy." Rather, this active theoretical language participates in the

heterogeneous labours of which the economy is composed. Defined in this way, Romantic

economics represents a critical trend within and around the study of economic phenomena

which extends well beyond the Romantic period proper. With Hoagwood and others I

regard the Ro~~n t i c s ' critique of political economy as in some ways an anticipation of

Marx. This study is indebted to recent interpretations of Mandst thought not exclusively

in its insistence on the historical priority of the class struggle such as entered the

mainstream of literary historicism, especially of the Romantic period, via the work of

Raymond Wfiarns and E. P. Thompson. Rather, this study .seeks to make clear the

co~ect ion between Austin's theory of the performative and recent analyses and

adaptations of Marxism interested in chalienging the idea that modem capitalist culture

such as began to emerge at the beginning of the nineteenth century is the only possible

historical or philosophical foundation for human action. With Frederic Jameson, for

instance, and his version of "late Mandsm" derived from Theodore Adorno and Georges

Lukacs, my understanding of Romantic economics sees the subject as a continually

emerging entity which can only be achieved through a vigilant engagement with the

historical forces that attempt to object@ it. Jameson's formulation of the political

unconscious demands that subjectivity be discovered through a constant engagement with

the myriad of competing discourses and interests between which, and only between which,

it can be understood autonomously. Though not specifically performative in its

orientation, therefore, the political unconscious shares with Austin's outline of

performative language a polemical insistence on an agentive power within the rules and

conventions which supposedly constitute it, and with which it is in dialectical

14

c~ntiontation.~ Unproductive creativity is not subordinate to the productive flow of

capital; rather the essential unproductivity of economic theory and the concept of social

production which it creates engage and enfold each other in a dialectical manner that

demands constant critical attention. My reading of Romantic economics is thus inspired

by Jacques Demda's announcement h Spectres of Manc that the tradition of

deconsbuctive thought that he inaugurated is hdamentally Manrist in its orientation;

such concepts as "iterability," the notion that the spoken word is always already a

repetition or citation of some conventional form which Derrida uses in his expansion of

Austin, represent "a radicalization" of philosophy and particularly the philosophy of

language, "in a certain qiril of Mdm" which will not allow any concept or idea to be

separated from the material conditions which give it form but which it wants to resist

(92)' My sense is that Austin too recognizes this fundamental contingency within the

Jameson calls these o b j e c t w g tendencies "semantic horizons" (Political Uncoylscious 75) and locates them at the various extents of social, political, and literary discourses which seek to define subjective experience. History, for Jameson, is the ultimate 'bntranscendable" horizon, in as much as he defines it as "the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or rescation as a mere object of representation or as a master code among many others. History is what hurts" (102). At the same time, the subject emerges fiom within this horizon as an expression of the realization of that necessity. Jameson's reading of Adorno's aesthetics expands his own intensely dialectical theory of interpretation. The search for the untranscendable horizon of history is a process of "desubjectiflcatio~ of tinding the material conditions for the emergence of the concept of the subject, which then comes into conflict with "aesthetic experience: some last remnant of absolutely subjective categories which the desubjectifying impulse cannot dissolve" (Lare M-m 123; see also M e s m mtd Form 4-12). Jameson fbrther locates these dialectical tendencies in Adorno's prose style (64). It is my belief that Austin's enigmatic theory of the speech act engages in a similar conf?ontation between the material forces of historical action and the dynamics of the subjective motivation of speech, and this engagement is evident, as it is in Adorno, in Austin's philosophical style and methodology. But because neither Jameson nor Adomo deals in any specific way with the concept of the performative, I limit my inclusion of them in this study to inspiration for my own interest in dialecticism.

'hother relevant facet of Spectres of M m to this study is Demda's readings of Shakespeare's Hmlet and Timon of Athem, both based on their convergences with Tibe

philosophy of language and, comelatively, the philosophy of concepts and thus

underscores his own significance to "a certain Spirit of Marxism."

This study thus converges with late Marxism in its critical demonstration of the

contingency of any theory which attempts to homogenize the extraordinary and

undefinable multiplicity of human experience even as it claims that there is no definitive

unity in that experience. That sublimated homogeneity is, as Jarneson argues,

characteristic of the capitalist mandate: anything can be exchanged for anything else. But

assumptions underlying that ubiquitous relativity are never questioned, merely accepted.

This problematic is central to the Romantic critique of political economy. The title of this

study, Divisions of Labour, is intended to recall this problematic of difference and

repetition in the classical notion of the division of labour, already a standard doctrine of

economic thought by the mid-eighteenth century, and hugely influential on economics,

politics, and sociology from Smith to Mill to Durkheim to Business Week and 7he

Economist. The division of labour is the great network of specialized trades and

competing interests which is assumed to exist at all levels of society fiom the family to the

workshop to the nation. For Marx, importantIy, the idea that the division of labour in

society is universal and beneficial hides a hdamental contradiction. At some early stage

in the development of Western culture, every labourer was an independent craftsperson,

and thus trade was a largely heterogeneous and inconsistent affair. Increases in population

and the localization of businesspeople into towns and cities inspired the commercial

demand for surplus quantities of commodities beyond the immediate needs of the

labourers themselves. This demand in turn inspired the scientific division of labour into

Communist Manifesto and The Eighteenth Bnmrore ofLouis Bonaparte respectively. Derrida's incorporation of the ambivalence of the economic subtexts of these plays with the theatrical sense that as drama. They also evade the totalizing strategies of interpretation testifies to the importance of the idea of theatre to the philosophy of deconstruction in its new prominently political incarnation.

what Marx calls "detail labouring" in the workshops. While the market expands into a

self-sustaining equilibrium, the fieedorn of the market rests on the imposition of

administrative restrictions on the economic fieedom of the factory labourer. At the same

time, for M w it is only the surplus energy of the worker which contributes to the profit

of the employer and thus to the fieedom of the marketplace. Labour power itself remains

heterogeneous and individualized; it only has the goal of organic relational regularity in

relation to other labours when it is conceived as such according to the relational values of

commodities.

What is interesting in this discussion is that the language of the economist shares in

this contradiction between prefigured rationalization and unharnessed eEart. While he

glorifies the idea that the division of labour in society is necessarily k e , the economist is

blind to the restrictions and regulations in the factory which makes that freedom possible:

The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrares the division of labour

in the workshop; We-long annexation of the labourer to a partial operation,

and his complete subjection to capital, as being an organization of labour

that increases its productiveness--that same bourgeois mind akn0unce.s

with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the

process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the

rights of property, fkedom and the selfaeterrnining 'genius' of the

individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists

of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general

organization of the labour of society, than that it would turn all society into

a factory. (Cqilal 1 : 477; emphasis added)

Marx's fucical economist is certainly a historical composite of trends and attitudes and it

is quite true that Marx himself does not acknowledge his own rhetoric even as he makes

this historical assumption. Correspondingly, the various and contradictory modes of

17

verbal and rhetorical action which Manr adumbrates in "bourgeois consciousness"

correspond to exertions or even labours which create, by industrious, imaginative,

rhetorical, and coercive means the truths by which we live. My point is that the creation

of economies is itself the result of verbal acts of publicly announcing beliefs in certain

ideas of how the world works and relating them to specific instances.

Though I believe that Romantic economics is a trend in economic thought

apparent in, though not completely encompassing, Marxism, I want to distinguish this

imagined verbal heterology fiom the concept of ideology. As Terry Eagleton explains,

ideology is a multifaceted concept in intellectual discourse, ranging in origin and

application from M m ' s commodity fetishism to the huge array of social and cultural

relations analyzed in the social and human sciences. Ideology does tend to coalesce

around a notion of social unity formulated as a set of values and beliefs which are then

used by the dominant power of a culture to maintain its control (28-30). Certainly,

Austin's speech act theory draws attention to the ideological implications of the very

bourgeois mentality of which Manc is so critical, its praisings, urgings, and

denouncements. As has been argued by Judith Butler and Sandy Petrey, Austin's notion

of the performative is thus comparable to Marx's own notion of ideology as it appears in

Marx' s critical texts such as The Gemany Iakology and me Eighteenth Bnrmaire of

Louis Bompmte and as it has been refined most prominently by Louis Althusser.

AIthusser makes plain the connection between the pervasiveness of the capitalist ideology

and language in an uncannily performative sense by suggesting that ideology "hails " the

subject it defines conceptually, as a policeman might hail us on the street were we to

perform an infraction in his sight (1 7 1). Butler thus compares the performative with

Althusser's notion of the "interpellation" of subjects into such prescribed conditions of

subjectivity as that which is created by social rituals perceived to derive from outside it.

Ideology may come into being through a habituation to ritualized enactments of

18

recognition, such as in Althusser's police state, or of celebration, as in Marx's satire on

bourgeois economics.' But Butler also argues that it is possible to see in the presence of

language a source of creative potential which is not interpelative, but rather substantial,

aflFective, and forcefbl. Butler's revision of Austin is analogous to instances of French

postmodern economics such as Lyotard7s libidinal economy and Baudrillard's symbolic

exchange. Though there are significant differences in their economic reflections7 both

Lyotard and Baudrillad have advanced a notion of a powerfdly physical, unconscious,

and most significantly grduitous energy which cannot be accounted for by a political

economy based on notions of utility and self-interest. Derived in part from Jacques

Lacan's structuralist revisions of the Freudian unconscious and Georges Bataille's radical

revisions of Marcel Mauss's notion of Pothch, postmodem economics dovetails with

Romanticism and speech-act theory alike in posing this energy as an outside alternative to

political economy's assumption of use and profit9

An important connection between postmodern economics and speech act theory

that is significant for this study of Romantic drama is its significant theafrrfrrcaI dimension.

Bataille, for instance, includes both gambling (an essential speech act) and theatre as

instances of a "principle of loss" which exists alongside and in conflict with such

conventionally understood human instincts as self-preservation (1 19-20). But the most

particularly germane connecting point between the postmodern critique of economics and

* See Petrey, "Reality of Representation," 464-65 for a comparison of Austin's performative, Marx's ideology, and Althusser ' s interpellation.

Pefanis provides an insightfid overview of these influences. According to Pefanis, the significant starting point for this genealogy was Kojeve's lectures on Hegel at the S O ~ O M ~ in the 1930s. Kojeve argued that in Hegel's dialectic of the master and slave, the work of the slave constitutes the perpetuation of a "desire for recognition" which, in constantly negating the dominating system, is the impetus of history (1 1-2).

nineteenth-century drama is Nietzsche's Birth of ~ragedy.'' Though ostensibly a historical

examination of ancient Greek drama, and circumstantially an apologia for Wagner, the

lasting contribution of Birth of Tragea to modem philosophy is its dialectical

co&ontation of the forces of reasoq'representation, and science, ruled over by the figure

of ApolIo, with will, repetition, and-art, dominated by the figure of Dionysus. By locating

the conflict of these forces on the ancient Greek stage Nietzsche conceives what Peter

Sloterdijk calls the ''tableaux" of philosophy in which Apollonian rationaIi~ confronts the

untenable nightmare of Dionysian excess (Hi)." The Dionysian is, in effect, the

'Qutler, for instance, invokes Nietzsche's use of the enigmatic German verbal- noun "das tun," the doing, to encapsulate this notion of a processive linguistic actualization which does not form itself into a positive concept (Excitable Speech 45-6).

" Sloterdijk offers an interpretation of the underlying ubiquity of the Apollonian in Nietzschean theatre in terms of the performative, and indeed theatrical, element of philosophical reason forcemy inventing the history it presumes to define:

historical-philosophical speech acts are the speech acts of a cultural orientation. The description of one's own historical position determines the quality of one's historical pose. Where, however, should these speech acts be performed if not on the dramatic stage of thought, upon which the engaged actors themselves intervene in the fate of their culture? We are able to recognize in Nietzsche more clearly than in anyone else ... the fact that great historical-philosophical oratory allows the speaker to burst forth like a force majeure, whereby this oratory reaches a crisis point in the self- realization as a proclamation of self on the part of the speaker, and not without this realization being inserted most narrowly into the tendencies and potentiality of the moment. ... The subjectivity of the speaker is elevated by this, purified of the interests of arrogance, and transformed into a phenomenon. Every essential historical moment is, however--as Walter Benjamin knew-a "moment of danger," and it is this danger that mediates all subjectivity. Thus one can say-presuming a slight taste for dark formulation--that it is not the thinker who is engaging himself and thinking. Rather, it is this danger that engages itself and thinks through him. (18)

That the danger of the historical moment thinks through the subject means that the proclamation of subjectivity is both threatened by and created by a basic force which itself can only be defined in negative terms by that proclamation. This is an interesting way of paraphrasing the political implications of Austin's theory of speech acts, as I will present it in Chapter 1. I wish to insist that this force is not necessarily dominant, and that what must be recognized is its potential to f d into self-conceptions which have the potential to

unproductive: intoxication, lethargy, but also joy and energy. Dionysianism registers the

creative power of art, and also its insurgent destructiveness. But there is in Nietzsche's

theatrical vision a forcefid counter-temptation to retum to the Apollonian fold, to name,

distance, and exclude the dangerous excesses of needlessness and unproductivity. This

force is not only compelling, SIoterdijk argues, but constant, to the extent that Dionysian

excess can be represented only as its other, as the un-representable (24-5). Nietzsche thus

conceives not of "a theatre of representation" but "a theatre of repetitioqw as Gilles

Deleuze revises the terms, "the emptiness of that space ... filled and determined by the

signs and masks through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles" (Repetition

rmd Dzfference 1 0). Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy represents a compelling link between

the demure world of modem philosophy and the more untenable and irascible world of

Romantic drama mainly because it challenges philosophy it sell; as Austin does, to confront

the traces of "force" that linger in its concept of truth. As Butler suggests, Nietzsche and

Austin together charge the notion of performance with the hidden cruelty of theatre. On

the other hand, the recognition of this cruelty manifests the awakening of the rebellious

consciousness of Dionysianism, in the form of unproductivity, which is defined by and yet

resists capitalist homogeneity.

We must be carell not to over-emphasize such concepts of "ideology" and

"force" because they tend to rei@ the idea of powers beyond the reach of the individual

agent which political economy contends it is the responsibility of the individual to respect

as the defining features of that individuality. The Romantics, moreover, were profoundly

aware that the subject emerges through and in cofiontation with, rather than by means of,

these forces; their dramatic project is an attempt to stage this profoundly dialectic process.

In part this dramatization hinges on the eminently Marxist idea of the material, the

become ideologies. For the significance of this Nietzschean dialectic to Romantic thought, see Rajan, Dmk Infetpreter 42-50.

21

objective existence of things prior to any conception of them as commodities, though, with

Baudrillard, I conceive that materiality to be unconnected to any (paradoxically)

transcendental notion of use. l2 The theatrical dimension of this dialecticism is articulated

in the notion of Trauerpiel, or "Mourning play, " as developed by Walter Benjamin in his

Origin of G e m Tragic Drama- By contrast to tragedy, through which the social fiction

of law is established by the hero's co&ontation with his own in.f?action, Trouerspiel

allegorizes the currespondeace of that law to its material conceptualization. Mourned on

stage, the lost heroic subject is transformed by the theatrical experience into a realization

of a potential redemption which can only be seen as a latent possibility of action

countering the action of history in fie utilitarian sense. Negativity is in Benjamin's

understanding the truth-content within the dramatized economy, figured on stage as

theatre itself. Although Benjamin's Trauer~piel is a dramaturgical product of the German

baroque and not English Romanticism, the philosophical polemic with which Benjamin

prefaces Origin echoes much of what is compelling and topical about Romantic aesthetic

and dramatic theory. In this "Epistemo-Critico Prologue," Benjamin makes a distinction

between "[tlhe object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention in the concept"

and "truth.. . an intentionless state of being made up of ideas" (36). While such a

distinction seems to recall a Romantic idealism for which truth corresponds to an apriori

category of spiritual fieedom (such as is found, for instance, in Schiller's notion of the

l2 My sense is that Romantics anticipate Baudrillard's claim in The Mirror of P rdc t ion that the concept of use is itself a creation not only of exchange processes but a h of political economy itself as theory. Baudrillard counters Kristeva's claim that Marxian revolution encompasses a realm of fiee-play and waste which is inherent in the idea of symbolic exchange as theorized by Bataille. Baudrillard contends that Mandst thought is in fact the "apotheosis" of political economy, Limiting all conceptions of force or discharge to the elemental bc t ion of use. What Baudrillard calls "symbolic exchange" and posits outside of the concept of usefiilness of political economy could, however, be said to correlate with Smith's sense of the unproduaivity of philosophy and thus be brought back into relation with political economy, and Mandsm, at the level of a consideration of its theoretical, and essentially performative, nature..

aesthetic education), Benjamin's idea-based truth without intentionality more closely

points to the natural redemption of that purer level of objectivity, as Benjamin calls it, "a

mode of being which in its lack of intentionality resembles the simple existence of things."

"Truth," Benjamin says, "is not an intent which realizes itself in empirical reality; it is the

power which determines the essence of this empirical realify" (36). But for Benjamin, that

redemption accords directly with a declaration of autonomy, though not, sigdicantly, of

subjective priority.

The state of being, beyond all phenomenality, to which done this power

belongs is that of the name. This determines the manner in which ideas are

given. But they are not so much given in a primordial language as in a

primordial form of perception, in which words possess their own nobility as

names, unimpaired by cognitive meaning.. . The idea is something linguistic,

it is that element of the symbolic in the essence of any word. In empirical

perception, in which words have become fragmented, they possess, in

addition to their more or less hidden symbolic aspect, an obvious profane

meaning. It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the

primacy of the symbolic character of the word in which the idea is given

self-consciousness.. . Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of

naming, and they have to be renewed in philosophical conternpiation. (36-

7)

With the "name of the idea," Benjamin encourages a philosophical perspective on

language, an intentionless "act of naming." This then is the symbolic aspect of the word

"given" to this unique mode of perception on language in its creative context. The

allegorical or "fiagmentedw world of "cognitive meaning" represents a super-imposition of

profanity. In it, and especially as it is dramatized by the excess of the baroque, Benjamin

charges, "[alny person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else"

23

(173). Benjamin points here to the theatrical orchestration of experience of which Marxist

thought is so critical. But, in that theatre is also, Benjamin opines, the perception of

redemption in the quest for truth, the hidden name of objects in their elemental material

state. While understanding the dynamic presence of linguistic forces in human subjectivity

and motivation and not sublimating them into broad determining conceptions of

wnsciousness, Romantic economics nevertheless sees the emancipatory or redemptive

potential which can only come fiom a direct engagement with material reality.

Benjamin implies that individual moments of dramatic action comprise an aesthetic

unity which is not, in the ordinary sense, the same as the causality presumed to underlie

history or even the collective distribution of significations, but which is rather an

accumulation of potentially redemptive gestures and transgressions at the local level of

individual material utterances. This also explains why Baudrillard's symbolic exchange and

Lyotard' s libidinal economy are so difficult in themselves to manage: they are visions of a

centre, a home, a space without management, an oikos without nomia, which exists in the

moment of its own action but which cannot be rationalized according to conventional

relational logic. This is where both speech-act theory and Romantic drama enter the stage

as significant points of mediation. For in Austin's thought and in important instances of

Romantic drama these discrete material instances of sudden verbal transgression of

political economy are dramatized as acts of language in contrast to what Marx called the

"language of commodities," the equations of values and meanings which exist between

concepts and manufactured objects. By associating Austin's notion of linguistic force with

materiality, I do not mean, as Austin complains is often the tendency of linguistic analysis,

to pinpoint "the minimum physical act" which somehow correlates the act of speaking to

some conventionally significant mode of action--that is, that saying "please pass the salt7'

equals a certain gesture of "requesting." Rather, I want to draw attention to the

continuous accumulation and bewildering variety of claims, statements, judgements,

promises, afEmations, and declarations which litter the scenes of discourse. I also want

to stress, while looking at the dynamics of Herent kinds of verbal action such as are

represented by the above List, that perfonnative language theory and Romantic theatre

studies alike can engage with the real problems of discrete economic and political

concerns and not simply reduce them all to a controversy of textuality. Speech-act theory

emphasizes the power of words to accomplish social change with no referential object but

their own existence as accomplishments. It is this substantial and forcefid matter of

language which so dismayed Smith and the economists that followed him: it is there, it is

sensed and felt, but it cannot be commodified. It cannot be given a value, because it has

no permanent form or positive nieaning. But this elusive material force also compels

economic thought: it is the utterance of evaluation which creates the value that is

supposed to inhere in the relations between commodities subsequently observed.

With this notion of the present but hidden materiality of the apparently

unproductive linguistic act, it is finally possible to offer conceptual definitions of

performance and theatre different from the perfonnativity and theatricality propounded by

post-structuralist and new-historicist criticism. By perfonnativity is implied an uncanny

and uncertain sense that agency is subtended by structures of authority and power which

rely on a rhetorical strategy to justify their efficacy and that of the agency they presume to

sustain. Theatricality, in turn, is the social play of that verbal conundrum seen in such a

way that the performance of those powers and authorities is foregrounded. As an

alternative to these concepts, I defineperfnnmce as that substantial verbal action

through which certain social endeavours take place, including the prescription of those

actions as non-linguistic or outside of the purview of language proper. If I call a meeting

to order, then for that meeting to come to order legitimately, there would have to exist a

complex nexus of rights and authorities by which I could call the meeting to order and by

which the other participants in the meeting would actually come to order. But while that

25

scene effectively dramatizes the causal relationships which tend to fimction in board-room

etiquette, the point of stressing the substantial act of performing the order itself is that, if

indeed I called the meeting to order, under those circumstances none of the authorities and

rights would be worth a jot unless I actually said something like "I call this meeting to

order." Subjective intention is not, moreover, necessary for that call to be considered

effective. If the meeting came to order in conjunction with some other event, say by a bird

squawking outside the window, then something eke has hqpeneg but, we still cannot

assume a causal link between such an event and the authorities which supposedly circulate

around it.

Theatre, then, is a very important instance of this kind of performance. What

actors say or do on stage and the impressions of the meaning of the play which the

audience takes away f?om that performance are not necessarily connected. Nevertheless,

it is by seeing an actor perform a certain action in a certain place at a certain time that I am

moved or humoured in a particular way. If I watch one character on stage promise to pay

another five dollars, I would be a fool if; the promise having gone unpaid during the play, I

went tearing backstage after the show demanding that the money be handed over. But in

the moment of its utterance, I must look past my skeptical judgement and believe that the

promise has been made. In this case, however, the vividness of the injustice of non-

payment or a system that would allow such reneging to take place, is rendered palpable by

the simultaneous materiality, self-evidence, and uselessness of the promise in its theatrical

setting. The adaptation here of an economic act to a hypothetical stage play is intentional;

by repeatedly drawing attention to the material act of speech which is frequently

subordinated to systems of behaviour and power in political economy, Romantic drama

offers a significant linguistic critique of political economy. From this reading of the

performative language of economics on the Romantic stage, my sense is that by

negotiating the relation between the materiality of the verbal act and its disappearance in

the conventionalism or institutionalism of authority, performative language theory can help

elucidate the impact of the palpable nothingness of performance on politid economy by

formulating a materially-based alternative to the subordination of unproductive labour and . other linguistic acts in the system of capital. The result of this elucidation is a new mode of

economics, one which embracesthe creative potential of human ingenuity and accepts the

potential manipulation of that genius by conventional or coercive means but also realizes

the contingency of both that genius and that coercion in the mass of competing interests

and inventions embodied by ordinary language. .e

Romantic theatre embodies the failure of the ideal of subjective autonomy; it also

embodies that negativity as an accumulation of energies composed in the material excesses

of word upon word, line upon Line, scene upon scene. The language of these plays, their

poetic hyperbole and occasional melodramatic ludicrousness, embodies within the

presumed relational value of word and meaning the presence of a si@cant verbal and

material mobility. On the Romantic stage, the language of economic action within

economic theory appears as what AEed Kitchcock called a ' ' M a c G u ~ " the purloined

object which the characters in Hitchcock's films seek, supposedly for some life-altering

purpose, but which turns out to be essentially inconsequential. What the MacGuffin is,

Hitchcock told Franwis TdEaut, is "beside the point ... of no importance whatever" (98);

what is important is that it is understood by certain characters to have vital importance

while for the greater number of participants in the story it is of no ~onsequence.'~ The

l3 "[TJhe term originated," Hitchcock explains, '%om a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the luggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin. ' The first one asks, 'What's a MacGuffin. ' 'Well,' the other man says, 'it's an apparatus for trapping Lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The fint man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers, 'Well then, that's no MacGufi! ' So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all" (99)

27

MacGuf£in is a fiagment of some untapped reality which has no immediately sensed

bearing on the world as it is commonly rationaked, and which is therefore excluded as a

useless object or a pointless gesture. Romantic drama tries to recapture the elusiveness of

the unproductive materiality of speech as theatre, and in the process of formalizing it

spectacularly, grandly, and sometimes farcically, exposes both its difficulty and its political

necessity.

But I still want to argue that this theatrical unproductivity is tied to the place of

Romantic drama in history, even while I want to use performative language to reconsider

how literary criticism might handle such historical contextualizations. "The drama,"

Benjamin wrote, "more than any other literary form, needs a resonance in history" (48). It

is the aim of this study to recapture the historical resonance in Romantic drama by tracing

its development in relation to the emergence of political economy as a theoretical

discipline. As Benjamin suggested, however, critical analysis can register this genuine

history only by "concerning itself with the metaphysics of this form, understood concretely

and in all its firlhess," demanding a sensitivity to a "mosaic" quality of conceptualization.

As a result, there is a need for a methodological apparatus which can attend to the

aesthetically rich correlation of language and mise en sc&e without attenuating the pitch

of its historical, and specifically economic, specificity. Part of the reason why speech-act

theory can do this, is because it too is attenuated to the relation between concepts like

convention, intention, and effect which are presumed to act through language while it

encourages attention to the discrete activation of language itself Chapter 1 will therefore

outline a new theory of Romantic drama based on the importance of Austin's theory of the

speech act to this materialist methodology. I argue that the dialectical impulse of

Romantic plays between their antagonism to theatrical conventionality on the one hand

and their sense of the material resilience of the theatrical act on the other is specifically

oriented around the question of the materiality of verbal performance, and that therefore

Austin's original and highly polemical introduction of the concept of the performative in

this material sense offers a significant theoretical base. It is this polemical imposition of

the concept of the performative, which partakes of both the broader phenomenological a

conceptions of verbal presence and more piagmatic desires to conceive of the ordinary

function of discrete verbal acts, and which is demonstrated even in Austin's work through

a new conception of material theatre which underlies-Romantic economics.

The remainder of this study will present three test cases of this speech-act theory . of Romantic drama in critical contestation with political economy. In keeping with my

definition of Romanticism not as a period but as an attitude toward theatricality and

economics, chapter 2 will argue that Richard Brinsley Sheridan's euphorically cynical

comedy, The &hmI for Sm&l, represents the basic polemical thrust of Romantic

economics by engaging with the problem of linguistic force in conjunction with the notion

of the contract, a central instance of performative language, and an understated but crucial

aspect of enlightenment economics. The final chapters will extend this engagement to

more specific economics problems in their historical contexts. Chapter 3 will consider the

economics of poverty in Wiuiarn Wordsworth's tragic experiment, 7he Borakrers.

Wordsworth's dramatization of hunger and alienation at the time of the Crusades offers a

displaced commentary on the exclusion of the poor and desolate fiom the utilitarianism of

the revolutionary period, and the paradoxically disturbing pleasure of theorizing that

poverty into relation with concepts of fieedom, necessity, and labour. Finally, chapter 4

will suggest that Percy Bysshe Shelley's excruciating melodrama, The Cenci, includes a

subtle allegory of the Bullion Controversy regarding the relative value of gold and its

representation as money which dominated economic thought in Britain for the first quarter

of the nineteenth century. Its verbal energy, challenging the decorum of acceptable stage

speech, deconstructs the theatricality inherent in the views of monetary economists that

money, the ultimate economic speech act, follows determinate principles of behaviour.

Chapter 1

The Economics of Anti-theatricality or is There an Dlocution in the House?

Towards a Speech-Act Theory of Romantic Drama

This chapter develops a theory of Romantic drama adapting the polemical

foundations of J- L. Austin's concept of the performative. The notion of "performative"

language intimates a theatrical conception of social behaviour with profound theoretical

and methodological implications for Austin's idea that language can do things other than

describe. It is important to remember that Austin introduced the performative not in a

treatise, or even in a book, but in the 1955 Wfiarn James lectures at Harvard University.

He was an adept lecturer and a popular teacher, though he apparently preferred the

competitive atmosphere of the symposium as the best arena for philosophical inquiry. His

approach in the James lectures reflects this sense that the discipline of philosophy demands

constant revision and reform through a direct contiontation with ordinary language.'

There is still the matter of Austin's famous exclusion of "utterances ... said by an actor on a

stage" from consideration under the terms of performative analysis (22). Although the

exclusion is only a minor part of his philosophical program, Austin's uneasy feelings about

theatrical utterances-that they are only corrupt or "parasiticn imitations of real and proper

speech-actually has paramount implications for the polemical trajectory which Austin

promoted through his analysis of performative language. This trajectory runs alongside

'For an account of Austin's "sharply astringent" teaching methods see Warnock "Austin" in Fann 7-15. Austin's preferred scholarly arena was his Saturday meetings. Oxfiord dons and students came together once a week to discuss new works of philosophy, including Wittgenstein's PhiZosophid Ihwtigatiom, and works of linguistics such as C homslq's Syntactical Structures. Only in 1 962, three years after Austin's death, did Unnson and Sbid edit and publish the lectures as How lo Do Things wilh Words.

many of the philosophical and polemical aims evident in Romantic literature, especially

Romanticism's own uneasy encounters with the theatre. A few readers of Austin suggest

that a model of perforrnative criticism may be extrtlpolated from the bizarre paradox of

Austin's staged repudiation of theatre.2 To date, no one has speculated on the relation

between Austin's exclusion of theatre and the enigmatic rejection of theatre which

distinguishes Romantic drama in the English Literary canon. This chapter suggests that

such a speculation is not only convenient but crucial to understanding both the potential of

speech-act theory as a critical medium and the critical intent of Romantic drama.

The mutual compatibility of Austin's theory and Romantic theatre hinges on the

dialectic inherent in perfontrance, the competing ideas that social behaviour is governed

by certain rules and praxes evident in linguistic usage and that such behaviour always

eludes explication because the necessary categorical divisions between convention and

intention, causality and accident, mentality and materiality, seriousness and playfulness, are

blurred. Both speech-act theory and Romantic drama ostensibly advocate a governing

dynamic of communicative action Limited to operations of mind: hence the emphasis on

"intentionality" in much speech-act theory and the characterization of Romantic drama as

"mental" or "closet theatre." However, to "closet" performance so that it becomes the

representative object of mental or social forces is also to recognize a threateningly

palpable energy within theatrical enunciation which needs to be go~erned.~ Yet this

Felman 108 draws attention to the way Austin himself partakes of the "seductiveness" of performative language as a phenomenon which resists positive explication by employing a "cheeky" participatory rhetoric of "indulgence" in his jocular and informal lecture style.

This is essentially the way Sedgwick dehes the closet in literary history and in homosexual discourse in relation to the supposedly normative regulations imposed on linguistic behaviour by Austin's speech-act theory. c"Closetedness' i tser ' she writes, "is a performance initiated by a silence that accrues particularly by fits and starts in relation to

energy obviates the material condition by which the interaction between a performative act

and its analysis can take place. The ideal of performative efficacy in speech-act theory co-

exists with an idea of a conceptually insubstantial experience which, fiom a rational

perspective, is only definable as false, fake, or to use Austin's term, "non-serious."

Theatre negates the positivist logical stratifications of perfonnative language theory and in

that negation opens it to the very possibility of its own implausible existence. By

foreclosing theatre, Austin and the Romantics alike point to a creative potential in social

interaction which cannot be foreclosed.

The dramatization of the negated, counter-rational, openly theatrical force within

verbal performance simultaneously with its suppression in both speech-act theory and

Romantic drama leads me to situate Austin's philosophy of language between

phenomenology and pragmatics, the two schools of thought to which he has been

variously allied. Phenomenological criticism, derived from the philosophy of Edmund

Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, considers how works of art and

literature "appear" to an observing consciousness or, more specifically, the way that the

appearance of art manifests a conceptual fluidity which includes the subject position of its

observer. Austin once called his method "linguistic phenomenologytt ("A Plea for

Excuses" 182); it is a premise of this study that Austin participates in the challenge

phenomenology mounts against the determinism underscoring much philosophical inquiry.

At the same time, Austin was a principal advocate of the pragmatic study of ordinary

language and the way complex philosophical concepts make themselves felt in daily life.

the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it" (Epistemology 3). My argument is that this "silence77 registers the nothingness which persists in the breakdown of the theatricalized nonnative discourses of economic theory, a breakdown that, in fact, Austin anticipates. For Sedgwick's reading of this differential speech-act theory in the context of theatrical performance see her "Introduction" to Perfnnance and Perfrmativify, 1-16.

Here Austin is in company with such philosophers and historians as Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig

Wingenstein, Quentin Skinner, Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, and, through the

intercession of Jiirgen Habermas, the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School. This

chapter will suggest that these phenomenological and pragmatic polarities intersect in

Austin's account of performance. Together they help to clarifL the dialectic of Romantic

drama, an u~esolvable encounter between the philosophical conception of language as a

defining structure of reality and the negation of that conceptualization in the resistance of

linguistic experience to such definitions.

Austin's challenge to philosophical positivism is the basis for the critique of

political economy offered by Romantic drama and its re-staging of economic speech acts.

This chapter will not address directly the significance of Romantic drama to the political

economy with which it is contemporary. It wiU nevertheless prepare the critical ground

for such a consideration. First, it will demonstrate the way performative language theory

in itself constitutes an alternative mode of analysis to the explanatory or descriptive modes

which predominate in the social sciences, notably in political economy. Second, it will

suggest that the way Romantic drama theory attempts to manage the coIlusive phenomena

ofthe theatre and the closet comprises an economics, specifically, an economics of anri-

theatricaIiity, and that it shares this administrative tendency with much speech-act theory

and criticism. Finally, it will show that the original formulation of speech-act theory in

How to Do Things with Worh and the Romantics' experiments with theatrical forms and

dramatic genres realize the existence of a power in language which subtends such concepts

as the subject, rationality, and political economy as they are palpably experienced. This

critical alternative to rational subordination is the theoretical ground of what wiU

subsequently be called Romantic economics.

Austin's Polemic

Applications of speech-act theory to literary criticism and social theory customarily

begin with a review of the major premises of How to Do TTiings with W o r k Such

reviews usually assume that the perfonnative can be used as a paradigm with which to

prove that social reality is subtended by language. The ovenvhelming tendency is to

conclude that language forms the structural basis for agency which it is the responsibility

of the critic or theorist to expose and elaborate. By contrast, my review of Austin's work

focuses on the polemical anti-determinism evident in Austin's lesser-known philosophical

essays and latent in the James lectures.' This attention to Austin's polemic reverses the

agenda of most applications of speech-act theory by insisting that the reality of language

as a social phenomenon is a condition of existence which cannot be circumscribed by

philosophical analysis but which nevertheless must be respected as a presence in the world.

In the first lecture of Haw to Do 17rings with Work. Austin challenges a basic

philosophical premise: the only purpose of language is the description of physical objects

or mental states. Austin calls this premise "the 'descriptive' fallacy" (3). There are, he

suggests, utterances other than statements; these utterances are neither non-sense nor

rhetorical appeals (to emotion, for instance) nor "pseudo-statements" (2)' but rather

incidents of ordinary speech which perform actions rather than refer to them. Austin thus

* In this I roughly follow Austin's adherents in Anglo-American philosophy. See for instance Warnock for a general survey of Austin's philosophical ideas and the place of performative language among them. Go- 98- 108 strongly recommends that Literary critics klly examine Austin's broader philosophical agenda before attempting to apply it to the study of literary works. These philosophical readers tend to understand Austin's project to be fimdamentally pragmatic, an effort to clarify exactly what happens when people speak, and this has led other scholars to suggest that Austin f d s into exactly the kind of normative traps he seems to be arguing against. My sense is that Austin's methodological confi-ontation with the materiality of the scene of language already anticipates these criticisms.

34

divides language into two categories: constative utterances and performative utterances.

"YOU are very richn and "Julia is running" are constative; they are "statements" which can

be considered true or false. "I bet you five dollars," "I bequeath" and "I promise" are

pe&ormative; they neither make statements about the world nor describe states of

consciousness. By isolating the phenomenon of verbal action, Austin overturns the basic

philosophical tenet that the exclusive purpose of language is representation.

Having proposed this basic division, Austin suddenly drops the challenge and

attempts in a more conventionally analytical manner to isolate the category of the

performative from the constative. Initially, he delineates the criteria necessary to calibrate

exactly what happens when these utterances are made according to semantic rules and

under normal social circumstances. Austin thus proposes six rules by which utterances

may be counted "happy" in this way: (At) the existence of "an accepted conventional

procedure having a certain conventional effect"; (A2) the appropriateness or authority of

"the particular persons and circumstances"; (B 1) "the procedure must be executed by all

participants both correctly and (B2) completely"; (TI) "the procedure is designed for use

and accomplished by persons having certain thoughts or feelings"; (r2) the participants

"must actually so conduct themselves subsequently." These rules emphasize proper and

necessary actions, gestures, effects, and the acceptance of that propriety and necessity by

all participants in the utterance situation (14- 15).

To consolidate these conventional rules, Austin must determine the extent of their

influence in a range of possible speech situations. He therefore considers instances in

which the rules are broken. Austin calls these instances "infelicities" (14). In the process,

he ascertains that conventional rules do not serve to isolate the performative fiom the

constative. There are a number of speech situations in which the applicability of

constative utterances to the immediate situation they are intended to describe implies the

35

efficacy of rules of conventional behaviour (32). Conversely, for conventional rules to be

effective, "certain statements have to be true" (44); the distinction between an act and a

fact becomes very slippery. Austin then turns to grammatical criteria, but these prove to

be similarly untenable. The phrase "I promise" may invoke an intention and a conventional

procedure, but neither word on its own substantiates the force of one or the other.

Indeed, a verb may be performative, as in "Ipromise," and it may, in another instance, be

constative as in "I promised" or "you will promise" (70-71).

That a constative utterance can also be a performative utterance turns out to be the

most significant conclusion of Austin's work. "It is essential to realize" Austin confirms,

"that 'true' and 'false', like 'free' and 'u&eet, do not stand for anything simple at all; but

only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong

thing, in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these

intentions" (145). Because the analytical criteria of rules and grammar do not encompass

all of the potential contingencies of performative utterances, including the realization that

performativity may be implied in a constative utterance, Austin shifts his perspective from

semantics to "the total speech act in the total speech situation" (52). The total speech act,

Austin asserts, has three dimensions: the locution, the illocution, and the perlocution. The

locution is comprised of the phonetic and gnunmatical "units of speech" (94). The

perlocution is the "sequel" of the utterance, an effect on the hearer which may induce an

emotional reaction or a new belief or another action. The illocution is what happens as

the locution occurs; in saying the locution "I promise" I have performed the illocutionary

act of promising. Austin insists that to understand what happens when a person speaks,

philosophers must pay particular attention to the illocution. Austin calls this aspect of the

utterance illmtionmy force, and he suggests that this power is somehow "given" in a

certain speech situation quite apart fiom the meaning of the words (100). The

36

illocutionary act is a social event in which the possible conventional and contextual

parameters of a certain word in a certain speech situation a d y occur. Uocutionary

force can only be regarded as a kind of spirit of the authorizing social power which makes

the speech act do something and which Lingers, like the smoke fiom a gun, in even the

most descriptive utterances as they are scrutinized by the forensic examination of

philosophy.

Because iliocutionary force is both a power and a social event, it focuses the

dialectical bind between the social situation of speech and its material independence fiom

that context which Austin encounters in Iiis delineation of the dimensions of the

performative. An important corollary to the illocutionary a d is the consent of the hearer

of that promise that it has been completed, that when I say, "I promise," I have thereby

promised. Austin calls this consent "uptoke" (1 17). Uptake is not the same as

perlocutionary effect, which is, by contrast, the response of the hearer (and also the

speaker, depending on the nature of the utterance) rather than some sign or indication that

the illocutionary act has, in fact, occurred. With the concept of uptake, Austin suggests

that language cannot be said to exist without some social dynamic between a speaker, a

hearer, and, often, a participating audience or witness. Austin has a good deal of dficulty

distinguishing the illocutionary act from its perlocutionary effect, largely because the

response of the hearer, the perlocutionary domain, is also necessary for uptake. Austin

must return to the notion of the "total speech act in the total speech situation" as the only

possible phenomenon for linguistic study, since he has just proved that its component

aspects cannot be separated.

Austin's inability to distinguish illocutionary acts and their uptake &om

perlocutionary effects and their causes points to the limits ofthe analytical style. Austin

keeps suggesting "doctrines" for the various aspects of the speech act, but the doctrines

keep opening themselves to revision and in most cases rejection. In the last lecture, for

instance, Austin retreats from these "numerous loose endsw (148) of his study to subdivide

the concepts of illocutionary force and perlocutionary effm into regulatory classifications

of performative verbs. He settles on verdictives (judgements, estimations), exercitives

(commands, warnings), cornmissives (promises, commitments), behabitives (greetings,

condolences), and expositives (statements, questions, afErmations). Nevertheless, these

categories overlap. A judgement, such as ''that angry buil is rushing straight for us!"

could also be construed as a waning ("we might be trampled!") or a command ("get out

of the way!"). Austin discovers that the investigation of what it means to use language in

social relations elucidates the fact that any categorization of speech into its rules and

dimensions can be "an abstraction only" (147). The speech situation always involves more

"action" than can be accounted for by philosophy. Crucially, Austin's initial discovely of

the performative utterance still holds: but now his challenge to the "descriptive fallacy" has

been expanded into a critique of method, as Austin cannot come to any conclusive rational

explanation of how the performative works..

At the conclusion of his lectures, Austin returns to his original distinction: "the

doctrine of the performativd constative distinction stands to the doctrine of locutionary

and illocutionary acts in the total speech situation as the special theory to the general

theory. And the need for the general theory arises simply because the traditional

'statement' is an abstraction, an ideal, and so is its traditional truth and falsity" (148). This

new division of speech-act theory into special and general theories creates a dynamic

dialectical mode of analysis between the need for rigorous modes of classification and

interpretation and the acceptance of linguistic agency in its mysterious yet palpable

materiality. The upshot of Austin's tum from the peculiarities of a limited set of English

verbs to a complete reconsideration of the materiality of the speech situation is its

38

profound emphasis on the contexts of an utterance considered as a whole event. These

possible contexts include the intentions of the speaker, what he or she wanted to say, but,

more significantly, the dynamics of the social relations inspiring, surrounding, and

seemingly determining that intention and its outcome. Thus, while speech-act theory

insists upon the rigorous analysis ofwords, it refuses to distinguish the way those words

work fiom the contexts in which they occur. For Austin, understanding language involves

an encounter with possibilities and contingencies, not necessarily with the systems and

facts intimated by the analysis of conventional rules and grammatical structures.

Polemics of Per$ormative k g u a g e in Byron's M h e d

I will now demonstrate the way Austin's antagonism to philosophical description

plays itself out in Romantic drama by reading a short scene fiom the play which most

succinctly elucidates the theatrical resonance of that challenge: Byron's Manfred.

Notorious for being one of the least stageable Romantic plays, Manfred is specifically

compelling in comparison with Austin's philosophical critique because Byron's own anti-

theatricality is staged as the hero Manfred's attitude toward social institutions and also as

the attitude of the play toward the hero's linguistic manipulation of those institutions.'

'Critics do not often read Mm?fed, let alone Byron's dramatic oeuvre, for insights into language theory, though a pragmatic though self-referential theory of language like Austin's finds aflhity with the way critics have read the paradoxically histrionic, self- engrossed, and sell-emancipating rhetoric of Byronism. As Bone suggests, "Byron's concept of the fke hero (or rather the hero seeking fieedom) is not monolithic-it has both development and inconsistency, and these are both produced by and help to condition the rhetoric of his poetry" (168). Most recent research into the politics of this rhetoric in Byron's drama has concentrated on the later historical plays Mmino Faliero (1 8 19)' Sordancpmlus (1821), and me Two Fo- (1821). For a comprehensive survey of the rhetoric and biographical context of Byronism in these plays see articles by Butler, "John Bull's Other Kingdom" and McGann, "Hero With a Thousand Faces." Jerome Christensen makes a comprehensive case for reading the dramatic and rhetorical "reflexivity' of the historical plays as exposing the aristocratic imposition of force onto the continuity of the

Manfied, a young aristocrat, burdened with feelings of guilt over an incestuous affair with

his now dead sister, seeks self-annihilation through the power of the spirit world to which

he has access. Intennixed with the histrionics which inevitably accompany these psychic

curses are scenes in which Manfred chides his fellow mortals for not being able to

understand his powers and sensibility. One of these scenes occurs early in the play at the

Chamois Hunter's cottage after he rescues Mad?ed tiom his attempted suicide fiom atop

the Tungfkau. The opening Lines present performative utterances as a mesh of injunctive

limits on the efficacy of discourse. The Hunter gives Manfied a warning: Ma&ed "must

not go forth" to the mountain-top because his "mind and body are alike unfit" (2.1.2-3).

Mad?ed retorts, however, by asserting his own knowledge: "I do know/ My route full

weil and need no fbrther guidance" (5-6). The Hunter then posits the conditions by which

ideology of capitalism (Byron's Strength 258-99). Michael Simpson converts this exposition of the rhetoric of historical presence into the basis for a Byronic dramaturgy, with Manfred as a case in point: "these plays.. . inscribe.. . an imperative rhetoric demanding its own realization. So prominent is this rhetoric in Byron's Manfred that the whole 'dramatic poem' resembles a parody of those conventions whereby dramatic discourse establishes the material and social contexts that then surround it" (Closet Perjromances 129). The comic element of this Byronic paradox is underscored by Butler and Christensen as they link the plays to Byron's satire in Don Juan; Melchiori was the first to argue that this comic destabilization of social convention is particularly apparent in Mrmfred, and that the play was "conceived in a spirit of self-irony" (59.. Other recent readings ofMmfLed adapt the rhetoric of Byronism to underline the ideological critique latent in the play's repudiation of its own mysticism. Thus Terence Hoagwod notes that "Inscribed in the poetic drama Manfred-.. is a dismissal of every transcendental possibility that the play has introduced" (Byron's Dialectic 3 8). What Hoagwood calls Byron's "Negative Dialectic" of transcendental rhetoric and materialist skepticism, Daniel Watkins reads as the tragic indolence of commercialism: Mmzed "does not so much explore the specific causes that may lead to the withering of social life... as study the features and consequences of it, specifically presenting what it means to live in a world that allows one to measure and value reality only in terms of private desire" (Materialist Critique 1 5 1). I do not include a detailed reading of Byron's plays in this study because they reflect in a broad and disdainfirl manner a metaphorical conception of political economy tout court rather than examine any specific economic issues.

Manfred's illocution, his affirmation, can be so subjectively determined, by estimating his

social status and authority: "Thy garb and gait bespeak thee of high Lineage-" (7).

Manfred dismisses the hunter's inquiry into the spedjcs of that lineage. Each asserts his

own judgement of the appropriateness of the question based on his relationship to the

social system: the Hunter lives within it, W e d would rather remain out of it. The

Hunter then sociably asks "pardon" (an Austinian behabitive) and invites him to "taste my

wine" (1 7).

The Hunter's admonitions and invitations represent a sociable respect for honour

and guest-friendship. Manfred, more withdrawn, yet also more impulsive than the Hunter,

repudiates conventional interaction and constantly reiterates his power of self-

determination, which is then re-interpreted by the Hunter to be dependent on the social

context of its own articulation. However, Byron's play performs a twist on this concern

for the interplay of social conventions. After pouring Manfred some wine, the hunter

witnesses one of Manfred's supernatural visions:

MANFRED. Away, away! there's blood upon the brim

Will it never-never sink in the earth?

HUNTER What dost thou mean? thy senses wander from thee.

MANFRED. I say tis blood--my blood! the pure warm stream

Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours

When we were in our youth, and had one heart,

And loved each other as we should not love,

And this was shed: but still it rises up,

Colouring the clouds, that shut me out fiom Heaven,

Where thou are not-and I shall ever be.

HUNTER. Man of strange words, and some half-maddening sin,

Which makes thee people vacancy, whate'er

Thy dread and sufferance be, there's comfort yet-

The aid of holy men, and heavenly patien-

MANFRED. Patience and patience! Hence-that word was made

For brutes of burthen, not for birds of prey!

Preach it to mortals of a dust like thine,-

I am not of thine order. (21-37)

The dialogue here is mostly an exchange of assertions. Manfied explicitly atfirms his

belief in the existence of the blood and its referential significance: "I suy 'tis blood-my

blood" (emphasis added). Manfied also a E m s the dependence of the assertion on his

utterance. The Hunter responds with a denial of the vision. He invokes social standards

to judge the vision, calling it "strange words" and "halfmad" and suggesting that Manfied

needs the aid of "holy men." Now the presence of the blood is called into question by the

standards of the Hunter and the society he invokes. At the same time, Manfred also

questions the applicability of the Hunter's warnings and judgements to his experience and

mode of perception. These, M d e d claims, maintain their own felicity by supernatural

standards beyond the Hunter's conventional Eame of reference. In this dialogue, none of

the illocutions is felicitous: they fd on deaf ears.

Already, then, a problem is evident in Manfked's denial of a socially sanctioned

meaning. A discourse which assumes a validity beyond social conventions must use the

discursive principles ofthat society to ratio- that assumption. At the same time, the

scene does not allow the Hunter's judgement of what is happening in fiont of him to be

classified as "unreal" or "invalid." When the Hunter concludes that visions of blood on

brims "must be borne" as indications of a correctable "a" Madied replies that this

supposedly diseased condition is for him normal: "Do not I bear it?-look on m e 1 live"

(41-42). And when the Hunter attempts to explain Manfred's delusions in terms of his

youth, Manfred retorts that his visions are m a n i f d o n s of an interminable entropy, a

perpetual being-in-death:

Think'st thou existence doth depend on time?

It do&: but actions are our epochs: mine

Have made my days and nights imperishable,

Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore,

Innumerable atoms, and one desart,

Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break,

But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks,

Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness. (5 1-58)

The blood represents the same materiality as the carcasses and wrecks which inhabit

Manfred's world-view. Yet the presence and origin of Manfred's blood is validated by his

saying it is his blood. This insistence lingers as the validation of the efficacy of the

declaration beyond that which can be classified by an appeal to social conventionality.

Manfred then explains that the blood he sees is the inherited blood of his f d y corrupted

by incest-a relationship that cannot be rationalized, and in fact must be outlawed for a

rational conventional procedure like mamiage to have any social value.

The scene is also dramaturgically clever. The size of the cup and the audience's

distance fkom it would render specific identification of the liquid on its brim impossible.

The mise en sche could be manipulated to give credence to either Manfred's or the

Hunteh vision. The cup, for instance, could be eerily illuminated or suggestions of

spiritual contact could be made with the proper gestures and background. The artificiality

of such additions would also heighten the hunter's scepticism. But the audience is not in a

position to say, "oh, well, he's just imagining things," since what they see on stage is not a

43

man and a cup with blood on its brim, but a man who says he is seeing blood. The theatre

can "people vacancy" because it is never empty-not hollow-not void. At the same time,

ManEred is remarkably insistent in stating the object of his vision, and in that insistence lies

the significance of the vision as an aspect of Byron's project, the theatricalization of

subjectivity in its most abstract conception. That is, Manfred holds to the absolute

authority of the illocutionary force of his own utterance "I say, 'tis my blood." That

utterance in tum creates for the spectators (and in this case the readers) of the play both

the reality of the blood, Manfied's ability to see it, and the illocutionary force of the

statement. To react to that insistence with the same reaction as the Hunter is to hold to a

notion of action, in both its theatrical and philosophical varieties, as something discrete

and calculable. Manfied's claim suggests that such discretion is neither possible, nor really

to the point.

The problem of the relation between performative utterances and the way they are

perceived is also evident in this scene's recollection of the banquet scene in Macbeth.

Seeing the bloody ghost of the murdered Banquo, Macbeth shouts, "Avaunt! and quit my

sight! Let the earth hide thee!" (3.4.94). As with Manfied's vision, Macbeth's ability to see

the ghost represents his contact with the supernatural world, a contact already noted by

Banquo in the opening scene of Shakespeare's play. Like the Chamois Hunter, Lady

Macbeth here represents the voice of necessary social decorum. She has morally

ostracized herselffiom her society by murdering Duncan, but she now invokes the

independent social world forged by her and Macbeth by compelling her husband to

maintain the bearing of his new kingship. Yet she also declares Macbeth's foolishness by

calling the vision, Wte the vision of the dagger at the murder scene, "flaws and starts,/

Impostors to true fear. [They] would well become/ A woman's story at a winter's fire,/

Authorized by her grandam. Shame itsem " (3 -4.64-67)- Lady Macbeth rejects social

standards as she abusively compares Macbeth to the conventionally feminine tale-teller and

earlier when she compels Macbeth to "unsex" her. But Lady Macbeth also uses accepted

conventions of masarline and feminine discourse to reproach her husband. What is

significant here is that the debate over the ghost's appearance is played out while it is on

stage. Printed copies of Shakespeare's play contain a stage direction for the ghost to enter

"and sil in Macbeth'splace. " While Macbeth is rebuked for admitting to the vision, the

supernatural wodd is not rejected by the dramaturgy of the play. The ghost appears to

Macbeth, and as such it is a real thing. Claims to its existence represent alternative values,

not something beyond value altogether as if the ghost were nonsense, though this is clearly

part of the difficulty, as Lady Macbeth attempts to say. The theatre makes these

supernaturai visions happen, and to that extent in the moment of their occurrence they are

not imitations of things, but are real things.

AU of these impulses away from and toward the truth value and implicii

responsibility of conventional signification interact at a social level, including the theatre.

What the actual theatre audience sees and believes in the moment of perception is just as

important to the concern for illocutionary value as the social world represented on stage.

But Banquo's ghost, and the other instances of supernaturalism in Macbeth also disrupt

the normal standards of positive evaluation which would go into determining just what

Banquo's ghost is, as Lady Macbeth tries to do. That she would castigate Macbeth for

unmanliness, for madness, for an inherited diseased disposition to such flights of fancy,

unhinges the standards of evaluation on the part of the audience fiom the hook of the

normal or the real, because the stage itself stages that unmanliness, and in so doing

demonstrates that the abnormal is also there. As I will be arguing throughout this study,

allusions to Shakespeare and other literary and topical sources are a significant vehicle of

this disruption. These allusions are the ghosts of a parasitic literariness inhabiting the

45

"representingn world on stage, and thus challenging the pathological separation of the

aesthetic or the abnormal fiom the realm of red effect.

The only speech acts in Byron's Chamois hunter scene which seem to achieve a

degree of success are the final set of orders performed by Manfred: "I depart--/ Tis

timefa~eweU!-Here's go14 and thanks for the& No words-it is thy due.-Follow me

not4 I h o w my pathhe mountain peril past:/ And once again I charge thee, follow not!"

(90-94). These are followed by another claim to knowledge of the path (echoing the

opening of the scene) and two commands for the Hunter not to come after him. As far as

this scene is concerned, Mad?& succeeds in rejecting the Hunter's social speech acts by

employing modes of illocutionary interaction which produce an idea of his individuality.

Manfred and the Hunter only agree, finally, to disagree and to part. Ultimately, however,

the scene recasts this undecidability in an exaggerated form as the incapacity of judgement

to rationalize what it perceives. Positive and negative discursive forces compete for

space, so to speak, on Byron's Romantic stage and use the theatre to make that

irreconcilability felt.

Speech Acts and Dramor A Critical Owrview

Romantic drama is not unique in exploring the problematic incapacity of

philosophy to formulate discrete causal relations between utterance and effects. The limits

of human knowledge in the face of the contingencies of living in the world estabIish the

thematic interest of tragedy and comedy and all genres in between, and even embrace the

di££iculties of live performance seldom co&onted in non-dramatic literature. Austin's

exclusion of drama and poetry from performative analysis has fhthered critical

controversies regarding the status of the work of art in a social or cultural context, and

what art can tell us about that context. In s nutshell, ifthe speech situation is administered

46

by a compIex negotiation of social standards and conventions, then the world as we

understand it is composed of a myriad of elaborate structures which are also "fictions."

Criticism can take upon itself the tasks of elucidating these fictions, just as Austin clarifies

the performative nature of all discourse, be it apparently descriptive or immediately active.

As a first step in this process, critics have applied the various categories of

illocutionary acts and the accompanying insights into the conventional dynamic of social

speech to the utterances performed by characters in literary works. For Richard Ohmann,

for instance, speech-act analysis of drama allows the critic to map the force of speakers'

utterances as they progress and interact. Using George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara,

Ohmann traces the various illocutionary acts used by the characters to interpose their

individual intentions into the world of social standards and conventions depicted by the

play. Ohrnann calls this interplay of assertions, commands, a££irmations, and invitations "a

train of illocutions." The critic charts the "movement of the characters and changes in

their relations to one another within the social world of the play [which] appear most

clearly in their illocutionary acts" (83). The varying claims made by the different

characters orchestrate the competing interests. "As illocutions erect competing realities

through the action of a work," Ohmann concludes, "so illocutions gradually define the

mode of reality which governs the whole work" (9 1).

Ohmann assumes that social norms are reflected and imitated by the world

depicted on stage; classifying and cataloguing them in a critical study serves the same

expositional fimction as Austin's classification of illocutions into ditferent categories. This

mode of critical insight easily accommodates predominantly mimetic genres, such as the

realist novel. But even realist works betray the often disjunctive relation between the

fictional status of the Literary work and the social context of its appearance and influence.

Thus Sandy Petrey reads Balzac's Colonel Chobert and 2hmsine in conjunction with

Austin's performative. Petrey claims that all language and thus all reality is mediated by

the conventional rules which underlie the performative. Thus Austints essential discovery

was that people "perform social reality as validated by the members of a collectivity"

(Litercay I k o v 37). Literature can thus realize how that collectivity fimctions to

produce the ideology of the historical period in which the literary work was produ~ed.~

Such historicizations of literature through the performative have also proved particularly

accommodating to drama studies which want to promote the idea that the stage embodies

the "fictional" or "rhetorical" elements of social administration. This approach has proved

especially usefbl to the study of drama composed in periods of rigid institutional power,

such as the European Renais~ance.~

The perfonnative has also been used to eIaborate a social theory of literary

creation. Such efforts have proved especially interesting in Romantic studies, in which

poetic creation is a crucial concern. Samuel Levin, for example, proposes that though a

Literary work embodies mimetically the way speech acts work in the world, lyric poetry

also instantiates a speech act by creating or declaring a vision of "a world" into the mind

of a hearer or reader (150). Levin focuses on the mystical, conventionally "Romantic"

idea that poetry is a product of a prophetic imagination. Gavin Edwards, by contrast,

positions this Romantic poetic observed creator in the social context of scenes of

observation, as in Blake's "London." The poet is regarded as one of many discursively

active speakers who control and malign the world which the poet is attempting to

reproduce in an essential or mystical character. Angela Esterhammer compares Levin's

See "The Reality of Representationn and "Castration, Speech Acts, and the Realist Difference." Petrey's views on the applicability of speech-act theory to the study of literature are widely disseminated in Speech Acts and Literary Xheory. For a scathing critique of the limitations of Petrey's conventionalist approach see Gorman 108- 17.

See especially Porter and Rivers.

48

and Edwards' respective readings of Blake to underscore the two aspects of the literary

perfonnative, the purely creative, intentional or "phenomenological speech act" and the

conventional, "socio-political speech act," which she sees to be in confkontation in the

encounter between Romantic poetry and its own creative power (23-25). Charles Altieri

and Mary Lwise h t t similarly examine the mediating social forces influencing artistic

creation and critical interpretation and which, they argue, can be discerned in the apparent

sociality of the literary work itseK8 Altieri suggests that the idea of a speech act can be

reformulated into a hermeneutic grounding for a positive theory of aesthetic meaning by

which the problernatics of fictionality can be conjoined with the presumed enlightening

fimction of art into a comprehensive hermeneutics of literary meaning (56).' Pratt argues

that classes of the performative can be used to take into account the range of extra-literary

experiences-publishing editing, selling and purchasing, reading and criticizing--which

surround literary work. By concentrating on the perfonnative dimensions of these social

' Both Altieri and Pratt are less in£luenced by J. L. Austin's philosophy of language than by H. P. Grice's. Like Austin, but in a more systematic manner, Grice proposed a model for interpreting human conversation based around conversational "maximsN-what to do or not to do in order to be understood by an interlocutor-built on a standard of "the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged" which Grice called "the co-operative principle" ("Logic and Conversation" 45). Realizing that the co- operative principle must entail that all communication must be absolutely factual, intentional, tmthful, sincere, but that these conditions are seldom obvious, Grice introduced the notion of "implicature." One of the conversational maxims, he argued, must at least be implied-positively in a metaphor, say, or negatively in a sarcastic comment-in order for communication to actually occur.

See also 81-96 and chapter 3. Harris 36-67 has employed Austin's performative and Grice's co-operative principle to construct a similarly complex, but nevertheless internally cohesive hermeneutic model of literature which invites exactly the kind of interpretation Harris sets out. The classic instance of the conversion of speech acts into a metaphor for the way literary critics want literary works to act is WoIfgang her's "The Reality of Fiction." For a reader-response based critique of Ohmann and Iser, See Fish., C ~ S S 22 1-24.

49

acts, Pratt proposes a "general description" of literature in its always context-dependent

setting (100). The idea that the performative can provide the basis for a hermeneutics

which presents its interpreters with an impression of its own social determination has also

proved f i t fu l to the study of theatrical performance. Keir Elam adapts the notion of the

"social, interpersonal, executive power" of the illocutionary act to suggest that theatrical

criticism can isolate the semiotic code of any performance based on the praxes of

interaction apparent in its script (Semiotics 150). Comprising not simply a train of

illocutions or a social dynamic, theatrical dialogue manifests the interdependence of action

in the world and the tools we normally think of as describing that world. By situating that

active dialogue in a setting which at the same time is being acted, a play redoubles on

itself the performative implications which in a literary work require an interpretive device.

The theatrical situation itself draws attention to the constructed nature of social

performance.

Stanley Fish and Shoshana Felman have analyzed the social discursive patterns in

Shakespeare's Coriolms and Moliere's Don Juan respectively, and rather than convert

these readings into a positivist vision ofthe ubiquity of social conventions, both have used

their critical assessments to underscore the Limitations and contingencies of speech-act

theory. Fish begins his reading with a fairly traditional account of what happens in the

dialogue of Shakespeare's CoriolanusS In refking to gratify the requirements of Roman

electoral procedure, Coriolanus reveals his desire "to be independent of society and of the

language with which it constitutes itself and its values, seeking instead a language that is

the servant of essences he alone can recognize because he done embodies them" (Class

206). Thus, at the turning point in the play, Coriolanus purposively banishes the citizens of

Rome ("I banish you! ") rather than allow himself to be dictated to by their conventional

codes of conduct and retribution. But this sought-for independence reverts to social

50

conventionalityty "Unfortunately," Fish continues, "language is wholly and intractably

conventional; it is a space already occupied by the public" (207). For Fish, Corioloms

allows the critic to trace a "wire-tight dialectic" between subjective intentions and social

conventions (205). But Fish then asks whether speech-act criticism can do anything more

than outline these illocutionary intersections: "just as it stops short of claiming knowledge

of what happens after the performance of an illocutionary act, so it is silent on the

question of what (if anything; the whole world may be conventional) preceded it.

Nobody," he continues disparagingly, "would deny that these are matters for a literary

critic but they are the province of rhetoric (the art of persuasion, a perlocutionary art) and

psychology. Speech-act theory can tell us nothing about them" (227). Certainly Literary

works like Coriolmns which seem to have a particular interest in the social utterances can

exemplify illocutionary acts because that is essentially what they are about. For Fish, the

applications of Austin's categories to these insights are strictly "metaphorical" summaries

of what is already evident in the literary work.

Fish's attack on speech-act criticism does not really offer any challenge to literary-

critical description in general. In "A Plea for Excuses," for instance, Austin says quite

specifically that the domain for the kind of analysis undertaken by ordinary-language

philosophy includes psychology, though unlike Fish, Austin is wary of trying to outdo

psychology in "contempt of the jargon'," suggesting at the same time that analysis should

be wary ofjargon in any case (189). In his own mysterious way, Fish restricts speech-act

theory to exactly the kind of descriptions which Austin himselfresisted, because it opens

the space for observations of more amorphous psychological realities which Fish himself

seems unable or unwilling to delineate. Reading Austin in conjunction with the equally

enigmatic psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, Felman points to precisely these more

expansive psychological implications. Significantly, she bases this assessment on a reading

of Moliere's Don Jwm. For Felman, the ability of individuals to nominate new

conventions at a distance from society atso allows individuals to manipulate those values

f?om within the social system. Don Juan's seemingly endless succession of false but

successfblly contracted promises represents an "escape [fiom] the hold of truth....

Although he has no intention whatsoever of keeping his promises, the seducer, strictly

speaking, does not lie, since he is doing no more than playing on the self-referentid

property of these performative utterances" (3 1). But in escaping the standard of truth,

Felrnan suggests, Don Juan f d s under the sway of other standards, the standards which

his language evokes as it calls certain redties into being. Drama represents not simply the

way intentions combine with social conventions to produce social action, but the way

human conduct is indebted to language. Language is not the vehicIe of economic

interaction (payments, debts, marriages); rather, language constitutes the interactive

dynamic of those exchange situations. Felrnan then shows that the acceptance of this

conditional existence is the lesson of Lacan's concept of the Symbolic and Austin's speech

act: our knowledge of human motivations and their contingencies reflects back on the

existence of that body of knowledge as language or utterance. Unlike Fish, who chides

Austin for not going beyond the structures of speech to the realms of psychology and

action, Felman shows that psychology and action return in analysis to the structures of

speech.

While Fish's and Felman's respective readings of CorioZamrs and Don J m reach

more or less the same conclusions, their re-applications of these readings to speech-act

theory and Austin's version of it seem to arrive at diametrically opposed positions. Fish

charges that in outlining the "conditions of intelligiiility" for the social dynamics of

speech, speech-act theory actually does little more than construct a metaphor between the

terminology of speech-act theory and the obvious aspects of performance evident in any

52

dramatic work. Felman, by contrast, contends that the dramatic work anticipates this

circularity and undermines the limitations which Fish sets. The literary or creative

momentum of performative speech is what makes the pefiormative a unique category of

linguistic understanding that subtends even the most objective empirical claims. Felman's

reading of Austin as Don Juan does have one significant limitation: her insistence in

uncovering this verbal creativity is ultimately to register the " ~ c i & t b i l i t y between

things and events" ( 1 07). This is the problem that Slavoj Zizek has located in

performative language theory itself. Zizek contends that Austin's gradual loosening of the

stratikations of the speech act from the constativd performative distinction, to the

locution/ illocutiod perlocution aspects, to the overlapping categories of illocutions

manifest a "theoretical deadlock" (Enjoy Your Symptom! 96)' an "ontological

misrecognition" (98) of the performative as simply a mdestation of an effervescent

social reality rather than as the active ground of the influence of social institutions on even

the most unconscious aspects of human behaviour. The necessity of manifesting these real

social institutions governing speech is also what Fish insists should be the guiding principle

of linguistic and literary analysis.

What these versions of speech-act criticism lack is Austin's dialectical sense of the

contingency of his own attempt to formulate a coherent "model" of utterances and their

contexts while still insisting that discovering and explaining what people actually do when

they speak is still the ultimate aim of philosophy. Petrey insists that the most significant

contribution of How to Do Things with Words is rule Al, that there must be an acceptable,

conventional procedure for an utterance to follow. Petrey does not see that Austin

abandons these conventional rules when he realizes that they do not offer satisfactory

criteria for the isolation of the performative. Pratt and Altieri are similarly disposed to

construct object-oriented models of communicative experience which they presume to

53

have isolated and observed in literary works themselves. Elam claims that the theatre also

recreates the perlocutionaxy effect produced in its audience by the illocutionary act,

though Austin himself never su~cessllly uncovers the moment where one ends and the

other begins. That a literary work or conversation might embody that self-consciousness

suggests that social behaviour is always in some sense rhetorical or even "theatrical." But

to say that the performative is applicable to the study of theatre because theatre seems to

embody the conventional or rhetorical aspects of the performative is to reduce the

relevance of theatre in the philosophy of language to an ambiguity of representation

that-and this is the important difference-exempts the critic from any implication in the

scene of interpretation. Criticism demands a static critical object, some-thing which can

model for what happens in the world. Thus, Byron's claim that he sees his own blood

appear on the brim of a cup is revealed to be a claim; all truth is revealed to be

underscored by a rhetorical contingency. In this way, Linguistic action in the literary or

theatrical "speech situation" serves a critical description. Byron's declaration remains

"non-serious," or worse, %on-sense," just play. This is precisely the transposition that

Austin's foundational contribution to speech-act themy disallows. The active energy or

illocutionary force of the speech situation cannot be classified into a succinct anticipating

formulation of conventional or rhetorical behaviour, be it completely deterministic or

utterly un-deterministic. It is to this dynamic force of speakaking that a performative theory

of drama must attend.

me Occasion of Iheufre in Rolttantic Drma Criticism

Romantic drama criticism and theory, the reviews lectures, and essays on the

theatre written by Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt, and other important Romantic authors,

betray a similar inability to extrapolate the material dimension of performance from an

54

overarching description of its psychological or historical meaning. This perspective rests

on two principles: an ovenvhelming admiration for the plays of Shakespeare and a critical

disdain for imprecision or inattention in the public theatres. The result is that the essayists

absorb Shakespeare's texts and their staping into an exemplary reflection of subjective

genius. Like the model of the peflorming subject envisioned by speech-act critics like

Fish, Altieri, and Petrey, the Romantic Shakespearean subject is aware of the status of

language as both a product of intentionality and a conditioning social context. The

Romantic critics convert that awareness into a rationalized image of the subject-in-the-

world. Shakespeare's oeuvre demands a close critical inspection by a reader who will

recognize the potential for imaginative genius within the limitations of its material

realization. Romantic anti-theatricality neither opposes dramatic imitation nor fears its

material "reality"; rather, it uses Shakespeare to exemplify a philosophicaI crisis of

subjective completion with language as its central metaphorical instance, much as speech-

act criticism uses the speech-act situation to illustrate the way social behaviour is

essentially rhetorical or conventional..

Take Hmler for instance, the play the Romantic critics agreed was impossible to

stage. In A. W. Schfegel's influential Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, the

defining feature of Hamlet is its inscrutability; Schlegel compares H d e t to "those

irrational equations in which a £?action of unknown magnitude always remains, that will in

no way admit of solution" (cited in Simpson, Origins, 264). "Seeing" Hamlet epitomizes

Romantic irony: the characters consider their condition on stage to be bereft of dynamic or

transcendental agency and in that alienation point to the truth of subjective experience:

that we all adapt or "play" to constitute ourselves as subjects. Hamlet consciously plays

the madman, though he is also "indifferent" to the maddening tendency toward self-

dramatization which is his defining characteristic (263). The spectator looks through the

55

scene toward the philosophical truth of the mysterious intentional conception of the

drama. At the same time, this spectator doubts the validity of that imaginative product, as

Hamlet doubts the reality of his fathefs ghost whenever he cannot see or hear it (265).

Shakespeare never allows tragic moments of action to be converted into statements of

sentimental realization; instead the implications of tragedy-the breakdown of the social

system-are juxtaposed to comic scenes of wIIective harmony and wlgar insubordination.

The goal of this dialectical engagement is anticipated by Schlegel's critical perspicuity, as

it resolves into an almost servile respect for Shakespearean genius. When this positive

dialectic between the intentional power of Shakespeare's genius and the possibility of its

realization is translated by Coleridge into the English milieu, it comes to have a more

direct bearing on the language of the play. Coleridge stresses Shakespeare's ability to

depict "the easy language of ordinary life'" as in the opening scene, but it is the compelling

sense of "the armour, the cold, the dead silence," surrounding the dialogue and "placing

the mind in the state congruous with tragedyt' which realizes the dramatist's ability to

induce a conception of the other side of this amiable conversation, the imaginative psyche

(Shakespearean Criticism 1 :34-3 5). The created effect, Coleridge insists, is "a due

balance between our attention to outward objects and our meditation on inward

thoughts-a due balance between the real and the imaginary world" (34). Hmlet

embodies the purpose of poetry to capture the spirit of subjective intentionality and also

enables a collective process of understanding of that struggle by setting it in and against

the generalized social context delineated in the play. For Hazlitt, verbal referentiality is

even fiather abstracted into a profound realization of mutual subjectivity between

audience and speaker: "Hamlet is a name; his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of

the poet's brain. What then are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts.

Their reality is the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet" (Complete Works 4:232).

56

Romantic critics sublimate the possibility of the non-sense or infelicity of Linguistic

action into a positive psychology of subjective experience as a balancing act between the

transcendental fieedom of thought and its material constraints in social interaction and

convention. This is, in a nutshell, the meaning of Himlet, as it is the meaning of speech-

act theory for critics like Ohmann, Petrey, and Felman. But the Romantic critics were also

reviewers, the arbiters of the theatrical art of their day; their judgements regarding the

meaning of Shakespeare's language occur in the context of theatrical performance. The

incorporation of the experience of Hamlet as theatre into a paradigm of psychologically

reflective genius thus registers the economizing, the management or governance, of what

happens in the moment of performance into a paradigm of a selfkeflexive, but

nevertheless, goal-oriented meaning. At the same time, this economy continually

confronts the materiality of the theatrical scene it tries to economize. This incorporative

management is nowhere more apparent than in Charles Lamb's monumentally important

essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare." Like Hazlitt's review, Lamb does not separate

Shakespeare f?om theatre as such; rather he presents a reading of HamIet which by its very

interiority, which is also its untenable expansiveness, cannot be reduced to the "level" at

which all serious issues are dramatized on the London stage. One of Lamb's most

compelling examples of this inadequacy is the scene in which Hamlet berates Ophelia:

All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave at her as if she had

committed some great crime, and the audience are highly pleased, because

the words of the part are satirical, and they are enforced by the strongest

expression of satirical indignation of which the face and voice are capable.

But then, whether Hamlet is likely to have put on such brutal appearances

to a lady whom he loved so dearly, is never thought on. The truth is, that

in all such deep aEections as had subsisted between Hamlet and Ophelia,

57

there is a stock of supererogatory love, ($1 may venture to use the

expression) which in any great grief of heart, especially where that which

preys on the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of indulgence

upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its heart's dearest object, in

the language of a temporary alienation; but it is not alienation, it is a

distraction purely, and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object: it

is not anger but grief d g the appearance of anger,-love awkwardly

counterfeiting hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown: but

such sternness and fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to shew, is no

counterfeit, but the real face of absolute aversior,*f irreconcilable

alienation It may be said that he puts on the madman; but then he should

only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his own real distraction will

give him leave; that is, incompletely, imperfectly; not in that confirmed,

practised way, like a master of his art, or as Dame Quickly would say, "like

one of those harlotry players." (1 : 103-04)

Lamb calls Hamlet a failed actor, incapable of completely absorbing the fidlness of

emotional experience into an abstract concept. But then, for Lamb, Hamlet is also the

best kind of actor because in his failure to reduce himself to one attitude or another in this

one instance, he betrays the complex, irreducible power of the soul in anguish. Hamlet's

love for Ophelia is superfluous to the communicable interaction demanded by Hamlet's

feigned insanity. His animosity, therefore, is both real and fake, counterfeit and genuine.

That ambivalent energy measures the genius of Shakespeare's authorship, creating

powerfid dramattic falsehoods which speak with all the resilience of absolute truth.

If we examine the way Lamb considers Hamlet's language, the extrapolated

significance of this excess becomes more problematic. Lamb opposes the idea that Hamlet

should speak to the crowd rather than to Ophelia or himself and denies the material fact

that W e t ' s words exist in some materid or theatrical dimension apart fkom the

embodiment of the excess of genius which circulates between Shakespeare, Hamlet, Lamb,

and the ideal closeted reader &an economy of specialized under~taading.'~ Lamb admits,

however, that even in the form of a reading text, Hamlet's "silent meditations with which

his bosom is bursting'' must be "reduced to words for the sake of the reader, who must

else remain ignorant of what is passing therew (1 : 100). This sense of the "reduction" of

genius to language is precisely the problem that Fish finds so irksome about what speech-

act theory purports to do. Fish never mentions performances of Coriolamrs, though he is

concerned with perfonnativity in it. For Lamb, famously, this rejection of the material

presence of language as the medium for the very economy he sets out to describe is

focused on the immediacy of theatre. Acting "levels all distinctions" (102) of character in

a way that obfiscates Shakespeare's imaginative potential; this is never truer than in

lo This economy of excess and regulation includes actors: recalling Kemble's performance ofMucbeth, Lamb comments that "the paidid anxiety about the act [of murdering Duncan], the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed doing never presses upon us with the pahfbl sense of presence.". Whether or not Lamb actually believed that this presence, "belong[ing] to history, something past and inevitable," disarmed the complexity of his "readingy' ofMacbeth as a balanced register of ambition and remorse, is not in question. Thus, following Jonas Barish's use of Lamb's essay to exemplify Romantic anti-theatricality as a fear of reality, Jacobus, ''Where Senators Perform," 380- 82 and Arac, ''Media of Sublimity," 2 14-19 view Lamb's anxiety as a basically conservative gesture: Lamb was concemed that the energies of such regicidal ambitions performed in the present could. inspire Jawbin excess in the public sphere. More recently, Carison, Theatre of Romanticism 168-69, Galperin, Return of the Visible, 134-39, and Simpson, Closet Pe~orma;rzces, 53-4, have argued that Lamb's fearsome "reality" is actually a product of the discourse of criticism, much as Burke's account of the destructive rampages of the French Revolution is a product of his own imagination, attempting rhetorically to construct an "other" against which to delineate a reflective posture of critical reason.

consideration of the way actors speak As in HmIef,

scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of

f i q , and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have

always been the most popular on stage. And the reason is plain, because

the spectators are here most palpably appeaied to, they are the proper

judges in this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be

formed round such "intellectual prize fighters." Talking is the direct object

of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare above

all, how obvious it is, that the form of paking, whether it be in soliloquy

or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting

the reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner

structure and workings of mind in a character, which he could otherwise

never have arrived at in thar form of cornpositon by any gift short of

intuition.. . the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a

controversy of elocution. (1 :99- 100)

Lamb distinguishes "talking" from "speaking" in order to remove the occasional situation

of theatre from his conception of performance. By formulating popular spectatorship as a

judgement on a "contest" or a "war of words," Lamb unwittingly points to the material

basis of the counterfeit he works so hard to uncover in Hamlet's repudiation of Ophelia.

Hatlitt's important reviews of Kean's and Kemble's respective versions of

Coriolanus provide a M e r significant illustration of the Romantic encounter with the

materiality of stage speech, not least because, as Fish argues, CorioIamrs is the ultimate

speech-act play, but more because, as Jane Moody contends, Hazlitt's reviews of

C o r i o h s are injected with much of the anxiety surrounding political and economic

upheavals of the early 1820s (224-34). These articles are also important reflections on

60

genius as a dialectical encounter between a stirring transcendent intentionality and the

"democratic7' avaifability of that subjective power through the dissemination of ideas in

material and repeatable form. As W h Galperin has argued, Hazlitt did not disdain the

theatriabation of Shakespeare's plays as Lamb did, but found in the emotional,

bordering on vulgar7 intensity of Edmund Kean, whom Hazlitt first saw in 18 14, an

opportunity to uncover a tension between Kean's style and Shakespeare's genius which

signaled the Link between transcendental principles of reason and the democratic impulse

of social liberty. As Galperin remarks, Hazlitt is always "impatient" with Kean for his

inability to w ntain hirnseif in the more ."inflexible7' and "haughty" roles such as Shylock

and Richard III, as whom Kean first appeared, and ultimately as Coriolanus; yet, it is in

juxtaposing Kean's verbal intensity with the ambition of these characters that the

dialectical genius of Shakespeare emerges as a foil to anti-democratic insurgency (144-

45). With C 0 r i 0 h . s ~ this dialectic takes on a decidedly Linguistic character. Hazlitt's

first essay on the play, published in 7he Emminer in December 18 16 and extolling the

virtues not of Kean's but of Kemble's aristocratic stature and power, includes Hazlitt's

famous distinction between the imagination and the understanding in poetry:

The cause of the people is indeed but ill calculated as a subject for poetry;

it admits of rhetoric, which goes into argument and explanation, but it

presents no immediate or distinct images to the mind. ... The language of

poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The imagination is an

exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes fiom one thing to add to

another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible

effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring

faculty: it judges of things, not according to their immediate impressions on

the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a

61

monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present

excitement of inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive

faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good by justice and

proportion. The one is aristocratid, the other a republican faculty. The

principle of poetry is a very anti-leveling p ~ c i p l e . It aims at effecf it

exists by contrasts. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It

presents an imposing appearance. It shows its head turreted, crowned, and

crested. Its eont is gilt and blood-stained. (Works 5:347-48)

The idea that the understanding is "distributive" suggests an economic impulse of

utilitarian benevolence as opposed to the "rnonopolizing faculty" of imagination. But in

comparison with the elaboration of the poetry of imagination, the poetry of understanding

is almost completely undefined here; it must be implied, while the force of imaginative

creativity and ultimately subjective control over distribution is palpably felt (like a

monopoly). But it is also inaccessible, even though its goal is the clarification of universal

access. Even Shakespeare, Hazlitt reasons, must have belonged to the "other side." The

genius of democratic liberty is thus underwritten here by the demure power of Kemble's

tempered, cold, and poetical performance. But it requires the contemplative or relational

understanding of criticism to convert it into the meaning which is left clouded in the vocal

extremities of stage speech. Kean's version in 1820 complicates this dialectical exhibition,

for "his haughty answer to the mob who banish him-'I banish you'-was given with all the

virulence of execration, and rage of impotent despair, as if he had to strain every nerve and

faculty of soul to shake off the contamination of their hated power over him, instead of

being delivered with calm, majestic self-possession" (1 8 :29O). Moody argues that the

opinion that Coriolanus' "intolerable airs and aristocratical pretensions.. . did not seem

legifimate" in Kean offers a critique of arbitrary government on its final fragile legs, as

62

may have seemed apparent in 1820 (23). Yet, the critical anticipation of the significance

of what is for Hazlitt onIy considerable in negative terms (the failure of Kean's

performance) points to a greater significance which requires the critic to mediate. In its

moment of articulation, the speech act "I banish you" has the opposite effect on Hazlitt to

that implied by its iUocutionary force, to separate Coriolanus f?om the crowd. Yet, once

performed, for HazIitt, that force is to be converted into perlocutionary significance.

Another way to put this is to say that in large part Romantic drama criticism is a

self-fulfilling prophecy, an anticipation of perlocutionary effect (understanding, agreement)

through the mediation of illocutionary force. As with the hermeneutical meaning of

speech acts in art suggested by Altieri, the creative insurgency ofthe utterance is

somehow lost, though it is intimated through the Uocutionary control possible in the craft

of the review essay. The medium for this control is simiIar to that of a declaration, a

speech act which calls into being the state that it names, as the Romantic critics do

Shakespearean genius. In this way, Romantic drama criticism participates in the transition

Baudrillard documents in Symbolic &change rmdDeath fkom a culture of the counterfeit,

in which representations are viewed nostalgically as imitations of some lost order of

revealed truth, to a culture of the simulacra, in which representations are regarded as

aspects of a process of manufacturing like ideas fiom a single cast (5 1-2). Shakespeare,

Kean, and Hazlitt, for instance, would thus each partake in the assembly-line construction

of the great ideas, and any deviation fiom this process, as Hazlitt accuses Kean of, or

Lamb intimates is the result of the "leveliig" tendency of actors, is treated as an insult or a

fault. L i e Austin, the Romantic drama critics also maintain a significant polemical edge, a

spirit of occasion in the essay form. But the active occasion registered in these essays is

reincorporated into a psychological and, as Baudrillard suggests, economic dismissal of

surface for depth, intentionality, political purpose, or propriety. This avoidance of the

63

materiality of the linguistic act in the moment of its utterance is the essential feature of

Romantic anti-theatricality. To understand the language of Romantic plays as opposed to

Romantic criticism, we must formulate a concept of verbal performance which includes

the materiality of theatre.

Phenomenologies of Performance

To build a theoretical w e w o r k for this material conception of linguistic

performance in Romantic drama, one that is sensitive to the critical import of its anti-

theatricality, it is necessary to situate Austin's polernic in a philosophical context which

will help to articulate its material dimension. To encompass this materiality by explicating

the experience of utterance rather than its conceptualization, I locate Austin's reflection

on it, and the complication it presents to critical and philosophical analysis, between two

philosophical discourses to which performative language theory is historically contiguous

and with which it has had reciprocal influence. These are the phenomenological

methodologies which developed primarily in France in the wake of Edmund Husserl and

the critical empiricism of Anglo-American pragmatics in company with the dialectics of

German Critical Theory. While it will certainly not be possible to offer a complete

account of these movements, it is possible to isolate their intersections with, and in some

cases adaptations of, performative language. It is also possible to register the significant

appearances of theatre hi these intersections, and ultimately, in Austin's account of the

performative. Finally, given that both phenomenology and Critical Theory have had

broader and often more criticd contact with the social sciences, this contextualization of

the pefiormative in terms of the experience ofpegonnance will offer a significant

theoretical ground for the re-staging of political economy on the Romantic stage.

The terms of the relation between performative language theory and

phenomenology are already apparent in theatre phenomenology, a mode of dramatic

interpretation developed in the philosophid context of European phenomenology by Bert

States, Bruce Wllshire, and Stanton Garner, and latent in the influential work of director-

theorists such as Peter Brook, Patrice Pavis, and Herbert Blau.ll Though these theorists

differ signScantly in approaches and mandates, they share not only a resistance to the

reduction of the theatre experience to a descriptive or mimetic code but a fascination with

the way theatre can expose the process by which human agents attempt and fail to explain

or comprehend the experience of agency. Pavis has articulated the major principle of

theatre phenomenology: the study of the theatrical event requires "a gestaN pattern" as its

mode of inquiry (Lmtgzmges 1 5). "The mise en scine, " Pavis writes, "is not the putting

into practice of what is present in the text. On the contrary, it is the speaking of the text in

a given staging, the way in which its presuppositions, its unspoken elements and its

enunciations are brought out that wilI confer on it a particular meaning" (18). That

particularity, or "occasionality," demands critical attention in relation to, or often against,

the assembled codes and signs offered in the play as an authorial work. "To read a

dramatic text, one must have some idea of its theatrical@, and the performance cannot

make a total abstraction of what the text says" (19). Thus Blau contends, theatre is

essentially a confrontation with the "irreducible," bodies, attitudes, gestures, emotions, and

most definitively, objects (Bodiks 99). These are perceived and experienced in aU their

materid palpability by characters on a stage, and by an audience in the moment of their

presentation; drama is, in a total sense, the dialectical experience of meeting with people

struggling to rationalize a world which we experience as the same difficulty. This is not

"For full explications of the reasoning behind and methodology of theatre phenomenology see States' Great Reckonings in Little Rooms and "The Phenomenological Attitude, " Wdshireqs "Theatre as he no me no lo^^, " and Gamer's Bodied S'ces.

the same dialectic as that projected by Romantic theatre theory, which attempted to adapt

the tension between transcendental genius and verbal embodiment to foreclose the

"meaning" of drama My argument here is that, by contrast to this anti-theatrical

economy, Austin's encounter with the performative on the Harvard lecture stage can be

counted as a phenomenal mtd theatrical encounter with the limit of rationality, dialectical

or otherwise. The subject of theatre phenomenology is thus the experience of

performance, how it works, rather than what a performance might describe; this is its

point of contact with Austin's "linguistic phenomenology.''

But as with Austin, this dialectic between experience and rationalization is not

always readily apparent. Phenomenology has always defined itself as the study of how the

world appears to a perceiving consciousness instead of how the world conforms to

rational models. In its original modem formulation, Edmund Husserl's Logical

Investigations, the m& operCIltdj of phenomenology was "eidetic reduction." Husserl

hoped to restrict the range of potential responses to these observed phenomena by

insisting that conscious response works by bracketing or "closeting" its disarming, for the

most part material, contingencies and restricting itself to an intentional focus on the pure

essences of the phenomenon at hand. One of these contingencies was what Husserl called

"non-objectifying acts" of language: words which seemed to do things in the world

without referring to any other thing, such as promising, contracting, commanding.

Familiar now as speech acts. these non-objectifying acts were identified by Husserl as

s i p for acts of intentional consciousness, an intentionality that becomes apparent through

its verbal articulation. l2 Through the period of Austin's academic career, phenomenology

l2 See Barry Smith and Crosby in Burkhardt for a possible and important source for the principles of speech-act theory in Husserl's account of 'Won-objectifying acts." Though she does not discuss Husserl, in Creating States, Esterhammer introduces the concept of the phenomenological speech act, "an author's ability to 'create' reality through

developed around the problem of the irreducibility of observed experience. Husserl

himsee for instance, gradually moved away fkom the technique of eidetic reduction to a

comprehensive understanding of wnsciousness and essence which includes the

participation of that conscious subject in attempted rational formations and which Husserl

called kbensweit, the "Me world," in The Crisis of Europeemr Sciences. This expansive

sense of the essence of conscious experience is most recognizable in the existentialism of

Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre and their refisal to define the ontological

foundation of the life world in any but negative terms. This negative impetus has found its

way recurrently into the dynamics of phenomenology as a dialectical manifestation of the

hidden limitations of reason; it is in this dialectical form that phenomenology has entered

into the sub-stratum of linguistic, social, and aesthetic theory in the mid- and late-

twentieth century.

To establish the significance of Austin's theory to the phenomenological

interpretation of theatre, it is necessary to understand how the phenomenon of speech

correlates with the important irreducible aspects of theatrical performance--gesture, the

a poetic or fictional utterance, independently of societal conventions but in accordance with literary conventions that ascribe creative (or visionary or prophetic) authority to the speaker's voice" (12). Her model "is divine creation by the word" (13). Esterhammer uses this notion of the phenomenological speech act to define more broadly "a similar type of performativity: non-conventional, extra-societal, deriving f?om the will or intentionality of the speaker alone." My sense is that this model of a speech-act phenomenology is not applicable to the theatrical medium because it stresses the "intentionality" of the phenomenological utterance in Romantic poetry. My use of phenomenology, like Esterhammer's, counters the "socio-political" model of conventionality employed by Pratt, Petrey, and others and, at the same time, suggests that such a phenomenological ideal always comes into contact with the social forces which create. But I also extend that phenomenological context to speech-act theory to stress its polemical potential against literary-critical models of speech which insist on regarding it as an object and not as a dynamic material and social act.

body, and space.I3 A specific resonance between concepts of space as it affects

consciousness and the interrelation of consciousness, action, and language is to be found

in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty A leading work in the drive to comprehend the

way the world appears before a perceiving consciousness rather than in conformity with

structures understood by consciousness, Merleau-Ponty's best known treatise,

PhenomerwZugy of Perception, embraces those materid, bodily, and spatial

experiences-including disease, death, and decay-which are nonnally divorced from the

subject's conception of its own selfhood." This includes communication, which, as

Merleau-Ponty argues in the chapter, "The Body as Expression, and Speech," can only be

appreciated alongside such phenomena as aphasia, physical disruptions in the ability to

speak, and anarthia, the "loss of power of articulate speech." Speech, for the

phenomenological analyst, must therefore be regarded both as a means of constative

reference and as performative action: language does not encompass "a certain stock of

words, but a certain way of using them .... The word could be identified as an instrument of

action and as a means of disinterested designation" (1 75).

Merleau-Ponty points to the material aspects attendant on the notion of a "speech

situation" as elaborated in speech-act theory. "In understanding others," Merleau-Ponty

13Austin's notion of "the total speech situation" reflects on its own the dialectical turn to the spatial and temporal dimensions of experience in the work of Gaston Bachelard, whose The Paetics of Space is seminal to theatre phenomenology. Bachelard is mainly interested in the psychology of this encounter with spatiality, not with its interrelation with language or even scientific scrutiny, which is why I do not examine his work in detail here.

" The best and most extensivereading of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology from the point of view of "bodily presence" and medical discourse is Leder, The Absent B e . By emphasizing the importance of gesture to the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Austin I am expanding their methodological similarities as noted by Fairchild and DiGiovanna.

writes,

the problem is always indeterminate because only the solution will bring the

data retrospectively to Light as convergent, only the central theme of a

philosophy once understood, endows the philosopher's writings with the

value of adequate signs. There is, then, a taking up of others' thought

through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think uccor&ng to

others which enriches our own thoughts. Here the meaning of words must

be finally induced by the words themselves, or more exactly, their

conceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of deduction from a gestural

meaning, which is immanent in speech. And, as in a foreign country, I

begin to understand the meaning of words through their place in a context

of action, and by taking part in a communal Life. (179)

Medeau-Ponty argues that we use words because they refer, but we understand what and

how words mean only by abstracting or reducing those limited meanings from the social

experience of participating in the use of speech, tonal expression, and bodily gesture. This

is where the connection between Austin's polemic and Merleau-Ponty's revisions to

phenomenology becomes apparent. In concentrating on the dimension of the meaning of

words that gestural expressiveness of the illocution is hidden. However, Austin notes that

he is not really interested in the "sense" of words, but in the way that their force seems to

be "given" in the speech situation (100). MerleauPonty, though not speaking to Austin

directly, expands that conceptualization of the illocutionary moment to its social and

dialectical dimension. "The sense of the gestures is not given," he writes, "but

understood, that is, recaptured by an act on the spectator's part. The whole difficulty is to

conceive this act clearly without codking it with a cognitive operation." He insists

moreover that the "meaning of a gesture thus 'understood' is not behind it, it is

intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gesture, and which I take up

on my own account" (1 85-86). This phenomenological approach to verbal performance

suggests that regardless of the analytical formula used to determine the criteria for the

validation of the performative utterance, such a determination is abstracted from the

material presence of the speech act in its gestural situation. The experience of promising,

for example, is hdarnentally more amorphous than the concept of "the promise"

described by philosophy. It is also findarnentally real, there before any consideration if

treated in this gestalt manner, while in a conceptual sense, the promise is only the

conglomeration of isolated criteria which it repeats or draws owand this is the way the

notion of conventionality is most often used in conjunction with performative analysis.

In a later chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty uses the

example of an empty but lighted theatre to illustrate the way conceptual perception as

opposed to phenomenological perception fbnctions. To the thus isolated observer, the

world on stage seems to be ready-made. But, just as light only brings the details of an

object into view when the observer too stands in that light (Phenomenology of Perception

3 1 I), so the theatre space seems to be a world existing before us (spatially and temporally)

because we follow the lights:

If1 imagine a theatre with no audience in which the curtain rises upon

illuminated scenery, I have the impression that the spectacle is in itself

visible or ready to be seen, and that the light which probes the back and

foreground, accentuating the shadows and permeating the scene through

and through, in a way anticipates our vision. Conversely our own vision

merely takes up on its own account and carries through the encompassing

of the scene by those paths traced out for it by the lighting, just as, when

we hear a sentence, we are surprised to discover the track of an alien

thought. We perceive in conformity with the light, as we think in

conformity with other people in verbal communication. And just as

communication presupposes (even while outstripping and enriching it in the

case of new and authentic expression) a certain linguistic setting through

which a meaning resides in the words, so perception presupposes in us an

apparatus capable of responding to the promptings of light in accordance

with the sense (that is in accordance with their direction and their

significance, which amount to one thing), of concentrating diffuse visibility

and completing what is merely foreshadowed in the spectacle. This

apparatus is the gaze, in other words the natural correlation between

appearances and our kinaesthetic unfoldings, something not known through

a law, but experienced as the involvement of our body in the typical

structures of a worId. (3 10)

The comparison between theatrical "promptings of light" and perceptual diffusion clearly

relates to Austin's challenge to the descriptive fallacy which grounds his theory of speech

acts. As with Austin, the experience of theatre is an experience of a performance under

scrutiny which suddenly comes to terms with its own limiting parameters. Significantly, it

is in isolation (a loaded word for the polemics of Austin's method) that the "sense" of

conceptuality comes to be seen in its own Iight. This awareness is at heart counter to

conception in a structural sense, but is felt in an expanded or "kinaesthetic" sense, that is,

as an immediacy of a dual presence of a f d a r coherence and a material strangeness, like

touching one hand with the other (93).

Few philosophers are as explicit in their comparisons between theatrical

spectatorship and philosophical speculation. Many variations on the performative around

and since Austin's lectures clarify the irrational material presence of speech in a way that is

relevant to the experience of the theatre. One of the most formative of these philosophers

is Ludwig Wttgenstein, whose enigmatic explication of "language games" in his

Philosophic2 Imestrgmom anticipates the polemical trajectory of Austin's anti-

philosophical agenda. Wsttgenstein may be said to have inaugurated the linguistic turn in

modem philosophy by claiming that philosophical classification in its traditiod empirical

mold m o t comprehend the elusive character of language as a material entity not

associable with the physical or psychological realities which it is presumed to describe.

Although Wittgenstein does not discuss theatre, he alludes at one point to the curious

theatrical dimension which any explanation must take to encompass all the dynamics of an

emotional phenomenon like fear which cannot be encompassed by description alone:

"What is fear?" he asks, "What does 'being &aid' mean? If1 wanted to detine it at a

single shewing-I should pIayuct fear" (1 88). And yet Wittgenstein also suggests that

"play acting" is itselfinadequate as description, because it assumes a mimetic repetition of

some idea which fear itself is not. Wtttgenstein thus deduces that the play of linguistic

usage to describe or explain is at once independent of the reality it describes, and at the

same time exists in that reality to the extent that there is no difference between them.

"Describing my state of mind (of fear, say) is something I do in a particular context ... Is it,

then, so surprising that I use the same expression in different games?" (188). Play-acting,

theatre in an essential sense, epitomizes the polemical direction of Wgenstein's

philosophy of language. Wittgenstein proposes, as Austin does, that actions performed in

language (such as promising and naming) are not a sub-class of descriptions; rather,

description is a sub-class of performance. When we describe a state of mind we use a

form of expression which we hope will accommodate the expectations of our own "mental

image" or the beliefs of others. "You are inclined to say it should really have been

expressed differently. Perhaps simply by making a sign with one's hand and then giving a

72

description" (1 402). Such contextdependent gestures demonstrate for Wlttgenstein the

dynamic of communication.

W~ttgenstein's gestural language games extend speech-act theory £?om an

inadequate classificatory linguistic system to a cod?ontation with the ontology of

philosophy taken as a dynamic relation between observing subjects and objects of

observatioe Wittgenstein takes a pragmatic approach to this Linguistic conditionality,

such that the philosopher's understandkg of words is always responsible to the way words

fbnction in the world. That is, the philosopher is observed as a subject, in the scene, so to

speak, of philosophy. ErniIe Benveniste's adaptation and critique of Austin also redirects

the metacritical potential of linguistics toward a consideration of subjectivity. He argues,

however, that Austin's notions of illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect, as we11 as

his sketched categories of perfonnative verbs, are too loose. Instead, he proposes a more

grammatically restrictive criterion for the performative, a criterion which Austin abandons:

the first-person indicative form of verbs. But Benveniste's rationale for returning to

grammatical criteria is not as straightforward as Austin's initial turn to them for the

convenience of isolation and classification. Benveniae reasons that the active potential of

language does not lie in the meaning of words, in the "instrumental" power which it

"lends" to human formulations of the world, but in the power of subjective agents who

comprehend the dynamics of the language system to adapt general actions, "identified" in

utterances, to specific instances of language use ("Subjectivity in Language" 223 -24). As

a result, subjectivity is not latent in the meaning of words, or otherwise in a motivating

power which exists behind words, but is rather "a consequence" of using certain linguistic

tools-frequently, but not necessarily, the pronoun "I."

Benveniste's revision of Austin also highlights and augments its realization of the

competition endemic to language between its objective conceptualization and its

73

motivated, spontaneous existence. Benveniste insists that the performative-constative

distinction can be maintained by the capacity in certain utterances to "denominate" the act

they also perform Though the verb "to be" is used in both sentences, and neither contains

the word "I," the sentences "the window is open" and "the meeting is open" are

fundamentally merent because the latter calls the meeting into existence by positing it in

the context of narrative of action ("Analytical Philosophy and Language" 236-37).

Benveniste seems to retreat from this radical position when he claims that the active

power of first-person indicative verbs to manifest and thereby make present subjectivity

also derives f?om the "authority" of the speaker to act in such a way in his or her social

context (236), and to this extent Benveniste seems to comply with Austin's rule Al. Yet

Benveniste also refuses to distinguish subjective intention from the act of speaking in a

communicative situation, suggesting that the emergence of subjectivity is a profoundly

inter-subjective process, a "dialectical reality" of "'I' and 'the othef . . . that will incorporate

the two terms and define them by mutual relationship" ('Subjectivity in Language" 225).

This intersubjectivity points to a fbrther dialectical relation between the in>-mentality of

language subordinated to an activating subject and the phenomenon by which that

subjectivity seems to exist by virtue of linguistic activation.

Most significantly, as Kaja Silverman has explained, the circular intersubjective

emergence of the subject's consciousness of subjectivity can be used to underscore the

respective situation of speakers and observers in film and theatre (43 -53). For Silverman,

the appearance of people in a visual medium which is also evidently present to a critical

observer elucidates exactly the dialectic of Benvenistean subjectivity between its

conventional and authorial forms and its instantaneous presence (47). For Benveniste, this

instantiation is part of the subject's existence in time; the sign and with the sign the subject,

exist in both a synchronic and a diachronic capacity. But Benveniste also stresses that the

74

coordinating forms of linguistic utterance* its conventions, authorities, and grammars7 are

also in themselves material or "empty" instances in a continuum of production:

Language is ... the possibility of subjectivity because it always contains the

linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivity, and discourse

provokes the emergence of subjectivity because it consists of discrete

instances. In some way, language puts forth *emptyn forms which each

speaker* in the exercise of discourseS appropriates to himseIf,.. The instance

of discourse is thus constitutive of all the coordinates which define the

subject. ("Subjectivity in Language" 227)

Discourse is staged, certainly, but the stage is also discursive, to the extent that it exists as

part of an overall temporal experience. For the philosopher of the subject, then,

"subjectivity" represents an encounter not simply with the constructedness of his own

subject-position, but also with the materiality of that construction, as opposed to an

objectified idea of " fictionality . "

Wittgenstein and Benveniste thus share a sense of language as a material event and

the dialectical potential which such an awareness of materiality brings to a meta-critical

account of philosophical conceptualization of the most basic human phenomena. The

dialectics of the speech situation dso leads Jacques Derrida in his famous, and stiII

wntrovssial, essay on Austin, "Signature Event Context," to suggest that "perhaps" the

actions implied by performative speech do not happen, at least not in the directed manner

assumed by empirical conceptions of subjective agency. Demda argues that the

communicability of language is preceded by "iterability," the fact that sounds and words

can be formed, repeated, and cited. Speech acts do occur, but not by virtue of any

quantifiable intention. Rather they enact a process of iteration, of repeating concepts

which are constructed presences, as opposed to siflcations of absent or unuttered (as of

75

yet) thoughts. For Demda, then, the materiality of the locution must be considered part of

a radically contingent perfonnative act. Moreover, Derrida suggests that the aon-

seriousness which Austin refised to consider in How to Do Things with Words cannot be

so excluded. Derrida asks, "ultimately, isn't it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly,

exception, 'non-serious' citiztiion (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined

modification of a general citationality - or rather a general iterability - without which

there would not even be a 'successll' performative?" (17). Thus, "a successlid

performative is necessarily a 'pure' performative, to adopt the word advanced later on by

Austin when he acknowledges that there is no 'pure' performative." No performative is

"successfirl" in itself: since it "always already" contains within it the trace of its non-

seriousness. By reformulating Austin's exclusion of theatrical utterances, Derrida points

to the radical contingency of utterance upon the phenomenon of speech.

Demda's reformulation of iterability as the paradoxical "condition of possibility" of

speech acts has had more influence on literary criticism than any other version of the

performative. It has had a particdarly broad impact on the treatment of speech acts in

relation to writing, since it is in writing, the marking of communication into patterns and

signs, that the ci&ztionaIiiry of the utterance is most definitively felt. Thus, Stephen

Wmspur adapts Wittgenstein's anti-empiricism to argue that the power of poetry is its

"recastingt' of its own textuality into a realization of the models which shape daily

existence to counter the notion that life is somehow contingent and meaningless. Thomas

Pave1 similarly combines the insights of speech-act theory regarding the determining

influence of social conventions and verbal structures with the notion of "fictiond worlds"

created in literary works to challenge the "ontological status" o f fictionality and reality.

The danger of this approach is that because it often concentrates on the structural

dynamics of the sign, it can potentially draw attention away fkom the dialectical encounter

76

of the sign with its discrete material instantiation within the speech situation. J. W i s

Miller, for instance, has extended the notion of iterability to claim that since narratives are

essentially iterated performative acts, they are therefore "baseless positings" which cannot

be verified by any epistemological analysis (145). As Timothy Gould has commented,

however, far fiom being a subversive critique of a positivist or descriptive epistemology,

Miller's adaptation of the performative gives almost absolute positive value to the

functioning of an object (25). The emphasis on textudity in speech-act criticism h d l l y

sets it back to a subjectsbject critical relation which Austin, as well as Wittgenstein,

Benveniste, and Demda, disallows.

A similar danger is apparent in the transfer of these textually-oriented ideas to the

study of drama. Thus Barbara Johnson argues that Derrida's notion of iterability is

exemplified by the predicament of theatrical imitation: "The non-seriousness of a

performative utterance 'said by an actor on the stage' results, then, not f?om his fictional

status but fiom his duality, £?om the spectator's consciousness that although the character

in the play is swearing to avenge his dead father's ghost, the actor's own performative

commitments iie elsewhere" (60). In a way, we are no fixther toward understanding the

dynamics of theatrical performance than we were with Ohmann's trains of illocutions. But

even the word "perForrnative" shows that theatre is an event rather than an object. It will

not withstand such positivist efforts to remove the subject from the contingencies and

responsibilities of its material existence by setting it against the internally coherent

dynamics of an objective textual entity, however fictional. Thus, Butler and Sedgwick

have both adapted an expanded form of the notion of "iterability" to feminism and queer

studies to draw attention not simply to the material nature of action, on stage and in

culture, but also to the radical ambivalence between subjective agency and conventional

institutional authority which that materiality presupposes and which foregrounds the

dynamic potential inherent in the act of speech. It is this in expansive sense of a Living

theatre which also repudiates the strictures of a conventionally "meaninm or

institutional theatre, that a material account of perfonnativity on stage intersects with

issues of socia1 and political economics. What theatre shows is not the baseIessness of

human performance, but its basis in the reality of which it is a part. It is not removable to

models or citations, to serve the banal purpose of explicating human fictionality. Rather,

iterability quite plainly shows the oppositg that the perfonnative utterance has a material

impact apart from the rules, intentions, and conventions which supposedly give it its

validity.

"The total speech act in the total speech situation," Austin adamantly concludes,

"is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating"

(148). Yet, the restrictiveness of that rather empirical claim about what philosophy should

examine is self-consciously tempered by Austin's realization that the performative

challenges the pos~ibiIity that it can "mean something," and become thereby part of a

rational system of knowledge. We can recognize the same spirit in Austin's Sense mtd

Sensibilia, in which he refutes the claims made by Ayers' The Foundations of Empirical

Kitowledge that sensory experience is by and large the experience of sense-data in

consciousness, that sensory experieice has a certain fixed structure which we might

generally call tmth and that language in turn is only responsible for elucidating that true

structure of sense-data. Austin contends that language simply does not work Iike that.

Often we resort to vague terms to clarify certain things which we cannot specify. Truth

and falsehood are therefore matters dependent upon the relative vagueness or elasticity of

our speech given the circumstance of utterance and the things under discussion.

The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an

action' as used in philosophy [as opposed to "down to earth occurrences of

action in ordinary speech" Austin notes], is a highly abstract expression - it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal

subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for any (or when

we remember, almost any) noun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the

adjective. Nobody, to be sure, relies on such dummies quite implicitly and

quite indefinitely. Yet notoriously it is possible to arrive at, or to derive the

idea for, an over-simplified metaphysics f?om the obsession of 'things' and

their 'qualities'. In a similar way, less commonly recognized even in these

semi-sophisticated times, we fd into the myth of the verb. We treat the

expression 'doing an action' no longer as a stand-in for a verb with a

personal subject, as which it has no doubt some uses, and might have more

if the range of verbs were not left unspecified, but as a self-explanatory,

ground-level description, one which brings adequately into the open the

essential features of everything that comes, by simple inspection, under it.

We scarcely notice even the most patent exceptions or dEculties (is to

think something, or say something, or to try to do something, to do an

action?), any more than we Eiet, in the ivresse des grQndesprofondeurs, as

to whether flames are things or events. So we come easily to think of our

behaviour over any time, and of a life as a whole, as consisting in doing

now action A, next action B, then action C, and so on, just as elsewhere we

come to think of the world as consisting of this, that and the other

substance or material thing, each with its properties. AIl 'actions' are, as

actions (meaning what?), equal, composing a quarrel with striking a match,

winning a war with sneezing: worse still, we assimilate them one and all to

the supposedly most obvious and easy cases, such as posting letters or

79

moving fingers, just as we assimilate all 'things' to horses or beds. ("Plea

for Excuses" 178-79)

Austin formufates a phenomenologid conception of the ordinary, of which language,

including the language of philosophy, is a part. There is for Austin no qualitative way to

determine, to philosophically distribute, the relations between actions as equivalences.

Thus, while Austin's attention to the dynamics of the speech event points to the

importance of the phenomenological impulse of his work especially to the corresponding

dynamics of Romanticism, Austin also stresses the need to examine the specific conditions

of specific acts. It is in this sense that Austin mediates phenomenological generality with

the pragmatic dificulties of economics to give them a more profound critical resilience.

Economies and Ercuses:Speech ACLF at Work and Play

The interpretation of the performative &om the perspective of this

phenomenological gestalt supposes that the dynamic force of performance manifests an

experience of verbal continuity which, in its extension beyond any relation to an abstract

meaning, challenges the authoritarian impulse of this abstracting tendency in criticism. At

the same time, the emphasis in W~ttgenstein's Philosophical Investigations on the tenuous

"family resemblances" between certain words and certain concepts and the emphasis in

Derrida7s "Signature Event Context" on the locutionary act, to give just two instances,

points to the importance of understanding the materiality of utterance not simply as a

gestalt continuum, but as a discrete event which, while they encompass a historical

dynamism, do not necessarily combine into a causal series. Indeed, the problematic

tendency of literary criticism to turn utterances into texts is important to the Romantic

critique of political economy because this kind of serialization is inherent in many

methodologies of the social sciences, including economics. its resistance to narratives of

causality may explain why, as in literary theory, Austin's theory of the performative has

not had universal theoretical appeal.15 To suggest that the perfonnative leads to a critique

of causality is not to reject the idea that causes and effects exist in the world and its

history; rather, the point is to draw attention to the limit of this historicization in its

consideration of discrete instances of verbal action.

It is largely because of the contingencies apparent in the enormous field of verbal

behaviours, that, in the late nineteenth century, economic theory adopted more rigorous

modes of mathematical modeling as its basic explanatory practice and turned away from

the historical methods still practised in political theory and sociology. But in as much as

speech-act theory has found its way into the social sciences, this attention to the pragmatic

implications of incidents of verbal performance has pointed to the dialectical implications

of Austin's polemic for the methodological assumption of rationality in the social

sciences.16 A significant incidence of this dialectic is apparent in the work of Austin's most

iduential follower, John Searle. Searlels theory of speech acts can be considered a

lSGrice's theories of meaning, conversation, and implicature, for instance, which were inspired by Austin's ordinary language philosophy, and on which Pratt and Altieri found their social theories of literary production and henneneutical interpretation, have been welcomed into semantic theory and social linguistics in a way that Austin's theory of performative language has not. At the 1997 Modem Languages Association Convention in Toronto, a session on semantics and grammar in Writing pedagogy in the social sciences was almost totally devoted to the importance of Grice's theories, while Austin's speech-act theory which inspired it was almost completely ignored. This preference for Grice over Austin may be the result of the fact that Grice's theory is more firmly based in the positivist methods of research and explanation already entrenched in the social sciences. Indeed, these methods closely resemble the conclusions of such literary critics as Ohmann, Petrey, and Fish, despite their claims that what they uncover is a ccconventional" (in Ohrnann's case), cccollective" (in Petrey's) or "rhetorical" (in Fish's) dynamics which incorporates all social action into a traceable relation of causes and effects.

l6 See for instance articles by Jung and GUM^ in Natanson, in which Austin's phenomenological sense of the slipperiness of the concept of action in relation to language is offered as a solution to the problem of rationality in social interaction.

81

descriptive philosophical system of a kind that Austin sets out to challenge, though Searle

is important to this study of political economy in Romantic drama because of the acclaim

he has received in analytical philosophy and the social sciences and because in subtle ways

this description does encompass many of the difficult contingencies in social behaviour

which performative language theory clarities. Searle defends his empirical mode of

analysis in three ways. First, he contends that illocutionary force is a systematic fbnaion

of standard paradigms of human thought evident in the meanings of everyday words and

sentences. In Speech Acts, Searle writes that "it is in principle possible for every speech

act one performs or could perform to be uniquely determined by a given sentence (or set . of sentences), given the assumptions that the speaker is speaking literally and that the

context is appropriate. And for these reasons a study of the meaning of sentences is not in

principle distinct %om a study of speech acts. Properly constructed they are the same

study" (18). Second, the two axes of Searle's speech-act theory, intention and convention,

comprise an economy of n o d behaviour which for him corresponds to the way human

beings interrelate. Searle insists that all speech situations, even those outside the dynamics

of one-to-one contact, include the intentionality of a conscious, rational subject. "When I

take a noise or mark on a piece of paper to be an instance of Linguistic communication," he

writes "one of the things I must assume is that the noise or mark was produced by a being

or beings more or less Like myself and produced with certain kinds of intentions" (16). In

this view, speech acts are constitutive vehicles by which a subject engages with the world

intentionally, that is with an eye to consciously and sincerely making things happen in it.

At the same time, however, Searle claims that intentions become speech acts when they

comply with established rules governing social discourse (45). In order to perform a

promise, my utterance must be in compliance with certain defining features of the

utterance situation called promising: I must oblige myself to a fiture act, I must believe

that you "would preferu me to do this future thing, this thing must be out of the ordinary (I

could not be doing it anyway), I intend to do the act, I intend to be placed under an

obligation, I intend for you to understand my intention. Intentionality is clearly a

governing principle for Searle, but his system demands conditions and rules by which that

intentionality is seen to be manifest in speech.

Third, and most importantly, Searle ignores the bdamental problem apparent in

Austinfs original treatment of the performative: the limitations of analysis itselfin the

formulation of a distinctive category of subjective behaviour. Searle's account of the

speech act confirms that subjectivity is defined simultaneously by an ability to perform

intentional acts of conscious willfiilness and by its formation by normatively established

social practices. Searle refises to recognize that neither criterion is apparent to the hearer

or receiver because his model is governed by a positivistic sense of the relation between

language, the world in which it is spoken, and the philosophy best suited to understand it.

"This method" he declares "one of constructing idealized models, is analogous to the sort

of theory construction that goes on in most sciences ... without abstraction and idealization

there is no systematization" (Speech Ace 56). Within this methodology, illocutions are

things that happen acwrdig to intrinsic and determined principles that have nothing to do

with locutionary utterance and perlocutionary effects. Hlocutionary force is for Searle a

property of certain types of words and as such, it appears as a near scientific unit

measuring how and to what' effect a spoken utterance acts in the world. He gives it a

mathematical formula, F@), with which he can then chart the various ways in which words

and world relate to one another. On the other hand, the range of influences on the

variations and relative strengths of the illocutionary force of any given utterance in Searle's

taxonomy of speech acts is staggeringly vague; it includes the "psychological states" of

speaker and hearer, their "relative status" to one another and "interest" in the acts and

83

states of affairs in question, the purpose of the utterance itseIfl and the style in which it is

presented. From these idealized models of speech Searle insists that the success and

hction of any act of speech can be predictably and accurately described.

Nevertheless, there are important points in Searlek account of the institutional

reality of speech acts which intersect with the negative dialectic between the

conventionality of social interaction and the mysterious Linguistic force which makes that

conventionality work. For instance, Searle claims that speech acts are conditional upon

both intentions and conventions, though he fails to consider that the authority of the

former might preclude the efficacy of the latter, and vice versa. Esterhammer draws closer

attention to the inconsistency in Searle's idealizing mathematical realism by highlighting his

admission that "supernatural" utterances have illocutionary force, though they demand no

conventional or institutional procedure (Creating Smtes 26-28; 42-43). These

supernatural utterances are an exceptional sub-class of Searle's class of declarations

(ErpresFion 1 8). Declarations in general are a special class of speech acts because,

according to Searle's terminology, they have interdependent "word to world fit"; they

create reality by being uttered, not by manifesting intentional sincerity as in the case of the

promise. In his algebraic formulation of the declaration, Searle replaces the normal

sincerity indicator with a "null symboln to indicate that it requires no internal sincerity

condition (1 9), asserting that "there must exist an extra-liiistic institution" for normal

declarations to take place. I must, for instance, be a priest, in order to baptize a child

(18). But he also offers two exceptions to this institutional requirement: divine utterances,

such as "let there be light," and "declarations which concern language itselc" including

naming and defining. For Esterhammer, Searle's "null point" signals the

phenomenological character in speech acts which in an ideal sense create worlds through

the power of speaking itselfand which is in dialectical confrontation with the "socio-

84

political" dimension of institutional regulation (27). For Searle, divine utterances and

naming are exceptional utterances, and yet declarations in general are "a special category

of speech acts" because they simply do not need to obey the sincerity condition. As

Esterhammer indicates, SearIe's e ~ ~ e p t i ~ i ~ point to an internal creative energy against

which his own pseudo-scientific examination of constitutive rules and "normal" social

behaviours pits itseK

A similar ambiguity is apparent in Searie's treatment of theatrical utterances.

Searle's commitment to the systematic analysis of human linguistic behaviour leads him to

defend Austin's reluctance to discuss "non-serious" or "parasitic" utterances. Searle

argues that the "exclusion of these parasitic forms &om consideration in his preliminary

discussion is a matter of research strategy .... Austin correctly saw that it was necessary to

hold in abeyance one set of questions, about parasitic discourse, until one has answered a

logically prior set of questions about 'serioust discourse" ("Reply" 205). The reasoning

behind this version of the exclusion can be seen in Searlets account of the "logical

dependence" of speech acts in the theatre: "the actor pretends to be someone other than he

actually is, and he pretends to perform the speech acts and other acts of that character"

(@resion 69). "Serious" speech acts in plays are the "directions to the actors as to how

they are to pretend to make assertions and to perform other actions ... the playwright's

performance in writing the text of the play is rather like writing a recipe for pretence. "

Searle concludes that the playwright's "recipe" has illocutionary force akin to "a set of

instructions for doing something" (70). Characters' utterances seem to fulfil the conditions

for making performative utterances, but they lack real illocutionary force. Stage discourse

is the combination of pretend speech acts provided by the actor and actual speech acts

provided by the "author." "The text of the play," Searle writes, "will consist of some

pseudoassertions, but it will for the most part consist of a series of serious directions to

85

the actors as to how they are to pretend to make assertions and to perform other actions"

(69). Actors "pretend to make assertions" and thus their assertions are not serious. On

the other hand, "the author of the play is not in general pretending to make assertions; he

is giving directions as to how to enact a pretense which the actors then follow." For

Searle, the distinction is evident in the intentions of each; actors intend to pretend, authors

intend to direct that pretense.

As Elam has noted, Searle's definition of theatre is very limited. Searle's separation

of author's directions and actor's utterance on the basis of pretense "is the apotheosis of

the authorial stage direction, or as it were the stage directive, as the real communicational

substance of the text. The dialogue, by the same token, is relegated to the margins as an

'unserious' if not unnecessary extra, the mere let's-pretend kid's s t u f f at which otherwise

all-too-serious adults agree somewhat irrationally to play" ("Much Ado" 44). Searle

cannot believe in the seriousness of stage utterances for the simple reason that his

rationalist model of what constitutes perfonnative behaviour disallows such a belief. In

the process he suggests that the irrational games adults play are in fact what we believe in

when we agree with Searle's systematic model, only we choose to ignore its irrationality.

Contra Searle, Elam agrees that the intentions of the actor and the author are different, but

not clearly "unserious" and "serious" respectively. True, Elam continues, the actor's

utterance represents the presumed speech of his or her character and that presumption is

by and large the work of a dramatist. But actors also seek to make an aesthetic

impression, to give pleasure to the audience. This is, after all, the way they make their

living. Actors must perjfiorm accepted procedures-acting, declaiming, bowing-to be

recognized as actors. They must also pejontr "correctly" and "completelyt' in accordance

with the requirements of their directors and audiences. The intentions of the author have

little to do with the success of theatrical speech acts. Rather, for Elam, conditions of

86

performative success are established by the community of the theatre itself and by the

conventions of theatiicd performance recognized by that community.

With Fish, Elam argues against Searle that the study of illocutionary acts is far too

limiting for dramatic criticism. Elam suggests, for instance, that theatre studies should

also consider the perlocutionary effkct of theatrical performance on its audience (50).

Interestingly, he singles out the theatre of Ganick, Kemble, and Keaq the theatre

contemporary with Romanticism, as an eminendy suitable object for a theatre history with

this perlocutionary emphasis (46). Coleridge suggests that the theatre audience's desire to

be "amused" leads to their "temporary half-faithn in and "voluntary contribution" to the

essential realization of a world on the stage. His own theory of performance thus

comprises the expectation of a perlocutionary effect produced by the illocutionary acts of

the actors (Shakeqwareun Criricism 1:178; cited in Elarn 55). But Elam also does not

consider-as Austin does and I would suggest the Romantic theatre critics, including

Coleridge, do too-the difficulty of distinguishing the illocutionary act from perlocutionary

effect, a difticulty that arises because "the irrational games people play" do not always

conform to the rational classifications which Austin and Searle offer them. To give Searle

his due, then, theatrical utterances me fictional, and the fact that they occur in the world

does not change the fact that they are so. But they also happen, as Searle's analysis of

declarations proves. The pragmatic account of utterance in terms of social or intentional

conditions does not in itself necessarily encompass why speech does things..

Searle has defended the way he reduces these different categories of speech on the

ground that it is rooted in a "metaphysical realism": this is the way, in actuality, that

people think about what they do with words. It is thus surprising that Searle remains

something of a controversialist in the social sciences. In his recent work, Searle has

moved away fiom the study of language proper to the study of how the philosophy of

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language interweaves with cognitive science to produce a dynamic model of human

intentionality, and how that intentionality subtends social phenomena such as money,

marriage, property, and so on: What distinguishes Searie's forays into the social sciences

is his quite open sense that because these phenomena are based on intentional initiatives,

they are not limitable to sequential narratives of operation, but remain contingent upon

such social phenomena as agreement and judgement. As in his earlier writing on language,

Searle is more likely to presume that such agreement will happen; however, the gaps and

holes in his formulations of such phenomena as declarations and theatrical speech, which

in turn can be said to underlie much social and economic behaviour, point directly to a

pragmatic awareness of the limitations of analytical research. What is important about

Seade's adaptation of Austin's speech act is that it brings these contingencies to bear on

the minutiae of discourse. While the phenomenological approach to the speech act defies

the standardization of behaviour to theoretical models by drawing attention to the

slipperiness of the whole scene of analysis, Searle's hyper-specific taxonomies demand

that this gestalt pattern can only achieve critical significance through the analysis of its

divisions: the discrete moments of articulation which occur in discourse and which do not

necessarily collect into normative structural patterns of action.

Jiirgen Habermas's recent adaptations of speech-act theory to his critical theory of

social action stress this dialectic between the dynamics of individual utterance situations

and the general phenomenon of communication, oriented around the process of "coming

to understanding." Theoretical discourse consists for Habermas of ongoing engagements

with the utterances of others in h e theoretical scene. He calls this engagement

cccommunicative action," a dynamic articulation of the way language works "&om the

standpoint of a sociological theory of actionw ( C o m m u n i ~ v e Action, 298). Like Austin,

though in a more definitive way, Habermas insists that the hearer is as much a subjective

88

agent as the speaker. Communicative action cannot be said to begin without the heareh

response to the utterance: yes or no: "conditions of satisfaction have to be supplemented

with conditions of sanction to complete the conditions of acceptability" (300). The hearer

does not simply obey conventional forces implicit in illocutions but judges the validity of

the speaker's utterance under the standard that said hearer believes to be in force.

Habermas realizes that this ideal formulation of independent judgement is not always in

pIay in the speech situation. Many of the coordinated social actions most often associated

with speech acts-bets, ceremonies, promises, commands, justifications--are specifically

perlocutionary or "strategic" acts, the analysis ofwhich should be focused on the methods

used by a speaker to influence or coerce a hearer into a particular fiarnework of judgement

which will determine the development of understanding between them in a particular way.

Certainly, Habermas agrees with Derrida that the knowledge of what makes a speech act

have an effect-its illocutionary forceprecedes either its use by a speaker or judgement by

a hearer: "A hearer understands the meaning of an utterance when, in addtion to

grammatical conditions of well-fomedness and general contextual conditions, he knows

those essential conditions under which he could be motivated by a speaker to take an

m a t i v e position" (Communicative Action 298). Habermas calls the study of these

positions and judgements in communicative action "universal pragmatics."

Habemas argues that speech acts in Literature similarly cannot be counted as valid

because they coerce agreement by staging their own readership. In a sense, Habermas's

version of the speech act seems inappropriate to a literary model of interpretation; indeed,

the reason Habermas is held in so little esteem by the literary academy outside of Germany

is that he refises to believe that the specified aesthetic and descriptive discourses of

Literary criticism-such as are also evident in Demda's critique of writing and Foucault's

critique of history and power-cannot or rather should not be applied to the attempt to

reach political and sociological understanding which is the enterprise of the social

sciences. There is no real meeting of autonomous subjects in literature, only a completed

text and a passive reader. "The transfer of validity" he writes, "is interrupted at the

bomdaries of the text; it does not extend through the communicative relation all the way

to the reader. Literary speech acts are in this sense illocutionarily disempowered" (Post-

Metaphysical ZhinRing, 223). If we counter that literary speech acts do have power

because they are exemplars of citatioaal signification, are we simply back to

deconstructing speech acts semioti~ally?'~ Since deconstruction teaches that all the

validity of these concepts is conditional upon textuality, rhetoric, and signification there is

little to do but treat them like literature. But little for Habermas is "self-validating"; the

point of the pragmatic stance is the realization that normative standards of validity do exist

in as much as things do get done, agreement is reached, regardless of what he calls

"nihilistic" denials of rationality in the world. However, these standards are also open to

rational scrutiny. We need the ideal of a substantial verbal eficacy, even if, as Searle also

admits, what we say is not always effi ive or, in Austin's terms, success~l. By contrast,

for Habermas, creating fictions, citing texts, even standardizing performative success by

conceiving it in terms of writing, misses this contingent dimension, even though it

presumes to critique the normative standards of communicative reason.

Habermas is adamantly opposed to the idea that universal pragmatics entails the

idea that verbal action is contingent upon reference, for that idea Limits the conception of

verbal operations to subjective consciousness, rather than the intersubjective relation of

speakers, hearers, and the normative standards of communicative success. If we begin

l7 Noms, for one, argues against Habermas that refining speech acts to rational non-literary, non-coercive exchange problematically presumes that all speakers and hearers have "access to some privileged realm of a priori concepts or uniquely self-validating tmth-claims" (1 74-75).

90

fkom the analytical gestalt of phenomenology. and at the same time consider the discrete

tectonics of the individual utterance, then we are not s&ply measuring perlocutionary

strategies or illocutionary convention, but exploring the way the "null point" of

illocutionary force intersects with and deconstructs its locutionary and perlocutionary

parameters to challenge the analytical reduction of speech to specialized narratives of

behavioural sequences. "The lifeworld must be defended," Habermas insists, "against

extreme alienation at the hands of the objectivating, the moralizing and the aestheticizing

interventions of expert cultures. " But theory must also "mediate &terpretatively between

expert knowledge and an everyday practice in need of orientation" (Post-MetaphysicaZ

minking 17- 1 8). If however we include in a theoretical model of literary interpretation

the realization that the experience of literary readership may not succeed, as a focus on the

specific material dimension of the utterance situation will do, then we do not strategically

anticipate the intersubjective relations oftext and reader which is the basis, for instance,

for the Romantic critic's insurgent anti-theatricality. The point is to see the discrete

utterances of theatrical performance as diflicult and elusive instances of utterances in the

Zve-world, the "unproductive" aesthetics of which complicate the normative success of

speech presumed by most literary critical models. In other words, as Robert Holub has

argued, there is no debate between Habermas and his post-modernist critics because all of

them to some extent are attempting to fiee language fiom the normative restraints of

theoretical anticipation. Difference and intersubjectivity work to the same goal, and even,

as Austin' s mediation of phenomenology and pragmatics suggests form the very dialectic

upon which a progressive mode of criticism can be based.

While the phenomenological impulse of performative language theory manifests

the "irreducible" gestalt of linguistic power which is usually sublimated within a larger

conception of social action or consciousness, a presence that is evinced in the conceptual

91

interrelation of performance in its social and theatrical senses, the pragmatic approach

clarifies the importance of maintaining a dialectical intersection of that gestalt with the

parameters and assumptions at work in individual instances of that social action. It is this

dialectic between ideality and materiality inherent in the speech act that enables speech-act

theory to redress the problematic clash of idealism and materialism attendant on historical,

literary, and most certainly economic, interpretation Indeed, speech-act theory itself can

counter accusations of eiditic reduction levelled at it f?om the perspective of more

materially oriented methodologies. One of the most vigilant of these materialist rebuttals

of the application of the performative to social research comes from Pierre Bourdieu. In

Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu argues that the reduction of the dispositions of

social agents to verbal semantics, no matter how ordinary, is not simply evasive but

damagingly naive:

It is not enough to say, as people sometimes do, in order to avoid the

dificulties inherent in a purely intemalist approach to language, that the

use made of language in a determinate situation by a determinate speaker,

with his style, rhetoric, and socially marked identity, provides words with

"co~otations" that are tied to a particular context, introducing into

discourse that surplus of meaning which gives it its "illocutionary force."

In fact, the use of language, the manner as much as the substance of

discourse, depends on the social position ofthe speaker, which governs the

access he can have to the language of the institution, that is, to the official,

orthodox, and legitimate speech. It is the access to the legitimate

instruments of expression, and therefore the participation in the authority

of the institution, which makes all the merence-irreducible to discourse

as such-between the straightforward impostures of masqueraders, who

disguise a performative as a descriptive or comtative statement, and the

authorized imposture of those who do the same thing with the

authorization and the authority of an institution. (109)

Bourdieu outlines precisely the problem fhcing any attempt to analyse the language of

economic exchange: the formal elements of language are ultimately irrelevant to the

imposition of institutional authorities governing how, where, and why we speak. But

Bourdieu's account of the speech situation betrays the presence of performance within his

conception of an institutional authority underlying verbal efficacy. The authorized speaker

is an "impostor." Furthermore, this imposter is characterized with reference to a rhetorical

scene involving a theatrical prop: the passing of "the skeptron.. . in Homer.. . to the orator

who is about to speak. .. . The spokesperson is an impostor endowed with the skeptron7'

(109). To "forget" this scene is, as Bourdieu says, to neglect the institutional dimension

of social speech acts, but in that turn it is also not possible to forget the element of "play-

acting" which is also its governing principle.

Bourdieu's ambivalence about the criteria for the validity of utterances in the social

field is anticipated by Austin. As Austin explains in the first lecture of How to Do Things

with Words his program is intended to expose and thereby debunk the descriptive fallacy.

The problem is that because performative utterances are uttered in the same grammatical

formation as their most common and largest sub-group, constatives, they are often

confbsed with verifiable statements. Austin already contends here, in language recalled

by Bourdieu, that the distinction between the disguise and the imposture is unclear:

The type of utterance we are to consider here is not, of course, in general a . type of non-sense; though misuse of it can, as we shall see, engender rather

special varieties of 'nonsense'. Rather, it is one of our second class-the

masqueraders. But it does not by any means necessarily masquerade as a

statement of fact, descriptive or constative. Yet it does quite commonly do

so, and that, oddly enough, when it assumes its most explicit form.

Grammarians have not, I believe, seen through this 'disguise' and

philosophers only at best incidentally. (4)

The grammatical position is that all utterances are constative. Austin challenges that

position by elucidating statements which are not constatives but which only pretend to be

so in grammatical form. It is this assumptive pretense of formal or grammatical regularity

that makes speech acts subordinate to the descriptive fallacy. Austin suggests here that

perforrnatives are only disguised as signs; they are really "something else" and eventually

he will admit that they are acts. This is the first indication in the lectures that non-

seriousness, disguise, masquerade are actually aspects of verbal action, what Bourdieu

calls imposture. Certainly, Austin's use of the terms disguise and masquerade is significant

here because they point to the particularly uncanny capacity of theatrical utterances to

demonstrate not only their theatricality (or performativity) but the codhion over what

exactly makes that performativity work and whether such a determination can be made.

But is it also possible to suggest that the grammatical limitation of verbal action to the

form of statements comprises another administrative tendency in analytical philosophy, the

mark of its economizing enterprise. Adomo would call this elucidation the "truth-

content" of the philosophy of language; its presumptive rationality is actually a

metaphorical abstraction of the distributive logic of capitalism, wherein the formal

requirements of a given economy are said to correlate precisely to the way that

distribution fbnctions in actuality.

What is important and unique about this elaboration of the constative masquerade

is that it foregrounds the truth-content of philosophical analysis by registering it in discrete

instances not of language but of utterance. Austin's polemical style puts the philosopher

94

in the position of an interloactor in order to show that the way language is to be analysed

must take into account the irregularities of the individual utterance situation as it is

experienced within a continuum of these now understood irregular moments of speech.

We can discover Austin's 'own polemical interest in this difficult critical dialectic by

examining his work on interpretation and mistakemess. Richard Rorty has examined the

phenomenon in the history of philosophy by which the individual dynamics of subjective

agency were incorporated into general conceptions of society and utility, which he calls

justr~catioion. He argues that epistemology f?om Descartes to Locke to Kant and beyond

gradually displaces the idea that knowledge is comprised of rhetorical articulations of

belief about the way things are in a given moment toward the scientific supposition that

knowledge is constituted by '"relations of ideas' conceived of as events in inner space"

which correspond to material facts or categorical imperatives (141). Mentioned by Rorty

as part of the modern philosophical critique of such meta-epistemological processes (1421,

Austin makes a fbxther and more subtle distinction between justifications and excuses in

his essay "A Plea for Excuses." With justifications, Austin argues, speakers appeal to

abstract conditions: "it was a good thing, or the right or sensible thing, or a permissible

thing to do ... we accept responsibility but deny that it was bad [or nonsensical or not

allowed]" (176). By contrast, with excuses, speakers appeal to circumstances not

accountable to a narrative of ethical or logical or psychological causality. Importantly, for

Austin, the domain of excuses and justifications alike is ordinary language: they are both

speech acts. But excuses delegate the criteria of verbal behaviour to the status of

mitigating transgressions, unexpected mishaps or misfires, the ubiquitous misfortunes

registered by the common occurrence ofc'oops7' in day-to-day language. The isolation of

excusing as a category of illocutionary acts and at the same time as a sub-category of

explanatory illocutionary behaviour referring to other speech acts betrays in a definitive

way the dynamic of the "total speech situation" as comprising both counter-rational acts

of utterance, and a tendency to exclude, or excuse, that counter-rationality to the domain

of aberration.

Paul de Man has M e r suggested that excuses Manifest a "performative logic"

(300) in claims of the veracity of certain inner YeeIings" or external conditions which are

not othenvise verifiable than by verbal means, but are introduced into discourse as

statements of fact. From an empirical perspective, that adopted by eighteenth-centuy

philosophy and economics, de Man claims, "knowledge, morality, possession, exposure,

affeaivity ... are all ultimately part of one system that is epistemologically as well as

ethically grounded and therefore available as meaning, in the mode of understanding"

(Allegories 287). Thus an unfWUed promise, the confession of an unwitnessed crime, an

unauthorized command, a plea of momentary insanity sfand because only the

persuasiveness of a later, secondary defence sufficiently proves their veracity. "No.. .

possibility of verification exists for the excuse, which is verbal in its utterance, in its effect

and in its authority; its purpose is not to state but to convince, itself an 'inner' process to

which only words can bear witness" (281). For de Man, an excuse is a speech act which

constitutes the objective reality of an action by declaring some generaly unverifiable truth

to be paradigmatic of a particular procedure, white at the same time it defers speculation

on the success or sincerity of the original performative utterance: "the excuse consists in

recapitulating the exposure in the guise of a concealment" (286).18 Excuses might thus be

l g ~ h e paramount instance of this rhetorical substitution is Rousseau' s description of how he avoided, for a time, penalty, for stealing a ribbon which he intended to give to a fellow servant, Marion. When asked who committed the robbery, the young Rousseau apparently replies "Marion," the first word that comes into his mind, and Marion is prosecuted. According to de Man, since there was no way to either prove or disprove exactly who stole the ribbon and Rousseauys excusing himselfftom the crime, and simultaneously his confession of another's supposed criminal action, both declares

said to be a "general" performative, not as seIf4dently active as promises and

commands, but latent in the fabric of reasoning behind the validity of these "special"

performafives. For de Man the dual vector of excuses constitutes a point of collision

between meaning and rhetoric, and affords an opportunity to recognize the performative

sub-stratum of denials, negations, substitutions, tricks and tropes in language which serve

to constitute in social and theoretical discourse the reality it presumes to describe. But

Austin's purpose in this essay is not to delineate a formal model of "the excuse" above and

beyond its own contingencies in speech, just as the purpose of How to Do Things with

Words is, in the final analysis, not to delineate a formal model of "the performative." To

put forward a materialist version of the total speech situation, as Bourdieu seems to do, is

to naively put faith in the calibration of such existing institutions outside of the formal

dynamics of speech as much as it is to hold to the inner dynamics of words and sentences.

What Austin calls '?he natural economy of language7' ("Plea for Excuses" 190) is here very

roughly a dialectic of inner and outer, of internal force and institutional regulation, which

must be accorded its transgressive moments, including those moments which also seem to

prohibit the examination of their own transgressiveness. In a nutshell, an excuse is still a

speech act, even it; as Austin suggests, attention to them within the context of other

speech acts can lead to a whole new "ramiculated branch of philosophy." It is this

reahtion, in short, which j u a e s the close scrutiny of individuated utterance acts while

still understanding that those discrete acts do not in themselves signify a greater reality.

This new philosophy registers the importance of a pragmatic attention to the

conundrum elucidated by phenomenology. The economic significance of this dialectic

Rousseau' s unverifiable innocence and creates the alternative truth (Marion' s guilt) which paradoxically verifies it. For a fulI discussion of de Man's writing on the performative in a literary context see Esterhammer, Creating States 36-40 and Chase.

amounts to an important change in the way we approach the place of verbal acts of

documentation and theorization in relation to economicprocesse~~ If the division of

labour, for insbnce, is viewed as an organic process of universal productivity extending

fiom the factory to the society, then the heterogenous exertions within it are interpreted to

be analogous purposive units oriented around that assumed universal goal. But ifthat

interpretation is taken into account as a material labour itselfwith its own independent

dynamic of observation, judgement, and articulation, then its strategic assumption of

coherence can be recognized to be an occlusion of the veq individuation which it must

maintain to distinguish it fiom other kinds of verbal action in the factory: commands,

restraints, time tables, quotas and so on. What is recognized, that is, is the discrete

material power of utterance within a collection of potentially aligning and potentidy

conflicting situations of communicative action. The recognition of that material power is

the keystone of Romantic economics.

Exclusion and Etiolation: Austh's fheatre

In what remains of this chapter, I will account for why it is Romantic drama in

particular which serves as a particularly effective forum for this critique by delineating the

parallels between the dramaturgical reflexivity of Romantic drama and Austin's sporadic

but sigruficant comments on the theatre made during the course of outlining his theory of

performative language. Austin's Oxford followers have usually conceived of the

"ordinaryM-as in the expression "ordinary languaget'-to be a version of "mmmon sense,"

the tradition of which, going back to late-eighteenth-century British philosophy, we will

consider in the next chapter. But the notion of "ordinary" in Austin also has the feel of an

untenable experience of motion and fluidity which, like theatre as opposed to drama, is

closer to a pure "event-hood" rather than the performative as a concept which analysis

98

loads with potential meaning. In Sense cmd Senribilia, Austin exemplifies this notion of

how the philosophical inquiry into "ordinary" perceptual experience cannot rest on

discrete rational conceptions of objects, ideas, and words by recounting the seemingly

mundane experience of going to the show. Austin contends that "when the plain man sees

on stage the Headless Woman, what he sees (and this is what he sees, whether he knows it

or not) is not something 'unreal' or 'immaterial', but a woman against a dark background

with her head in a black bag. If the trick is well done, he doesn't (because it's deliberately

made very difticult for him) properly sue up what he sees, or see what it is; but to say this

is far £?om concluding that he sees something else'' (14). There is perhaps no clearer

statement of the mandate of theatre phenomenology; through Austin its perceptual

mandate extends to a deconstruction of the way philosophy treats the language it

interprets and the language of its own mode of interpretation. In a macabre way, the

figure is a supernatural one. And what is important about Austin's suggestion here is that

the conceptualization af the headless woman is neither a trick nor a horror: it is both and

more. The performative on stage works in the same way. Its restricted economy of rules

and conventions is brought to light as a conceptual construct, the special instance of a

gener aiized abstraction which it also creates..

Austin's reactions to theatre help to illuminate in a specific way the larger

polemical aim of How to Do Things with Wordr: the phenomenological position that

philosophy must take in response to the evidently contradictory objects of its

investigations and its own relation to that inquiry. Austin considers theatricality because

he wants to bracket it, closet it, fiom the conventional and intentional criteria he is

outlining at that point in the lectures. The ground for this move is that theatre is a non-

serious and corrupt form of the performative. But then Austin goes on to show not that

such non-seriousness is more or less attendant simply on the perfonnative as he observes it

99

(in fact he never makes this claim, as Derrida does) but rather that perfonnative language

theory fails to produce a system of speech acts because it cannot isolate serious speech

acts from corrupt ones, misfires, grammatical deviants, unintentional perlocutions and so

on, even though these are by definition not performatives. Thus, theatre exemplifies the

"Mac- of M a n performativity, the "nothing at allw at the heart of this

supposedly normal and self-regulating state of affairs which mauifiests both its theatrical

and its hdamentally irrational character.

To embellish this aspect of Austin's speech-act theory, I turn to his related

philosophical essays, most of which were concerned precisely with debunking the

structure- and concept-based philosophical positivism which invades so much

performative criticism. Austin's final published essay, "Pretending," is especially important

to theatre studies because it examines the status in the world of imitations and pretence

and critiques certain summations Austin finds inadequate to certain other contexts in

which an opposing viewpoint could be expressed. Austin argues against the claim that

"there is necessarily involved in pretence, or shamming, the notion of a limit which must

not be overstepped: pretence is always insulated, as it were, eom reality" (cited in Austin,

Papers 253). By this formulation, one can, for example, perform certain actions which

correspond to those associated with anger but once one starts to smash furniture one is

not pretending, one is really "being angry." It is possible to pretend to be angry only up to

a point, after which one is really angry, according to the empiricai evidence one presents

to others. Accumulating evidence in this way and abstracting it into patterns of behaviour,

it is supposed, amounts to the creation of lasting nominal differentiation between one

emotional state andfanother. If I can discover the consistent border between pretending to

be angry and really being angry, I can determine what it means to be angry in the first

place. The same might go for joy or pain, though the evidence of border will not be the

same as that of anger. Limits between being and pretending shift, but descriptions of "real"

states are dependent on that limik

Austin argues that these Limits cannot be established because doing actions and

beiig in a certain state are not the same thing. If I am pretending to be a ferocious lion

and I take a bite out of your leg in the process, that does not mean that I am a d y a

lion, merely that while pretending to be a lion I took said bite. At the same time, I could

not justify that bite by saying, "I am a lion and that is what Lions do" because clearly I am

not a lion Performing isolated actions does not make me exist in a certain state,

pretended or real. Austin considers this faulty equation between "to do" and "to be."

Biting does not suddenly transform me into a Lion, even though it is more drastic

behaviour than roaring or prowling about the carpet on all fours. On the other hand, the

claim that I was pretending to be a lion neither invalidates or excuses the bite (256). So,

doing angty things does not necessarily make me "angry" (I could put on a really

convincing show) but not doing "angry things" like fighting or yelling or swearing does

not necessarily make me not angry. By this logic, I could make a promise, which I have no

intention of keeping in all seeming seriousness and it could be accepted by the person to

whom it is offered. "Pretending" suggests that my pretending to make a promise does not

mean I did not make it and there is not way of knowing, until fbrther evidence is found,

that it was not a real promise. There are no inherent qualities in promises which are not

also apparent in pretence.

Stanley Cavell, one of Austin's most important, if under-appreciated, adherents and

a significant theorist of drama in his own right, is not convinced that Austin's view of

pretence can supplement the problem of serious and non-serious speech acts or that the

essay "Pretending" complements the philosophical spirit of Austin's oeuvre. The account

of imitation as neither all-being nor non-being is about as close to a descriptive philosophy

as Austin gets and a vague and rather cloudy description at that. But Cavell is specifically

concerned with the ethical implications of what seems to him to be a dangerously sceptical

attitude toward human understanding. "It betokens," Cavell notes, "that human utterances

are essentially vulnerable to insincerity (you may say false consciousness) and that the

realization that we may never know whether others are sincere or genuine (I do not

exclude the first person) is apt to become unbearable" (P-ges 58). CaveU associates

this kind of descriptive negativity which conflates pretence and genuineness with a

"scepticism with respect to minds at that place that the possibilities of dreaming and

hallucination and illusion arise in scepticism with respect to things." Scepticism of this

kind-characteristic of deconstruction, we might add-is not Austin's style. As a sceptic,

Austin could not trust human action enough to argue that things actually happen in the

world in spite of and as a result of accident, yet-to-be justified behaviour, infelicity or

insincerity. "Pretending" allows pretence to exist in the world without becoming non-

being, that it has its own measure of effective exhence beside, around, and within other

forms of earnest or apparent being.

What "Pretending" does do is challenge the tendency in philosophy to unilaterally

distinguish serious fiom non-serious be haviour even as it demonstrates, as Cavell

suggests, the presence of both forms of behaviour in ordinary social interaction. It is

therefore possible to recognize in this essay a fiuther instance of Austin's polemical

insistence that philosophy attend to the materiality of ordinaxy behaviour as it appears

rather than concern itself with the intricacies of intentionality or conventionality which it

presumes to be inherent in the processes of communicative action. If, for instance, I

promise to pay you five dollars with all the marks of being sincere then only by

scrutinizing every possible contingency of that speech act would you be able to say that

the promise is void. The presumption must be, however, that if within certain believable

102

boundaries I have said I promise to pay, then for all intents and purposes, that promise has

been made, especially if you take it to have been made. Prior to the infraction of

conventional rules or constitutive sincerify is the fact of the infelicity of my statement, an

infelicity that in the moment of utterance will not be apparent.

It is crucial to realize that Austin's own statement that theatrical utterances are

%on-serious," "hollow or voidM comes in the lecture on felicity and potential infelicity, or

misfires, that point in the lecture where the potentiality and contingency of speaking is

directly relevant to the question of a proper philosophical mandate. The purpose of that

lecture is to exclude those utterances which are infelicitous and, therefore, not classifiable

under the term "performative," since the isolated efficacy of the performative, at this early

stage, is to be determined exclusively by the conventional rules. It is therefore necessary

to re-read Austin's own famous "exclusion" very carerlly. Here is the statement in 111:

...as utterances our perfonnatives are also heir to certain other kinds of ill

which infect all utterances. And these likewise, though again they might be

brought into a more general account, we are deliberately excluding. L

mean, for example, the following: a performative utterance will, for

example, be in apeczdiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the

stage, or ifintroduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a

similar manner to any and every utterance -- a sea-change in special

circumstaoces. Language in such circumstances is in special ways --

intelligibly - used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use -

- ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiol'atiom of language. AU this

we are excl'udiing from consideration. (2 1-22)

Nowhere does Austin say he is excluding theatrical or literary utterances because they

imitate real speech or because they are necessarily without force. He even intimates that "a

more general account" of the topic will consider the force and effect of Literary utterances

and by that he means the expansion of analytical inquiry toward the kinds of contingencies

among which accusations of pretence or theatricality is only one. Though understated,

even tied to the movement of Austin's whole lecture series, such a move has the same

polemical importance to his reformulation of philosophical method as Austin's distinction

at the end of the lectures between a "special theoryt' of the performative, such as the one

he began with, and a "general theory" which is the expanded notion that all utterances are

essentially performative. Austin is not really talking about the falsity of literature but the

abnormality of circumstances when speech acts occur in Literature in comparison with the

criterion of n o d conventional procedures he is at this point delineating and will soon

abandon.

But what is this abnormality? What exactly does Austin mean by hollow?

Presumably he means what he says: "void," empty, without substance. Speech acts

performed by actors on stage are void because they do not follow any actual social

procedures, do not actually do anything, or have no real effect upon an intended audience.

But this is not really true. Surely, there are perfonnative praxes to follow at the theatre.

Actors speak, follow procedures of acting etiquette and form, and audiences respond with

applause, most of the time. No one regards actors as speaking in "bad faith" when they

make certain statements even though an audience might regard that statement as void

because it is art and not reality.'' If an actor stopped speaking his Lines and started

l9 Salz argues that illocutions on stage must be said to take effect in the context of the dynamics of the scene being acted and the audience's necessary suspension of disbelief toward it. S a h compares, quite effectively, illocutionary acts to smoking on stage: if an actor smokes a cigarette during the course of a scene, we cannot say that the cigarette has not been smoked even ifthe actor is in character when he smokes it. Austin's analogies in "Pretendingy' make the same suggestion: for instance, I pretend for the sake of appearances to play a round of golfwith my boss and finish eighteen holes accordingly,

addressing the audience, would that not also count as a sizeable shift in social attitude,

worthy of illocutionary interest? Or rather, while actors' speech may lack or resist positive

content, it is charged in the speech situation of theatre with the force of a real, and indeed

effective, and certainly affective, utterance. Its hollowness, its negativity, is therefore the

uncanny, phenomenological resilience of language as a non-identity which nevertheless has

force and effect in the world. So Austin is not wrong when he excludes theatrical

utterances &om analytical consideration, for the challenge of the performative, of

performance, is exactly the recognition that a trace of this unclassifiable motivating power

within "the speech situation" is, by the end of Austin's lectures, what makes words do

things.

Another way to consider the metacritical implications of Austin's rather devious

introduction of the problem of theatre into his work is to note his fiequent allusions to

drama itself. For instance, Austin says in the first lecture that the "classic expression" of

the descriptive fallacy "is to be found in the Hippolytus (I. 6 12)"--that is, a literary work, a

play even, "where Hippolytus says ... 'my tongue swore to but my heart (or mind or other

backstage artiste) did not'. Thus 'I promise to ...I obliges me - puts on record my spiritual

assumption of a spiritual shackle" (9-10). So Hippolytus's promise was made in bad fdith

to people who believed him. Did it fail to be a promise? Not exactly, because it was

accepted as a promise by someone else. So what is grammatically and logically non-

serious has in practical discourse serious consequences. But the line is taken from a

tragedy. Is it not therefore non-serious, parasitical, logically exempt? No-because what

is grammatically and logically non-serious has in practical discourse serious consequences.

there is Little point in claiming that I was on& pretending to play golf. What this points to, I am arguing, is the importance of the materiality of the utterance to the effectiveness of illocutionary acts.

Only the critical distance of "fbrther inspection" will expose the fact that the actor playing

Hippolytus is "only acting in a play."

Austin includes an important footnote to his citation f?om H i p p o l ' : "But I do

not mean to rule out all the offktage performers-the Lights men, the stage manager, even

the prompter, I am objecting only to certain understudies, who would duplicate the playw

(10). Who are these understudies? Illegitimate actors? Stage managers and prompters

must be taken seriously; they are giving legitimate orders, as even Searle knows. But what

about the legitimate actors? Austin seems to oppose them to their officious duplicating

understudies, dutifUlly proclaiming the lines all out of context. Austin is speaking

metaphorically, but the implication of Austin's metaphor is significant to the status of

theatrical speech and, more importantly, theatrical perception. The theatre compellingIy

illuminates the abnormality and contingency of speech as an event which cannot be

rationalized into a system of causality located (by an interpreter) in semantics or even in

the locution. Austin's footnote tells us that as analysts of language we are not simply

examining meanings and that language as an object of study always resists such scrutiny."

And this is what Austin urges us to do throughout Haw to Do 2king.s with Words. We are

asked repeatedly to listen closely to what we say, not to make distinctions between serious

mCaveLl has a similar reply: "When Hippolytus says My tongue swore to but my heart did not' is he an actor on the stage? Does he think he is, that is, take himself to be on some inner stage? Does Austin imagine one or other of these possibilities to be in effect? Does Austin think we, or anyone at any time, may not be able to tell these differences? Or not tell them in Kippolytus because we cannot tell them in ourselves? Is there something confbsing in the figure of Hippolytus that would confuse Austin about all this? (His slam at the back stage artiste suggests that there is)" (Passages 56-57). I do not think Austin is confused: the voice of the actor is just as confbsing as the voice of anyone else, and that is exactly the problem. In the find section of his study of King Lem, "The Avoidance of Love," Cave11 raises this problem again. We go to the theatre not to see actors pretend but to see characters live. That is we identify with the characterst actions as we would anyone's actions. In the case of speech they are d equally non-szrious or Liable to be, on qualified inspection. See Disowning 95- 102.

106

and non-serious f o d y but to understand what has been done exactly in the act of

saying. The problem which the lectures try to overwme is that this inspection is only

possible within contexts of action and no descriptive exclusions urn be made. It is thus

sigdicant that Austin would include two Shakespearean allusions in this passage: one to

Hamlet ("our perfonnatives are also heir to certain kinds of P") and one to The Tempest

("sea-change"). Finally, it is certainly significant that Austin is delivering a lecture; the

precarious theatricality of what he says in these allusory terms here further disrupts the

positivism implied by the restriction on literary analysis. "We are excluding" is a

constative statement which does something while seemingly disguising that active

dimension, exactly the "general account" Austin establishes over the course of the

lectures.

In this way, utterances delivered on a theatre stage or a lecture podium are

important to Austin's analysis because they highlight precisely the same unca~iness of

perfonnativity which makes itself felt when introduced in relation to the assumptions that

all utterances are statements mtd the suggestion that linguistic performance is the logical

result of the intersection of genuine intentions and real conventions. The aesthetic

theatricality of performance is as important to theatre as the content of that performance.

The actor's utterance has both illocutionaxy and theatricd force. It is a statement and it is

also the aesthetic representation, or rather, the performance, of a statement. This means

that as a "total speech situation" theatre realizes the problem of how to gauge the validity

of utterances, how to determine the intentions, conventions, and responses which will

make an utterance "real" and thus the analyzable object of rational inquiry.

Disclosing Romantic Perfmmce

Before elaborating the way Romantic theatre engages with the materiality of

perfonnative utterances to mount the critique of political economy latent in Austin's

philosophy of language, I want to briefly review some instances in the Romantic drama

canon in which that performative materiality is apparent. To be sure, there are ties to be

made between Austin's phenomenological pragmatics-for lack ofa better term-and the

deconstructive impulses in German Idealism which influenced the Romantic dramatist via

the popularity of Schiller's Die Rc;iuber and, concurrently, the whole tradition of English

melodrama via the astounding popularity of ~otzebue." But just as Romantic economics

is in large part a response to the native classical politicd economy emerging in the works

of David Hume and Adam Smith and others, so its dramatization realizes the intersection

of that response with a native concern for the complexities and subtleties of language and

social action. This realization often occurs on stage as the meeting of comedy and

tragedy, the exposure of the aberrant fictionahtion of meaning through the simultaneous

presentation of its negation. Pre-romantic theatre manifests this confrontation frequently

in its comedies, especially burlesque satires such as Sheridan's B e Critic (178 1) and

Frederick Reynolds' The Dramatist (1 789). The Critic opens with a biting depiction of

the business of drama, exemplified by such characters as Mr. Sneer, a dramatist who

*%ant is becoming recognized as having been engaged in a dialectical encounter between the ideal of an "essencet' and its de-ontological appearance as part of a continuous materiality. This is, for instance, Deleuze's seminal reading of the sublime in Kant's Critique of Judgement. as Kant argues, the only response that reason can offer the subject to the massive, frightening, and irrational experiences which characterize the sublime is that they cannot be rationalized, then the imagination, Deleuze suggests, retains the freedom with which it can explain the beautifid, and must be seen as utterly creative and reactionary, in direct competition with reason This contest is central to the dialectical philosophies of Scheling and Hegel which were so influential on Romantic philosophy and later Marxist economics. In aesthetics, too, Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Ma, combines a notion of the "naive" apriori consciousness of Kantian reason with the "sentimental" consciousness aware of the hitations of naivete in a way that had an enormous influence on G e m and English aesthetics, and theatre, as it was reconceived in Schiller's first tragedy, Die Rduber.

108

praises the critics who scathe his plays, and Mr. PufS who gives lectures on how to make

money by spreading absolutely false nunours and writing brilliant reviews for plays that

have not been written. The opening half of the play also features a group of

incomprehensible Italian opera singers, and their interpreter, who speaks neither Italian

nor English. The point is clear: communication does not occur through the transmission

of k t s , but through the manipulation of sounds and social stigmas. The result is a social

cacophony, which is then brilliantly realized in the second half of the play, taken up

entirely with a rehearsal of Puffs own play, featuring satires of many of Sheridan's own

dramaturgical effects, including striking clocks, mad scenes, and tableaux. The effect of

the play is not, however, an indictment of social hypocrisy, but rather a celebration of the

theatrical negativity which inhabits social discourse and which emerges only when it is

denied. Reynolds' The Dramutist, heavily influenced by Sheridan, relates the adventures

of a playwright aptly named Vapid who is incapable of engaging with society without

tuming it into a play. During the climactic contiontation between the plays' numerous

young lovers, he urges them to make sure that they do not "ruin the denouement" by not

agreeing to marry. Vapid himself is involved with a young woman whose father despises

the theatre. In this way, Vapid represents the theatrical mentality at the heart of the social

context which tries to convert it into something more real. Much of the play is concerned

very self-consciously with the way people promise and contract with each other routinely

without any conviction that what they say corresponds to some "other" mental reality.

Indeed, Vapid is not the only character to highlight that negativity: one of the play's most

successfiil characters is Mr. Ennui, who is incapable of relieving his own sense of

perpetual boredom, even when he is provoked into pretending to be a belligerent, swarthy

Parliamentarian in order to impress the father of the woman he loves (but who doesn't, it

turns out, love him, though Ennui doesn't seem to care). Ennui is a remarkably proleptic

character, in that the indolence he prescribes and satirizes became in the early nineteenth

century a commonplace way of mocking Romanticism, as in, for instance, Peacock's

N i g h m e Abbey (1 8 1 8).

Late eighteenth-century comedy comes close to farce7 in that it discloses in all its

usual unexpectedness the common but intolerable corporeality of human behaviour, what

Henri Bergson a century later d e d "rnechanicuf inelasticityf' (67). Social grace in

comedy is reduced to the level of a pun, exposing the difference which Linguistic

referentiality commonly hides. At the same time, however, what keeps these plays fiom

becoming completely farcical is their dramatization of this inelasticity as something which

remains hidden to cognitive interaction but is apparent to a broader perceptual experience.

This negativity translates into Romantic drama as the defining element of its psychological

emphasis on character as opposed to the social emphasis on plot in the drama of earlier

periods. It is an especially prominent feature of Gothic drama, as will be discussed in

chapter 3. But, by way of preface, I want to distinguish the performative theatricality of

the Gothic and the negativity of theatre which emerges in the encounter between

Romantic drama and the perfonnativity it both adapts and rejects. A good example of this

exploration of dramatic character is Joanna Baillie's "Introductory Discourse" to the

published version of her Phys on the P ~ o n s , a collection of plays, every two of which

are devoted to exploring the dynamics of certain emotions-love, hate, jealousy, and so

on-which Baillie worked on and expanded for her entire dramatic career. Baillie begins

by suggesting that although the passions are not normally apparent in social contact, they

are attractive to human curiosity when seen in horrifying circumstances (war, execution,

distress)-that is, when the observed subject is perceived to be conf?onted by its own

adda t ion . Baillie insists that the attractiveness of these passions, though the opposite of

what we would habitually consider admirable behaviour, is a compulsive reaction of the

observer. "Let us understand," she writes,

fiom obse~ation or report, that any person harbours in his breast,

concealed fiom the world's eye, some powerfbl rankling passion of what

kind soever it may be, we will observe every word, every motion, every

10015 even the distant gait of such a man, with a constancy and attention

bestowed upon no other. Nay, should we meet him unexpectedly on our

way, a feeling will pass across our minds as though we found ourselves in

the neighbourhood of some secret and f d thing. If invisible, would we

not follow him into his lonely haunts, into his closet, into the midnight

silence of his chamber? There is, perhaps, no employment which the

human mind will with so much avidity pursue, as the discovery of

concealed passion, as the tracing the varieties and progress of a pembed

soul. (11)

The scene of perturbation is the "closet," by Baillie's reckoning, but the process of

discovery, which Baillie stresses is the inevitable response to an encounter with mental

disturbance, signals a distinct un-closeting. The darkness of mind retains that negativity,

then, in as much as it is experienced by an observer in the social context of its analysis.

Despite the weight of the word "closet" to a certain conception of Romantic drama

as anti-theatrical, like other contemporary theorists of the stage, Baillie situates the

psychological tensions of dramatic action directly on the stage. In fact, she argues that

poetry and novels are inadequate to the task of this disclosure because they always

strategically mediate a character's psychosis with rhetorical effkct and narrative guidance.

By contrast, "the characters of the drama must speak directly for themselves. Under the

influence of every passion, humour, and impression; in the artificial veilings of hypocrisy

and ceremony, in the openness of freedom and confidence, and in the lonely hour or

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meditation, they speaku (24). Key to Baillie's theory of the theatre is the centrality of

"speech" not as explanation or even as code, but as act. Theatre, the site of this un-

closeting of language in its expressive, active dimension, has a more direct impact on the

attentive observer thaa the semiotic meanings implied by the conventions of genre.

Tragedy, or rather tragic -heroes, also do not offer an opportunity to experience the

ateactions of the hidden passions because for the most part they are too "grand" or well-

designed, or even wekc ted to constitute believable and therefore genuinely interesting

action (33). Baillie therefore recommends a theatre in which the passions are presented in

their "native prerogative" (40), a drama of "ordinary" life. Like Austin's analysis of the

performative, Baillie's analysis of drama is dialectical. Both demonstrate how the criteria

for the validity and meaning of active language cannot be ascertained in order to manage

the genuine resilience of that action as perceived under ordinary circumstances. Baillie's

interest in dramatic language is psychological: she attempts to locate "great characters

strugghg with ditficulties, and placed in situations of eminence and danger" (42), in

contexts of on the whole normal social experience. Baillie, Like Lamb and Hazlitt,

conceives of a theatre which highlights the "closet" as a space which is manageable in the

sense that the genuine psychic interest of character is not "flattened" by the brazen

physicality of acting. But she also intersects that staged-closet with the very materiality

which it seeks to transcend and thus emphasizes more directly the dialecticism of that

presentation by focusing on "direct speech" as its nodal point. "Speech" as self-explication

is for Baillie an allegorical arrangement of conceptualizations; as stage event, however,

this allegory is set against i t ~ l f a s a mosaic of dispositions (explication and passion) from

which the symbolic resonance of language as subjective experience emerges.

Baillie writes plays to balance "the passions ... depicted not only with their bold and

prominent features, but also with those minute and delicate traits" (68) and the interest of

a varied plot. She lays unusual emphasis on secondary characters who remain distinct

fiom the central passionate figure but are not "insipid and insignificantH (69). What is

most interesting about the plays, especially De Monfort, Baillie's best known tragedy, is

that this dialectical dramaturgy is oriented around the dynamics of language as the medium

of socio-structural relations and the IinguisGc action of social relations as an event? De

Monfoort was composed to illustrate the irrationality of hatred. The story revolves around

the aristocratic De Monfort and his lifelong loathing for a middle-class rival Rezenvelt,

who De Monfort feels offiends his honour by being as capable and cultivated as himself,

though he is of lesser rank, by infiltrating aristocratic society, and by loving his sister.

Through most of the play, De Monfort's seething contempt is subdued by the social

goings-on of the other characters, the bourgeois Count Freberg, his wife, and attendants,

including Rezenfelt, and De Monfort's sister Jane. Early in the third act, for instance, De

Monfort is compelled by his sister to make a public show of shaking hands with Rezenfelt.

De Monfort is nervous and awkward, and he rehses Freberg's suggestion that the hand-

shake will lead to "fUture love" (356). The implication is that the gesture will enact the

mutual respect which societal convention demands De Monfort give to Rezenfelt for his

meritorious accomplishments. But De Monfort rehses to acknowledge the conventional

meaning of his own gesture because the dishonesty of such a move is below his

honourable sensibilities: "I will not offer you an hand of concord/ And poorly hide the

motives which constrain md.. (Hodding out his hand) Take this fiom one who boasts no

feeling of warmth,/ But never will deceive" (356). Significantly, Baillie provides a very

specific stage direction, suggesting that the gesture is meant to appear forced and stilted.

For an impressive reading of ~e Monfort engaged directly with its dramaturgical conception of the linguistic action of social relations see Burroughs, 116-29.

113

De Monfort also makes two important speech acts here, both of which distance the

gesture from the implication of fiendship which it conventionally indicates. He

commands that Rezenfelt take his hand in a way that seems to separate De Monfort's hand

from his intention even to move i t At the foreground of Baillie's dramaturgy is the

suggestion that the most basic social gestures are at once the product of a motivating

subjective consciousless and also somehow exclusive of the sentiments associated with

that subjectivity. As the scene ends, all the characters greet and bid fsrewell to each other,

as De Monfort stands bemused at their niceties, which Baillie clearly exaggerates to

dramatize their obsequiousness. And yet, De Monfort's claim that he has a "cold" (3 57)

respect for social honour suggests at the same time the socially constructed nature of his

anti-social behaviour and beliefs.

The point of this scene is not necessarily to criticize social constructionism and

advocate an essential "Romantic" sensibility, rather, the scene presents an audience with a

situation in which the criteria for behavioural validity remain very much undecided. This

feeling of indeterminacy lingers until the very end of the play, and is particularly

compelling with regard to the characters' obsessions not with what they say, but with the

manner and validity of their speech Suspecting that Rezenfelt has designs on his estate,

and on his sister Jane, De Monfort attacks his rival and is disarmed by him, but then with

the help of the sinister Grimes, has Rezenfelt secretly murdered. The murder scene in

particular reveals Baillie's hack for drawing attention to the way sounds, including words,

are compelled into meaning by conceptual abstraction. Throughout the £ha1 two acts

familiarly gothic sounds, hooting owls, footsteps, anguished groans are heard, and their

suggestiveness is either claimed by the characters who hear them, or disputed in dialogue.

At the last, having been convicted of RezenfeIt's murder, De Monfort's own body is

charged with significant value. The officer who reports the death, asks: "I am an officer on

114

duty call'd And have authority to say, how died?" to which Jane De Monfort answers

mysteriously:

Tell them by whose authority you come,

He died that death which best becomes a man

Who is with keenest sense of conscious ill

And deep remorse asd'd, a wounded spirit.

A death that kills the noble and the brave,

And only them. He had no other wound. (410)

We have already such a challenge at work in the Chamois Hunter scene in

Mmfied. =ed declares explicitly: "I say 'tis blood -- my blood." The hunter denies

the blood. The presumed success of these speech acts overdetermines the significance of

the wind blood, but that signifmince is pulled back into the illocutionary realm by the

material thereness of the liquid as neither one nor the other f?om the perspective of a

viewing audience which is incapable of coming to a final determination of the truth or

pretense of what they see. Byron's investment in the supernatural suggests a belief in the

transcendence of interior or mental processes over a mode of interaction based purely on

exterior sign systems which accord the privilege of reality to such palpable elements of

subjective experience as the body and social status and not to subjectivity itself It is in

negating those external criteria as somehow invalid, or at least subordinate within a

psychological rather than a physiological or political order, that Romantic drama manifests

its anti-theatrical bent. The supernatural element is there and the audience can be made to

accept it, but it is also downplayed by its artificiality. The social denial of the supernatural

is also there and acceptable, but it is in conflict with the acceptability of the supernatural

(however artificial) and with its own artificiality as stage utterance. This predicament is

most evident when h&nf?ed interacts with the spirit world. This is not surprising, since

115

the appearance of the supernatural is dependent on stage effect. In the opening scene of

the play, ManGied makes a series of commands to the spirits to "Rise! Appear!" In

keeping with the rules of speech acts, Manfi.ed must maintain the necessary authority to

make the command: "I call upon you by the charm/ Which gives me power.. . by

the voice of him who is the first among you - by this sign,/ Which makes you tremble - by the claims of him/ Who is undying" (34-40; emphasis added). Manfred's commands

here imply a positive correspondence between locution, meaning, and a generally

acknowledged availability of illocutionary force and effect. Suddenly M d e d engages the

spirits "by a power/ Deeper than all yet urged." The metaphor of depth here corresponds

to the interiorization of Manfied's illocutionary authority in his own psychic power. Yet

that internal depth is also externalized onto Manfied's implication in the process of re-

iteration: "By the strong m e which is upon my Soul,/ The thought which is within me

and around me,/ I do compel ye to my will" (46-48). The curse on Manfked is an

utterance which comes fiorn somewhere else-where we are not sure-and thus to swear

or conjure by it is to swear on the lasting power of what was once itselfa speech act and

not simply a meaning or implication. But for an audience witnessing an highly

melodramatic act of conjuring, that original curse itself becomes drawn into the

phenomenological plane of iteration, of the material repetitiveness which makes language

work.

Manfred's power is troped by "a want spell,/ Which had its birthplace in a star

condemned,/ The burning wreck of a demolished world,/ A wandering hell in the e t e d

Space" (42-45). The star, the birthplace of the tyrant speU, is manifested by Manfied's

supernatural power. Yet, what the audience sees is clearly a stage-crafted representation

of that power. The light of the star mirrors the light of conceptual perception which

Merleau-Ponty uses to explain the isolating compulsion of the philosophy of language.

116

And in mirroring that conceptuality, the light becomes an allegory for the materiality of its

own construction To add to the ambiguity, the spirits refer to "thy Star," implying that

Manfi.ed possesses its power while Manfred suggests later in the scene that the spirits

appear to him only as "the steady aspect of a clear large Star" (1 78). He claims to

become the audience of a drama produced by the spirits rather than of his own creation,

even though he had expended so much energy directing and producing this micro-drama

with his psyche. Having produced the star by means of his command, Manfi-ed wants to

deny responsibility for its presence. Along the same lines, Manfred demands

"Forgetfidness" and "Oblivion-seK-oblivion!" But he rekses to explain what it is he

wants to forget. There is an illocutionary contradiction here: the felicity of both a demand

and refusal depends on the authority of the speaker, but the felicitous refi.mil to make the

substance of that demand explicit would render that demand utterly ineffective. The

spirits reveal their own amazement at the predicament in which Mhfked has implicated

them. "We answer - as we answered; our reply/ Is ever in thine own words" (1 58-9).

The spirits are infinitely pliable to Manfred's power, but they cannot obey his demand that

they make him forget an act he wiU not name. "We can but give thee that which we

possess" (139). In other words, Manfred must utter the circumstances of his curse before

it can be made to be forgotten. Doing so, however, socializes Manfi.ed's curse, making it

known.

This theatrical context is exaggerated in the play's appeals to it, and so the play can

be said as well to repudiate-polemically-the interactive mode of "reading" theatre

promoted by Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb. Giorgio Melchiori remarks that the play's

appeal to the audience's experience watching the play is "actually so deliberate, and the

evocation of a medley of seven spirits in the following lines is so highfalutin'

that.. .reinforced by the Gothic gallery as a background and the midnight hour.. . I cannot

help feeling that there is a strong element of parody in ali this set up" (54). Parody implies

an imitation and a rejection. It is clear ftom Manfred's opening speech that he rejects

conventional social application of his power. But what is Byron rejecting? Melchiori

concludes that "Manfred, this B d a m tragedy, the Witch Drama as Byron called it later in

his correspondence with Murray, was a final revisitation of the Byronic hero conceived in

the spirit of self-mockery" (55). By mocking his own serious pretensions to absolute self-

sufficiency, the Byronic hero in the theatre exposes the aestheticbation of heroism in the

first place.z3 But M d e d ' s mocking gestures also make a significant heroic gesture

because they are self-consciously performative. When Manfied says to the authoritative

spirits of Arimanes, "Bid him bow down to that which is above him,/ The overmling

Infinite - the Maker/ Who made him not for worship - let him kneel,/ And we will kneel

togetherw (2.4.46-49), he mocks their behabitive proceedings. But he does so in the name

of another power. The mockery he makes of the spirit hierarchy here is not gratuitous,

but rather a significant authoritative rehsal to engage in an empty act. Again, Manfied

turns his denial of institutional procedure into a felicitous performance based on another

set of social conventions.

Manfred's dilemma is Austin's dilemma: how to locate the criteria for the validity

of speech. Like Austin as well, however, Byron-as opposed to Manfied4amatizes this

=Melchiori makes a persuasive case. The opening speech with its mystic hall and midnight hour reduce ironically the spirit of High Romanticism to its lowest gothic denominator. Manfied can be wildly possessed by his own power or project a sense of utter self-reliance. Intonation and gesture can affect the way this kind of individualism is perceived; a M&ed devoid of restraint can be very effective if acted well. The importance of intonation means that regardless of whether Manfired's speech is declarative or assertive in illocutionary force it does have a crucial perlocutionary effect upon the audience. That is, the viewer must decide if the speech is believably pathetic or just pompously affected. Either the scene truly embodies the anguish of psychic genius or it simply parodies the self-conscious tragic heroism for which Byron was something of a celebrity.

problem, polemically, as an elucidation of a fundamental undecidability in the effort to

establish social criteria for the efficacy of the speech act on the one hand, and to establish

a concept of functioning intentional authority on the other. The dilemma becomes most

apparent when we consider Manfred's relationship with his sister, Astarte. Astarte

represented the society with which W e d was at one point content. But she is an

exteriorized version of him, the socialized version of his desire, giving it external validity.

She is defined by him and through him as the fetish-object which exists for the sake of its

spectator, even at the level of speech: "her features all, to the very tone/ Even of her voice,

they said were like to mine;/ But softened all, and tempered into beauty" (2.2.106-08). In

Manfied's mind, Astarte can assuage his guilt, because, he selfishly believes, she "caused"

him to commit the crime in the first place. When her phantom appears, Manfid implores

her to "speak to me! ... Say that thou loath'st me not ... I would hear yet once before I

perish/ The voice which was my music-Speak to me!" (2.4.1 17-34). The success of these

commands will validate Manfied's authority over her, and yet in commanding her to speak,

he forces the responsibility of accomplishing the procedure onto her. The language of

Astarte's ghost, on the other hand, is significantly elusive:

MANFRED. Say on, say on-

I Iive but in the sound-it is thy voice!

PHANTOM. Manfied ! To-morrow ends thine earthly ills. Farewell!

MANFRED. Yet one word more* I forgiven?

PHANTOM. Farewell!

MANFRED. Say, s h d we meet again?

PHANTOM. FareweU !

MANFRED. One word for mercy! Say thou lovest me.

PHANTOM. Manfied!

119

[& Spirt of ASTARTE rSsclppeurs] (2.4.150-56)

For Madted, Astarte represents the means to the reestablishing of some kind of order.

But her farewells and her naming of W e d are at once socially viable and self-

consciously empty. The farewell is an Austinian behabitive, a recognition of conventional

interaction. Likewise, that she names M e d signals that she can assert that he

exists-but in name only, not in force. Unlike Manfred, whose refusals to participate in

performative procedure are ambiguously confirmations of his involvement in those

procedures, the phantom of Astarte simply does not say what M d e d ' s supposed

direction of her discourse demands. She neither forgives nor loves. She does not assume

the responsibility.

The phantom does make one cornmissive gesture: the promise of Manfked's death.

It is this eventuality that evinces the Link between the phantom's (and Manfied's)

performative language and their theatricality. The phantom, like the spirits, is a product

of stage effect; her appearance is a high-point in the play because, quite simply, it is so

spectacular. As such she is highly aestheticized, as Manfied's treatment of her as a fetish-

object also presumes. Thus Manfied is again implicated in a self-consciously theatrical

procedure, not only a performative one. And his involvement in his own theatricality,

being openly "hollow," invalidates the conventional success of his commands and his

control. The promise of Manfred's death is the promise of the play's end. When the spirit

of death does amve, M d e d again refuses to follow, because the end does not come on

his terms, by his act of decision or creation. "I am prepitred for all things," he says, "but m

&ny / The power which summons me" (3.4.82). Here the declarative nature of M&ed's

rejection is at its most pronounced, as is his presumption of its subjective origin. "Thou

hast no power over me," he declares, "hat I feel;/ Thou never shalt possess me, that I

know:/ ... The Mind which is immortal makes itsew Requital for its good or evil

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thoughts,-/ Is its own origin of ill and end" (125-3 1)+ut not in the theatre. While alive,

Mi&ed clings to his own subjectivity. But he cannot declare his subjectivity because

throughout his play his language is directed to an audience that knows that his language is

the product of text and staging. His final words are perhaps the most telling in the play:

"Old man! 'tis not so difEcuit to diew (3 -4.1 5 1). The h e reaf?kms Manfked's repudiation

of the institutional redemptive perfotmafive ethic of prayer, confeSSi04 and forgiveness.

Dying without absolution is Manfred's final triumph because he has not acknowledged any

authority but his own. But I think it is also a theatrical line, proclaiming, declaring the

end of the play and its repudiation of its own perlocutionary success: "it's not so diflicult

to die (on stage)." That is, when the autain falls on the final scene, the falsity of the entire

procedure is openly aiEmed; nothing that the characters have said can be said to have

really had a genuine effect. The dead actors rise up and take their curtain call. The

audience cheers. Manfied resembles Guildenstern in his similar final acquiescence at the

end of Stoppard's play: "Well, well know better next time. Now you see me, now you--"

(92). But what is interesting about these declarations, is that they validate the priority of

the theatrical experience as the reality which is commonly sublimated into expected social

rituals, including, for instance, a sorrowfid, anxious, and unwanted death. In the case of

this play, M h e d dies-the play ends, or rather Manfied dies because the play ends. The

question remains then, what is it that actually kills Manfred? I think it is his struggle to

release himseK ultimately, from social bonds, be they physical or discursive. This is

something that no audience will allow.

The theatricality of Manfred, in spite of its anti-theatrical pretensions, gives us a

sense of how intensely the materiality of the performative "speech situation" makes itself

felt in Romantic drama. The foregoing reading ofMm@ed in terms of its theatrical

resofiances is paradigmtic of the kind of reading which this study will offer in later

chapters. But one play more than any other of the early nineteenth century makes this

material resonance utterly apparent: Thomas Love1 Beddoes' Death's Jest Book, or The

Fool's Tragedy. Beddoes, a medical doctor significantly influenced by the anatomical

implications of German idealism as they were developed at Jena, where he spent most of

his maturity, began Death's Jest Book in 1 8 2 5 . ~ Though it achieved a more or less

finished form, he tinkered with it incessantly until his suicide in 1849. Beddoes' sense that

he couldn't complete the play, though he did write it to be performed, is reflected by its

sprawling and seemingly non-sensical plot. The play begins with the journey of two

brother knights, Wo&m and Isbrand to Egypt, to rescue Duke Melveric of Miinsterberg,

whom Isbrand hates and with whom WoEam has just sworn an oath of "brotherly"

allegiance, and Sibylla, beloved of both WolGam and Melveric. The complexities of these

tenuous relationships reflect the world of the play in general, where oaths and pledges are

made repeatedly, and never seem to have any e E i . Thus, as soon as WoLfiarn arrives,

Melveric plots his assassination out of jealousy of exactly those virtues which inspired his

brother-like respect. Having murdered WoEam, Melveric returns to Miinsterberg with

Sibylla and followed by the now even more vengefd Isbrand. Suddenly Melveric forgets

his affection for Sibylla, his arrival home reminding him of his own dead wife. As

Melveric plans to call the Duchess back from the dead, Isbrand switches her body with

WoIfiamfs who is summarily called back fiorn the dead by Melveric. The ghost pledges

again his love for Sibylla, who joins him in death. But W o E m cannot return. Isbrand

meanwhile has led a revolution against the Duke and installed himself as an even worse

24 Moyian shows that the dramaturgy of Death 's Jest Book is derived directly firom medical techniques adapted from German Idealism of the Jena School. For readings of the play focussed specifically on its existential response to Iinguistic seK determination, see Richardson 156-72 and Thompson, Bedhes, 59-62. The seminal reading of the importance of Beddoes' last play to Romanticism in general remains Frye 5 1-86.

122

tyrant. Isbrand then plots to destroy the Duke's sons Adamar and Athulfby having them

repeat exactly the lovedeath trial of their father and W o h . Of course, the revolution

fils and Isbrand is reinstated as court fool before being murdered by one of his own

conspirators. Athulf has murdered his reprehensible brother, and is compelled by the

ghost of WoEam to take his own Life in exchange. The ghost then drags Melveric to hell.

Those few readers of the play who have attempted an interpretation of it stress that

the characters do not seem to live outside of what is demanded of them by the play itself;

they disappear willy-nilly, die, but remain as ghosts, change character traits entirely to suit

the immediate interest of the scene in which they at that point appear. As in most

Romantic plays, the political resonance of its scenes of revolution is displaced into a

historical setting; but that setting is never really established. Some of the characters are

Crusaders; others are ancient Romans. The play is indeed a literally foolish k e

macabre: causality has no bearing on action, and few actions have any e f f i s . In fact, the

play concludes with an actual dance of death, though a painted fiesco of such a dance is

prominent in a number of the scenes. Death is, in fact, the hero of the play, the suggestion

being, cynically and desperately, that the negation of all feeling, all commitment, all hope

is the basic human lot.

But what is especially compelling about Death's Jest Book from the perspective of

speech-act theory is the fact that, though language is clearly structurally and thematicaUy

important, it does not subordinate the other aspects of this sprawling and difficult work in

order to suggest that hum& nature is somehow bound up in structures of conventionality

or grammar. If the uncanny materiality of speech is latent within the effort to produce

rneaningfbl communicative redemption in such plays as De Monfot and Remorse, then in

Beddoes' last great work, that materiality is foregrounded as the very condition under

which speech happens: "how palely, with what careless lips/ Do we salute this unhoped

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change of fortune! .. . I utter/ shadows of words, Like to an ancient ghost,/ Arisen out of

sea-wrapt creatures/ Where none can speak his language" (1 -2.1 76-8 1). By their emphasis

on carelessness and incommunicability, these lines resist exactly the kind of interpretation

which they invite, by, in a sense, rejecting in the form of an utterance, the possibility that

such an utterance will be m&@. This is not to be taken, however, as a paraphrase of

nineteenth-century truisms regarding the inadequacy of language in the hope of some

stronger mode of communication. In a world controlled by death, and the death-wish, the

basis for human motivation is materiality itself. Language is thus conceived on a number of

occasions in active, but also material terms, especially in the political sub-plot. Despairing

of the subversive behaviour of his sons, for instance, Duke Melveric exclaims: "0 not

sons, but contracts,/ Between my lust and a destroying fiend,/ Written in my dearest

blood, whose date ran out,/ They are become death-warrants" (2.2.474-77). At the very

end of the play, Wolfiam, the ghostly representative ofthe death-in-life state of all of the

characters, "blessesYhe dead while casting the Duke, "still alive, into the world o' th'

dead" (5.4.3 57). There is, in other words, no difference between the two states.

Beddoes Death's Jest B w k is an impossible play. It combines the frenetic

dramaturgical pace of Strindberg's Dream Play, the metaphysical adroitness of one of

Coleridge's opium-induced hallucinations, and the despair of Eliot's The W m e Lmd. But

it also sets itself against a manner of seeing and perceiving which will see it as impossible

and then bracket it accordingly. It asks to be closeted, hidden away, rejected-and appears

in the process as that which drama also is, the hidden space of negativity within the very

positive forces of rationality. Thus the play attempts to render palpable on stage what is in

most drama only latent: its own failure, its own non-seriousness, its own "being-in-death,"

and yet also the realization that these "infelicities" are powerfbl presences within the

essential phenomena of the human economy. This is also what Austin's lectures set out to

124

do: hstrate the possibility of positive identification by pointing to the phenomenal

thereness of language which evades its own conceptualizafion. A speech-act theory of

Romantic drama looks to plays like Death's Jest Book and Manfed for manifestations of

Austin's hidden polemical edge. And in finding them, it can position Romantic drama at

the threshold of a radical linguistic and economic critique.

Chapter 2

Excuses for Enlightenment: The Sentimental Economy and The School for Scanalh.I

Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comic masterpiece, 2 7 ~ School for S ' I , is

anything but a Romantic play. It belongs, rather, to the civilized mindset of the

Enlightenment. It is witty, charming, and urbane. There are no enraptured heroes, no

vengeful ghosts, no bloody murders. It is neither dramatically hyperbolic, nor excessively

poetic, and it is certainly not in any way metaphysical. But although Sheridan has, until

very recently, rarely been mentioned in company with the Romantics, he deserves to be

regarded as an older, but important contemporary. In the early 1780s he became one of

the leading figures of the reform-minded Whig Opposition and remained there until 1806.

His politics, his intelligence, and his dramatic skU were widely admired by the prominent

London literati with whom he was associated, including Johnson, Hume, Gibbon, and

Boswell and later Coleridge, Byron, Hunt, Hazlitt, Inchbald, and Scott. And, like both his

Enlightenment and his Romantic contemporaries, Sheridan was obsessed with the

dynamics of language in social relations, and specifically with the way language influenced

political and economic development. I want to suggest here that School for Scm&I,

Sheridan's most enduring and complex comedy, should be considered a forerunner of

Romantic drama, if not one of its exemplary instances, because it anticipates in a very

direct way the critique of political economic rationalism characteristic of Romanticism.

Given the complication to period boundaries which this association between

School for ScmhScondol and Romantic economics presents, it is probably best to simply ignore

such arbitrary period boundaries altogether. But in the context of the political economy of

the same period, it is worthwhile to return to the name formerly given to the Preromantic

period, "Sentimental." ' The term "sentiment7' has a number of definitions: a

psychological disposition toward spontaneous emotion or virtue, a declaration of that

emotional or virtuous state, and the attitude of honest and moral goodness signalled by

such fhnkness. The idea of a "sentiment" is an equivocation in a literal sense: it privileges

universal moral truth over the verbal apparati of rational speculation but still employs a

highly speculative mode of expression to just@ that rejection of its own linguistic form.

School for Sc&l is built around this contradiction, and also draws attention to its

economic implications. At the end of the play, for instance, the irascible Sir Peter Teazle

commands his trusted steward Rowley to halt in mid-sentence a trite proverbial

interpretation of the cofising events which have just ocaured. "Hold my dear Rowley"

Sir Peter says, "-ifyou have any Regard for menever let me hear you utter any thing

Wte-a Sentiment. I have had enough of them to serve me the rest of my Life" (5 -2.25 1-53

P 291). Sir Peter stops Rowley in mid-sentence because what Rowley says could never

encapsulate the malicious betrayals and fervent reconciliations which have just occurred;

to do so would drag on precisely the circulation of scandal-creating sentiments which

Rowley's "sentiment" is attempting to explain and regulate. But Sir Peter orders Rowley

to stop talking because he is saturated with sentiments to the point that they have become

useless. The energy of speculative verbal gestures needs to be re-regulated, re-packaged,

and re-commodified into an ideal object of enlightened sense which exists in the mind of

the experienced social being-but not, particularly, as language. This is exactly the process

underlying the economic concept of just price. All commodities have use value in

themselves, but their exchange value with regard to other commodities is established by

Loftis contends that Sheridan is for the most part a "burlesque" playwright, whose attitude toward sentiment is for the most part satirical. Robert Hume, The Rakish Stage 3 12-55, by contrast, argues that though Sheridan seems to repudiate the naked and trite emotionalism characteristic of other playwrights of his day there are clear instances of sentimentalism throughout his dramatic oeuvre. See also Marshall Brown, Preromanticism 1 96-23 8.

contracts, promises to pay. These negotiations are contingent, demanding in many cases

rhetorical shenanigans or even coercion. Once these prices have become normalized

through constant repetition or habit, the slippery contractual dynamic of their origins is

disregarded, and the notion of the exchange price of the commodity becomes constatively

associated with a certain worth or value believed to be inherent in the object or power

itseK its utility. In an economy still built around direct contact between producers and

consumers, this difficult process of sublimation is still apparent, as a price which, though

believed to be immediately understood, still derives Born negotiations over value. Sir

Peter's order is composed in the form ofjust such an immediately effective contract: "if

you have any regard for me," do not speak. But it hides the master-servant relationship

between Sir Peter and Rowley, such that Rowley has no choice but to comply.

This dubiety concerning the illocutionary force of Sir Peter's utterance is crucial to

the intersection between verbal performance and the new philosophy of capitalism. School

for Sc&l appeared at a particularly cnrcial moment in the development of classical

political economy: Smith's Wealth of Nations was published while Sheridan was

composing the play? In engaging with the dynamics of performance and various modes of

the contract, the play dovetails with the problematics of performance apparent in the idea

that economic exchange is a "contract" and therefore latent in the Enlightenment tradition

of Smith's treatise. The main action of School for S ' I concerns the competition

Though no record of direct correspondence between Sheridan and Adam Smith exists, historical evidence suggests that the comparison is not altogether untoward. They had numerous common fiends and acquaintances: Boswell, Garrick, Gibbon and particularly Burke. Smith was present at Sheridan's induction into Samuel Johnson's Literary Club in late 1775. A letter fiom Henry M a c k e ~ e to John Logan (June 6 1782) testifies that Smith was an avid theatre-goer and knew Sheridan in his capacity as the manager of Drury Lane. See Mackenzie 1 : 1 1 7. Sheridan had probably heard of Wealth of Nations by the opening of fie Schooi for Scan&. The first edition, published on March 9, 1776, almost immediately began to wield political influence in the Parliamentary circles into which Sheridan would soon venture. See Ross, Chapters 17-1 8.

128

between the brothers Charies and Joseph S u r k over the hand of Maria, ward to Sir

Peter Teazle, and-more directly--over the good favour of their benefactor uncle Sir Oliver

Swface, who has just returned from W a Charles we learn is a spendthrift and a

rapscallion, while Joseph appears to be pious and demure. But this distinction does not

hold for very long, for Joseph is also a selfish scandal-monger, while Charles is honest and

generous to a fault. Joseph is constantly spouting off proverbs and "sentiments" giving

him an air of learned reflectiveness. Charles is noisome, bossy, and a heavy drinker; in one

of the play's most memorable scenes, selling the fkmily portraits to Sir Oliver (in disguise

as a money-lender) as collateral for a loan. When Charles swears not to sell a small picture

of Sir Oliver, however, Sir Oliver is so impressed by this act of devotion that he pays

Charles handsomely, and with Sir Peter's consent, allows Charles and Maria to marry,

though strangely, they never appear on stage together until the final Act. At the heart of

Schwl for S d I then is the dynamics of promises, pledges, and contracts in some

defhitively economic situations: an auction, several loans, and a marriage.

Meanwhile, Sir Peter Teazle spends most of the play in deep anxiety over the

fidelity of his young wife and over the possibility that he will be scandalized by her

slanderous fiends, Mrs. Candour, Mr. Snake, Lady Sneer, and Sir Benjamin Backbite.

The secondary action exemplifies Sheridan's interest in the way language acts in a manner

that is more implied in the main plot, but it is in this drarnaturigcal enveloping of the

thematics of the action that School for ScLafclbZ looks ahead to the techniques of the early

nineteenth century. Ifthe performance of economic sublimation is Sheridan's subject

matter, the complexities of theatre as the material event of that performance are his

subliminal tool. Thus, School for SccazclbI also illustrates the way that verbal action is

enveloped by other Linguistic gestures which dramatize and consolidate its "truth" in the

paradoxically anti-theatrical philosophical environment. Through its topical references to

contemporary economic affairs and its conflation of this economic sub-text with visual

effects and generic conventions, % School for Skm&Z shows how apologies,

justifications, and most importantly excuses, circumscribe economic speech acts. As

Austin argued, excuses are grammatically and contextually validated claims to truth,

another form of speech act simultaneously in operation and at least equally as important as

more obvious verbal acts We commanding and contracting, or buying and selling. The

priority granted by classical economics to 'Yellow feeling," "human sociability" and

"common sensey' to explain the fimction of the market system entails a substratum of

beliefs which must be justified and, in some instances, excused if economic theory is to be

able to count on their truth. me School for Skmukzl is a dramatic reflection on this aspect

of economic theory. By emphasizing the materiality of the performance of sentiments in

relation to conceptions of how sentiments hction, Schoolfor Scandal anticipates the

conflict between the idealism of the Romantic avant-garde and the utilitarianism of the

economic vanguard.

Accounts of Scandal

Since its first performances, critics have marked SchooI for Sc&I for the subtle

blend of "art and nature" which defines the ambivalence of sentimentalism. On the

morning after the play premiered, me St. Jmnes Chronicle proclaimed the play's chief

asset to be 'Mdogue replete with Wity yet as easy and natural as if there were none"

( D r m t i c Works 3 1 5) . From this paradox, contemporary commentators derived the

play's didactic purpose: an expod of "Detraction and Hypocrisy." One review, however,

turned this natural wit on its head. Instead of lauding the play's ironic representation of

social foibles, the London Maguzine criticized "its incitements to a perseverance in vicious

idle habits, and consequential injuries" (3 2 1). By reducing usury, profligacy, and domestic

irresponsibility to a "natural" balance between decorum and benevolence, between social

grace and sentimental generosity, the Lortcton Magaim suggested, School for SkmabZ

"conveys pointed instructions" for the easy conuption of morals "to those who are apt to

mistake appearances for realities" (322).

Such apprehensions did not last. The Romantic critics touted ?%e School for

&mdd as the great comedy of the age because it seemed to embody the anti-rational

indolence which they associated with the genius of pure art. In his essay "On the

M c i a l Comedy of the Last Cenhuy," for instance, Lamb recalled nostalgically that the

histrionic playrlness of the original cast, their "highly artificial manner" and "downright

acted villainy ... so diEerent f?om the pressure of conscious a d wickedness-the

hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy" resisted any attempt to label the characters

according to moral categories (2: 144). The School for SCCIltCJbI, Lamb opined, is a

"holiday barring out the pedant Reflection," inhabiting "the regions of pure comedy, where

no cold moral reigns" (2: 146). Wazlitt admired the play for its "exact propriety both in..

gestures and sentiments, which reminded us of the good old times when everyone

belonged to a marked class in society and maintained himself in his characteristic

absurdities by a cheveux&-fiis of prejudices, forms, and ceremonies. .. Its great

excellence is in the invention of comic situations" (Works 5 :25O-5 1). There is more than a

hint of the mechanical in Hazlitt's nostalgia which is an important part of Sheridan's

dramaturgical critique of sentiment in political economy. Most modem critics, however,

extend Hazlitt's sense of the superficiality of this play, its characters, and their "sentiments"

to suggest that Sheridan's sensitivity to the rhetorical "deep structure" of discourse, his

satires of contemporary linguistic theory, and his precise attention to theatrical convention

and decorum, implicitly defend sentimental principles of honesty and mutual respect3 Yet

Loftis insists that "[tlhe depiction in The School for Scancla] ofa benevolent man's triumph over a hypocrite illustrates a homely moral truth that was popular in the eighteenth century" (96). In the end, however, the dramaturgical aesthetics of the play "lack subtlety of emotion and motivation7' such that all the characters are stock figures of sentimental comedy. Thought they disagree that Charles Surface is unproblematically benevolent, Durant argues that Sheridan believed wholeheartedly in "innate human

such readings and critical terminology as burlesque, satire and artifice obliquely mount

their own ethical attack on what they perceive to be the immorality of artifice? regardless

of the critic's descriptive intentions. Whether analysis constitutes a general reflection on

the nature of artifice or espouses, on Sheridan's behaf, a critique of eighteenth-century

morals, it implies that Sheridan's play didactically illustrates the ubiquity of "detraction

and hypocrisy."'

This perspective neglects important questions of economic liability which

throughout Z k School for Scmrckrl are bound together with comic insights into the nature

of sentiment as an aesthetic mode and as a social discourse. In this way, The School for

S&i provides an opportunity to critique the discursive assumptions at work in its own

reception history in a way that anticipates the counter-critical tendencies of later "high"-

Romantic drama. If words perpetuate realities, if meaning is scandal, how can anyone

assert a "homely truth" and not be open to charges of hackneyed balderdash? This kind of 3

analysis overlooks and forgives-that is, in Austin's and de Man's sense, excuses-the

discursive foundation of social reality which is the premise behind the play's association of

dramaturgical effect and social pretence. To this extent, then, the London Magazim

reviewer was correct in his assessment of the play. But while it attacks Sheridan's

comedy for rendering counterfeit forms of exchange both economically feasible and

socially acceptable, and for equating that discursive counterfeit with dramaturgical

apprehensions of truth" and that sound rhetorical practices could be used to mount an ethical critique of rhetorical excess. Worth suggests that the dramaturgical craftiness of the play is self-evidently a satire on the artificiality of conversation and social Life in Sheridan's day.

Wiesenthal argues that Sheridan's plays "undermine any complaisant fith in the simple referentiality of words" (3 18) and focuses almost entirely upon matters of dramatic form. Hess-Luttich similarly orients his reading of the play around the "empirical" analysis of conversation and "forms of art" (4 19). Latent in both readings however is the supposition that Sheridan mounts a "radical critique ofthe specific forms of communication he considered prevailing in his time" (426).

132

success, lke School for 2kamW projects this dilemma in its naturally witty dialogue. For

Sheridan, both the economy and economics are realized in the performative, the

counterfet that works, the counterfet which excuses its own axtiiiciality and justifies itself

as part of the natural movement of economic growth. In that realization the play not only

foreshadows its own critique, but also intimates the ideological implications of that

critique.

This is not to say that Sheridan's critics are mistaken about the nature of his

application of comic and theatrical forms or its importance to an understanding of

language. The play does not so much wnf?ont economic issues head-on as examine them

fiom an aesthetic remove. Any attempt at a serious study of Sheridan's drama contends

with his frivolous attitude toward theatre, politics, and economics. Sheridan was an adept

capitalist, a consummate believer in the good of a circulating commodity economy and the

kind of social identity it precipitated. He was a theatrical politician, who insisted that the

theatre was utterly unpolitical. He was continuously in debt, but was always able to find

creditors to finance his political career, his theatre, his wives and mistresses.' As a long-

standiig Whig Member of Parliament, Sheridan was notorious for his ability to argue any

point from any side with great emotional fervour and to great popular acclaim without any

genuine commitment to the issue whatsoever6 He considered play-writing an easy and

' Hazlitt makes the connection between Sheridan's linguistic agility and his line of credit: "If anyone came to request the repayment of a loan &om him, he borrowed more. A cordial shake of his hand was a receipt in full for all demands. He could 'coin his smile for drachmas', cancel his bonds with bon mots, and give jokes in discharge of a bill" (cited in Mikhail ix).

For a comprehensive account of Sheridan's Parliamentary rhetoric see Reid, 'Toiling the Rival: Argument and Identity in Sheridan's Speeches." For an application of this rhetorical talent to a reading of the plays as satires of linguistics see Durant, "Sheridan and Language."

convenient way to make enough money to jump-start his political careera7 To suggest that

Sheridan's satire on social artifice in his drama constitutes a deeply-held belief on his part

in the moral good of absolute truth not only contradicts biographical evidence, but also

suggests that the ideology of sentimental benevolence supported by any claim to the

existence of inner truth does not require any qualification, a qualification to which

Sheridan's plays and Life call attention

As the biographical evidence suggests, Sheridan understood (seriously, if not

consciously) that capital, a basically linguistic entity' generates exchange because it is

quintessentially non-serious or unproductive in the dialectical sense apparent in speech-act

theory. Language for Austin is a means of social practice and a problematic, untenable

intersection of validity and difference. Austin's concept of the performative should

therefore be a weil-used critical tool for interpreting Sheridan's plays. Indeed, fie Rivals

(1 774) and The Crftic (1 779) present paradigmatic instances of active language: Mrs.

Malaprop's ''press[*ig] words into service" without regard for their conventional

meanings, Bob Acres' "oaths-referential," and Mr. Puffs artfbl circulation of play-reviews

without plays and scandal sheets without scandals. Puffing particularly manifests the way

language can create a reality by means of its circulation independent of any other signified

object. Indeed, it demonstrates the way language used in this way creates the dynamics of

subjectivity through its own objective realization. Puffing also hints, importantly, at the

correspondence between scandal and capital, since Puffing is always a commercial

Biographers tend to forgive Sheridan's attempts to deal with the financial crises which plagued him as the Manager of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Sheridan seldom paid his actors, but even though the theatre averaged a revenue of above 50,000 pounds a year, the biographers never mention embezzlement. These financial difliculties are often put down to the massively over-budget renovations to the theatre that Sheridan undertook in 1794. His original 1776 purchase of Garrick's controlling shares in Drury Lane is held as a cunning display of confident bravura and fiscal acumen; Sheridan accomplished the sale with no collateral and with little concern for how he would recover. In fact, he never did.

venture: "I dare say now you conceive halfthe very paragraphs and advertisements you

see, to be written by the parties concerned, or their fiends?-No such thing- Nme out of

ten, manufactured by me in the way of business ... I supported myself two years entirely by

my misfortunes. .. assisted by a long sickness, and other occasional disorders; and a very

comfortable living I had of it" (1 -2.73- 108). In these plays, and in The School for

Scandal, the seemingly irreconcilable duplicity between the artificiality of social discourse

and the fm that it does make things happen is permeated by the language of economic

exchange.

Far from accepting the significance of perfonnativity to Sheridan's dramaturgy,

two recent commentators have challenged its alignment with the principles of Austinian

speech-act theory. Contrasting Sheridan's soliloquies and dialogue to the paternalism of

sentimental comedy, Marshall Brown opines that the latter's "mode of speech.. . is

performative; the characters speak not so much to be heard as to call a situation or an

ordering of existence into being.. . stabilizing time and fixing consciousness in the mirror of

representation7' (Preromanttcim 206). This ordering is for Brown a figure of thanaos,

the negation of the life-force or eros. Sheridan's alternative, cleverly figured by Brown in

terms of Deleuze and Guattari's schizoid "desiring machine," is neither referential truth

nor socially-constructed ideology, but "scandal.. .a temporalized negation that ultimately

generates judgement by regularizing and redistributing the conflicts of drives, of sexes and

of generations7' (229). What Brown neglects to see is that in Sheridan's world negation

remains distempered at the level of its obsession with performative language by the very

dramatization of its explications of scandal and desire. Language is in part the

representation of a motivated psychology, but it also creates the psychological subject that

the dramatic representation takes as its object. In this way, for Sheridan as for Austin, the

motivational power of language remains hidden fiom explanation, and thus cannot be

figured into an economy measured by criteria of success. And Brown argues explicitly

135

that his reading of Sheridan is capitalistic, without acknowledging its potential for

deconstnrctive critique. The world of the Surfaces, for Brown, is exactly that: surfaces, a

libidinal field of production which creates both commodities and forces, means, and

command structures, "arrogating both the whole and part of the process, which now seem

to emanate £?om it as a quasi cause" (236). Sheridads theatre, for Brown, does

complicate performance but together they create an object field; its "silences and negations

enact resistance to imposed norms and characters," yet they also "afEm the rights of man

to the pursuit of happiness" (259).

Julie Carlson, in a reading of Sheridan's late political allegory, P i m o Y similarly

argues that his discursive strategy challenges the principles of Austin's performative

("Trying" 373). Best known for its amazing popularity and bombastic energy, Piuaro is a

political and literary anomaly. The play tells the story of a confrontation between the

Spanish conquistadores and an Inca tribe during the early colonization of the Americas.

Written and performed in 1799, at the height of the invasion fears of late 1790s and the

height of the craze for German melodrama, P i m o defends the colonization of the new

world and the dissemination of Christianity to the vulgar colonies and is itself an

adaptation of one of Kotzebue's best known plays Focusing on Sheridan's use of his own

prosecution speech against Warren Hastings in composing the important speeches in this

colonial spectacle, Carlson demonstrates how political language in political theatre, and

the theatre of politics, achieves its rhetorical goals by reproducing and invoking its own

criteria of authority with affective appeals to supposedly universal principles of constancy

and geniality, strength and gentleness. Rather than refer to existing authorities or even

stratified political biases, Carlson contends, Sheridan's political and theatrical discourses

alike create the objects they seem to describe and the dispositions they seem to support.

When the Inca hero Rolla declares to the Spanish emissary, "Tell your invaders this, and

tell them too, we seek no change; and, least of all, such change as they would bring us"

(2.2.34-5), he articulates an adaptability disguised as resistance. That adaptability,

Carlson contends, is the primary feature of a rhetorical dissemination of conceptual

understanding that has no "verifiable7" to use de Mads term, content. The dramaturgical

anomalousness of Pizcaro includes for Cadson the intersection of politics and theatre as

similar forms of rhetorical and allegorical mobility, which "points up to a certain

wis-ess to J. L. Austin's desire to cordon off the perfonnative &om theatre" (373).

Speech makes things happen substantially, though logically and referentially nothing is

said.' Repeated and regurgitated in whatever medium or context deemed necessary to

fbrther its immediate cause, political language "moves" by being portable, by moving.

Brown's and Carlson's readings are the most thorough and convincing accounts of

Sheridan's dramaturgy to date. But their recourse to a pre-linguistic "sublimation" of

Libidinal desire into the social matrix appeals to "deep" psychological and metaphysical

truths of the kind already encountered as problematic in speech-act theory. Austin's

account of the complicated nexus of conditions and conventions which go into social

practice, including those aspects of discourse related to the way philosophy itself

"accounts" for language by justifjmg its own descriptive tendencies, questions the socio-

psychological grounds of human action used by Carlson and Brown to discount Austin's

philosophy of language as a relevant model for interpretations of Sheridan's plays. By

contrast, my reading of The Schoolfor 2kumhI parallels the polemical aspects of Austin's

linguistic phenomenology to emphasize Sheridan's application of his comprehension of

perfonnativity to the economy of sentiment and the sentimental economy. Sheridan's

comic portrayal of credit and debt, promises and contracts, oaths, vows, and bets focuses

on the rhetoric employed to "sublimate"-just@ or excusethem into the "natural" forces

of the market economy. By restaging excuses and justifications around other socially

' For an extensive account of the contradictory allegiances of P i m o in its historical setting see Donohue 125-56.

137

constructive pediocmatives, the theatrical dialogue of T k & b l for suspends

appeals to nature, common sense and truth in their moment of articulation, revealing them

to be tactical acts of speech. The play also restages the extra-linguistic and sentimental

aspects of mise en scSne, notably the visual dynamics of portraiture and tabl- through

the orchestration of verbal articulations of their significance on stage. At the same time,

the verbal administration of the sentimental subject also participates in an experience of

w m m d realization internal to the play's comic plot, through its obsession with

marriage, and external to the play's theatrical setting, through its seldom discussed

historical, and economic, topicality. In this way, B e School for SkamAzf dramatizes the

very dialectic of performance and theatre which speech-act theory proposes to clarify.

A m i t y Acts

One of the ways Sheridan's theatre comments on the strategies for legitimizing

specific forms of social behaviour is through its topical restagings of instances of that

justification in contemporary economic affairs, hcluding the occasion of its own

censorship. On May 7, 1777, the night before its premiere, The Schouf for S c d I was

temporarily suppressed. The Deputy Examiner of Plays, Edward Capell, construed some

oblique references to the practice of selling &annuities as attacks on Benjamin Hopkins,

the government-supported candidate in the election for City Chamberlain, and refhsed to

grant a licence for performance. As Sheridan later recalled in a Parliamentary speech on

censorship, Hopkins "had been charged with some practices similar to those of Moses the

Jew, in lending money to yGung men under age, and it was supposed that the character of

the play was levelled at him, in order to injure him in his contest" (Speeches IV, 188).

Hopkios had agreed to lend "a certain sum of money upon an annuity bond of Sir John St.

Aubin," a sixteen-year-old baronet, with the intercession of a Jewish broker. When the

loan was made public, Hopkins withdrew from the contract; St. Aubin later received the

loan f?om a Mr. Baker. The press was outraged. Hoplrias, a public figure, was severely

scolded for involving himself with usurers- 'The Jew acted in his vocation. But what

apology can be made for a man grown hoary in the commerce of the world; a Director of

the Bank, a Merchant, once a Senator, at the time of the transaction a Magistrate, and

now Chamberiain of the CityT9 Defendiug government interests from fbrther scandal,

Capell declared the play to be "a factous and seditious opposition to a court candidate."

On hearing of the suppression Sheridan went straight to Lord Hertford, who, as Lord

Chamberlain, had final licensing authority and "explained the circumstances of the scene to

be a matter of general satire, not of personal obloquy or ridicule." Hertford "laughed at

the affair, and gave the licence" (1 88).

Each moment in this "train of illocutions" contains two performatives. Hopkins

contracts with St. Aubin, and then reneges on his agreement once he is found out by

claiming that the real lender was a Jewish broker who had acted on his behalf. The press

repudiates Hopkins as "the Christian Shylock" but downplays charges of usury against the

Jewish brokers on the grounds that it is a racial and therefore inevitable characteristic.

The Deputy Examiner refuses to grant the license and the Lord Chamberlain reverses the

decision as laughably overzealous. Sheridan implies that the scenes in question are not

related to any specific incident, but are merely humorous musings on human nature. His

denial of "personal obloquy" is in fact the last in a series of statements deflecting personal

responsibility for an intentional action. In each case, some breach of decorum has been

committed by someone-Hopkins, Sheridan, the Examiner-but no blame is assigned and no

contract is suspended, regardless of breaches of legal standards.

The relevance of the Hopkins affair to the suppression of School for S c h I lies

From The Gareteer, March 24, 1777. For an overview of the published reactions to the Hopkins affair and their relevance to Sheridan's references to it see Price 3 00-3 03.

in its instantiation of the relation between "special" and "general" performativity evident in

these justilications. On the one hand, the various instances of the case, from the annuity

itself to the reasoning behind the suppression, are all acts of language which create a

reality by invoking the contextual authority of a subject position: a contract, an accusation,

a command. On the other hand, the affair also demonstrates how that linguistic

perfonnafivity is sublimated into an historical continuum by other fonns of discursive

action: the distribution of responsibilities through the r e a s s i ~ o n of named authorities

(The Jewish Broker and the elusive Mr. Baker for Hopkins), the socially constructed

truths of racial stereotyping, the laughing contempt of "general satire." The history of

annuities exemplifies this bizarre legitimation process. In an muity contract, a lender

grants a lump sum in exchange for a pledge on the part of the borrower to make annual

repayments at a rate of interest calculated against Life expectancy. The accumulation of

interest against stocked monetary fbnds had, since the middle ages, been treated as a form

of counterfeiting. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, a number of "assurance

societies" for the maintenance of widows had already been established. But by 1777, this

Life annuities trade had produced some alarming developments. Underage sons of

aristocrats borrowed large sums of money at exorbitant interest contracting to repay the

loans as annuities drawn from expected inkeritances. To protect the young aristocracy,

Parliament passed in the spring of 1777 "An Act for registering the grants of life annuities;

and for the better protection of infants against such grants" (1 7 George III c. 26).

Borrowers and lenders were required to "inroll" in Chancery (section 2) the date, the

amount contracted and "the name or names of the person or persons by whom, and on

whose behalf, the said consideration, or any part thereof shall be advanced" (section 3).1°

'O A fee was also paid to Chancery (section 5).The fees differ according to the amount of the principal. One shilling is paid to register a loan of up to 200 pounds. After 200 pounds, the fee increases by sixpence per 100 pounds lent. It is interesting to consider that the government could use this opportunity to increase its own revenues.

140

"Lnfants" (anyone under 21) were ineligible for annuities (section 6). Monthly interest was

to be Limited to 10 shillings per hundred pounds advanced (section 7).

The Act also demanded that all of the various public declaratkns entailed in its

fofmalization of Annuities contracts be made "bomfide," in good faith. Everything that

was proclaimed, had to be proclaimed utterly sincerely. If any of the stipulated conditions

were not met, and especially the stipulatioa of bomfi&, the Act insists, the contract was

"null and void." Significantly, then, the Annuity Act does not deiine a contract as suck

Rather, it tries to distinguish legitimate contracts, made b o ~ j i d e and in accordance with

certain legal conditions, from illegitimate contracts, also performed bomfide but outside

the time and place stipulated by the bill. In this way, the Act attempts to pre-determine,

like a script complete with stage directions, words, actions, places, times, and even names,

the validity of registered contracts. To underscore the necessity of its regulations, the bill

declares itself to be a moral alternative to "secret" contracts: "the pernicious practice of

raising money by the hesale of lije annuities bath of late years greatly increased and is

much promoted by the secrecy with which such frrmsactiom me conducted. ."

The Act is thus a teIlingIy equivocal document. Its stipulations resemble what

Searle calls "regulative rules," those rules of discourse which determine the propriety or

legality of "an activity whose existence is logically independent of the rules" (Speech Acts

34). The Annuity Act, similarly, does not define annuity contracts; it simply takes

preventive measures against unregulated annuities contracted in secret. But the Act also

demonstrates how those secret annuities are contracted in order to posit their illegitimacy.

The age restriction clause, for instance, does not imply that an oath made by an infant is

not an oath, only that the conditions for a legitimate oath comply with the regulative

conditions of the Act. No lender was to "procure, engage, solicit or ask" a borrower

under 21 to engage in an annuity, to publicize a previous annuity after he turned 21 or to

claim that he is over 21. To avoid this indemnity, the Act requires the agent "to make

oath, or to give his or her word of honour or solemn promise, that he or she will not plead

idhcy." Thus the Act relies on the "constitutive rules" of oath-taking to establish the

regulative conditions legitimating the oath. If an oath is legitimate because it is made born

fide, then the application of regulations, some of which deny the legitimacy of oaths,

contradicts the very assumption of sincerity upon which its efficacy as a legal procedure

rests.

Rather than replicate attempts to legitimate contract behaviour through the

sublimation of internally regulating principles of behaviour, the so-called "seditious"

references to annuities for which The Schwl for Scandal was suppressed dramatize the

performative wnditionality of the legitimation process itself. Sheridan's "general satire"

must be viewed as an evasi& on the dramatist's part, of the political subversiveness of his

own art. Nevertheless, Sheridan's references to annuities and the Annuity Act highlight

this equivocation by associating the incapacity of its regulative procedures with its own

farcical artificiality. In act 111, Sir Oliver Surface and Moses, a Jewish money-lender, en

route to see Sir Oliver's extravagant nephew Charles, encounter Trip, Charles' servant,

who tries to procure a loan £?om Moses by purchasing an annuity. To get his annuity,

Trip assures Moses that he can avoid the regulations:

TRIP. But a props Moses-have you been able to get me that little Bill

discounted?

SIR OLIVER Wants to raise Money toemercy on me-has his distresses

I warrant like a Lord-and affects Creditors and Duns!

M0SES.Twa.s not to be done indeed Mr. Trip-[gives the note]

TRIP. Good lack-you surprise me-rny Friend Brush has indursed it and I:

thought when he put his Mark on the Back of the Bill 'twas as good

as cash

MOSES. No 'twouldn't do-

142

TRIP. A s m a l l - d u t Twenty Pounds-hearkee Moses do you think you

could get it to me by way of an annuity?

SIR OLIVER. An annuity! ha! ha! a Footman raise Money by annuity-well

done Luxury egad!

MOSES. But you must ensure your Place.

TRIP. 0 with all my Heart-111 ensure my Place and my Life too if you

Pleas€+

SIR OLIVER It's more than I would your neck.

TRIP. But Moses it must be done before this d-d register takes

place-one wouldnY Like to have one's Name made public you know.

(3.2.29-48)

Trip appeals to a system of economic contract-making based on sentimental openness, but

that appeal belies the contradictory nature of its declarative foundation. Importantly,

Sheridan focuses on the paradoxical materiality of declarations. The repetition of names,

£iom Brush to Trip to Moses embodies the-logic of metaphorical substitution at work in

monetary transfer. At the same time, Moses' repeated refusal to recognize the validity of

the notes is actually a refusal to recognize the authority of the signature. What is

important here is that Sheridan draws attention to how the problem of linguistic

reproduction is either ignored or implicated into debates on the validity of economic

exchange. The validity of exchange derives from its internal conditions of fulfilment, not

those of any external governing force, despite the fact that such governance proclaims its

illegality. Thus, a promissory note has monetary value because it is "indursed" as

exchangeable by its signature and not because it corresponds to some externally regulated

value.

The dramaturgical layout of this scene seems to illustrate the satire on dishonesty

which critics tend to concfude was Sheridads thematic aim. Sir OIiver's sarcastic reactions

to Trip's and Moses' c o n t . for instance, provide a voice of antipathy against the

legitimacy of this surreptitious contract. As he is leaving Charles' house, Sir Oliver spies

Moses and Trip and again decries their business: "They are now planning an annuity ... in

my Day Servants were content with the Follies of their Masters when they were worn a

Little Thread-Bare but now they have their Vices, like their Birth-Day Cloaths with the

Gloss onM (4.2.271). These comments stress Trip's clownish foppery in order to proclaim

the illegitiina~y of his economic fieedom But Sheridan's use of theatrical h m h g

through Sir Oliver's asides reflects ironically back on Sir Oliver's own highly theatrical

demeanour." Sir Oliver's language is bound up in the equivocations of sentimental

honesty and counterfeit circulation. The scene in which he is taught the art of negotiating

loans by his fiend Sir Peter Teazle, Moses, and Rowley also features a reference to the

annuity bill. The scene is remarkable for its rapid battery of suggestions for the rhetorical

creation of funds, what Sir Oliver calls "the cant of usury. " But Sir Oliver is taught that

contract negotiation is an irregular process of innuendo and deference combined with

shocking avarice. Moses tells Sir Oliver that if he asks his nephew for "eight or ten per

" The assxiation of the Trip-Moses exchange with the Hopkins affair is also premature. Moses is not based on Hopkins, despite the accusations that Hopkins had associations with "Jewry Street." Moses is more likely based on Jacob Nathan Moses, a London money-lender with whom Sheridan had extensive and favourable dealings. The more likely candidate for Hopkins is Sir Oliver, the wealthy, socially upstanding Christian gentleman who also happens to be an expert in the socially scandalous trade of usury and who disguises himself as a Jewish broker who disguises himself as a Christian gentleman. This Moses had some dealings with Wdoughby Lacy, a fellow proprietor of Drury-Lane and a notorious spend-thrift. Lacy sold part of his share of the theatre in order to pay Moses two notes off 1000 each, but it was Sheridan who was eventually sued for the £2000. It is unclear whether Sheridan borrowed money from Moses or whether he had taken responsibility for Lacy's debts. The case was resolved on December 23, 1777 though the events probably date ffom a period just before Sheridan completed School for Sczrtzkzl. There is no indication that Sheridan was ever sued for defamation (Dramatic Works 302-03). The point is that, like Hopkins, Sir Oliver must excuse the invalidating theatricality of his own economic agency in order to invoke its constitutive legitimacy and the constitutive il-legitimacy of Trip's.

144

cent on the loan," he will be discovered immediately." Rather Sir Oliver must take as

much advantizge of the situation as possible: "if [Charles] appears not very anxious for the

supply-you should require only forty or fifty per cent-but if you find him in great Distress

and want the monies very bad-you may ask , - double" (3.1 P 253).

Wre "the good honest tradew which Sir Oliver is "learningw in this scene, the

manner of speaking involved in the contract negotiation combines deviance with defiance.

It is here that Sheridan dips in a reference to the Annuity Act:

MOSES. Then you know-you haven't the monies yourself-but are

forced-to borrow them for him of a Friend.

SIR OLIVER Oh I borrow it of a Friend do I?

MOSES. Yes-and your Friend is an unconscionable Dog-but you can't

help it.-

SIR OLIVER My fiend in an unconscionable Dog is he?

MOSES. Yes.-And He himself hasn't the moneys by him - but is forced

to sell stock at a great L o s s

SIR OLIVER' He is forced to sell stock is heat a great loss is he-well

that's very kind of him.

SIR PETER Efaith Sir Oliver, Mr. Premium, I mean, you'll soon be

Master of the Trade- but Moses-wouldn't you have him run out a

Little against the annuity Bill that would be in character I should

think-

MOSES. Very much-

ROWLEY. And lament that a young man must be at years of discretion

before He is suffered to ruin himself-

MOSES. Ayegreat Pity!

SIR PETER And abuse-the Public-for allowing merit to an act whose

only object -is to snatch Misfortune and imprudence-fiom the

rapacious relief of umy! (3.1.97- 1 16)

"Running out," is exactly what this passage has the four men do, for there is no talk in this

lesson of any money actually changing hands. Rather, a long series of excuses and

promises defer the premium. Running out, like "the great Loss" that the unconscionable

Dog will suffer, also connotes an w8CU8fion, an emptiness which is what the cycle of debt

both depends upon and prevents. An heresting pun is buried in Sir Petef s reflection: to

ryn in Latin is curro, narere, the root of the Engiish word currency. Sheridan draws

attention not only to the iterability of currency but also its centrality to a system of

similarly transferable excesses: interest, debt, even arudous urgency, the emotional stress

of financial exchange which the annuities act bureaucratically ignores. Cleverly, and with

his peculiar talent for this kind of pun, Sheridan parallels the act of speaking the contract

to the economic action of contracts themselves; indeed, speaking a contract is its

economic action. Sheridan also figures this exchange a s physical excess, extensions of

bodily activity. There is a rhetorical Iwcuriance to Sir Peter's languagerepeated "p"s and

long, rolled "rns-underscoring the "excessiveness" of the desire for ready money and its

elemental physicality. In the scene of Olivex's education into the ways of usury, he is told

to defer the actual premium to an *unconscionable dog." The animal physicality and

thoughtless greed of this persona points to the rhetorical physicality of names

emblematized in the dog metaphor, as the self-referentiality of the name "Mr. Premium"

obviates the dramatistic presentation of Sir Oliver himself both in his disguise and in his

"real" character. Indeed, Sheridan's pun on running out extends to these animalistic

connotations, as cur is also a Latinate slang term for dog.

Sir Oliver's repetitions of Moses' instructions emphasize the iterative nature of

these promises. The lesson is in fkct a forecasting, a promise of how to make promises;

later, Sir Oliver will repeat the lessons verbatim in his i n t e ~ e w with Charles Surface.

146

The act of naming, the declarative "here and now" of an individual's participation in the

kinds of economic exchange contingent upon personal credibility, establishes the efficacy

of the annuity rather than any inner intentional consciousness or sincerity. At the same

time, as Benveniste insists, that contingency of the declaration on authorities beyond its

articulation is apparent in the material act of speaking, in the instant of the articulation of

subjectivity itself in the speech situation. While the lesson in promising demonstrates the

way that the libidinal field of financial desire is perpetuated, it also expounds the

materiality of the speech situation which negates the regularity of that field of deferrals. In

an even more biting sneer at the Act, a rejected manuscript version ofthe scene has Sir

Peter recommend that Sir Oliver "enquire if the borrower is a minor," in which case,

Moses agrees, "his conscience will direct him.. . To have the bond in another Name" (cited

in Dramatic Works 302). A contract evading the age restriction by means of a false name

openly defies the bomfide stipulation of the Annuity Act and the sincerity requirement of

the speech act. Sheridan suggests here that the non-seriousness of nafning, its material

iterability, is in fact the "positive possibility" of the contract a s opposed to its utterance

born@%?.

Like Sheridan's own claim that the scene is merely "a general satire," the readings

of annuities performed on stage (Sir Peter's, Sir Oliver's) supply the kind of "meaningn

which the Act itself hoped to limit to the modes of utterance it stipulated. But Sheridan

also dramatizes those acts of interpretation as themselves modes of utterance affected by

precisely the immediate, creative, and material fluidity in declaring and naming which

inspired the Act in the first place. With this in mind, one more element can be added to the

"readingsn of annuities in School for S . I . The Annuity Act was passed on May 12,

1777. 7he School for S d I opened on May 8. This means that members of the

audience so inclined were able, like Trip, to establish secret annuities contracts "before

this d - 4 register takes place." Even after the register took office, secret annuities could

147

flourish, since the audience already knew how to avoid them: they could give false names,

declare majority age, and so o n In this way, the annuities scenes exemplify the way

Sheridan combines performance, the exemplary demonstration of how subjects behave,

and theatre, an instance of action in which the concept of subjectivity is materially

artidat ed.

Comprehending the historical si@cance of this play, however, means

understanding the way the play situates itself historically, in the instant of theatrical action.

By extending the stage world beyond its limits, topicality disrupts the distinction between

serious and non-serious, normality and excess, validity and void. In this way the material

event of performance exposes itself fiom within the conceptual "drama" of mental states,

subjective motivations, and social relations which it is supposed to exemptify. Thus

Sheridan's theatre deconstructs the political economy of sentiment supposedly at the heart

of such regulative gestures as the Annuity Act by pointing to the circulating mechanisms

which not only explain and sustain it but also create it.

Scorn'sh Economics and Social Acts

Sheridan's "general satire" of the Annuity Act dovetails with important questions

of intentionality and form apparent in eighteenth-century theories of promising and

contract-making. This connection can partially be understood by examining sporadic but

informative appearances of life annuities in the political economy of this period. To

facilitate the spread of the annuities trade, prominent mathematicians published actuarial

tables computing the proper rates of annuities measured against average Life expectancy.

Richard Price's Obst?rvatiom on Reversionary Payments, for example, first delivered to

the Royal Society in 1771, used these tables to outline soiutions to typical insurance

problems. Price insisted that by trusting in sound mathematical principles, every individual

is capable of insuring his or her own fhture maintenance.12 The annuity contract

anticipates the mathematical positivism which became prominent in political economy over

the course of the nineteenth century. The logic of mathematical equivalence persuasively

assures the perlocutioaary effect anticipaied in the act of contractual agreement. But the

constative validity implied in the harmonization of a declaration of Me-expectancy and the

achlal time of death perpetuates the myth of a determined future posited in the present by

the performative logic of the illocutionary act. The calculations of returns and rates of

interest, the entire concept of life expectancy, even the act of naming oneselfin order to

validate one's status as either borrower or lender, achieve logical clarity fiom the internal

consistency of their wholly verbal equivalences and the institutional facticity of names and

rates rather than fiom the referential validity of recognized brute facts. The issue here is

We expectancy, not We-span, speculative gambling, not historical record. Price's lecture

and other theoretical accounts of annuities convert this gamble with the irrevocable

circumstantiality of life into a sure thing by declaring, or rather promising its manifest

consistency according to the logic of established mathematical averages.

The controversy over the performative nature of annuities contracts also connects

Sheridan's play to a broad tradition of contract theory which interweaves with the growth

of political economy in the eighteenth century, including Wealth of Nations, published in

1776, the year in which Sheridan took over Drury Lane and wrote much of SchooI for

S m h I . l3 James Gordley has suggested that the contract theory of this period can be

l2 The published version (which went through five editions by Price's death) included criticisms of the benevolent societies and Price's ideas on how annuities formulae could be adapted to curb the National Debt. As discussed by E h a n , Price's proposals inspired Wfiarn Pitt the Younger, who sought Price's advice on financial policy during the 1780s (26 1-63).

l3 See Holdsworth 9: 664 for a discussion of the annuity bill in the tradition of the English usury laws: "What legislation there was, was directed to regulating, not the general principles of the law of contract, but particular contracts."

149 :I

generalized by contrasting the increasingly prominent empiricism inspired by Descartes

and Newton (1 13) and the Natural Law philosophy derived mainly ftom Samuel Pufendorf

(121). This distinction, however, is complex and subtle. On the one hand, while the

empiricists claimed to have uncovered the "natural" rules and propensities of human

action, they insisted on the exclusive logical priority of human customs and habits in

accordance with the data obsewed by the philosopher (1 18- 19). On the other hand, while

the Natural Law philosophers agreed on the priority of lived experience over ideal virtues,

they also contended the existence of an instinctive understanding of ethical rights in every

individual, what Francis Hutcheson called "the moral sense" (1 3 1 -3 2). As the contract

was bandied about in legal theory and social philosophy, and eventually poiitical economy,

it came to be realized that determining the moral obligation of a promise or a contract

involved balancing the social conventions and ethical assumptions of the speakers, the

hearers, and their social milieu with their intentions and moral aims-the same problematic

examined by speech-act theory.

The economic thought of the eighteenth century is thus replete with inconsistencies

regarding the primary role and specific effect of contracts and promises in economic

relations. Paul de Man, as was noted in chapter 1, has shown how Rousseau's theory of

the social contract conflates the idea of the general will of a political unit into the internal

belief system of an individual speaker, even as it insists upon the absolute autonomy of

that subjective agent. Rousseau's conundrum exemplifies the problematic ambiguity of

individual acts of speech and perceived universal laws and conditions. Both Locke and

Hobbes argued that the property relations which motivated the formation of societies in

the first place are essentially contractual. Hobbes' identification of the sanctity of religious

oaths and his understanding of the need for such pledges to be reiterated, accompanied in

most instances by recurrent threats of violence, anticipates the principle of performative

iteration. Hobbes is just as insistent that the words used to transfer rights to property

fkom one agent to another-his definition of a contract-are "merely" signs and utterly

divorced f?om the actions they exclusiveIy represent.'' Locke's version of the social

contract, the ontological agreement between individuals to respect individual property. the

value of gold and the limits of government includes the idea that at some fu-distant point

in human history there must have been some "consent" regarding the need for those limits,

a consent which parallels in his Eksay on Himan UnalerstmuVng, an agreement about the

meaning of words and their arbitrary relations to ideas.15 The French economiste, k R J.

Turgot sketched an intersubjective theory of price, based on the "esteem value7' each

subjective participant is willing to pay or trade for a certain commodity in exchange for

another. Turgot was one of the first economists to suggest that the workings of the

economy resemble the operations of language.. But he was also in the coterie of the

physiocrats; and he did in fact argue that the value of commodities was estimable only in

relation to the absolute standard of the products of land, which language and negotiation

could only represent. Sir James Steuart in his 1767 Inquiry info the Principles of Political

Oeconomy, the last great eighteenth-century economic treatise to appear before Wealth of

Nations, insists that the economy is best governed by the direct mediation of "statesmen"

in a flexible enough position to alter legislation and decree economic policies in the face of

crisis and trade imbalance. At the same time, Steuart's overall social vision is "a fi-ee and

perfect society, which is, a general tacit contract, from which reciprocal rmd

proportionul services r e d universally between all those who compose it" (I. 88). Even

as late as the early nineteenth-century, Jeremy Bentharn could argue for the existence of

what he called "fictional entities" while still demanding that contracts could only have

" See Leviathan, Part 1, chapters 6 and 14.

Is An Essay Concerning Humrm Uis tanding , Book 3, chapter 1. For comparisons of lockets philosophical principles with his economic thought see Appleby, "Locke, Liberalism" and Thompson, Morlels 54-64.

151

legitimate social effect ifthey were in accordance with the freedom of the market and the

fundamental utility of human action.I6

The economic significance of the contract debate comes into particular focus with

the publication of Smith's Weolh of Nafim in 1776. This is in part because of its

influence on the development of economic thought. But Smith's work also straddles,

historically and philosophically, the most pointed contention of the century over the

epistemological status of economic contracts between the radical empirical view ofDavid

Hume that economic exchange has nothing to do with promises and the common sense

view of Thomas Reid that mental and verbal actions are logically indistinguishable. Hume

argues that there is no rational proof that uttering a promise entails moral obligation;

contracts and promises are rather vehicles for communal negotiations of self-interest and

affection. A group of self-interested individuals is in direct competition for existing

property. "No aEection of the human mind" Hume writes, "has both a sufficient force, and

'%e historiography of eighteenth-century intellectual discourse also tends to stress constative rationalism over rhetorical disputation as the dominant philosophical mindset of the eighteenth century. As Foucault famously argued, the eighteenth century marks the shift from a conception of language as the register of human participation in a grand network of constantly "renewed" analogically related "similitudes and signatures" (34-5) into universal ideas of which words were the artificial indicators and grammar the conventional structure. For Foucault, a parallel shift occurs in political economy; while in the seventeenth century vaiue was analogous to visible circulating wealth, by Smith's time wealth represented so-called "natural" economic forces such as command over labour or the allocation of revenues. J. G. A. Pocock's account of the rise of a notion of permanent and universal "personal autonomy" in matters of property rights and capital distribution similarly suggests that the general acceptability of that doctrine marks the turn to a secular faith in the existence of imagination, fortune, identity distinct fiom language which accords with the growth of pubtic credit as a morally viable entity (98). Credit, which had formerly existed only as barter, becomes a "mechanism" capable of sustaining itself and any individual who holds it as the paradoxid investiture in socially acceptable fictions. Credit and economic mobility &sf as ideas apart £?om the language of promising which enacts them. Yet, in Pocock's own analysis it is possible to recognize the very performativity which the emerging classical ideology strove to suppress. The practice and the experience of crediting, of promising to pay, ultimately leads to beliefs beyond immediate expectations in rationalized and predictable fbtures.

152

a proper direction to counter-balance the love of gain, and render men fit members of

society, by making them abstain from the possessions ofothers" (Treatise 492).

Competition demands personal ownership, anived at through a consideration of mutual

benefit (489). Being only "a certarn form of words," Hume argues, "a promise is not

naturally intelligible" (522). It only stands in for a certain "act of mind" which "must

necessarily be the willing of that obligation, which arises fkom the promise" but is not

constituted by the promise as such (5 16). That a resolution of wiU entails obligation is "a

manifest absurdity." Since our ideas about the benefits of certain sensations can only be

reflected upon after the fact of impression, and we cannot change these sentiments by an

act of will, then promises cannot create states of affairs. Conventional obligation arises as

a way of easing the processes of agreement and transaction, but the principles of

obligation remain fmc5.d and symbolic:

Now as nothing more enlivens any idea than a present impression, and a

relation betwixt that impression and the idea; Itis natural for us to seek

some false light fiom this quarter. In order to aid the imagination in

conceiving the transference of property, we take the sensible object and

actually transfer its possession to the person on whom we would bestow

the property. The suppos'd resemblance of the actions, and the presence of

this sensible delivery, deceive the mind, and make it fancy, that it conceives

the mysterious transition of the property. And that this explication of the

matter is jusf appears hence, that men have invented a symbolical delivery,

to satisfy the h c y , where the real one is impracticable (5 15)

Hurne confirms the symbolism of promising by recasting it in the terms of his sceptical

mode of inquiry. Commonly, Hume asserts, promises appear to necessitate obligation.

Hume's philosophical "explication' by contrast exposes these "present impressionst' as

153

"suppos'd" and "mysterious."" I can speak a promise and not hold to its obligation if it is

not my interest to do so. I could be deliberatively deceptive or making a joke. For Hume,

all of thae possible scenarios demonstrate that the relation between the act of uttering a

promise and any obligation to keep that promise is purely conventional.

It may be necessary, however, to create situations of obligations, and in those

instances to utter conventionally agreed fornutas of intention or approbation. But that

conventionality proves all the more ~e~evidently for Hume the separation of human

action and its social investments from the hct ion of language. The conventional

agreement to respect the property of others

is not of the nature of a promise.. . but only of a general sense of common

interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another,

and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I

observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of

his goods, provihd he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He

is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this

common sense of interest is mutually express'd and is known to both, it

produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly be

call'd a convention or agreement betwixt us, tho' without the imposition of

a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the

other, and are perform'd on the supposition, that something is to be

p e r f o d on the other part. Two men who pull the oars of a boat, do it by

agreement or convention, tho' they have never given promises to each

other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession, the less deriv'd

" With classic impiety, Hume declares the inherent obligation of promises to be "one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagin'd and may even be compared to trmbsiantiation and holy or&rsl' (524).

from human conventions, that it arises gradually and acquires force by slow

progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of

transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more that

the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a

confidence of the fixture regularity of their conduct: And 'tis only on the I

expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In

like msnner are languages gradually establish'd by human conventions

without any promise (490)

Like Austin's. Hume's view of contract theory is critical rather than prescriptive, though

they differ hndamentally on the nature of the relation between speech and contract

behaviour. There may be, Hume argues, a certain formulation of words associated with a

certain act of agreement, but those words have no bearing on the efficacy of the act itself

which is learned by each party by convention and habituation. It is possible, he will later

say in the Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, that the specific instance of

contract behaviour which appears to be effective in one context is not in another; thus the

"words. .. inheritance and contract, stand for ideas infinitely complicated; and to dehe

them exactly a hundred volumes of laws, and a thousand volumes of commentators have

not been found sufficient" (32). Yet, Hume can just as easily claim the general truth of his

own deductions, since by his own reasoning he anticipates the sceptical position that

would prove him wrong. Hume therefore claims that laws can only come into being by

means of a constant reflection on patterns of similarity and contiguity between specific

instances of behaviour. In the essay "Of the Original Contract," Hume again argues (with

Locke and Rousseau) that there is no standard of moral obligation implicit in the idea of a

promise, but contends as well (against them) that there is no universal concept of justice, a

"acit or "general will," to which speakers are at the same time obliged. Our

immediate need to form social communities is inspired by our "love of children" and

255

"gratitude to benefactors, pity to the unfortunate" (fisa),s 479). Yet, "it is reflection only,

which engages us to sacrifice such strong passions to the interests of peace and public

ordern (480). Hume's application of his earlier argument against inherent obligation is

compelling in the context of this rebuttal of the fallacy of "the social" or "original

c o n t ~ " between governments and people. The numerous historical examples of the self-

interested motives of kings and the self-preserving motives of ordinary people are here

used to prove that the "results to society of.. humane instincts" are felt, or sensed,

"antecedent to any such reflection" on logical morality.

Hume's empiricism maintains, and even defends, a fbndamental ambiguity.

Language originates with the recognition of mutual needs and the resulting ascription of

names to objects and actions. Yet, this ascription also implies the existence of a more

basic form of conceptual abstraction, one which demands a certain recognizable linguistic

form. The two men in the boat do not need words to understand that they must work

together to row efficiently, but can afterward reflect that what they have done is an

instance of contract negotiation which they are thus in a position to transpose into other

situations as a possible conventional procedure. In his economic essays, this ambiguity

proves to be a very useM tactic. It allows Hume to say, on the one hand, that an

imaginary means of circulating wealth such as public credit is "dangerousyy (35 1) to the

fabric and prestige of the state and that defences of the system of taxation which supplies

that credit, though they "might naturally have passed for trials of wit among rhetoricians,"

represent "absurd maxims" (352) contrary to reason. At the same time, Hume can claim

that localized credit between independent traders is "of some advantage to commerce, by

diminishing its profits, promoting circulation, and encouraging industry" (3 54). There is

no ideal of statehood to defend from potential bankruptcy, and that again points to the

problem in Hume between the material event of an utterance and the formation of objects

of reflection. Ultimately, Hume "capitalizes," as Thomas Pfau suggests, on the efficacy of

speech acts to translate these local utterance situations into the basis for an economic

system., even as he denies, by the same lo@c, the efficacy of speech acts (289-95).18

On the other side of this debate is the Common-Sense philosophy of Thomas

~ e i d . ' ~ By "common sense" Reid means both methodological reliance upon the self-

evidence of ceW mental and social events and also the first principles which determine

mental and social action. Reid argued that the empiricist *Doctrine of Ideas," the notion

that mental power comists in the passive accumulation and reflective retrammission of

objects in the mind based on the demands of the passions, was not only logically false, but

morally ~ n s o u n d . ~ He was convinced that the individual is an active and free agent who

l8 Christensen has' compellingly argued that this central paradox of Humean enlightenment is in part explained by examining the dynamics of Hume's own writing and publishing practice. The immediate and supra-contextual impact of the essay form allows Hume to make arrant logical contradictions regarding the influence of luxury and rhetoric upon human affairs, even as he needs both that bourgeois environment and a powem and persuasive technique to make those same condemning arguments (68). Both Christensen and Pfu take some inspiration fiom Deleuze's essay on Hume, Empiricism mtd Subjectivity For Deleuze's reading of Hume's theories of society and action (45-6). As Christensen (1 4) and Pfau (1 9) both stress, however, Hume's formulation of an institutionally constituted obligation which is not restricted by verbal principles is a major step in the justification of the emerging capitalist ideology.

l9 Historians of philosophy have recently credited Reid with the earliest account of speech acts; see especially Nerlich and Clarke 103- 1 1 1 and articles by Jenson, Schuhmann, and Barry Smith. Reid's importance to the development of political economy should not be underestimated. Though Reid's most concrete statements on the importance of contracts and promises to social behaviour appear in Ihtellectual Powers of Mrm (1 785) and Active Powers of the Humnn Mind (1788), many years after the publication of Wealth of Nutiom, the essays were based on lectures Reid gave as chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, succeeding Smith, from 1 764 to 1 780. The principles of the moral, social and linguistic philosophy expounded in Reid's lectures and books are already evident in Reid's Inquiry info the Human Mind ( 1 764) The line of succession to modem economics runs through Reid; after Smith, Reid taught Dugald Stewart, who, succeeding Reid in the same chair, taught Francis Homer and James Mill (Spencer 13 1-3 5).

20 Reid argued that the empiricists had fundamentally misapplied the word idea. In his Inquiry into the Human Mind, Reid distinguishes the "philosophical meaning" (225) of the word as Locke and Hume use it - recollections of sense impressions - fiom its common usage, a product of "powers, faculties and operations" of the mind. "mn popular

acts in accordance with external reality and social order because the mind has certain

inherent powers by which it understands sensory experience ("intellectual power") and

performs moral choices ("active power*). Reid attacked Hume's sceptical notion tbat the

correlation between words, ideas and impressions is analogous or arbitrary. What offends

Reid about this model of experience is its reduction of human perception and action to

sensory mechanics. He does not dispute Locke's basic premise that we experience the

world through relations with it. But he is convinced that we do not experience the wodd

atomistically through chance encounters with events and objects which are then

assembled, upon deductive reflection, into conventional rules (Rollin 259). Indeed, Reid

seems at times to be even more strikingly empirical than Hume. Though powers of mind

could be "perfectly clear in every man come to years of understanding.. . we cannot define

them according to rules of logic, by a genus and a specific difference. And when we

attempt it," he continues, "we rather darken than give light to them" (Active Powers 436).

While Hume argues that sensations cause impressions, Reid challenges that notion of

causation, arguing that there is an intercausal relationship between the act of knowing

certain things and imagining certain circumstances and physical sensations which also

embody those general qualities. This inter-causal correlation or mental conception cannot

be proven or reduced, Reid insists. We can only derive a first principle of experience fkom

and feel confident in our knowledge that this self-evident power "triumphs over reason,

and laughs at all the arguments of a philosopher" (Inquiry 121).

Once we understand this restriction, it is possible to comprehend that mental

processes do in fact work, even if it is not always possible to logically know how. For

Reid, the ability to translate the.experience of an object into knowledge derives fiom an

language, " Reid writes, "ideo sigrufies the same thing as conception, apprehension, notion. To have an idea of anything, is to conceive it. To have a distinct idea, is to conceive it distinctly. To have no idea of it, is not to conceive it at all" (224). See also Lehrer 84-6.

inherent mental ability to make those kinds of connections. With Berkeley, Reid suggests

that this correspondence indicates natural signs in the world expressive of essential

qualities which language is not capable of discovering. But constitutive principles of mind

allow the subject to gather a fUrther lexicon of applicable general experiences which are

natural to the practical conversation of social existence. These are not impressed ideas but

ideas resulting f?om active contact with the world which Reid called interchangeably

"natural signs" and "the natural language. " By uncovering these mental and social powers,

Reid believes, philosophy serves a practical purpose, which the empiricists neglect. The

proper object of philosophical analysis is the expressive conduct of individuals in contact

with the world and with one another. Though his method covers a carefitl assessment of

the intellectual powers of perception and the active powers of moral action, Reid insists

that it is not to conjectured metaphysical axioms that philosophy must look for its

credentials, but to the ordinary conduct and the ordinary language of ordinary people.

Reid's paramount instance of this emancipatory knowledge is the efficacy of

contractual language. Reid's "Of the Nature and Obligation of a Contract," the final

chapter of his Essays on the Active P m r s of he Human Mind, exemplifies Reid's critique

of empiricism and his faith in Linguistic power as the foundation of human sociability. The

mind can conceive ideas "in solitude, without intercourse with any other intelligent being"

and define them according to categories of "genus and difference." Hume's idea that such

definitions are merely conventional names for things does not apply to contracts because

the principle of obligation which defines contracts cannot exist independent of context:

A man may see, and hear, and remember, and judge, and reason; he may

deliberate and form purposes, and execute them, without the intervention

of any other intelligent being. They are solitary acts. But when he asks a

question for information, when he testifies a fact, when he gives a

command to his servant, when he makes a promise, or enters into a

159

contract, these are social acts of mind, and can have no existence without

the intervention of some other intelligent being, who acts a part in them.

Between the operations of the mind, which, for want of a more proper

name, I have called soZi&ry, and those I have called suciaZ, there is this

very remarkable distinction, that, in the solitary, the expression of them by

words, or any other sensible sign, is accidental. They may exist, and be

complete, without being expressed, without being known to any other

person. But, .in the social operations7 the expression is essential. They

cannot exist without being expressed by words or signs, and known to the

other party. (437-38)

Social acts cannot be reduced to objects of sense or reflection. This is particularly true,

Reid argues, for promises. I cannot think to myseE "I promise" and have promised,

because this thought has no social application. I cannot promise myself, Reid would say, I

can only "make" a promise to someone else. Regardless of my intention, in the social

context of speech, when I promise I enter into an obligation. Promises and contracts are

therefore not abstract representations of a social order, but the necessary condition for the

constitution of society itself: "Ifnature had not made man capable of such social

operations of mind, and fUmished him with a language to express them, he might thi*

and reason, and deliberate, and will; he might have desires and aversions, joy and sorrow.. .

but at the same time, he would still be a solitary being, even when in a crowd" (438).

Promising thus embodies inherent and necessary sociability and manifests "common"

human principles as a practical guide to moral behaviour. But for Reid, the existence of

promises also proves the existence in human society of necesq moral fidelity. This is not

simply an observation, but a logical fact. If there were no fidelity, there would be no need

for promises. Since promises are made, and societies do function, then there must be such

a thing as fidelity (443). Intentions have no bearing on the obligation implied in the

uttering of a promise, since by definition the utterance "I promise" is the social act of

contracting an obligation with someone else. "A fraudulent person may contract with a

fixed purpose of not performing his engagementn Reid says. %ut this purpose makes no

change with regard to his obligation He is as much bound as the honest man, who

contracts with a fixed purpose of performing" (446). Hume's arguments for the

conventionality of co11tracts are irrelevant; "shocking absurdities," Reid calls them, ‘With

no metaphysical subtility can ever justif)" (448). Intent to deceive or a promise in jest,

conditions of uttering which Hume has used to prove the conventionality of promising are

for Reid, matters of solitary resolution which have no impact on the fact of promising, and

therefore entering a social obligation.

Reid's philosophy of "common sense" is specially suited to economic issues:

"Common sense is that degree ofjudgement which is common to men with whom we can

converse and transact business" (InteZZechral Pmvers 422b; cited in Jensen 360).

Especially pertinent evidence of Reid's convictions that economic action is logically

inseparable fiom linguistic principles can be found in his manuscript papers and lectures on

economic matter^.^' Here, Reid interweaves theories of the division of labour, price, and

money with a discussion of contracts, itself part of a still greater consideration of

individual rights, establishing a dehitive connection between eighteenth-century economic

theory and the theory of contracts. The notes reveal exactly Reid's determination that the

linguistic expression of prornising is not an arbitrary representation of will, but an

irreducible and natural active mode of human speech: "In a Contract or promise the Wi

or intention does not bind'udess it be expressed Nor 2 The expressing an intention

Much of the economic material is concentrated in a fhkly complete set of lecture notes on Trivate Jurisprudence." These are the most consistently dated of the manuscripts: March 1 to April 1 1765. Other notes are dated 1770-71. A significant early draft of the essay on contracts derived fiom a paper on contracts in general is not dated but is presumed to have been written in Glasgow. The dates correspond to the period in which Smith gave his 1766 lectures on jurisprudence and was writing Wealth of Nations.

without actually contracting Nor 3 Words without intention, Nor 4 Does the want of an

intention to pefiorm hinder the @!digation Not even when the person with whom the

Contract is made perceives that it is made without the intention of performance" (Ethics

155). The notes set this notion of an inherently and logically obligatory contract in the

practical context of a lecture on individual property rights and their exchange, which is

itself set in a larger discussion moral rights in general. Reid's definition of rights runs

contrary to Hobbes' and though it owes much to Pufendorf and Hutcheson, it differs &om

these earlier accounts in its sense that rights are determined by a linguistic power rather

than a moral sense. While Hobbes had argued that the difference between a right and law

was that which an individual could and could not do as determined over time by society, in

Reid's system right itself is determined by law:

AU Laws circumscribe a Mans actions and confine him within a certain Sphere

within which he may exercise his power and act according to his pleasure but he

cannot go beyond this Sphere without transgressing the laws and thereby

becoming obnoxious to punishment. And this sphere of Action within which if a

man confined himse& he was no way obnoxious was called his Right. The Law

not onley [sic] circumscribes my Actions and ltixes certain Limits to them, but it

likewise directs & prescribes certain actions to be done by others that respect me

& tend to my benefite. Thus it obliges those who owe me to pay their just debts,

& those who have contracted with me to perform their Engagement (142)

Once again, promises and contracts exemplify natural propriety. This is not a social

contract in Locke's sense for there is no imagined precedent-setting "mutual consent"

establishing legal rights from time immemorial. Reid orients his theory toward

demonstrating that language follows and determines certain inherent principles of action.

Law determines individual right through the distinctly performative influence of language

on the demarcation of a "space" or "sphere" of ethical conduct. The law is an immutable

language which "fixes. .. directs ... prescri bes... obliges." Matters of property and

distribution, "what a man had a tittIe [sic] by law to do or possess or enjoy" (141) are

likewise determined by the inherent power of contract. As the perfonnativity of contracts

is theoretically aligned to the irreducible common sense principles of mind in the later

essay, so in the lectures Reid comects his theory of property rights to the principles of

common sense by suggesting that the operations of natural language are irreducible to

signification or reference: "Right ...is not a Quality of the thing or of the Person having

right. Nor is it any Real Relation between the thing and the Person. Nor is it any

comexion or association between the thing and Person in our Imagination" (146). "Right"

is a conventionaliy simplified word for a set of complex actions involving many other

powerfid words, much like Austin and Searle's taxonomies of pe r fodves :

When we say that a man has a Right to such a house or to such a

pretestation fiom an other, This is no more but a short technical way of

expressing what would require many words to express it in the most direct

and natural way. It is an artiticial way of s i g , g that certain actions of

the person who is said to have the right are within the limits of his duty,

and at the same time it signifies certain actions of others towards him to be

their duty. Upon the whole therefore Uans [sic] Civil Right is a figure of

Speech by which we understand all that the Law of the State allows him to

do possess and enjoy and all which the Law obliges others to do for his

benefit. (146)

Words then do not represent an instinctual sphere of action as Hume argued. Rather, the

sphere of rights is itself regulated, or created, by the natural language of social acts. Reid's

conviction that these principles are irreducible beyond their natural process in the

workings of the imagination allows him to state categorically that an imagined mechanism

of intersubjective rights and obligations can logically be said to exist. Indeed, the central

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maxim of this sphere, that "it is impossible that any Right can belong to me, but it must

imply some obligation upon another or more," rests on the common sense truth that a

mental sphere of action exists. This law of property obeys the laws of contract language.

Reid is not unusual even among the most sbunchly empirical eighteenth-century

mnomists, Like his arch-rival Hume, in arguing that property relations are negotiated

transactions of an ostensibly contractual nature. But in applying the theory of social acts

to a general theory of economic relations Reid's philosophy represents a radical break fiom

the distrust in language as sign typical of economics before his and Smith's. For Reid,

there is no difference between language and exchange because exchange is language. The

impact that this break has on Smithian economics is apparent in how much of Reid's

"common sense" logic of natural signs and social acts is evident in Smith's own theories of

discourse and in Wealth of Nations, particularly in the theory of price. Yet, Smith neither

shares Hume's outright disbelief in the existence of the social contract, nor openly

endorses Reid's notion of the logical inherence of moral obligation in utterance. But he

does come close, on occasion, to making that claim. Reid's concept of social acts, the

forebear of the Austinian speech act, is therefore latent in Smith-and it is this latency to

which Sheridan draws attention in his dramatization of economic contracts.. Like Hurne,

Smith disperses the conditions of validity away from the verbal dynamics of intersubjective

exchange into the psychological dynamic of social relationality, the matrices of forces and

connections which make things happen in the world and which language can and should

only describe. Yet, Smith's own concept of theoretical understanding shows that

dispersion itself to be a performative act, a form of justification incompatible with the

constative logic it seeks to advance.

Smith's theories of scientific inquiry, developed primarily in an early essay entitled

"The P ~ c i p l e s which Lead and Direqt Philosophical Enquiries, Illustrated by the History

of Astronomy," demonstrate the convergence of the Humean and Common-Sensical

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strands of Smith's thought which underlie his seemingly contradictory accounts of

contracts and exchange. He stresses the importance of revision, imagination and dialogue

in the formation of ideas and systems. Smith knew that language and thought could not

represent absolute truth or predict necessary outcorne~.~ Rather, they are responses to

"surprise and wonder" a subject feels whenever it encounters a new and usually

overwhelming phenomenon beyond its immediate fiarne of reference. This state demands

that the subject accommodate~the newly encountered phenomena within concepts which

are logically regular and imaginatively pleasing. "Philosophy," therefore, "by representing

the invisible chains which bind together all these disjointed and discordant appearances,

endeavours to introduce order into this chaos ofjarring and discordant appearances, to

allay this tumult of the imagination, and to restore it.. . to that tone of tranquillity and

composure which is both most agreeable in itself, and most suitable to its nature" (Emly

Wn'tings 45). There is an echo here of Burke's assessment of the pathological reaction to

the sublime which demands some kind of recuperative reduction of the encountered object

to the proportions of the beautifid. It is interesting, moreover, that Smith illustrates this

experience in 'Wistostory of Astronomy" by describing a reaction to the awesome productive

capabilities of factory manufacture, possibly his earliest description of the division of

labour. Philosophy thus progresses through a process of abstracting general principles

a In "Of the External Senses" Smith r d s Berkeley's comparison of language and vision as the only, but nevertheless inadequate, means to understanding: "The objects of sight, as Dr. Berkley [sic] finely observes, constitute a sort of language which the Author of Nature addresses to our eyes ... As, in common language, the words or sounds bear no resemblance to the things which they denote, so in this other language, the visible objects bear no sort of resemblance to the tangible object which they represent7' ( m s on Philosophid Subjectr 156). For a reading of the significance of Smith's early writings on epistemology and language to the tensions between speculation and reason see Motooka 199-204. I wish to thank Prof. Douglas Long of the Department of Political Science, University of Western Ontario for a copy of his address to the 1994 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association entitled "Adam Smith on the Discourse of Political Inquiry."

165

f?om previous arrangements of signs and imitations which have fided to Live up to the

comprehensiveness and clarity which a new object of contemplation demands. The process

is ongoing, but its aim is systematic, in accordance with the general beliefs and customs of

the community. In short, as Lindgen argues' "Smith did not entertain realistic

epistemological views, but views more accurafely described as conventionalistic" (899).

A consistent feature of this account of Smith's theory of inquiry, comparable in

this respect with Hume's, is its devotion to the coostative language resulting f?om

empirical limitation on philosophy to observe and describe. But within Smith's own

conjectures on language, communication and their application to a general theory of the

economy, namely contract exchange, is a conception of the power of language to

construct the reality Smith insists it can only represent, even imaginatively or

conventionally. That is, Smith's own circumlocution of the general theory of

performativify by appeals to the stabilizing intluence of habit and social custom, actually

manifests the perfonnative as the ontological ground of his own system. In his

"Considerations on the Formation of First Languages," Smith imagines the development

of systems of grammar and syntax toward ever increasing abstraction which is compatible

with his formulation of the development of philosophical inquiry &om wonder and surprise

to knowledge, and which remains at the same time equally as conventional. That is, the

increasing abstraction of grammar derives from a need to be ever more general and

imaginative in the formation of complex ideas which also persistently appeal to the

imaginary root of that abstraction in deference to the reality of social conventions and

human passions which it represents. At the same time, however, the essay is built upon

the conjecture that humans have a capacity to assign "names" to objects (Emly Wn'tings

225); thus the sociability which Smith's philosophical system exemplifies accords, as in

Reid's common-sense philosophy, with a sense of the inherent illocutionary force of those

immediate social acts.

There is then an inherently theatrical tendency in Smith's understanding of how

language hctions in society. Indeed, in his Wfthe Nature of that Imitation which takes I

place in what are called the Imitative Arts," Smith insists that theatre must maintain a

certain modesty and decorum in accordance with certain standards of imaginative harmony

and aesthetic propriety; dramatic art is thus conceptuaUy analogous to grammar and

philosophical inquiry (Emly Writings 162-66). This theatrical sense is most apparent,

howeve, in Smith's lheory ofMoal Senriments (1759), certainly the work for which he

was most renowned in his own lifetime. There, he claims that our sense of social

propriety, right, and morality is determined by our sympathetic reactions to the fortunes

and calamities of others. These reactions emerge in the form of sentiments, and are rooted

in the capacity to imagine the sensations which another feels under certain circumstances.

Sentiment arises &om the simple fact of social proximity, such that the interrelations

between individuals is basically spectatorid. Smith claims that we know what to feel

about the experiences of another because we can imagine the reactions of someone else

were we in an observed situation. The spectator is thus a social arbiter of the merit of

actions. Smith suggests that we learn to govern our own behaviour because each

individual is also the spectator of his or her own actions; there is within each of us an

impartial spectator. David Marshall has thus argued that Smith models his theory of the

impartial spectator on a "theatricalw conceptualization of psycho-social dispositions

(Figure of Theater 186-87). As a number of scholars have claimed, moreover, the theory

of the impartial spectator forms the basis for Smith's economic views on the division of

labour and market price. 23 By internalizing our understanding of the potential hardships

and injustices that could befall others, economic agents learn to bdance their demands and

" For Smith's conventionalism and the impact of his theories of aesthetics, rhetoric, and moral speculation on the development of various aspects of his economic system, particularly modes of trade and exchange, see Endres 84-93; Heilbronner 434-39; Young 377-82.

needs against those of the. greater society. Economic exchange thus includes a

fundamentally theatrical component: the negotiation of spectatorid perspectives.

Laaguage plays a significant role in determining social action and reaction, though

Smith is carem to understate that reakation. In one sigruficant case, however, Smith

suggests that the impartial spectator hct ion does not entail the construction of fixed

rules of morality. "It is impossible," Smith admits, "to express all the variations which

each sentiment either does or ought to undergo, according to every possible variation of

circumstances. They are endless, and language wants names to mark them" (328). This

difficulty is illustrated, significantly, with the question of the obligation of contracts.

Smith imagines a situation in which a man is accosted by a robber but is unable to give him

any money, so promises to pay when the funds are available. Is the man obliged to pay?

Any right thinking judge, Smith suggests, would consider such an obligation "the most

ridiculous of all absurdities" (330). But then, "according to the common sentiments of

mankind ... some regard would be thought due even to a promise of this kind" (33 1). If he

pays the fidl promised amount, the man is doing himself an injustice. If he does not pay,

he risks being found "guilty of an action with which, in the imaginations of men, some

degree of shame is inseparably connectedn (333). The social nexus which governs

sympathy indicates that there is a logical connection between speaking a promise and

being obliged to pay. At the same time, the impartial spectator remains suspicious of that

immediacy to the point that for Smith the determination of any governing institution of

social behaviour is "impossible" (33 1).

Smith's most systematic account of the legality of contracts is found in his

Lectures on Juri~~"udence, which scholars tend to agree present much of the groundwork

out of which the more sophisticated general theories of Wealth of Nations will wme. In

the lecture titled "PERSONAL RIGHT," Smith stresses the connection between contract

behaviour and the general social principles governing economic exchange or "the right

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one has to demand the performance of some sort of senice &om an other" (Jursprudence

86). As with Reid, then, a theory of economic behaviour derives fiom speculations on the

nature of legality, but in Smith's case there is less emphasis placed on the existence of a

"sphere of rights7' which constitutes the logical ground of rights and their transfer.

Vivieme Brown has suggested that the lectures mark a significant break in Smith's

philosophy fkom the natural law tradition, which is much more evident in Reid. Smith

thus attempts to determine the validity of contracts by looking at instances where that

validity is challenged: "If we consider now the reasons why contracts were not binding, we

will discover also the causes which gradually introduced their validity" (Jur.sprzictence

89). Such an approach, typical of a historical-analytical mode, is also that employed by

Austin in his attempt to uncover the criteria for linguistic felicity, as is Smith's sense that

this approach encourages a tranquillity of mind according to social custom and ordinary

language leading to fbther and more productive reflection. But unlike Austin-and Reid-

Smith specifically de-emphasizes the profitability of an inquiry into language: "there are

several reasons which greatly retard the validity of contracts, as the uncertainty of

language. Language at all times must be somewhat ambiguous'' (88).

Nevertheless, though Smith dismisses language as a basis for contract validity, that

possibility repeatedly creeps into his discourse. For a start, and most obviously, Smith

begins his discussion by demonstrating that language is the basis for contract validity, in

spite of its ambiguity fiom the perspective of jurisprudence:

We shall first consider the obligations which arise from contract or

agreement; and before we consider them it will be proper to consider what

it is in a contract which produces an obligation to perform the thing

contracted. Now it appears evident that a bare declaration of will to do

such and such a thing can not produce an obligation. It means no more

than that [it] is the present design of the person who makes such a

declaration to do so and so; and all that is required of him to make such a

declaration l a m is sincerity, that is, that it be really iiis intention at that

time to do as he said. If he should afterwards be induced by circumstances

to alter his intention, we wuld not say that he had violated an obligation;

we migbt indeed if he did so on slight grounds accuse him of levity, and

being easily turned and altered in his designs. The only thing that can make

an obligation in this manner is an open and plain declaration that he desires

the person to whom he makes the declaration to have a dependence on

what he promises. The words in which we commonly make such a

declaration [ara I promise to do so and so, you may depend on it. The

expectation and dependance of the prornittee that he shall obtain what was

promised is hear [sic] altogether reasonable, and such as an impartial

spectator would readily go along with, whereas in the former case the

spectator could [not] go along with him if he formed any great expectation.

(867)

With Hume, Smith disallows the efficacy of any declaration of will on the grounds that it

only indexes a present condition of mind which is Liable to change. What makes a contract

inviolable is not the promise as such, but the creation of an expectation in the mind of the

hearer, that is, the acknowledged anticipation of uptake. With Reid, Smith contends that a

promise is valid when it accords with the logic of an intersubjective moment of mutual

understanding, entailing that the words of the speaker constitute his or her subjectivity by

positing verbally (and only verbally) his intentions in the mind of the hearer, thus also

constituting the subject position of the hearer as one of "expectation and dependance."

This exchange of verbal positing transcends the limitations of temporality introduced by

the defining function of the context of utterance (the here-and-now) because what is

established in the mind of both hearer and speaker is not a fact true or false, but an

abstracted form of continuous subjectivity, a future invested with the abstract

dependability posited by the speaker. But in the passage Smith must reverse the

implications of this abstraction such that the mechanical and therefore unreliable

representation of an immediate claim does not effect the valid claim of dependency. At

the same time, in order to render that dependency vatid, Smith must assume that the claim

attains perlocutionary effect of its own accord, and that this particular form of utterance

can create a valid social subject while the declaration of will cannot. By this logic, one

particular mode of utterance is mechanically effective while another is not. Smith can

therefore claim that a contract is valid if it is not a mechanically reproduced sign but also

use the model of sigruficative reproduction to clarify the proper form of an effective

promise.

Smith continues to downplay the function of grammatical formation in contract

exchange as he describes the progressive move in the history of jurisprudence from the

belief in the validity of a verbal claim to the ascription of validity to the conditions of

context and aim. In early societies, Smith claims, all contracts were considered valid

simply on the grounds of faith in what was spoken. As a result of the fact that the formal

declaration of will was so easily forgotten and was effectiveIy unprovable, so many cases

of breach of contract came before the courts that contract cases were simply not

arbitrated. Eventually, formal arrangements for the uttering of contracts had to be

prescribed. But because of the uncertainty of any utterance, even the formal contract had -

to be administered, in this case by the clergy, who then became the sole arbiters of such

decisions; the result was temporary order at the price of individual liberty. Finally, Smith

argues, a contract could o d y be considered valid if it involved a red transaction of

material property. The words which previously had only indicated a vague intention now

corresponded to a genuine thing. From here, "with the extension of commerce" new kinds

of contraas were added. Trade in early societies was only legal if accompanied by spoken

171

oaths. As commerce expanded, "it was found neceswy to extend the power of making

contracts" to include those that were considered important &om the point of view of

commerce, such as partnerships and sales. (M.prtl&nce 91)

In this sense, the criteria of contracts changed from the formal requirements of

speech to the demands of context. There is no change, however, to the actual dynamic of

the contract itself. What makes commercial exchange work is the consumer's expectation

of dependency on the part of the producer and vice versa. The general rules of contract

making do not change, only the specific criteria by which those contraas are to be

considered valid by a court of law. Commerce is the ground by which "real" contracts are

valid, while the dynamics of contractual exchange provide the ontological framework for

commerce. Such an equivocal position is justified by the very vocabulary of Smith's

system. In the historical description of the contract, the verbal contract is subordinated

below the real because of "the uncertainty of language7' (88), yet the form of the contract

itself does not change, just as rhetorical elegance cannot undermine the necessity of

grammar. Just as the rules of justice are comparable to a grammar, while the rules of

ethics resemble the speculative afterthoughts of criticism, so the contract is both

structurally uniform (it obeys certain universal and always accurate rules) and ethically

flexible (it cannot always produce the same results). The contract presents an alternate

and indeed primary set of criteria for action, especially commercial action, words or

"rules7' which Smith, Like Hume and Reid, attempts to subordinate to psycho-sociological

processes. Smith all but ignores the verbal ontology he has just prescribed for the

promise. The reason is that for him language and subjectivity are themselves already

aspects of the larger network of socio-psychological processes that me commerce. Like

strands of DNA, language is as much the ground of commerce as commerce is the pretext

of useful language. Words or rules are not so much subordinate to exchange or the

spectator function as such; they are all synecdochal aspects of a whole state of being called

172

"sociability." The enlightenment philosopherscooomist emphasizes, as Austin does, the

material presence of the utterance itself and the conditions under which it is spoken. At the

same time, historical priority is given to the rise of commerce as the precondition for the

expansion of contract behaviour toward more reliable and more abstract criteria of

validity. Smith's realization of the place of language in contracts-commercial

contracts-implies the reverse of what the lectures ostensibly make clear. Contract

behaviour, W e , and exchange are constituted by specific forms of verbalizing

expectations and declaring dependency, and are therefore performative acts. The

uncertainty of language is an argument against basing contract validity on verbal structure,

as it is in Austin's expansion of the conditions of the validity of the performative away

fiom lodonary meaning and toward the illocutionary act. Yet, though Smith (and

Hume) had no conception of the illocution explicitly, the very structure of commerce itself

makes manifest its f ~ e s . But because language is unreliable, those conditions must be

made as general as possible and as reproducible as possible so as to make a declaration not

just reflect but become reality.

The argument of Wealth of Nations, no less complex and equivocal, also reveals an

awareness of the foundation of commercial exchange in the illocution, though this

linguistic aspect is even W e r sublimated into Smith's social orientation in this work.

The equivocation between constative and performative logic is particularly evident in

Smith's account of economic motivation in the second chapter of his economic treatise,

"the Principle which gives occasion to the Division of Labour." This chapter conf?onts

directly the question of the criteria of contracts and reveals Smith at his most rhetorically

evasive:

The division of labour, fiom which so many advantages are derived is not

originally the effect of any human wisdom, which forsees and intends that

general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though

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very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature

which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter,

and exchange one thing for another. (25)

Stephen Copley has argued that the words "natural" and "nature" are "problematic

throughout" Wealth of Ndiom~ sometimes referring to "usual" states of affairs; sometimes

corresponding to 'kirious ideal models of society and commerce which owe more to the

exemplary discourses of humanism than to the analytical discipline of scientific economics"

('The 'Natural' Economy" 164). These two definitions conflict in a significantly Austinian

manner: a fbnctioning, current disposition to act or speak in a situation does not

necessarily correspond to the general locutionary meaning of a word. Acting "naturaUy"

does not mean to act according to the state of nature historically defined. By spreading

out conflicting connotations of the term throughout the text, Smith avoids the problem of

having to reconcile their opposition. In the same way, Smith structures the passage to

avoid empirically untenable connections between acts of exchange and the general human

"propensity." Smith introduces the "propensity" in opposition to the operational aspects

of the understanding: knowledge or foresight, intentionality and finally utility. These

would entail that the "natural" basis for the market system was comprehensible only

according to the context-contingent criteria of each instance of exchange. Smith then

removes the categorical statement of that principle of exchange to a haf independent

phrase.

Smith's equivocal rhetoric is most apparent in the phrase "necessary, though very

slow and gradual consequence." By invoking necessary cause and effect Smith can

guarantee a relation between a disposition to trade and the division of labour. Yet, Smith

qualifies that necessity under an historical schema of evolutionary development, which by

his own theory of inquiry is a narrative of chance encounters leading to the reconfiguration

of abstract principles according to the requirements of a temporally specific social context.

Even the adverb "certain" allows Smith to incorporate the idea of specificity and

generality into one concept, since the word invokes both an exemplary selection and a

vague coIIdvity. The "certain propensity" is a clever synecdoche for itsex Even the

phrase "the propensity to truck, barter and exchange7' is ambiguous. Smith altered the

phrase, as noted by the Glasgow editors, from an earlier version in his Lectures on

J ~ ~ ~ n c e in which the rhetorical foundation of exchange is manifest: "The real

foundation of it is that principle to persuade which so much prevails in human natureH

(Juriqmdence B 221; A vi.56). Smith omits the linguistic component of economic

transactions by classifying it as a form of physical trade, "truck" or "barter." There is a

metaphor here: as the mental process, the human "propensity" or inclination is clarified by

aligning it to an objectively verifiable act of physical transfer, just as the "real" contract in

the Lectures on Juriqmdence attains a greater validity than the verbal because it involves

a transfer of materially verifiable things rather than unverifiable locutions.

The evasiveness of the passage draws attention to the rhetoricity of its own act of

naming, rendering it verifiable not by the Literal existence of an object or fact, but through

the cogency of its own verbal power. While the ensuing lengthy paragraph attempts to

fiuther verify, by illustration, the existence of "this propensity," "this disposition to truck,

barter and exchange" as it is later called (25), even naming it, finally, as a "species of

contract" (emphasis added) obviates the contingency of exactly the kind of linguistic

enterprise it undertakes to describe by its own circumlocutory rhetoric:

Whether this propensity be one of those original principles in human

nature, of which no fiuther account can be given; or whether, as seems

more probable, it be the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason

and speech, it belongs not to our present subject to enquire. it is common

to all men and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know

neither this nor any other species of contracts. ( 2 ~ ) ~ ~

Smith further verifies the "reality" of the trucking disposition by contrasting it to other

forms of behaviour, bracketing them as anomalies of otherwise "natural" modes of

exchange. Animals seem to engage in genuine transactions but such instances are only an

"accidental concurrence of their passion in the same object at the same time." The

question of time, as we saw above, ultimately proves vital here. For Smith admits that just

as a "puppy fhwns upon its dam, and a spaniel endeavours by a thousand attractions to

engage the attention of its master.. . . Man sometimes uses the same arts with his brethren"

(emphasis added) But such a clear i w c e of "persuasion" as Smith calls it, over the

course of this micro-narrative, is made to disappear: "He has not time, however, to do this

upon every occasion. In civilized society he stands at all times in need of the co-operation

and assistance of the great multitude" (emphasis added). Benevolence similarly plays no

part in this scheme. "It is not &om the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the

baker that we expect our dinner," Smith famously asserts, "but fkom their regard to their

own interest." The exception to the "law" of self-interest is beggary, but even where

charity is the immediate source of "the whole fund of his subsistence" the beggar does not

live day to day simply by begging but by exchanging what he is given for other things.

The exclusion of appeals to charity and benevolence or even sympathy generally from

Smith's conception of market exchange has been argued to be an instance of "non-tuism"

whereby the feelings of one participant in exchange for the feelings of the other are

immaterial and what is really respected and obeyed by each party is "the rules of the

game" implicit in the make-up of commercial society itself; "the sigruficant feature of this

241n Puttenham's Art of English Poesie (1 5 89) the figure of upria, or "the Doubtfull" is illustrated by this "whether ... whether ..." construction (189). It is an evasive gesture, ultimately meant to avoid demarcating the symptoms of its own logical weakness. It is as if Smith cannot bring himself to equate the power of contract exchange with "reason and speech" because that would open it to the counter-claim that it is not real. So language is only an unexplainable "more probable ... necessary" precondition to exchange.

176

relationship" Brown notes "is the symmetry of the exchange relation.. . everyone

knows that the other is in the same position as themselvesy' (53)? The presentation of

this symmetrical relationship is a crucial aspect of Smith's actual illustration of the

exchange process, in contradistinction to the rhetoric of begging:

man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is vain

for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to

prevail if he caninterest their self-Iove in his fivour, and shew them that it

is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.

Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give

me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want is the

meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain fiom

one another the far greater part of those good offices we stand in need of.

(26)

Brown is right to equate this demonstration of exchange behaviour with the rules of the

contract. But while this "model" is constative in form, it is performative in effkt. Instead

of demonstrating a physical trade, to which the "propensity to truck, barter and exchangeyy

is implicitly compared, this passage shows a transfer of knowledge, and particularly of

mental knowledge, an "interestyy in "self-love" which cannot be objectively verified.

Moreover, Smith shifts into indirect speech to actualize the exemplary moment of transfer

and then 4 s that example "the meaning of every such offer," again conflating a context-

specific verbal act and a general locutionary meaning. But the contract, when it is named,

zs For a greater elaboration of "'non-tuismy' in Wealth of Nations as a refutation of ethical accounts of its price and exchange mechanism, see Wdson. Smith's non-tuistic reliance on conventional "rules" refbtes the older notion that exchange derived from necessity or utility. Troduction should indeed be production 'for use'; but if that rather obvious requirement is to be met, there must be some reasonably satisfactory method of ascertaining the wants of the final users, whether of private individuals or of private organizationsyy (79).

177

exposes an equivocation between the sublation of performativity into a mental state and its

-on in Smith's own text. For Srnith does not actually say that the propensity is a

contract; he says "[ilt is common to all men, aod to be found in no other race of animals,

which seem to know neither this nor rmy other species of contract." Exchange thus

appears as a variety of contract, but no qualifiable characteristics can be found for ?his"

mental mode of action other than that it is contractual. In avoiding language as the

definitive principle of exchange as opposed to simply its vehicle, Smith not only admits to

its linguistic ontology, but manufactures it, so to speak, in the rhetorical structure of his

own text.

Smith gestures toward the possibility that exchange may in fact be linguistic, but

avoids the idea as if it were some awkward distraction. Vincent Bladen refers to Smith's

spoken exchanges as "incentives.. . getting things done by an appeal to self-interest" (1 7),

but in fact Smith never says that economic exchange is occasioned by appeals, but rather

through a "shew" of interests and benefits. The point of course is to suggest that sociable

market behaviour is not definable as anything but itself: and which everyone already

understands because they always do it. Smith's rhetoric, on the contrary' draws attention

to its own defining role in constructing that general understanding by simultaneously

generalizing it to the absolute limit of behaviowd understanding (it is "natural") and

utterly vacating it of any comprehensible properties (it cannot be described). Yet in the

context of Smith's overall remarks on the contract this incompatability registers a latent

faith in the perfonnative power ofwords which Smith's enlightenment discourse seeks to

exclude or forget-in a nutshell, excuse.

As John Barrell has notably commented, Smith's concept of the division of labour

is at once a highly aesthetic model of social harmony, and an honest account of social

fragmentation. But Smith also indicates that the ambivalence between unity and diierence

which he establishes in his account of the'division of labour is manifest in the linguistic, or

rather contractual, foundation of those social relations. The tension of Wealth of Nations

thus hinges on the mdty of converting heterogeneous incidents of discursive contact

into exemplifications of a homogeneous system. This tension is significantly apparent in

Smith's concepts of natural and market price. Smith's basic argument is that the nahlral

price of commodities equals the amount of labour that goes into producing them. The

process of evaluation begins as barter and thus with the comparison between various

commodities based on the individual trading producer's understanding of those

investments in effort and toil. But different consumers will have different demands, which

may adjust the immediate or "market price" of that commodity as it exchanged. Smith

states, however, that there are certain patterns of behaviour in the marketplace which will

bring market price back into Line with natural price. Iffor instance, there is great supply of

a particular commodity at one time, more of it needs to be sold, and so the market price

will fall; as soon as the demand once again begins to exceed supply, the price will rise to

the value of labour:

The market price of any particular commodity, though it may continue long

above, can seldom continue long below its natural price. Whatever part of

it was paid below the natural rate, the persons whose interest it affected

would immediately feel the loss, and would immediately withdraw either so

much land, or so much labour, or so much stock, from being employed

about it, that the quantity brought to market would soon be no more than

s a c i e n t to supply the effectual demand. Its market price, therefore,

would soon rise to the natural price. This at least would be the case where

there was perfect liberty. (1 :78)

Although market price wilI fluctuate above or below natural price depending on the

current rate of supply or demand for that commodity, Smith claims, "natural price.. . is, as

it were, the central price, to which the prices of al l commodities are continually

gravitating" (1 :75). Smith's concept of this gravitating market price suggests that

exchange behaviour operates according to principles of uniformity and decorum. Within

that impression of '%he market," however, the inconsistencies concurrent with supply and

demand, changes in harvest, weather, disposition, and government suggest that the

gravitation toward natural price is, as Smith says, continual. As in Hume's reformulation

of the social contracts, and corresponding to his own theories of inquj. and sentiment,

Smith's notions of market and natural price exemplify a social nexus within which there

may be changes and developments according to immediate contingencies, but at the same

time, that nexus must correspond to a conventional and institutional ideal of what should

happen, as Smith says, in "perfect Liberty."

One of the things that makes Wealth of Nations such a remarkable book, .

considering the influence of its classical liberal principles on the development of political

economy in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, is its sense of the enormous

amount of doubts and anxieties attendant on the processes of economic growth which it is

also trying to stabilize. With Hume, Smith resists the idea that the division of labour and

economic growth are adumbrated by a social contract because he does not want to fix

economic behaviour to laws or rules--the ascription of which are, he says, unproductive

labours in themselves-but rather wants to encourage the ebb and flow of institutional

procedures which are open to revision and reform. Thus, in the long chapter on the wages

of labour, Smith cannily demonstrates the extent to which the administration of wages

must be sensitive to the dispositions of workers relative to the demands of the season or

the availability of necessary commodities. "Great labour" he says "either of mind or of

body, continued for several days together is in most men naturally followed by a great

desire of relaxation, which, if not restrained by force or by some strong necessity, is

almost irresistible" (1 :loo). Such desires and dispositions can, Smith, admits, lead to

violence, exploitation, social crises, and war, and a good deal of Wealth of Ndom is

devoted to explaining how these things can occur, and how the "natural system of liberty"

exemplii5e.d by the "'gravitationsy' of the market will alleviate them. The point is that each

of these possible contingencies is unique in its own way, something which Smith's quite

sensible references to the differences between the English and the Scottish price of com,

for example (1 :93), indicate. The flow of capital, measured in tenns of rent, wages, and

labour is not, therefore, always consistent. The economic system, based on Smith's belief

in the sentimental disposition of individuals toward social and conventional standards

gathers those differences into a self-regulating system which encompasses the tendencies

toward mobility and change. Wealth of Nations is a justification for the bourgeois ideal of

human potential, though it also restrains itself &om anticipating the bourgeois utopia that

is sometimes accredited to it.

Though Smith does not directly correlate this constant and largely undeterminable

process of negotiation directly with the language of contracts, that connection is apparent

in Reid's lectures on price and his observation of their connection to social acts. "When,"

Reid suggests, ' k e here enquire into the natural Measure of the Price of things in Society

it is that we may be able to determine more justly the limits of right and wrong in those

Contracts wherein a price or value is put upon things" (Pructiical Ehics 1 62). Reid is

more forthcoming than Smith about the difEculties of discovering the natural price in the

marketplace since "the natural Use of Commodities which are the Object of Commerce is

to Supply Mens real or Imaginary Wants and to gratify their desires" and not to conform

to anticipated correspondences between those desires and the value of labour. The

irregularities of immediate demand move not between a negotiated market price and the

price inherent in the commodity but between situations of extreme demand and

normalized, and therefore fluctuating, standards of value:

A Man that sells his Birthright for a Mess of Pottage shewes that in his

present distress he values the one more than the other. Yet on ordinary

occasions he would pay no more for his pottage than the Market price.

The buyer desires to have the Commodity as cheap as he can have it. The

Seller desires to have as good a price as he can get. These contrary desires

after some bidding and Edging like lines that cross one another meet in a

certain point, and there the bargain is struck. Since therefore the price of

things hath such dependence on the wants of individuals real or imaginary

their opinions whether wise or foolish, their desires whether reasonable or

unreasonable; it may seem impossible to discover any fixed principles or

Rules by which it is govern'd. The Price of things in Commerce is an

Event that depends upon a vast Multitude of contingencies which may

seem beyond the reach of Human Prudence and foresight" (163).

Like Austin, therefore, Reid counters the phiiosophical premise that the dispositions of

individuals can be catalogued into rules of behaviour by pointing to the inconsistencies

attendant on discrete moments of discursive interaction. Reid does say, like Smith, that

there is a natural price of commodities corresponding to the amount of labour which goes

into making them. But even then, Reid shows, the labour price represents only a possible

limit, not an actual fixed value: "there is not such an equality among men even [in] the

State of Nature, far less in political society, but that a days Labour of one Man may bear a

much higher price than a days Labour of another man" (164). The price of tools, the

expense of assistance, even changes of fashion will cause what might be called the fixed or

natural price of commodities to change.

Reid's sensitivity to the discrete differences between moments of discursive action

offers a slight recalibration of Smith's notion of the invisible hand of nature. It is

important to be carefid not to make too much of this metaphor-though it is at the same

time crucial to realize that it is a metaphor. It actually appears in Moral Sentiments and in

Wealth of Nations, which has added significant grist to the mill of philosophers and

182

economists hoping to find the key wmection between these two texts. Smith stresses in

both passages the ignorance of those people who advance the causes of national wealth

and general social harmony and that the criteria for the flow of revenue and resources are

in fact not conditioned by any one intentional act at any given time. This is why it is found

in Wdlth of Nations in book lV, in which Smith attacks the sophistical adherents of what

he calls 'mercantilism' which would seek to promote foreign trade over domestic growth

for the sake of increased wealth in the form of gold reserves, a position which defies all of

Smith's instincts about long term equilibrium and social harmony. At the same time, the

metaphor of the invisible hand is itself an endorsement of a kind of sophism, the creative

extension of rule-governed behaviour unrestrained by moral judgements and impartial

spectators. The invisible hand is not a philosophical proposition, but a firmly economic

one. On the other hand, it once again exposes the philosophical contradiction at the heart

of Smith's system with regard to the philosophy of language.

What is at stake here is the relation between the language of economic behaviour

and the language of economic theory which tries to understand and regulate it. Wendy

Motooka has recently suggested that the language of Smithian economics is "qukotic" to

the extent that it is aware of the contingencies and digressiveness of verbal interaction but

at the same time tries to capture those digressions into an image of a general human

condition (222-25). The philosopher is both a participant in the market-though he trades

in ideas rather than goods-and at the same time he is above it: the philosopher's job is

"not to do anything, but to observe every thing'' (1:21). Nevertheless, as a highly

specialized participant in the division of labour, the philosopher's speculations are on their

own "mproductive labours" whose mental efforts must conform to general ideals of

aesthetic harmony or conventional notions of social use in order to make any contribution,

in which case their observations must be regarded with suspicion. Bringing Smith's

economic theory into the light of discourse analysis runs the risk of levelling the playing

183

field Smith is in f8ct, correct: there is a signiscant diffkrence between a philosophical

statement and a market contract, and it is therefore not sensible to consider them willy-

nilly to be alike because they are both linguistic. What we can say, however, is that

although a philosophical assertion and an evaluative declaration are both verbal, they also

have profoundly different kinds of illocutiollsuy force, contingent, as Austin shows, on the

immediate c i r m c e s of the speech situation in which they are uttered. What Smithian

economics tries to do, hesitantly, is bring these illocutionary difrences together under the

conceptual heading of liberty. In the process it masks the material power of the individual

utterance in the guise of an instance of conventionally prescribed behaviour.

Mmrioge Conkacts

By bringing together Sheridan's satire on the Annuity Act and the problematics of

the contract in Enlightenment political economy, I am arguing that Sheridan's critical

emphasis is on the loss of a sense of materiality of the speech situation in the concern for

theorizing the discourse of economics in terms of the psychological dynamics of sentiment

and its grounding of social relations in modes of customary behaviour. Sheridan's

connection to such debates is his father, the elocutionist Thomas Sheridan, probably the

best known theorist of the social and economic import of affective language. An actor

and manager himselfas well as an influential linguist, lexicographer and educator,

Sheridan argued that the universal essence of language is the communicative power of

physical gesture and affective tone. To learn to speak entails learning to engage in a body-

language of movement and sound which all members of society are capable of

comprehending but which must be perfkcted to overcome the obfiiscating logic of

Lockean sign theory. As Carlson notes, the elder Sheridan's aim was the development of

elocutionary "mobility," the ability to communicate with anybody on anything anytime.

Content, in other words, is sekondary in communicative interaction to the creative impact

184

of gestural and tonal affect. Like capital itself then, language for Thomas Sheridan is not

tied to any correct or inherent value.

But while the elder Sheridan believed that public rhetoric llfilled this

disseminating fbnction-and Thomas Sheridan was widely known by such able rhetoricians

and liberal thinkers as Thomas Jefferson for those beliefs-his son used the dynamics of the

event of public speaking in its most openly fictitious context to scrutinize the ideological

and economic implications of his Mer's own "entightenment." Topicality is one of the

effective ways Sheridan uses his medium, the theatre, to underscore that exposure. His

critical adaptation of performance to this critique of economic immateriality complements

theatrical sensationalism within the the play's interweaving plots, which are themselves

concerned with matters of discursive justification. As Sir Oliver condemns the contract

situation in which he himself participates, he enacts the performative dimension apparent

within the rhetoric of Enlightement economics. His framing gestures impose ethical

significance on Trip's contract, rendering it unjusti6abIe in relation to the performative and

ideological conditions of "normal" negotiative behaviour. At the same time, his own

theatrical adaptation of the evasive mechanisms of the "secret" contract are justified by

him as the means to reform his nephew Charles. In the remainder of this chapter, I want

to demonstrate how this mode of excusing theoretical performance plays itself out in the

major contract situation of this play and that of the comic genre in general: marriage.

Focusing on the marriage contract will allow us to extend the verbal problematic clarified

in the annuities references to a comprehensive understanding of the performative

interrelation between economics and sentimentality.

This enfolding of scenes of contract exchange within scenes of theoretical

speculation is evident in the structure of the play's various plots, and, interestingly, in the

way Sheridan composed them. The Surface plot, Sir Olive?s return fkom India to oversee

the distribution of his brother's will, and the rivalry of his two nephews for that money and

185

for Maria, is actually a late addition to what was already a complicated mesh of stories.

The other intersecting marriage plots were originally drafted as separate plays, me

Slmderers and The Teazles. Sheridan entwined the fragmentary scenes of scandal-

mongering with the post-marital contention between Sir Peter and his young wife to make

up the first two acts of the play; for instance, Sir Peter's anxieties that he will not be able

to control his wife's spending habits are confounded by a similar apprehension that he will

be scannafized as a cuckold and a slrinnint by the slandering company Lady Teazle keeps.

Acts three and four are dominated by Sir Ohex's disguised entrapment of Charles and

Joseph Surface into revealing their true benevolence and maliciousness respectively. The

Surface plot is based not on earlier dramatic drafts, but on current events which Sheridan

knew would adapt well to theatrical demand for topicality, such as is apparent in the

references to the Annuities Act and in the Picture Auction scene, which was inspired by

Sir Joshua Reynolds' Exhibition at the Royal Academy in the Spring of 1777. There are

also significant overlaps between these two major plots. Sir Peter's reveries on the

scandalous state of his maniage are interrupted by the news that Sir Oliver has arrived

home from India in act 1 scene 2, and Sir Oliver himself cajoles Sir Peter for manying late

in act 2 scene 3. Maria, the object of Joseph Surface's, and eventually his brother Charles'

a€fiections, is not only Sir Peter's ward, but she Lives with Lady Sneenvell. Joseph Surface

is one of the worst tale-tellers of the scandal group. His scandal-mongering is exacerbated

by his penchant for "sentiments"-quipped proverbs "framing" the meaning of others', and

usually his brothers' behaviour. The two plots finally intersect once and for all in the

famous screen scene of Act 4 scene 3, and continue in this vein through Act 5. If the

major question of the play is the nature of sentiment, of genuine fellow-feeling underlying

absolute subject-presence in the form of declarative statements, as opposed to scandal, the

verbal circulation of unverifiable rumour which paradoxically invents subjectivity, then the

continual enfolding of the two plots underscores the mutual alignment of these two themes

throughout the play.

Maniage is the dominant leitmotif of these intersections, and it situates Sheridan's

dramaturgid reflections on the ambivalence of sentiment around the perfonnativity of

marriage, or more broadly, the marriage contract. The issue is the same as that registered

by the annuities references and by Smithian economics: to what extent is marriage

constituted by an act of subjective agency or is agency created by declaration? The story-

book wedding promise is bne of Austin's exemplary speech acts in the first lecture of Haw

To Do 17rings With Worh: "I do (sc. take this woman to be my l a d l wedded wife)'-as

uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony" (5). Austin is, famously, wrong here;"

the Anglican service, with which Austin and Sheridan were likely familiar, actually has the

bride and groom answer "I will" to questions regarding their love and fidelity, after which

the celebrant converts these pledges of devotion into a marriage by saying "I now

pronounce you husband and wife." For Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,

however, Austin's mistake is not the point. Rather, they criticize Austin for reifying the

gender roles and social conventions implicit in the traditional Western wedding ceremony.

Butler suggests that Austin's exemplification of speech acts with the "normaltf heterosexual

marriage supposedly entered into by willing subjects belies the ideological implications of

perfonnativity in general. Marriage realizes the "interpellation" of subjects which "come

into beingt' by being named, or in this case, re-named, as is suggested by the formula, "I

now pronounce you.. . " (Butler, Bodies that M d e r 225). But this economy, so

configured, also belies its material contingency. As Searie notes, declarations, particularly

such institutional, religious forms of naming are "emptyM of a sincerity condrtion

(IGpression 18). This means that we cannot speak of an "It' coming into being

" According to Urmson, "Austin realized that the expression 'I do' is not used in the marriage ceremony too late to correct his mistake. [The editors] have let it remain in the text as it is philosophically unimportant that it is a mistake" f luw to Do Things with Words 5 n2).

discursively without converting that material iteration into a created object. The "acts" of

"pronouacing," "willing," and "doing" marriage all derive their authority fiom the fact that

their conventional powers are justified by some unknown consent; this "null point" is

brought into view by focusing on the relation between marriage of any form and its verbal

articulation. The economy of marriage, as sentimental as it may seem, hides an absence

which lingers in the formation of sentiments characteristic, in comedy at least, of weddings

and courtship. This is Austin's polemical mandate, as I have been insisting, and so it is not

surprising that the reference to marriage comes early in the lectures, after which Austin

reconceives the speech act into a much more complex and untenable entity that even

Butler, I think, allows.z7

There is also a historical context to Sheridan's understanding of these theoretical

complexities. In June 1753, Parliament passed the Hardwicke Act. This Act restricted

the place and hours at which marriage could take place, stipulated that the marriage had to

be perfbrmed by an authorized clergyman, and insisted that the names of the parties to be

married had to be declared a month before the wedding could take place so that the

publication of banns could proceed properly on three consecutive Sundays prior to the

wedding. The Hardwicke Act is similar in its linguistic implications to Sheridan's

references to the Annuity Act, and it fbrther establishes a connection between the p!ay and

the social economy of sentiment. Any marriage solemnized without compliance with the

conditions of the bill was to be declared '%aid." Like the Annuity Act, the Hardwicke Act

was inspired by "secret" contractual agreements, and in response it attempts to regulate

Felrnan examines Austin's comments on marriage in this way by suggesting that when Austin says that saying "I do" in a marriage ceremony doesn't mean I describe marriage but "do it ... I am indulging in it" (How to 5-6) he is partaking in a sexual suggestiveness that implies that marriage is a seductive and bodily act that cannot be pinned down conceptually. Fehan's comparison between Austin and Moliere's Don Juan is compelling here because Moliere is a well-known influence on Sheridan. It is also coincidentally fitting that Felrnan calls this section of her discussion "The Last Word of Scandal" (1 08- 1 12).

the conditions by which a marriage could be considered socially legitimate. The

Hardwicke Act does not &fine or explain what mamage is. Rather, it reifies the socidy

regulative conditions surrounding matrimony and granting it social legitimacy as the

constitutive conditions of a proper marriage?

The Hardwicke act wielded a significant influence on the way marriage was treated

in legal terms, and though the specific tenns of its conditions were revised by Parliament,

its regulative approach was not altered. In one of his first Parliamentary speeches,

Sheridan opposed the proposal of his party leader, Charles Fox, that the marriage age be

reduced fiom eighteen to sixteen for women and from twenty-one to eighteen for men

because "it would abridge that happy fieedorn of intercourse, which modem custom had

introduced between the youth of both sexes; and which was, in his opinion, the best

nursery of happy marriages" (Speeches I 16). There is, however, a p laf i sexual tension

in the choice of the word "intercourse" which draws attention to libidinal energy which the

legal governance of marriage and Sheridan's remarks in favour of such govemance seem

to d i sp la~e .~ If the regulative dramaturgy insisted upon by the law legitimates marriage

by turning it from something that happens in language to something that language

describes, in School for Scandal this process is also ironically overturned. Marriage is the

obsessive subject of the play's early "scandal" scenes, and they in fact allude directly to the

marriages of women of fashion and servants which inspired its legal regulation:

CRABTREE. ... have you heard the news?-

MRS. CANDOUR, What Sir, do you mean the Report of-

For a rll discussion of the debates surrounding the passing of the Hardwicke Act, see Hopkins 3 22-3 1.

FOX paid tribute to Sheridan's apparently contradictory stance on marriage: "his honourable Wend ... had so much ingenuity of mind that he could contrive to give an argument what turn he pleased; he considered not, therefore, when what he said was generally in support of domestic tyranny, he should ground it on a wish to preserve liberty" (cited in Speeches 17). Sheridan and his first wife Elizabeth had in fact eloped.

189

CRABTREE. No ma'am that's not it.-Miss is going to be married

to her own Footman.

MRS. CANDOUR Impossible!

CRABTREE. Ask Sir Benjamin. 1 .

SIR BEN1 'Tis very true Ma'arwveqdung is fixed and the Wedding

Livery bespoke.

CRABTREE. Yes and they do say there were pressing Reasons for't.

LADY SNEER' Why I have heard something of this before.

MRS. CANDOUR. It can't be - and I wonder any one should believe

such a story of so prudent a Lady as Miss Ni~cely.

SIR BENJ. 0 Lud ma'am that's the very reason 'twas believed at

once,-she has always been so cautious and so reserved that evely

Body was sure there was some reason for it at bottom.

MRS. CANDOUR. Why to be sure a Tale of Scandal is as fatal to the

Credit of a prudent Lady of her Stamp as a Fever is generally to

those of the strongest Constitutions7 but there is a sort of puny

sickly Reputation that is always ailing yet will outlive the robuster

Characters of a hundred Prudes. (1.1.254-72)

Scandalous language feverishly turns nothings into somethings ("No ma'am that's not it ...

I have heard something of this before") by spreading and redistributing the physical energy e

of repetition and speech into circulating truths. Similarly, the announcement of marriage

arrangements (bespeaking livery for instance) converts libidinal energy ("pressing

reasons," i. e. pregnancy) into "legitimate" domesticity. Social infraction becomes social

normality, by ignoring its own pathology, scandal becomes truth by sublimating its no*

referentiality The marriage of Miss Nicely and the footman, correspondingly, is

legitimated by coflating its residual causes and eff'ects ( s e ~ Livery), its befores and afters,

into a continuous stream of "reasoning" toward the socially inevitable, which then omits

entirely the fhct of the wedding, the saying "I will." Linguistic action translates into

ideological nacrative by forgetting its constitutive action?

The Teazles' domestic relations emblematize exactly the economy of excuses and

exclusions which Sheridan paradoxically reveals to be the basis for the legitimacy of

marital union. Most of the problems in the Teazle marriage hinge on questions of

economy and accountability. Sir Peter's opening speech demonstrates specifically the

extent to which he accepts the entrapment of the simulacra of social authority:

When an Old Bachelor takes a young Wife - what is he to expect! - 'Tis

now Six Months since Lady Teazle made me the happiest of Men - and I

have been the miserablest Dog ever since that ever committed wedlock: - we rift a little going to church - and came to a Quarrel before the Bells

were done ringing - I was more than once nearly choak'd with gall during

the Honeymoon -- and had lost all comfort in Life before my Friends had

done wishing me Joy - yet I chose with caution -- a Girl bred whol[l]y in

the country -- who never knew Luxury beyond one silk Gown nor

?he metaphor embedded in the reference to Miss Nicely's "stamp" is especially pertinent for the rise of potential scandalous marriages follows the rise of fluid credit and mobility which allowed eloping couples to wed. Thus, the debased "stamp," the monetary unit which can circulate and create commerce well in excess of its intrinsic value because it not longer needs to be measured against its own weight, represents the normality of the credit society, though it appears as coin, as gold unit. The claim of its inherent value denies its circu1atory affect. Sir Peter Teazle clarifies this association of scandal and the money economy in one of his debates with his wife: "many a wretch has rid on a hurdle who has done less mischief than those utterers of forg'd Tales, coiners of Scandal,-and clippers of Reputation" (2.1.85-7). To equate coining and clipping as similarly criminal is to indict on the same grounds both the illegal practice of clipping minute chips fkom government coins, thus rendering the coins more valuable than their weight, counterfeiting as the practice of making false coins, and the actual distribution of coinage by the government, the official coiners. Even Samuel Johnson in his definition of coining did not distinguish counterfeit corn legal money. These issues will be fbrther explored in chapter 5.

Dissipation above the annual Gala of a Race-Ball - yet now she plays her

Part in all the extravagant Fopperies of the Fashion and the Town with as

ready a & as if she had never seen a Bush nor a grass Plat out of

Grosvenor-Square -- ! I am saeer'd at by my old acquaintance - paragraph'd! -- in the news-Papers - She dissipates my Fortune, and

contradicts all my Humours -- Yet the worst of it is I doubt I love her or I

should never bear all this -- However I'll never be weak enough to own it.

(1.2.1-17; P 237)

Sir Peter fears the scandal he associates with £inancia1 dissipation, though he will later

show his skill in "the cant of usury." Sir Peter's account of the marriage as a series of

unfortunate, unexpected and escalating disagreements avoids any reason for the dispute,

any intention by either party to cause harm or lay blame. Instead, the marriage becomes a

dispute over economy. The Teazles' scandalous contentiousness is the logical condition of

socially acceptable marriage.

When Lady Teazle first appears, she has already intemaIized the lessons of the

scandal school; her own appeals to the general normality of fashion and miscreance

requisite of London life complement her husband's self-justifying disclaimers. "I know

very well that women of Fashion in London are accountable to nobody after they are

married.. . I'm sure I'm not more extravagant than a woman of Fashion ought to be ...

Lord! Sir Peter 1 am not to blame because Flow'rs are dear in cold weather? you should

find fault with the Climate and not with me" (2.1.5-23). Unaccountability also defines the

credit economy on which Lady Teazle relies to maintain her fashionable status. As with

Sir Peter, Sheridan draws particular attention to the way Lady Teazle excuses herself from

any responsibility with regard to that economic mobility. The Teazles are, in their way,

arch-empiricists, who, like the slanderers, claim that all they report is beyond their control;

but they also reveal the Linguistic substantiality of contention and debate which qualifies

192

any claim to extra-linguistic reality- As Lady Teazle says to her husband, "it isn't using me

well to be ill-humour'd when I am not bye," as if her disagreements with him gave her the

energy to define and excuse herself.

The Teazles' attempts to reform their mamage do not remove them fiom the

mutual culpability implied in their arguments. But what is consistent in the Teazle story is

its realization both of the way language situates blame or reasoning onto an object-other,

and the way that an articulation of blame exists, self-referentially, as a momentary

instance. Having settled the matter of Lady Teazle's accounts, their discourse turns to the

nature of their discourse, as if, having agreed on the extension of their economy, that

economy demands the energy of W h e r contention: "SIR PETER Now-see my- Angel

take care-contradicting isn't the way to keep Friends. LADY TEAZLE. Then don't begin

it, my Love! ... SIR PETER There now you want to quarrel again- LADY TEAZLE.

NwI am sure I don't-but if you will be so peevish-" (3.1.208- 17) Eventually, the Teazles

agree to "a separate maintenance," becoming in Lady TeazIe's words "the happiest

Couple," though the separation does not last long. An irony of negation and hope

pervades the Teazles' verbal conftontations. As with Trip's annuity, the Teazles naturalize

the contract by denying the very state of verbal conf?ontation which conditions obligation

and circulation. The Teazles demonstrate the implications of Austin's mistake,

foregrounding the latent power of "I do," the idea of an instant production of the marriage

state, but in a more observable way, exposing the social conditionality of the on-going

promise of "I will," the state sanction of "I pronounce," and even the more slippery

iterability of the wedding act with which Buder criticizes Austin's hetero-sexism. Sir

Peter's anxieties over being scandalized and his corresponding determination to

economize are thus part and parcel of the same regulating tendency which defines

sentiment ond scandal. The Teazles' constant revisions of their marriage vows therefore

also foreground the kind of revisionary gestures of empiricism: when cofionted by the

193

imagiuary status of its generalizatons, enlightenment political economy recalibrates itself

according to W e r generaking statements. What these scenes of revision dramatize,

then, is the material dimension of these general excusing tendencies, the continuous

reiteration of the sentiment which it should logically instantiate.

Pictures and Presents

Sheridan's interest in the material or theatrical conditions by which economic

speech acts and their theoretical justification at once come into being and deconstruct

themselves extends to the relation established over the course of the play between visual

aesthetics, aesthetic theory, and the theoretical ratification of economic systems. Visual

signs can be said to perform not because they are any more "natural" than verbal signs but

because both achieve efficacy by the distinctly verbal elaboration of systems of beliefs and

justifications of conditioning aesthetic discourses. Visuality on stage operates very much

like topicality: both provide a locus of action in the dramatic setting which transcends the

aesthetic difference of theatre objectively considered to become part of the circulation of

validity claims in the greater social world. The particular aesthetic discourse which

dominates the middle portion of the play and much of its main plot is portraiture, as

featured in the picture-auction scene. Sheridan links the aesthetic discourses on

portraiture with the ideological justification employed in economic theory. As with

Smithian economics, portrait-painters during this period were enmeshed in a controversy

over the relative position of the artist to productivity. Critics ill-disposed to champion

portraiture often criticized it for demarcating the financial privilege and aristocratic

affinities of the sitter through the excessive exposition of finery and trinkets. The problem

was not simply that the minuscule details of famild descent and material wealth were

pretentious and in some instance f&rications. Painters were flatterers who cheated their

subjects out of hundreds of pounds by appealing to their vanity. Female sitters,

194

particularly, were accused of prostituting themselves in a combined apotheosis of the

luxuriant corruption of both sexual and economic conversation Painting itself then is an

embodiment not only of the luxury and counterfeit economic privilege it presumes to

display but also of the taint of luxuriousness and miscreance within the economy. Yet

portrait painting was defended throughout the century, and most idhentially by Jonathan

Richardson, as an instance of how luxury commodities could contribute to the growth of . .

the national economy. Worthy portraits, Richardson claimed, "are as current Money as

Gold in most parts of Europe, and this with an inconsiderable expense of the Productions

of Nature; what a Treasure then have all the Great Masters here, and elsewhere given to

the world!" (cited in Conway 8). The argument is parallel to that of Hume's own

reflections on the viability of luxury. Of course, as is implied in the notion of 'worth"

itself, Richardson's discrimination between what he considered to be good and bad

portraits, like Hume's and Smith's equivocations over what made a particular commodity

"luxurious," indicates the extent to which the objective aesthetic judgement which

supposedly validates the bbgood" of capitalist trade is already inflected by a concern for the

viability of commodities on the market. The painted subject must be shown to be

dynamic, mobile, active, vigorous, rather Like the economy which portraiture itself is said

to encourage. The analogy of economic growth and aesthetic merit represents, therefore,

an equivocal justification for the value of money and the money economy based on its

synonymity with the aesthetic values disseminated by the appeal to vitality and nature.

The argument itself is synonymous with the sublimation of verbal difference into the

natural progressive function of the contract in market exchange. From this perspective

then, both the defenders and the detractors of portraiture make the same case; the

substantive reality of circulated market value is the ground for aesthetic value. Good

painting is good for the economy because it embodies the health and vitality of the systems

of circulating products, especially gold (a sophisticated way of saying art sells so what's

the problem). So-called bad painting marks the corruption already latent in the circulation

of paper money and unproductive trades, implying, as above, that good art is the cultural

embodiment of the healthy and moral economic state.

Tne School for Scandal isolates the economic sub-text of the debate over the value

of portraiture by dmmtmn . . g not portraiture as such but its critical evaluation. In the

poem which accompanied Sheridan's presentation copy of the play, "A Portrait: Address'd

to a Lady with the Comedy of the School for Scandal," the scandal-mongering viewers of

the verse-portrait are named "Ye skill'd to coin the precious Tale,/ Creating Proof -

where Innuendos fail!" (17-8). The suggestion that art criticism participates in the

counterfeit money economy undermines the high moral ground of the anti-portraiture

polemic and its didactic agenda. Moreover, Sheridan outlines exady the movement fiom

special to general perfonnativity-innuendo to proof-which characterizes the justification

of theoretical insight in empirical thought and particularly the telling ambiguities used to

justify the circulation of money. In the play, portraiture and its criticism are presented

analogically with the question of monetary circulation and its implications. It is in those

moments that The S c W for Sccntdal invites speculation into the materiality of the critical

or theoretical enterprise.

Aesthetic value is another problematic form of sentimental scandal. Hence, when

Sir Oliver fiarnes the annuity contract between Trip and Moses as a scene-within-a-scene,

he draws attention back on his own accomplishment of the usurious arts, the circulation of

linguistic evaluation as a cover for the non-existence of "real" capital. This earning gesture

is paradigmatic of Sheridan's adaptation of visual aesthetics. The question of a natural

versus a counterfeit economy in the relation of language, art, and commercial exchange is

dramatized in the picture-auction scene in which Charles sells all his family portraits to his

disguised uncle as security on a loan. But the climax of the scene, the Promissory Draught

given to Charles, the featured contract of the whole play,also has signiscant political

implications which in turn cast doubt on Sir Oliver's economic credibility. Jack Durant has

demonstrated the extent to which this scene engages with contemporary debates on the

merits of portraiture. "NaturaUym situated as a "Shepherdess feeding her flock" Charles'

"Great Aunt Deborah, done by KneUer thought to be in his best Manner,"--and, according

to Sir Oliver, "a woman who set such Value on hersew-is "knocked down" for "Five

pound ten" (4.1.4 1-6). Charles offers matched portraits of " Wfiam and Walter Blunt

Esquires, both Members of Parliament and Noted Speakers "for forty guineas, and what's

very Extraordinary," he exclaims "this is the 6rst time they were ever bought and sold."

Sir Oliver buys them "for the honour of Parliament." The auction restages the debate

regarding the economic merits of portraiture as an ethically valid aesthetic rnediu~n.~'

This aesthetic operates in the ca2agnorids of the Promissory Draught. Thoroughly

convinced that the slanderers were right in their assessment of Charles' selfish

extravagance, Sir Oliver is suddenly surprised to find Charles refbsing to part with a small

rendering of himself "before he went to India," meen years previously. When Sir Oliver

presses him with "as much for that as for all the restt' Charles declares: "No hang it, I'lI not

part with poor Noll -- The Old Fellow has been very good to me, and egad I'll keep his

Durant argues that Sheridan's allusions to current trends in art theory agree with the contemporary aesthetic theories of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Jonathan Richardson that the goal of art is to embody the mobility, vigour and natural dynamism of the individual mind. Art, they al l agree, should stress the participation of the spectator; with broad strokes and dynamic, almost moving imagery, the best painting should lead the spectator to an appreciation not of status or bhion, but of general human truths. Though Reynolds is known to have preferred historical subjects to portraits and admonished the tendency of portrait-painters to emphasize commercial worth over essential virtue, his own aesthetics of mobility corresponds closely to Richardson's defence. Sheridan knew Reynolds, praised by Charles Surface as the "Modem Raphael"; the painter had recently completed a portrait of Sheridan's wife Elizabeth and had works exhibited at the London Academy while School was in rehearsal. Charles' comments, Durant shows, echo Reynold's disdain for the speciously detailed "likenesses" of Kneller, the artist of Aunt Deborah as the Shepherdess. Importantly, Knellefs dormidable status rested not only on the gaudiness of his work, but the fact that he chose, as Horace Walpole later noted, to make his artistic reputation "subservient to his fortune" (''Picture-Auction Scene" 3 6 4 3 )

Picture, while h e a Room to put it in" (4.1.97-9 P 268). Charles' "true" spirit is thus

unveiled before Sir Oliver. Instead of paying him the pdtry 300 pounds arranged for the

portraits, Sir Oliver gives Charles a draught for eight hundred (1 1 1). The draught rewards

Charles for being the kind of sentimental spirit-dynamic, generous, emotional, and yet

dutifid and honest-which Reynolds and other det i c ians of his day suggested was the

deeper and proper subject of true portraiture. Durant and others conclude that the play is

in fact designed to draw out an almost cathartic gratification at the revelation of Charles'

benevolent nature.

This sentimental reading of the reconciliation of Charles and Sir Oliver is

complicated by its situation within an apologetic discourse for economic mobility. Sir

Oliver's gift parallels in obvious ways the annuities contract between Moses and Trip

which Sir Oliver had previously so disdained. It is offered in the spirit of presumably

genuine liberality and affection contrary to the conventionally acceptable and restraining

reprimand that Sir Oliver should give Charles for his luxuriance and thoughtlessness

according to Sir Oliver's own strictures against Trip. We might say that Sir Oliver's gift is

emblematic of the spirit of born@ which the Annuity Act both insisted upon and

regulated. Sheridan cunningly underscores this irony by enveloping the scene between

Charles and Sir Oliver with that of Moses and Trip. Moreover, as the techniques in

contract negotiation taught to Sir Oliver by Sir Peter and Moses recommend, no money

changes hands: the draught is a promissory note. But what is interesting is that in drawing

these seK-evident parallels between Oliver and Moses, Charles and Trip, Sheridan

questions the authenticity of promising, which is itself contingent upon the genuine self-

presence, the essential openness or honesty of the contracting parties. Charles Surface is

himself a complicating factor in the ambiguities surrounding the "valueH of the gift.

Though the revelation of his sentimental attachment to M y is a pleasant surprise, his

economic behaviour is wild and impetuous, as much after receiving Sir Oliver's Draught

as before, confirming for the most part the scandal-mongers' reports. Under honest

Rowley's watchfbl disapproval, Charles gives 100 pounds of his draught to a poor relatio~

rather than pay his creditors waiting at the door. Generous the act may be, but it is not I

exactly economically prudent. "Damn your economy," he exclaims, "and now for hazard"

(4.1.170). The most suspect aspect of Charles' character, given the economic context of

the play, is his evident idleness. Charles is a "Plain-Dealer" to be sure (3.3.122), but his

business is hardly industrious or even remotely productive. As Smith showed, an

individual does not have to be a manufacturer or a farmer to contribute to the economy;

unproductive labour has a definite role to play in contriiuting to the general well-being

necessary to maintain good government and avoid crises. But there is something distinctly

cynical in Charles selling atl of his family books on the pretence of sharing "knowledge"

(199). In this way, Sheridan's dramatization of Oliver's gdk resembles the paradox of @-

giving as theorized by Marcel Mauss: a gift cannot exist without some form of recognition

for which it is exchanged, in which case it is not a genuine gift. But by staging the gift

manifestly in terms of the performance of contracts, Sheridan also deconstructs the

process of co-ordinating that recognition of exchange. The phenomenal pointlessness of

giving in Sir Oliver's excessive and theatrical manner translates not into the playll

thoughtlessness of Charles' countergift, which in turn discombobulates the trickle-down

system of sentimental reform Sir Oliver expects.'* The illocutionary act of giving or

promising, dramatically isolated, undermines its anticipated perlocutionary effects,

exchange, recognition, and recompense.

'' I am more sympathetic to Bataille's and Baudrillard's conviction of the deconstructive potential of the countergift than I am to Derrida's sense in Given Time that this counter@ is impossible without a system of exchange which will acknowledge it. My sense is that the countergift constitutes a reflective gesture against the epistemological rationalization of gift exchange over all, rather than an alternate form of primitive economics. For a reading of Bataille in terms of this metacritique of economic rationality see Nancy 16-42.

199

The clearest evidence for this sceptical view of Sir OLivds gift is its association

with India Sir Oliver's Indian connections are established repeatedly in the play. Sir Peter

descriies Sir Oliver's "eastern liberality" as the cause for the early economic independence

of the Surfaces 0.2.46). Charles refers to his unde as "the little honest nabob" (IV. 1.125).

Sir Oliver, disguised as Mr. Stanley but discussing himself3 confkonts Joseph Surf= with

his ingratitude, asking, "has he never-transmitted-you-Bullion! -Rupees! -Pagodas! -"

(V. 1.68). "0 Dear Sir, " the lying Joseph complains, "-Nothing of the kind-no-no-a

few Presents-now and then-China-shawls-Congo Tea-Avadavatr- and Indian

Crackers-little more, believe me." While these references to Sir Oliver's time in India

attest to his generosity and thus presumably to the credibility of his gift to Charles, the

topical importance of his India comections challenges such a face-value reading and

krther challenges the notion of a "natural" contract economy as theorized by Hume and

Smith, though Smith was himself highly critical of the East India Company. The words

"nabob" and "Presents" are hugely significant in this context. "Nabob" was the general

term for East India merchants. By 1757, the East India Company had entrenched its

monopoly in the sub-continent and subdued the colonized Indian princes into cooperating

with the Company's mandate. M e r 1760, many India merchants returned to England in

very wealthy circumstances. They purchased large estates and Parliamentary seats, which

made them unpopular. The English social elite and their metropolitan lackeys regarded

then as threats to aristocratic privilege; the press caricatured them as vulgar boors.

Historians claim that these reports are largely untrue and that many nabobs were

intelligent and cultivated. The focus of this "universal condemnation" was for the most

part their trade practices while in India (Marshall 179). The East India Company kept

salaries low and outlawed all private trade between company employees and Indian

authorities. Stdl, India's main attraction for many of the English traders was the promise

of wealth which they were prepared to get in any way possible, from serving the interests

200

of particular Indian states to offering political influence to embezzling fkom India coffers.

Most of these large-scale transactions were the product of some form of verbal

arrangement, called a "Present." Prominent English Nabobs such as Robert Clive, R i ckd

Barwell and Warren Hastings-who would later loom large in Sheridan's Parliamentary

career-defended presents as genuine and unsolicited gifts recognizing honourable acts.

Yet, many so-cailed presents were contracted in advance of any action and involved

surreptitious trading practices, not to mention military threats.

By the 1770s a good deal of British India's wealth had been depleted by English

demands for Presents. Though many British observers regarded this self-evident, self-

motivated greed as a presumptuous abuse of financial decorum, economic theorists were

more cautious. In his lengthy indictment of the East India Company, Adam Smith charges

its employees with indifference and self-interest, a paradoxical position considering that

self-interest and to a certain degree moral ignorance are essential to his systems of natural

liberty and aggregate economic growth. Smith admits, ever the impartial empiricist, that

those who "have clamoured loudest against [the Nabobs] would, probably, not have acted

better themselvest' (2541). Smith is also very clear about what was the proper hnction of

wealth earned or goods purchased overseas in the healthy maintenance of a credit

economy of the kind relied upon by Charles and propagated by Sir Oliver. A nation could

maintain itself on a credit system alone while its gold was used as an international currency

to stimulate overseas trade. "If merchants employ [gold and silver] in purchasing goods in

one foreign country in order to supply the consumption of another.. . whatever profit they

make wiu be an addition to the neat revenue of their own country" (1 :294). But, these

merchants will distribute foreign goods back into the economy in one of two forms:

[Tlhey may either, first, purchase such goods as are likely to be consumed by idle

people who produce nothing such as foreign wine, foreign silks etc. or, secondly,

they may purchase an additional stock of materials, tools, and provisions, in order

20 1

to maintain and employ an additional number of industrious people, who re-

produce, with a profit, the value of their annual consumption. (1:294)

The latter mode of employment is socially beneficial because it maintains a consistent

increase not only in consumption but in the industry necessary to support that

consumption. The former mode, Smith charges, "promotes prodigality, increases expense

and consumption without increasing production, or establishing any permanent fimd for

supporting that expense, and is in every respect hurtFul to the society." I would go so far

as to say that Sheridan is thinking specifically of these passages fiom Wealth of Nations

when composing the reconciliation between the prodigal Charles and his nabob uncle,

though it suffices to say that both Smith and Sheridan have a well-known contemporary

issue in mind in their respective interest in the nabobs. A generous spirit both Charles

Surface and his uncle may have, but the evidence of the references to Sir Oliver's time in

India suggests that such generosity does not provide the foundation for domestic stability.

As in the annuities references, therefore, Sir Oliver's present to Charles and

Charles' sentimental attachment to the "honest little Nabob" are set within a complex

ironic tension between the theatrical and the topical, what is evidently false and what is

known to be true. Yet, by questioning the truth of what is known, by converting the

judgements of the audience into scandal, so to speak, Sheridan ambiguously posits a

troubling "truth" to surfaces. Truth then becomes not a matter of inherence or theatricality

at all, but a matter of context. Sir Oliver's portrait is less a cYfaithfbl" rendering of

benevolence or energy, than an embodiment of its rhetorical posture of self-justification,

just as Charles' faith in his uncle is itself not wholly benevolent but also strategic. Just as

it lambasts the aesthetic value of Kneller's portraits, so it questions the notion of value as

something that is embodied in something else and exposes a notion of value as a set of

justifications converting a useless and therefore problematic expenditure into a culturally

and socially legitimated discursive act.

202

The Sentimenial Economy

The early and middle sections of Sheridan's play demonstrate at the level of its

constantly revising dialogue and its intensely theatrical mixture of topicality and visuality

the way dramatic performance is used to expose the problematics of contract and

exchange in politid economy. It is this exposure which Iinks Sheridan to the broader

social critique of later Romantic drama and its concern for economics. Looked at another

way, it might be said that Sheridan sets the tenor for the dramatic setting of Romantic

economics by focusing his attention not on any single economic topic, but on the process

by which the contingencies of economics in general, and especially its own creative

discourse, are incorporated into what we can now call the "Sentimental Economy." The

final scenes of the play bring together the topical and visual aspects of its dramaturgy to

suggest the way the sentimental economy wraps itself around the theatrical foundation of

contractual behaviour in order to contend that it is not in that way verbal, though it is,

ironically, conventional. The same enveloping of supposedly self-constituting meaning by

acts ofjustification is apparent in Sheridan's adaptation of the other important late-

eighteenth-century visual technique, the tableau. Martin Meisel defines tableaux as

"achieved situations" in which the moral aims of the play are concentrated into an affective

pause, a suspension of action and dialogue usually at the exact moment of a catastrophic

revelation. Tableaux are b z e n arzagnorises, hypostatized emblems for the morals

advocated by the plot. The eighteenth-century theorist who most clearly ascribes the

power of the tableau is the French writer and philosopher, Denis Diderot. Diderot's

theatre theory champions the "achieved situation" as a culturally significant alternative to

the stagnation of an aristocratic ethics of caste. The degeneration of the aristocratic

theatre is embodied for Diderot by the coup de theatre; these outlandish spectacles

accompanying unbelievable and unnatural turns of plot propagated the visual orientation

and arbitrariness of monarchical power. Moreover, these scenes are explained by the

actors, as if to reinforce sentiments and ideologies which its audience does not feel or even

resists. Diderot wanted to replace that "unnaturalH declamatory style with familiar

domestic plots highlighted by picturesque moments of interior revaluation: the tableau. As

outlined in his 1757 Preface, Conversaljbm Sur le FilsN6ure2, the tableau is at the heart

of the theatrical version of this absorptive aesthetic. This dramaturgy is "audience-

oriented" or perlocutionary. The tableau is "so natural and so true" (12) as to be literally a

substitute for real direct encouragements for moral reform. Simply witnessing on stage a

reunited f d l y will induce like desires for conjugal harmony in the audience. Clearly,

then, the bourgeois theatre was for Diderot "a scene of psychological emancipation" Like

the polite salons which, with Diderot as their guiding light, heralded the revelatory

aesthetics of the age of sensibility: "These are times of ignorance and crime, of fanaticism

and conquests. But there comes a moment when the clouds open up; then men bow down

as they see the truth and pay homage to virtue" (40). Michael Fried and Peter Szondi

have already shown how this aesthetics encouraged the new bourgeois ideology of work,

piety and conjugal love by staging in art scenes of "absorption" in those values. The

immediate sympathy felt by the reforming audience for the merits (and demerits) of the

characters in the moment of their sublimation into a dramaturgically elaborated social

relationality validates those same values as the basis for the cultural dissemination of social

and economic mobility.

Meisel pinpoints the tableau at the centre of the aesthetics of melodrama but notes

that the defining instance of an achieved situation in English drama is the screen-scene in

The S c M for S&I. But Sheridan is critical of the discourses which validate tableau

as an effective means of communal homogenization and moral standardization. This

internal critique of the linguistic and ideological implications of tableaux are apparent in

the well-known "screen-scene" of Act IV. Marshall Brown comments that the screen

signals Sheridan's scepticism regarding the "depth" invoked in the sentimental repudiation

of linguistic circulation within a discourse validating the social depth of the circulating

economy. Joseph Surfhce's screen, hung with maps and having its back to the window, at

once suggests the readiness of signs to be validated by a society and the lack of requisite

substance for that validation. When the screen Ws, there is a moment of dumbfounded

amazement: a tableau. But this tableau is nothing like Diderot's parting clouds. Joseph

tries to "confess" and "explainn the situation; that is he attempts to justify the incident,

locate blame elsewhere, excuse himself Not only will he explain in objective referential

terms Lady Teazle's presence, he also guarantees "satisfaction" in line with acceptable

standards of social action. Thus encouraging Sir Peter's validation of his openly

illocutionary statements, Joseph lies about Lady Teazle's presence. And although Sir Peter

believes him, Lady Teazle steps fonvard to explain that "not one word" of the explanation

is true. She then proceeds to give an entirely different account with the same

expectations. Sir Peter believes it and this time Surface denies it. The point is that rational

agreement is almost impossible to reach without a wealth of previously learned

knowledge. Of course Lady Teazle and Joseph will invalidate one another's explanations

because they both know that neither is telling the truth though each wants to be believed.

Sir Peter validates the statements because he has been coerced by their previous fictional

representations of themselves as the honest intellectual and the loving wife. Importantly,

the audience knows that Surface and Lady Teazle are lying. We also know that the play on

the whole is a fiction and that its validity always remains in question. And it is this

perspective which allows us to maintain a distance even £?om the abstract and off-handed

"truths" which even its most truffil characters proclaim. Sheridan shows that

perlocutionary success is dependent on previously learned behaviour and expectations-

Uocutionary forcethe validity of which is itself questionable. Agreement runs the risk of

either f a g to take account of its own fictions or of having to fictionalize itself While

not directly related to the immediate economic concerns of the 1770s in the way that the

205

annuities references and Sir Oliver's "Nabob" portrait are, the tableau nevertheless

represents the climactic moment in the play in which the structural pattern of fixst and

second order speech acts is most elaborately staged. As it turns out, however, Lady

Teazle's own excuses for her behaviour and consequent reform prove to have significant

import for the economics of marriage.

Wre a portrait, the tableau is not communicatively silent because a linguistic

apparatus implicitly informs that silence: the preface, the stage directions, and the moral

norms needed to be taught to the audience to understand the tableau in the first place. As

in speech-act analysis and in economic theory, the whole context of social engagement

demonstrates that coercive perlocutionary acts are necessary to teach the knowledge

required for fbrther perlocutionary validation. Much more than simply a complex duality

of intention and convention, of individual will and social power, Sheridan's peculiarly

serious variety of non-seriousness invites an appreciation of the absolute limit of meaning

as utterance: the possibility that words do make things happen, absolutely, that the

materiality of the signifier always precedes the meaning of the sign. Of course, in practical

or even in economic terms, it is safer to suggest, as this chapter has done, that this

linguistic surface traces the pattern of excuse which gives the Lie, so to speak, to that

which cannot be verified, the truth of perpetual change, of constant desire and absolute

daregulation It is not surprising, then, that in School for S ' I , the philosopher is also

the villain, Joseph Surface. Joseph's proverbs, a comic hallmark of Sheridan's linguistic

genius, capture exactly the descent into platitude and generality on behalf of empirical

truth which excuse human action as part of some greater mystical power: "the man who

does not share in the Distresses of a Brother, even tho' merited by his own misconduct --

deserves.. ." (1.1. 230). The fact that Surtace never finishes his "sentiments" inheres the

vitality of perpetual incompleteness as the philosophical ground for the romance quest of I

capitalism. As the scandal-mongers know, Joseph's sentiments are just that, "surface

206 A

sentiments" which Joseph uses in appropriate situations to validate his own claims to

honesty. But by the end of the play, as stories of Sir Peter's death become greatly

exaggerated-fa with a Sir Peter who he thinks has been killed, Sir Benjamin invents a

dramatic recovery and mistakes Sir Oliver for a doctor, yet another disguise-the operation

of scandal has been both utterly disenfranchised and utterly ubiquitous. Even as Mr.

Snake is bought off by Sir Peter to give away Lady Sneerwell's and Joseph's plot to

ensnare Charles, he appeals to their sense of his reputation: "consider I Live by the Badness

of my Character!-I have nothing but my Infamy to depend on! and if it were known that I

had been betray'd into an honest Action I should lose every Friend I have in the worfd"

(5.3.220-23).

The play concludes on such an inconclusive note, with Charles Surface, addressing

his betrothed Maria: "Tho' - thou dear Maid; should'st wa[i]ve thy Beauty's Sway,/ -- Thou still must Rule -- because I will obey;/ An humbled Fugitive from Folly View,/ No

Sanctuary near -- but Love and - YOU" (298). In Charles' confessional is his own

admission of guilt, which is at the same time excused by his obedience to her. In his

determination of Maria's rule is her excuse, or waiver, fiom valuation. The curtain Ms,

however, on a note of serious anxiety, an insistence on the need for due credit from its

spectators to destroy the very thing which motivates it: "You can indeed each Anxious

Fear remove,/ For even Scandal dies if you approve." That is to say, the approval of the

audience wiU remove the infelicity of theatricality, of criminal falsity or artfirlness, and in

that gesture destroy or negate the very stuff from which it is made. Charles is the fitting

speaker of these lines. His own profligacy is far fiom the enlightenment idea of the

propitious philosopher, but is rather its parody, the uneconomical economist. Like his

brother, Charles is a master excuser. Sir Oliver (who has already forgiven him for

sentimental reasons) queries "you.. . could justzfi yourself too." Charles' reply is the

quintessence of excuse:

207

CHARLES SURFACE. To be Sure Sir Oliver I did make a littfe free with

the Family Canvass that's the Truth on't - my Ancestors may

certainly rise in Evidence against me there's no denying it - but

believe me sincere when I tell you, and upon my soul I would not

Say it if1 was not -- that if1 do not appear mortified - at the

exposure of my Follies - it is because I feel this moment the

warmest satisfaaion - in seeing you - my liberal Benefactor.

SIR OLIVER Charles - I believe you (5 -3.136-43)

The sincerest sentiment is an easy way of getting out of a scrape. The confession of

wrongdoing becomes strength of character, resourcefilness. There are no conventions

here except the search for the right word. Charles' marriage contract is neither a

representation of love nor even an sign of his sincerity in giving up his wayward lifestyle.

He must reftte his contractual obligations to establish the belief that they are in force.

"Why as to Reforming" he proclaims "I'll make no Promises-and that I take to be a proof

that I intend to set about it" (249-50).

Sentiment, therefore, is the master fallback, the mystification of the economy and

the sublimation of language into a universal standard of motivation and desire. Maria

herself is something of a sentimentalist-and yet an ambiguous one which points to the

troubling status of gender in the play. Like the Surface brothers, to whom she is related

by adoption, Maria finds it easy to blame the condition of her world on unverifiable

propositions; "nothing" she says of the scandal school, " could--excuse the intemperance

of their tongues but a natural and ungovernable bitterness of mind" (2.2.1 86-7). And yet,

she first appears very much under Lady Sneerwell's wing. Maria does excuse the

scandalers; her chastisement and her patience amount pretty much to forgiveness.

Similarly, with respect to Charles, Maria excuses herself altogether: "whatever my

sentiments of that Unfortunate young man are.. . be assured I shall not feel more bound to

give him up because his Distresses have lost him the regard even of a Brother." But when

she is asked to approve of Charles as a husband, after his profligacy is indeed excused, she

says: '4 have little to say" and resigns him to Lady Sneerwell. And when she is tinally

given the opportunity to speak her vow, not surprisingly, it remains unspoken:

SIR PETER What! you rogue don't you ask the Girl's Consent first?

CHARLES SURFACE. 0 I have done that a long time - above a minute

ago -- and She has look'd yes - MARIA, For Shame - Charles - I protest Sir Peter there has not been a

word -

SIR OLIVER Well then the fewer the Better -- may your love for each

other never h o w -abatement.

SIR PETER And may you live as happily together as Lady Teazle and I --

intend to do. (5.3.233-41)

The parallel with Sir Peter is telling. The Teazles' marriage is excused into sentimental

harmony and the sentimental harmony of Charles and Maria likewise is called into

existence by the good-wishes and benevolent hand-shaking of the traditional comic

ending. But, as Maria points out, there is no vow, no actual promise, while, as Sir Peter

says, there are nothing but promises.

Sheridan is no Wollstonecraft: his indictment of the sentimental economy of desire

does not present a radically feminist alternative. It is, rather, an expod of the surface, the

perfornativity of theory, on which that economy is founded. Perhaps the most

sentimental moment in the play is neither the marriage nor the screen-scene, which is the

prelude to the reconstitution of a marriage along much the same lines, but the final face-

to-face, or surface-to-surface meeting of Charles and Joseph: "SURFACE. Charles -!

CHARLES SURFACE. Joseph! SURFACE. 'Tis now compleat! - CHARLES SURFACE. Ve$' (294). The stage directions c . for a "Pause" as the brothers turn to

209

fkce each other, and all the while Sir Oliver unraveIs the truth that the brothers are

"Destitute of Truth." It seems an odd moment to declare completeness; in fact,

conclusiveness fdters into an absurdly grammatical qualification: '%cry." The meeting is

an opening onto a plane of exactitude and exchange. It is a vision, in the form of a

metaphorical meeting of surfaces, of economic totality at its most brazenly scandalous.

Scandal is not the antithesis of the sentimental economy, but its precondition. Sheridan's

play suggests that the circulation of language is the constitutive pre-condition of economic

exchange in the mystified form of sentimentalism and its political rejoinder, Liberalityy

because it is the precondition of theoretical qualification. There is at the heart ofthis

master comedy a darkness, perhaps even an anger. This is what Charles Lamb felt when

he saw in Joseph Surface a pure villainy without any sense of morals, for morals are only

excuses. In his biographical note on Sheridan, written in 1 842, Leigh Hunt called the

playwright "Shakespeare without a Heart." It is an apt epithet. For Sheridan, the

theatrical world of characters and hearts and private mental depth, which the Romantics so

admired in the bard, were aspects of language and performance, creations of surfaces. But

the Romantics know this too. It is the most vital claim of their theatre.

Chapter 3

"this strange aversion": The Borderers and the Economics of Poverty

And then, as I screw up my eyes, and gaze intently in the nearest mirror,

the temble realisation comes. There I am staring into the bloated visage

and bared fangs of the most hideous of ogres. And it is myse HI... Readers

will pardon the egotism of this hyperbole.

E. P. Thompson, 75e Poverty of Theory

If School for SCCMdbZ dramatizes economic theory as comic excess, then William

Wordsworth's only completed play, me Borderers, reconceives it as tragic despair. Set in

the Tweed valley between England and Scotland during the political upheavals

precipitated by the Crusades, The Borderers is appropriately convoluted and ambiguous.

Mortirner, a headstrong but well-meaning captain of a band of outlaws, is seduced by

Rivers, a wandering Crusader, into murdering Herbert, an old baron. Rivers accuses

Herbert of selling his only daughter, Matilda, as a bride to the man who is actually her real

father. At first Mortirner is shocked and dismayed by the accusation, in part because he

admires Herbert but more because he is in love with Matilda. He is finally convinced of

Herbert's villainy by a passing beggar-woman, who says she is Matilda' s mother.

Mortimer struggles over the rightness of killing the old man, but having persuaded his

band, with Rivers' help, that Herbert is the vile coward Rivers claims he i s who thus

deserves to be "sacrificed" (2.3.428), Mortimer finally abandons Herbert on a heath,

believing that he will, in time, be rescued by some benevolent stranger. Ecstatic, Rivers

confesses to Mortimer that he had intended to dupe him, and turn him into a version of

himself, as he too had once been betrayed into murder, though he does not know that

21 1

Mortimer has repeated exactly the crime of abandonment he formerly committed.

Meanwhile, Herbert is discovered by a shepherd, Robert, who also leaves Herbert to die

for fear of being accused of his murder. Encountered by Mortimer, who berates him for

repeating his own criminal inaction, and by Matilda, who convinces him that her father will

survive, Robert brings the dying Herbert to his cottage. It is then that Mortimer realizes

that he had forgotten to leave Herbert any food when he abandoned him on the heath.

Not knowing that Mortimer has caused her father's death, Matilda curses his murderer,

and when Mortimer reveals that it is he, she &ts away. Rivers then tries to convince

Mortimer to flee to the Crusades with him, but realizing that Rivers has betrayed them all,

Mortimer's band surrounds and kills him. Mortimer vows to become a wanderer, a

spectral reminder of his own crimes.

This intricate plot suggests why The Borderers was not staged in Wordsworth's

lifetime. When Wordsworth submitted his play for review to Covent Garden, the

management rejected it on the grounds of "metaphysical obscurity" (Letters 197 n 1). He

finally published the play in the early 1 840s for inclusion in Poems, Chiefly of Ear& und

Later Years claiming little more relevance for it than as a document of his own

disenchantment with the French Revolution. Nevertheless, the major themes of betrayal,

abandonment, and despair in The Borderers offer an interpretation of the political

economy with which it is contemporary and specifically of its concern with the problem of

poverty. Wordsworth's play registers a shift of emphasis in British political economy

during the 1790s from enlightened convictions of the viability of an economic system

based on sentiment and mutual understanding toward stricter efforts to formulate laws of

value and distribution derived from observations of necessity. The French Revolution was

inspired, in part, by such enlightenment refiains as liberty and utility, and these ideals

continued to inspire both defenders of the Revolution, like Thomas Paine and Wfiarn

Godwin, and its critics, notably Edmund Burke, well after the Revolution itself had gone

awry.' This violent turn in the Revolution precipitated an interminable European War

which in turn led to restrictions on agriculture and trade and periodic increases in

mendicity and crime across Britain. Smith's "system of natural liberty" had its limits.

Food was scarce' tariffs were high, and the general population, it was assumed, was

getting larger. The temptation to fall into torpor and dissipation, Thomas Robert Malthus

argued in his 1798 Esrqy on Population, would lead to moral depravity and sexual

licentiousness and thus make matters worse. Political economy was going to have to

become more restrictive. If people who were unwilling or unable to do an honest day's

work or show "moral restraint" were going to die, Malthus said, then all the better for the

rest of us.

The question of how much regard or disregard the political economy of the 1790s

had for the poor is basically ethical. But Wordsworth's drama also considers the

epistemological implications of the economics of poverty. For poverty represents another

instance of the null-point of materiality in the midst of the economics which tries to

manage and correct it. Poverty tends to be defined as a negative corollary to property or

capital, but the word also connotes a more general sense of "deficiency" or "lack,

scantiness, dearth, scarcity" as applied to any concept or quality (OED 3-4). The problem

is that poverty as a material condition has certain features--hunger, homelessness,

destitution-but these conditions can only be understood intellectually with respect to the

positive value of the things they lack: food, home, hope. As Malthus said in the 1806

version of his &say, "all poverty is relative" (2: 156). Viewed from a phenomenological

perspective, this treatment of poverty as hndamentally an undesirable absence also

registers the tendency in political economy to see such phenomena as aberrations which

For an account of Adam Smith's influence on French political economy during the revolutionary period, see Sewell 94-106. For Smith's influence on the question of the poor in the British revolutionary debates see Winch, Riches rmd Poverty 198-220 and on Malthus 23 7-4 1.

can nevertheless be observed and to a large extent corrected by imposing on it systems of

regulation. In its troubling persistence, despite its undesirability, poverty thus becomes a

touchstone for the rhetorical, or performative, materiality within political economy's own . .

systematmng efforts.

Wordsworth's treatment of the economics of poverty in rite Borderers hinges on

this epistemological conundrum. Much of its dramatic action is built around the

characters' attempts to mold an idea of poverty into an inspirational catalyst for spiritual

growth A number of critics have agreed that this desperate reaction to what Wordsworth

later called "Upstart Theory" (Prelude 1850 7: 529) as it appears in The Borderers

illustrates his turn away fiom Godwinian rationalism and toward the common-sense

inspired Toryism of Edmund Burke. But Wordsworth also dramatizes the rehsal among

political economists and philosophers to recognize the undefinability of poverty in their

own economic theories2 It is in this way that Wordsworth's critique of the economics of

poverty intersects with the Romantic theory of performan~e.~ Wordsworth converts his

* Readers of Wordsworth's early poetic engagement with political economy are right to stress his interest in the economics of poverty and charity and to draw attention to the points of contact between Lp-cal Ballads and the theoretical and pamphlet Literature dealing with charity. For the most part, critics agree that such poems as "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," "The Old Cumberland Beggar," "Old Man Travelling," b'Michael" and "Resolution and Independence" betray Wordsworth's conservative support for the belief that the best way to care for the poor was to leave them alone, with the proviso that genuine human sympathy will lead to spontaneous acts of charity by those in a position to perform them, and thus strengthen the affective bonds of the whole community. This notion of "private charity" was also advanced by Edmund Burke, and the similarity between his views on the subject and the pat economic recommendations for spontaneous benevolence in the poems of Lyrical BalladF has for most critics proved Wordsworth's Burkean conservatism. But already in The Borderers, Wordsworth demonstrates a scepticism toward Burkean economics, especially as it concerns the poor, as analytically deconstructive as his restaging of Burke's nemesis Godwin, and hingeing on the realization that the affeaive power of language can posit systems of human motivation while it is also haunted by the limit of that positing in the desire for systematic regularity.

F O ~ historicist readings of poverty in 77re Borderers see Jewett 73-8 and Liy Sense of History 25 1-66.

hesitations regarding the ethical soundness of the economics of poverty into an experiment

with contemporary techniques of declamation and gesture, and of conventions of the

Gothic and bourgeois tragedy. Sensitive to the thrilling shock-value of the theatrical

experience produced by these forms, Wordsworth adapts them to embody in his own

theatre a theoretical mis-recognition of the material contingencies of theoty. This theatre

exemplifies unproductive labour. It is an expense signalling capitalism's ignorance of the

eff'ects of circulation and the threat of dissolution. Poverty is the Mac- of this

economic theatre; it marks the hdamentd vacuity and barremess which political

economy seeks to eradicate both from itself and the world which it presumes to describe.

Yet I submit that what emerges from this dramaturgy is the beginning of a new economics

of poverty which maintains the polemical edge against theoretical homogenization also

apparent in Austin's theory of perfonnative language. Austin's hesitant attitude toward

the theatre ultimately demonstrates that the speech act must be set in the context of its

potential for infelicity as a phenomenal act of utterance. Wordsworth's similar theatrical

anti-theatricality-for lack of a better term-has a similar polemical agenda: to expose the

incapacity of economic theory to encompass poverty, vagrancy, and other unproductive

modes of existence within rational constructs of distribution. In its consideration of the

limbo-like desperation of people struggling with forces which seem to be beyond them,

but which they sense also me them, The Borderers stages a turning point, a c'crisis," in the

development of economic thought fiom its rhetorical invocation of the sentimental nexus

of self-interested exchange to its specification of rational laws of necessary distributive

limits in the early decades of the nineteenth century.'

* Living in a large summer mansion, rent-& (though without the poetry-hating businessman-landlord's knowledge), but having only a few meagre sticks of furniture, finding little income, and having to spend the better part of their time raising their own vegetables, the Wordsworth's at this time could be said to have been living through a "crisis," a borukr existence between security and struggle which doubtless had a profound e f f i on Wordsworth's dramatic writing (Johnston 475-76).

"A man by men deserted''

In a note appended to the 1842 version of his play, Wordsworth outlined the

epistemological crisis which the French Revolution precipitated in his understanding:

The study of human nature suggests this a& truth, that, as in the trials to

which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start fiom their very

opposite qualities, so are there no limits to the hardening of the heart, and

the perversion of the understanding to which they may carry their slaves.

During my long residence in France, while the Revolution was rapidly

advancing to its extremes of wickedness, I had fiequent opportunities of

being an eye-witness to this process, and it was while that knowledge was

fiesh upon my memory, that the Tragedy of "The Borderers" was

composed. (B 8 13)'

The suggestion here is that incidents in The Borderers are more or less straightforward

"reflections," as he explained in the 1843 Fenwick note, of a process of philosophical

erosion fiom hope to desperation such as Wordsworth "was a witness" to in France (B

8 1 5).6 For this 1 842 version of the play, Wordsworth changed the name Rivers to

Oswald, and it has been suggested that Wordsworth had in mind Colonel John Oswald, a

' All references to The Borders use the early version of the play in Robert Osborn's edition and are given with act, scene, and line number. All references to material in Osborn's apparatus are indicated by B and page number.

David Marshall has eloquently shown, the original version of the play offers a more ambivalent notion of 'kitness." Marshall suggests that the central dramatic action of the play, Mortimer's abandonment of the blind Herbert on the Heath, is calculated to make its audience aware of exactly the moral problem of only seeing what we intend to see rather than paying witness to the realities of what is there ("Eye-witnesses" 296). M y reading of Wordsworth's engagement with political economy is indebted to Marshall's important observations on the relation between political ethics and dramatic experimentation in The Borderers. I will focus, however, on the primary importance of language in this difficult verbal dramaturgy to the theme of abandonment as Marshall delineates it.

mysterious Englishman who had arrived in France at the beginning of the Revolution and

who was planning, with great zeal, to cany the Revolutionary ideals to ~ritain.' O d d

was a supreme intellectualist, and considering that Wordsworth knew him in Paris, it is

perhaps not surprising that Rivers should be associated with him. Rivers' long description

of his own character in Act N features a philosophical justification for complete rational

disinterest: since the world of chance, emotion, and nature was so much stronger than any

human institution, the best possible ''intellectual being" was absolute removal f?om any

social responsibility: The worst possible "curse" on the thinking individual, Rivers claims,

is the knowledge that he or she is beholden to the social or natural world, and so is "self-

consumed" (4.2.13 6-3 8) By this same logic, any act of manipulation is allowable since on

the one hand, it strengthens general beliefs in individual reason and on the other it serves

to heighten the rational pleasure of the manipulator: "to be truly the world's &end/ We

must become an object of its hate" (156-57). At the same time, that manipulation is

justified by its own claims of observational perspective: the goal of thought is "to enlarge/

The intellectual empire of mankind./ 'Tis slavery-all is slavery, we receive/ Laws, and we

ask not whence those laws have come" (1 88-92).

But the French Revolution is not the only historical context for the themes of

intellect and abandonment in The Borderers, despite Wordsworth's later pronouncements.

Composed between 1796 and 1797, at Racedown in the West Country, 7he Borderers is

one of a number of early works in which Wordsworth worked through his first hand

encounter with the dreadfbl conditions of one of the then poorest parts of the country,

made worse by bad harvests and food shortage^.^ 7he Borcierers shares with the early

' For a fid account of the revolutionary context of The Borderers see Erdman 22- 33.

Randel 379 provides a brief summary of The Borderers as an account of "betrayal," which anticipates the sense of betrayal Wordsworth orchestrates around the marginalized vagrants of Tintern Abbey. For accounts of the terrible poverty around

drafts of The Recluse, also begun in 1796, a tendency to mirror in the deathly appearance

of the abject poor the harsh disinterest of political and economic policy. One of these

figures is the old Cumberland beggar, who first appears in a draft entitled '?)exription of

a Beggar." The draft begins:

He travels on a solitary man

His age has no companion On the ground

His eyes are turned and as he moves along

They move along the ground: and evermore

Instead of nature's f ~ r variety

Her ample scope of hill and dale, of clouds

And the blue sky the same short span of earth

Is all his prospect.

The combined sense of immobility and isolation here is an apt synecdoche for an idea of

vagrancy which can only be understood in negative terms. Set in the middle of "The Old

Cumberland Beggar," and its famous invocation of a "mild necessity of use7' (91), this

description intimates the need for sympathetic acts of charity on the old man's behalfg As

Racedown while Wordsworth live there see Moorman I: 283-84. For Wordsworth's anxieties about poverty and their influence on his poetry see Rzepka 227-39. Because I concentrate on its 1790s context, I refer only to the early version of me Borderers, published in facing-text edition with the late version in the Comell Wordsworth.

The exact contexts employed by this poem's numerous historicist critics to elaborate this conservatism are extensive and varied. Bostetter 55-6 and Woodring 96 identify in the poem Wordsworth's wavering loyalties between the rational libertarian inclinations of the Godwin circle and his later renewed faith in the comunal power of natural fellow-feeling. For a comparison of "The Old Cumberland Beggar" with the advocacy of locally administered as opposed to government legislated poor reliec see Chandler, Wordsworfh 's Second N-e 62-92 and Marilyn Butler 84-5. David Simpson makes a case for the sympathetic reader's respect for the old man's apparently resigned self-sufficiency, which leads to his inclusion, through the generosity of the bystander, into the economic system of laissez-faire, which Wordsworth "accepts7' even as he "turn.. . against" the utilitarian argument for work houses and forced labour. See Wordsworfh 's

the rest of the 1800 poem elaborates, such charitable acts generate a spiritual well-being

which will then maintain sentimental assurance and enable the consistent flow of capital

through the sentimental nexus of enlightenment political economy. But the description of

the old man also stands as an ironic mirror of empirical spectatorship as it is articulated by

enlightenment thought. Though not explicitly blind, the old man's vision is fixed on the

ground before him, "seeing still/ And never knowing" what he sees. This mental blindness

is then transposed into the perspective of the poetic readership, as the draft itself embodies

the stasis of the old man's lack of vision. "In the same never ending line impress'd The

nails of cart or chariot wheel have left/ hpress'd on the white road, in the same line/ At

distance still the same Poor Traveller!"" The old man's cognition-less vision mirrors the

spectatorid nescience of those who observe him, while his near motionlessness constitutes

Historical Iwmtion 162-69. Koch compares Wordsworth's description with other insensitive depictions of beggars in the pamphlet literature of the cceconomics of charity." Gary Harrison has recently documented the extent to which the pamphlet literature of the 1780s and 1790s was concerned with the question of what to do for, or with, the poor. Harrison concludes that this "economics of charity'' manifests some significant ironies: pamphleteers in favour of charity such as Sarah Trimmer and George Dyer, as well as Blake, Burke, Bums, Godwin, and Smith were sympathetic to the plight of the poor, but insisted either that the poor were dangerous and unclean or that they symbolized an ideal form of resignation worthy of distant admiration ("Economy of Charity" 24-34). While Harrison uses this economics of charity to illustrate the liberal contradictions of Wordsworth's oeuvre, based largely on some of the same general elaborations of the contradictions of philosophical motivation that Wordsworth gives in his own account of the origin of me Borderers, I contend that Wordsworth's attention to the epistemological assumptions of economics demonstrates a critical distance f?om it.

lo See LWwZ BaZIh.ds 483 -7 for transcriptions of this early manuscript. The end of the fiagment became the opening of "Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch" first published in the 1798 Lyrical BaZlbds. That version adds a more conventional ending, in which the poet asks the old man "whither he was bound, and what/ The object of his journey," only to be told, surprising% yet sentimentally, that the old man is going to pay a last visit to his dying son. The acceptance of death "in tranquillity" is perhaps the ultimate Christian recompense for a life of hardship. But even in this poem, the tension between that rationalization and the abjected materiality of the dying object remains unresolved; Wordsworth omitted the revelatory last lines of the poem after 1815.

the material presence which empirical spectatorship refuses to see as it formulates systems

of necessity, usefidness, and spiritual, or rather capita, growth. Put another way, the old

man is a dbppeIggcger of the economics of charity which tries to understand him, but

elucidates thereby those asp- of political economy-its empirical fixations on seeing

rather than knowing-which it tries to repress. The 1800 version of the poem, with its

ironically didactic descriptions of charity, can thus be read as-an elaborate dramatic

monologue delivered by a "blind" political economist. The persistence of the draft in the

middle of this longer poem thus comes to represent the actual materiality of the poverty

which political economy essentially abandons by arguing that it senres a higher purpose."

In the eagment "A Discharged Soldier," also intended for the Recluse, the

speaker recalls his meeting with a gaunt and starving infantryman just returned from "the

tropic isles" (100). The soldier obviously figures a kind of death-in-We: "His visage,

wasted though it seemed, was largd In feature; his cheeks sunken; and his mouW Shewed

ghastly in the moonlight. From behind/ A mile-stone propped him" (49-52). As with the

old beggar, however, Wordsworth stresses the connection between seeing and not-seeing,

by which the poor are understood only in terms of their Liminal existence:

His face was turned

Towards the road, yet not as ifhe sought

For any living thing. He appeared

Forlorn and desolate, a man cut off

From all his kind, and more than half detached

l1 Critics have noted the dramatic irony of this poem. Jacobus' sense in Traditon dExper iment 181-82 that the purpose of the poem was "to heighten our awareness of our own state" as much as that of the old man suggests an important self-reflexiveness regarding both charitable feelings and their rationalization within system of economy. Harrison 139-71 argues that Wordsworth shocks his readers into sympathy with the plight of the beggar, this reading is supported by Langan 7 1-2 and extensively examined by Jamis.

From his own nature. (5 5-60)

As Wordsworth would later incorporate the mirroring blindness of the old man into a

critique of the epistemology of charity in "The Old Cumberland Beggar," so the isolation

of the discharged soldier thwarts the complacency of the speaker as he appears in the

opening of the poem, bounding over the hills, "receiving in my own despite/ Amusement.. .

the stillness drinking in/ A restoration like the claim of sleep ... I looked not round, nor did

the solitudd Speak to my eye, but it was heard and felt/ Oh happy state!" (13-28).

Though the speaker helps the soldier to find a place to rest for the night, and thus helps to

re-incorporate him into the cycle of beneficence and fellow-feeling ("I returned/ The

blessing of the poor unhappy man"), the poem ends on the note of unresolved isolation

persistently embodied by the soldier: "And so we parted" (170-72). It is possible that the

speaker's anxiety encapsulates the general fear in the 1790s that demobilized soldiers with

no projected aims in life would inevitably turn to dissolution and crime (Liu, Sense of

History 225-27). But the fiagment itself offers a more reflective examination of the

motives behind the speaker's own observations. Wordsworth's early depictions of

criminal behaviour, including the two Salisbury Plain poems, "The Convict," and the

fiagment of a Gothic Tale (which Wordsworth adapted for Act 2 of The Bordkrers) also

demonstrate an attempt to comprehend the epistemology of judgement and remorse, while

still treating criminality as a social fact rather than as part of a larger social picture in

which the only possible way of conceiving of a criminal act is as a moral distraction

demanding spiritual redemption. The fhdamental psychosis of crime, destruction,

murder, waste, is seen in these early poems to inhabit the efforts to explain or remedy

them.

The same ambiguous mirroring of poverty and epistemological blindness is

apparent in the action of 7?ze Bordkrers, or rather in its inaction. There is some question,

for instance, of the legitimacy of Mortimer's position: his band are ostensibly outlaws,

- . living a relatively spartan, contingent, and-it is intimated-cnmtnal existence, though as in

the Robin Hood myth, they feel that it is their responsibility to "[dlefend the innocent"

(2.3.337). Importantly, few details are provided concerning when, why, or how the band

go about robbing f?om the rich and giving to the poor, if in fact that is what they do, other

than such comments as Rivers' that "this band" is "collected for the noblest ends,/ Here on

the savage c o f i e s of the Tweed/ To guard the innocent7' (1.1.32-5). These are nobles

without vassalage, Crusaders without a cause; as Marjean hrrinton has argued, the power

vacuum in Britain caused by the Crusades is a significant backdrop to the play's

overwhelming sense of arbitrary and rneaningIess power struggles.'*

The secondary plot, often cded the "pre-plot" because most of its action is

already completed long before the time of the play, focuses on Herbert and his daughter

Matilda Herbert is also blind, which is crucial to the dynamic of witnessing that the play

will develop and which points directly to the doppelgtinger effect evident in the poems

contemporary with it. When we first encounter Herbert and Matilda they are delivering

Miitilda to a convent, where she is to receive a "bequest" and save them '%om the

extreme of penury" (1.1.125-28). We learn that Matilda is in love with Mortimer, in spite

of the fact that her father considers him "a base fieebooterf Who here, upon the borders of

the Tweed,/ Doth prey alike on two distracted countries,/ Traitor to both" (175-78). This

description of Mortimer as a figure of the border itself, fighting a war on both sides,

without any clear sense of purpose, captures the dichotomy of the economics of poverty.

Herbert himself lives in a state of near penury, though by birth and in name he is noble,

and during the second act it is learned that his lands have been reinstated by royal decree

(2.3.330-37). He has a cottage, but he is constantly being guided and rescued by

shepherds and strangers; Mortimer and Rivers in fact pretend to be such stranger-fiends

lZ For a comparison of Herbert's tale to accounts of the Crusades contemporary with the play, see Parker, "Reading Wordsworth's Power" 308- 12.

in order to gain Herbert's trust (2.1.124-3 1). Herbert views his own poverty much as an

economist might: it is an accident of happenstance to be survived with stoical resignation.

But Herbert also condanns anyone who does not conform to his projection of the world.13

This obsessiveness emerges in this important opening scene in some alarming ways. We

learn that he had taken his wife and young family on a Crusade where, during the siege of

Antioch, mother and infant son were slaughtered. Returning to England with the daughter

he rescues £torn the burning city, Herbert discovers that his lauds have been "usurped"

(1.1.16 1). His 'cmelancholy story moved a stranger" (1 6 5 ) who becomes Matilda's

patroness, while Herbert himself finds solace with ''the good Abbot of Saint Cuthbert's"

who "[s]upplied ms] helplessness with food and raiment" (167-68). Again, Herbert is

both hero and victim, pauper and protector, mirroring in his own attempt to reverse his

condition of uselessness that very condition.

The ambiguities do not stop there, however. In what he calls his ccexcessive"

reading of the Herbert-MatiIda subplot, Reeve Parker isolates the fact that this relationship

is based on the constant reiteration of their history and asserts that Herbert retells these

tales in order to strengthen "the very bondage of gratitude and pity that leads her,

reciprocally7 to sacrifice herself in the passionate action of protecting and saving him in old

l3 Herbert has provoked broad and divided critical interest. For Hartman, Herbert represents the essential innocence of nature against which Rivers and Mortirner struggle. David Erdman provides a political reading of Herbert, claiming that he represents the cccustom'7 and "law" of the Burkean social contract which is threatened by the revolutionary implications of Rivers' intellectualism. This sympathetic reading of Herbert has lent credence to the popular view that the play is ostensibly Burkean-or at least anti- Godwinian-in its outlook. Storch, by contrast, contends that the competition between Herbert and Mortirner over Matilda is emblematic of that fiaught state of unfUlfilled desire which Rivers' seduction of Mortimer will later accentuate, such that neither Herbert nor Burke (by implication) represents a completely satisfactory moral position with regard to the injustices depicted in the play. =taker 360-67 offers an interesting and sympathetic reading of Herbert, whom Whitaker played in the 1988 Yale University production of the play. Herbert is for Whitaker a Pinteresque figure who has been homily disappointed by his life and thus regards everything with a certain distrust though at the same time he wants there to be some relief to his suffering.

age" (3 05). Such "ruthless possessiveness directed toward his daughter is incestuous,"

David Collings agrees, since in telling and re-telling the story of how he allowed his wife

to die in the flames and rescued his daughter, he "chooses MatiIda over his wife7 in effect

killing the mother and embracing Matifda instearf' (5 1). This "anti-narrative.. expos[es]

the illegitimacy of the symbolic order and the violence at its foundation" (Collings 52)' an

unconscious abdication of authority that Parker labels Herbert's "self-usurpation"

("Readhg Wordsworth's Power" 309).

There are important historical and economic contexts for these complexities. The

end of the eighteenth century saw the rise of an ideological commitment to an idea of the

nuclear family linked by "love" to offset the troubling dispersal of allegiances and

responsibilities throughout the upper and middle-class household: the presence of

servants, the tendency for children to remain at home after marriage, the increase in

bastardy.14 What ultimately persuades Mortimer of the truth of Rivers' tale is the

synonymity between the horror that Matilda is for Herbert an exchangeable commodity for

his own selfish ends, and Herbert's own account of how Matilda is a substitute for her

own mother (Sense of History 229-36). There is an economy at work in the Herbert-

Matilda relationship, but it is not presented as an economy based on sentiment or the

natural &ections of "the nuclear ethos.. . [of] the middle-class family'' (274). Rather, the

competition between Herbert and MatiIda, and Herbert and Mortimer for Matilda, must be

viewed as a threat to the very sentimental domesticity it seems to exemplify. The point

that is repeatedly stressed in the examination of these contexts for Herbert's narrative is

l4 Cohen 22-3 has shown that since death in childbirth was relatively common, many young girls replaced their mothers as responsible heads of households and sometimes as afFectionate partners. One result of this "shift" of f d y roles was that the innocence and meekness of young girls was often used as a model of wifely conduct. The fiequent confbsion and occasional hysteria of these young daughter-wives were symptomatic of the f a y ' s own internal breakdown caused by the fathers' insistence that their daughters assume the role of the mother.

224

that its entire foundation in is entirely compromised not only by its latent

psycho-sexual tensions but by the political chaos which, by reiterating the necessity of

familial love, it tries to exclude fiom its concept of obligation. Matilda herselfbetrays

some confusion of her own over her roles as daughter and wife such that whenever she

declares her love for Mortimer, Herbert feels compelled to reiterate her obligations to him

by telling and retelling their story to which she willingly agrees: "let me hear it all," she

exclaim. "'Twiu do me good" (1.1.156-57). She also declares her allegiance to

Mortimer by invoking the power of his words: "Oh could you hear his voice. .. He is onel

(I guess not what bad tongue has wronged him with you),/ All gentleness and love" (134-

36). Mortimer too in his youth has heard Matilda retelling her father's tales: "It was my

joy," Mortimer tells Rivers, "to sit and hear Matildd Repeat her father's terrible

adventures/ Till all the band of play-mates wept together" (65-7). Matilda's susceptibility

to the affective power of narration, then, foreshadows Rivers' cormption of Mortimer.

These readings demonstrate the extent to which Wordsworth's play is concerned

with the way economies of obligation and exchange were gradually precluding any

perceived local aberrations in their constitutive uniformity. This interest is particularly

manifest at the turning point of the opening section of the play. Rivers succeeds in

persuading Mortimer that Herbert is not Matilda's father, and that he bought her from a

poor woman who has since also been reduced to vagrancy. For his own personal gain,

Rivers insists, Herbert is planning to sell Matilda to her supposedly "real" father, the

aristocratic orgiast Lord Clifford. Again, an act of verbal persuasion is juxtaposed with a

characterization of poverty,. for the beggar woman is herself an interestingly ironic figure

for the condition of mendicity. She relates to Mortimer and Rivers two dreams

symbolizing the plight of the poor at the hands of so-called charitable benevolence:

. My poor babe

Was crying, as I thought, crying for bread

When I had none to give him, whereupon

I put a slip1 of foxglove in his hand

Which pleased him so that he was hushed at once;

When into one of those sanie spotted bells

A Bee came darting, which the child with joy

Imprisoned there, and held it to his ear-

And suddenly grew black as he would die

... I fancied a strange dog

Trotting alone, along a beaten road

Came to the child as by my side he slept

And fondly licked his face, then on a sudden

Snapped fierce to make a morsel of his head (1 -3 -25-4 1)

Between these two accounts, Mortimer gives the Beggarwoman some money: ' M y

babbling gossip," he says to her condescendingly, "Here's what will comfort you" (34-5) - -after an aside to Rivers ' k e have no time for this" (34). Considering that the

Begganvoman's dreams evoke as clear an indictment of charitable behaviour as any in the

play, Mortimer's gesture represents a palpable instance of dramatic irony, especially as the

gesture is conscious and deliberately dismissive. It is only when she explains what she

knows about the illicitness of Herbert and Matilda's relationship that Mortimer's interest

in her is aroused, and then only when she claims that she is Matilda' s real mother, does

Mortimer show her any respect, even admiration. As Liu shows, what upsets Mortimer

the most is the idea that Herbert could buy a child fiom her father and sell her again to the

same man as his wife-yet another repetition of Matilda's confbsed status as an object of

exchange, a distortion of family values of utility and respect that the honourable Mortimer

cannot abide. (Sense of History 23 1-32). Wordsworth interposes a further distortion of

nuclear family values by having the beggar woman repeatedly refer to her own mendicity

and Herbert's stinginess: "Charity!" she says of Herbert's behaviour: "If you can melt a

rock he is your man" (1.3.74-5). Herbert's interest in Matilda is the money she will

receive &om her patroness (1 1 5-8)- At the same time, her claims to victimization aIso

contradict the worth which she, and then Mortimer, claim for her. There is, moreover,

considerable doubt concerning the actual status of this beggar, since she is paid by Rivers

for her part in his schemes and thus, as John Rieder suggests, she exemplifies e d y the

kind ~f'~commercial artist" that she and Rivers accuse Herbert of being (1 32). Although

he is at first dismissive of the Beggarwoman, Mortirner is impressed by her conviction

because he too clings to normative social conventions regarding the innocence and

sanctity of familial bonds as he does the morality of benevolence. What he does not see is

that the "poverty" here is measured against the very idea of wealth and capital circulation

he so detests, and which he also, ironically, embodies.

The pre-plot lays the thematic and dramaturgical groundwork for Rivers' gradual

seduction of Mortirner into a life of philosophical disinterest above, he presumes, the petty

struggles for social and economic status. Rivers and Mortimer convince Herbert that they

are his friends, and offer to guide him to see MatiIda Instead, however, they lead him to

an old ruin, where Rivers insists that Mortirner kill him. But though he tries, interminably,

to bring himself to the deed, MoFtimer cannot bring himsetf to murder the baron, so

impressed is he with Herbert's seeming beatitude. Herbert retells his tale of the

destruction of Antioch and his and Matilda's rescue, leading Mortimer also to c o b his

honourable admiration for such acts of courage. But the pre-plot has already indicated

some suspicious ambivalences concerning these tales, and the Beggarwoman has

dramatically exemplified the 'wmmercial" side of mendicity. Rivers, however, exploits

these ambivalences and, proclaiming once again Herbert's tyrannical manipulation of his

daughter for the sake of personal economic gain, Rivers is able to convince Mortimer and

his band of Herbert's criminality and the need to sacrifice him in an act of ritual "justice."

The middle acts of the play repeatedly foreground the performative sub-stratum for

the justification of systems of commercial growth and social stability which deflect the

materiality of poverty. In a sense, none of the characters who claim to be poor is really

poor, or is only poor in conformity with an idea of poverty that is relative to, and thus

theoretically subordinate to, abstract notions of wealth, commerce, nature, or justice.

Wordsworth's characters talk interminably about poverty-their own and that of those

they protect or admire-but poverty itself remains for the most part an unrepresentable

condition which the characters hope to turn into a something by speaking about it. This

abjection of the material condition of poverty through its theoretical explication is the

central implication of the play's climactic centre: Mortimer leads Herbert to a lonely heath,

where again Herbert tells the tale of his social demise. "Like a Mendicant," Herbert tells

Mortimer, "[w]hom no one comes to meet, I stood alone./ I murmured, but remembering

him who feeds/ The pelican and the ostrich in the Desert,/ From my own threshold I

looked up to heaven,/ And did not want glimmerings of quiet hope" (3.3.92-7). Herbert

then explains that he had been rescued by a shepherd who guided them to safety. So

Mortimer, under the influence of Riven' calculating logic, abandons the old man on a

heath to test his fortune and his daughter's dependability-only to discover that he has

taken the old man's only sustenance: a scrip of food. The crime, then, such as it is, is that

there is no actual deed, that nothing in the end was done and in the process Herbert dies.

That is, Mortimer believes Herbert to be part of a benevolent system of redemption and

charity (indeed, as Herbert believes himself to be and as the feudal context also intimates)

and in the process ignores his immediate physical condition. That the pre-plot confounds

Mortirner's interpretation only heightens the irony of his abandonment for the sake of an

economical act.

The remaining acts replay this irony between the control exerted by reason and the

228

forgetfulness that theory brings about. Herbert is found dying on a cliffside by a cottager,

Robert, who also abandons him to avoid beiig accused of killing him, a prosecution that is

more than likely, given his low social standing. Critics have of late become more

interested in this ostensibly minor figure. Willism Jewett argues that Robert is the play's

great characterization of an individual who only lives for the sake of another's demands

(73-8). In the medieval setting of the play he is a tenant h e r and thus beholden to the

whims of a feudal landlord. It is also suggested that Robert has a somewhat shady past

and may have been imprisoned or tortured, hence his wife Margaret's fear that he will be

put on the "dreadful engine" of torture (4.3.85). In an early draft of the play, Wordsworth

called Robert simply "cottager" which, as Liu points out, in Wordsworth's time

designated both a day-labourer Living in deplorable domestic conditions, and a member of

the rural yeormn class of relatively independent means (Sense of History 24 1-43). More

evidently, Robert repeats Mortimer's crime of abandoning Herbert for the sake of his own

rationalization of the situation and his willing ignorance of Herbert's fate, the

abandonment of a poor man struggling for Life to protect what Little life and property the

more secure man might have. Fittingly' the scene in which Robert and Mortimer confront

each other with the crime--one of the first to be written1'-presents them both as mutual

accusers and victims:

ROBERT. He was torn,

His head was bruised, and there was blood about him.

MORTIMER. That was no work of mine.

ROBERT Nor mine, God knows.

MORTIMER But had he strength to walk? I could have borne him

A thousand miles.

ROBERT. I am in poverty

See 'Edge of Heath Scene" in Wordsworth, Borrleers 56-8.

And know how busy are the tongues of men.

My heart was willing, Sir, but I am one

Whose deeds will not stand by their own light,

And though it smote me more than tongue can speak-

I left him.

MORTIMER (looks (II him for some time) I believe that there are beings

For unknown ads permitted to put on

The shape of man, and thou art one of them.

But human things have pressed so hard on me-

ROBERT. My wife and children came into my mind-

MORTIMER. Oh monster! monster! There are three of us.

And we shall howl together. (5.2.42-57)

In each others' eyes, Mortimer and Robert are "beings7* with the power of determination;

in the 1842 text Wordsworth will change "beings" to "phantoms" (B 263). Each appears

to himself, however, as an oppressed human thing, with immediate cares, notably

"poverty." The scene is remarkable for the way the material limitation with which each

attempts to excuse himself from the crime is what they also accuse each other of ignoring

in Herbert's state. This is precisely the mirroring pattern which Wordsworth uses

throughout the 1790s to criticize the epistemology of the economics of poverty.

The "character," or more properly the leitmotif, closest to representing a genuine

condition of poverty in Be Borukrers is the image of the deserted man with out-stretched

hands. It first appears in Rivers' initial soliloquy: "These fools of feeling are mere birds of

winter/ That haunt some barren island of the north,/ Where if a famished man stretch forth

his hand/ They think it is to feed them7' (2.1.5-9). True to form, Rivers' indictment of I

Mortimer's band boldly undermines their assumed beneficence; what makes Rivers such a

compelling character is that within the context of the philosophical assumptions of the

230

other characters as they are depicted, Rivers is basically right about them. The image of

the man with outstretched hands returns in Rivers' description of the man he abandoned:

. . A man by men deserted.-

Not buried in the sand-not dead or dying,

But standing, walking-stretching forth his arms:

In all things Like yourselves, but in the agony

With which he called for mercy-and even so,

He was forsaken. (4.2.45-50)

The captain, placed on a barren rock-a stage, Marshall calls it-emblematizes the

materiality of the condition of poverty as an absolute null-point: utter, desperate, and

demanding unproductivity. The captain is wholly other, unreadable, perhaps-to the

extent that his plea for mercy is somehow inhuman and unintelligible. And yet, the captain

is this inhuman other because he has been abandoned &om the circuit of convention and

motive and justification which defines the social system; like Mortimer at the play's

opening, Rivers at this point in his history believes in same honour system as Mortimer,

the realization that his abandonment of the captain was really not his own doing leads to

his realization of the benefit of complete intellectual disinterest, the efficacy of the false,

the glory of the theatrical, and the relish for aimless sacrifice. Finally, Mortimer is seen in

the same posture: ' b o k there," calls one of the "woodmen" who narrate his appearance

in Act V, "how he spreads out his arms as 'twerd To save himself fiom falling" (5.1.16-

7). Mortimer, however, has been falling throughout the play, "sinking," he says, into a

state of self-fiagrnentation. And in his final Lines, Mortimer becomes again the (dis)figure

of the abandoned: "A thing by pain and thought compelled to Live,/ Yet loathing life, till

heaven in mercy strike me/ With blank forgetllness - that I may die" (5.3.272-75). But

we do not actually see this apparition; M o h e r in fact posits himself into the role of that

which the world forgets. The irony of this final line is that there is no real sympathy with

poverty or vagrancy here, only a construction of an alien presence which is, for all that,

situated within a grandiloquent and melodramatic future. Mortimer, for all his denials of

activity, of selfhood, is still in the end, and the responsibility of that individuation still

comes fiom a divine mercy, an institution supposedly holding together an economy of self-

sacrSce, but which in the process refuses to see the object of its actual destructiveness.

nteoreticui Vagrancy: SmiIh, Burke, and m d z n

The tragic cycle of justification and abandonment which Wordsworth dramatizes in

The Borcierers and posits as the basis for an epistemological critique of the economics of

poverty is a tragic re-rendering of the circulation of scandal which Sheridan elucidated

within the political economy of the contract. The sporadic and questionable images of

poverty in the play, that is, mirror the absorption of an idea of poverty as a material

condition in itself into a larger theoretical conception of growth and wealth against which

poverty is seen as a troublingly persistent aberration. One source for Wordsworth's

radical re-alignment of linguistic unproductivity with theories of poverty and what to do

about it is Adam Smith. Wordsworth's comments on Smith, limited though they are,

criticize the Scottish philosopher for his unawareness of the dilettantish abstractness of his

system. Wealth of Nations has the dubious honour of being cited by name in nte PreIu&

and very much as a work tainted by its surprising irrelevance and worthlessness:

Plans without thought, or bottomed on false thought

And false philosophy; having brought to test

Of solid life and true result the books

Of modem statists, and thereby perceived

The utter hollowness of what we name

"The wealth of nations" where done that wealth

is lodged. (1805 13%-8 1)

232

As if sensing the "hollowness" of his economy, Smith himself is notoriously reticent

about poverty. But when he does discuss the poor, he illustrates the troubling impact that

an awareness of their unproductivity has on his otherwise systematic discourse. In one

reference to the condition of the poor in Wealth of Nations, Smith criticizes the poor laws

for preventing those on public relief from moving ftom their own parishes to where work

is available (1 : 15657). This reproach-that legislated poor-relief imposed severe

restrictions upon the economic opportunities vital to the expansion of productivity and

trade-was typical of the utilitarian agenda. It exemplifies precisely the view that poverty

exists only in relation to 'me natural system of liberty" which legislation disrupts when it

isolates the poor in the parish of their birth for administrative purposes.

But when Smith outlines the philosophical ground of his economic theory, the

poor reappear as instances of a condition of perpetual desire within a system open to the

idea that it works only within its own theoretical bounds. In Moral Sentiments, for

instance, Smith claims that most people ignore beggars (144) while elsewhere in the same

text he proposes that the silent "resignation" of the destitute to their lot should be a

testament to the stoical ethos necessary for acceptance into society (185). But these are

hypothetical responses. As Smith r e d i , they do not amount to "real" modes of

existence called poverty and riches; rather, Smith's reflections on poverty cmd reactions to

it define the epistemological Limit of their own rationality:

The poor man ... is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places

him out of the sight of mankind, or, that ifthey take any notice of him, they

have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which

he suffers. He is mortified upon both accounts; for though to be

overlooked, and to be disapproved of, are things entirely different, yet as

obscurity covers us f?om the daylight of honour and approbation, to feel

that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope,

233

and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature. The poor man

goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the

same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel. Those humble cares and

paidid attentions which occupy those in his situation, afford no amusement

to the dissipated and the gay. They turn away their eyes from him, or if the

extremity of his distress forces them to look at him, it is only to spum so

disagreeable an object fiom among them. The fortunate and the proud

wonder at the insdence of human wretchedness, that it should dare

presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness. (5 1)

Missing fiom this account of the poor man is any explanation of his poverty. Rather,

Smith figures poverty on the one hand as "obscurity," the absorption of the subject into

the social milieu to such an extent that all observable meritorious qualities have

disappeared, and, on the other hand, as "shame," the understanding that obscurity is

brought about by repulsiveness. Smith's poor man is, importantly, aware of his condition,

and, just as importantly, that realization occurs "in the midst" of the social system. Yet, he

is also "Unheeded," removed fiom participating in the system which surrounds him. Smith

f ahe r elides a third-person account of "the poor rnan" with the insecurities which "we7'-

the author and his community of readers-know will inspire ethical standards of sociability,

as if implicating that readership in its own unproductivity. Consumer expenditure comes

uneasily to light in the reference to 'We amusement [ofl the dissipated and the gay." The

poor man does not simply signifj. the working nexus of social perfonnativity, but rather

manifests the unproductivity of that gefiormance.

Beggars also appear in Wealth of Nations as rather surprising signs of the

suppressed unproductivity latent in economic exchange. In the important second chapter

of Book I, as we have seen, Smith makes the astonishing remark that the division of

labour, the rationalized separation of tasks enabling increased productivity, is

234

"occasioned" by "the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange," which is itself "the

necessary consequence of the f d t i e s of reason and speech" (1 :25). He immediately

states that this origin is not within the purview of bis text, and then contrasts proper

market relations with "means of persuasion" used by beggars, salesmen, and courtiers

alike "with their brethren" "Man sometimes3" Smith writes, %hen he has no other means

of engaging them to act according to his inclinations, endeavours by every servile and

fawning attention to obtain their good will" (26). Other surprising reminders of the

corresponding unproductivity of pauperism and language run through Wealth of Nations,

usually emerging in sections of the work not directly pertaining to its economic thesis, but

ones which consider the margins of that economic agenda. In the final book, while

discussing education, Smith argues that the only way for students to get a proper

education is to pay their teachers directly 'md for each class taught, since with stipends the

lecturers will "neglect their duties" (2:761). What this means is that even in those instances

in which teachers have both a university stipend and are paid fees by the students, "the

necessity of application, though always more or less diminished, is not. .. entirely taken

away." At a certain point, "professors" are beggars in the strictest sense if they do not

comprehend their responsibilities in terms of their relevance, their productivity, in the

market for their pedagogical goods: "salaries put the private teacher, who would pretend

to come into competition. .. in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade

without a bounty, in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. If he sells

his goods at nearly the same price, he cannot have the same profit, and poverty and

beggary at least, if not bankruptcy and ruin, will infallibly be his lot" (2:780) Smith also

contends that the Tower orders" do not need the kind of education paid for by their

betters, yet do require some kind of distraction fiom "the torpor of.. mind" in the form of

plays and entertainments (2:784-85). This is perhaps a harsh and ultimately

condescending claim; Stephen Copley suggests that it signals the existence of two

economies in Smith's system, one of unmitigated industrial productivity7 and one of polite

negotiative, and even philosophical exchange ('Red Jobs7' 66). It is nevertheless pertinent

that Smith asserts the essential uselessness of teaching when it is removed from the

demands of a consumer market, even as he adapts its potential didacticism to the demands

of the capitalist economy.

Smith's ambivalence regarding the unproductivity of rhetoric lingers in the

economics of the 1790s which is much more directly concerned with the question of

poverty than Wealth of Nations. A compelling example of the analogous sublimation of

poverty and linguistic action can be found in Burke's 13tmghts andDetuiZs on Scurcity

(1 795). l6 As has often been remarked, first by Thomas Paine, Burke creates in the

Refections the very ''theatre of calamities" which he wants to repudiate, first and

foremost, by constructing a theatre of inviolable conventional institutions, congregating

around the social contract (cited in Jacobus "Where Senators Perform" 3 67). Repeatedly

in these works. Burke declares faith in the efficacy of the interconnected system of

production, consumption, and price and his antagonism toward any attempt to unsettle its

balance. 171ought.s rmdDetails was composed specifically in response to proposed

government legislation to allow local Justices of the Peace to raise the amount of

l6 Wordsworth could not have read this pamphlet while composing The Borcierers; it was assembled ftom assorted notes and drafts by Burke's literary executors in 1 799- 1800. Yet Thoughts ond D e t d refkames much of the theoretical position of the Refections and of the Letters on a Regicide Peace, which Wordsworth had read before 1797 (Johnston 494). There is a direct correlation between Burke's disgust with the events of the French Revolution, and more to the point, contemporary English justifications for it relative to the English Revolution of 1688, and belief that ''manners" and "honour" for traditional "constitutions" of wealth and privilege must underlie the successll operation of an economic system. This is exactly the kind of mind-set that Mortimer declares for himself at the opening of m e Borrierx "I honour hm," he says to W U e d of Rivers. Pocock has finther shown that Burke's dismay at the events in France is largely focused on the introduction o fa paper currency: a system of fictional exchange cannot be used in place of an established system of "real" exchange, or exchange based on a mutual f%th in propriety and property (193-214).

distributed poor relief relative to the increase in the price of bread, which itselfwas the

result of a particularly bad wheat harvest in the winter of 1795-96? Burke's account of

the Med harvest is a narrative of a certain current "nature of things" which has the

rhetorical purpose of promising the continuation of that natural system. Abstracting the

implications of that exemplary nacrative of intercomectedness, Burke formulates an

e t e d present of labour relations: the market.

The balance between consumption and production makes price. The

market settles and alone can settle, that price. Market is the meeting and

conference of the consumer and p r d c e r , when they mutually discover

each other's wants. Nobody, I believe, has observed with any reflection

what market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the

celerity, the general equity, with which the balance of wants is settled.

They who wish the destruction of that balance, and would fain, by arbitrary

regulation decree, that defective production should not be compensated by

encreasing price, directly lay their m e to the root of production itself.

(133)

Burke's use of the narrative present contrasts with his use of the explicitly performative

verb "decree." Introduce promises of charity and hope into the natural cycle of desire and

gratification which is the market and you destroy the natural equilibrium of economic

exchange. The violence of Burke's final metaphor recalls the violent pillage of Marie

"~hough Burke agrees that the harvest was bad, a good part of Thaghfs and Dem'Is is devoted to proving that agricultural work throughout the country continued despite the difticulties of the season. "All the productions of the earth link with each other," Burke declares. "AU the sources of plenty, in all and every article, were dried or h z e n up. The scarcity was not as gentlemen seem to suppose, in wheat only" (140). As a result of this general shortage, the price of nearly every agricultural commodity rose, afkdng wages and profits on all fionts. Burke claims that, contrary to reports in the newspapers, there was neither a general farnine, nor a greater fluctuation in prices relative to availabiiity and happenstance than in other times of crisis.

237

Antoinette's boudoir in the Reflctiom, which Burke likened to a tragedy, but which at

the same time marked the destruction of a theatre of chivalry, the "root" of political

stability. The irnplicatiorq are certainly the same: human society survives only to the

extent that individual agents respect "natural" ins-tihrtions which, good or bad, are beyond

their subjective control.

Burke's characterization of this natural market corresponds to his theory of

language. Burke had argued in An Eitqrriry into Our I&as of the Sublime rmd the

Beautiful (1757) that certain words do not represent objects, but sustain the existence of

what he called "complex-simples," ideas that could not be fathomed outside of their

abstract designations: honour, duty, goodness. Burke's challenge to the English

supporters of the French Revolution in the Reflections, that this shift in the agenda of

government through the overthrow of the monarchy and the imposition of legal paper

currency is an a o n t to human decency and propriety, is sustained by the premise that

these complex ideas are not arbitrary conceptual impositions on haphazardly associated

impressions; they exist, and in an eternal constitutional form--the social contract. As

Balfour argues, the "contract envisioned by Burkey' in the Refections "is thoroughly

spectral" (226). It is an "invisible oath" of moral, I a A , and mannerly conduct which

once made cannot be broken. It is not, Balfour points out, in any way "empirid," for it

has no actual verbal form. It is the ur-contract which guarantees the perpetuation of

politics itself. In and Derails, the contract reappears, this time as the implicit

agreement of all labour relations that both labourer and employer will be in a position to

thrive and thus extend the system in perpetuity. "There is an implied contract, much

stronger than any Instrument or article of agreement' between the labourer in any

occupation and his employer-that the labour, so far as that labour is concerned, shall be

sufficient to pay to the employer a profit on his capital, and a compensation for his risk; in

a word, that the labour shall produce an advantage equal to the payment" (123). Lie

238

Smith, Burke posits a social relationality based on the perceived mutual necessary

desirability of labow mtd profit to sustain the economic system. The local and material

conditions of each agreement or contract in it& including those conditions which leave

the labourer in the very state of destitution that his agreement with the employer

supposedly alleviates, are sublated into a basically sentimental concept of contract

behaviour.

Siace labour is the only commodity the "lower orders" possess, then that is their

bargaining chip in the negotiations over wages. "Labour is a commodity like every other,

and rises or falls according to the demand" (122). For their own part, the lower class are

obliged to compensate the employer for his risk in employing them. For Burke, there is no

such thing as a class of people called ''the poor" outside the contractual system of labour

relations. "The labouring people are only poor, because they are numerous. Numbers in

their nature imply poverty. Ln a fair distribution among a vast multitude, none can have

much" (12 1). Legislated relief interferes with the eternal efficacy of the market:

Nothing can be so base and so wicked as the political canting language,

"The Labouring Poor." Let compassion be shewn in action, the more the

better, according to every man's ability, but let there be no lamentation of

their condition. It is no relief to their miserable circumstances; it is only an

insult to their miserable understandings. It arises fkom a total want of

charity, or a total want of thought. Want of one kind was never relieved by

the want of any other kind. Patience, labour, sobriety, hgafity, and

religion, should be recommended to them; all the rest is downrightfiaud.

Burke equates genuine charity with a state of mind in no need of further reflection, a state

of mind which is somehow satisfied. At the same time, Burke admits that entering into

contractual negotiations on both sides of the labourer-employer h e is a process of

satisfying desire, which also perpetuates the condition of desire itself. Fraud, like

arbitrariness, is not simply spectral to the extent that it is invisible, but also because it !

demonstrates the repression of the arbitrariness of the promise implied in Burke's narrative

of the market system. The poor thus become an emblem of the arbitrary institutionalism

(in the active sense) of Burke's system within the nature he actually seeks to describe.

The clearest and most extreme example of the paradoxical existence of these

economic simulacra with the appropriation of the poor is Malthus' Essay on the Principle

of Poplan'on. In the P r b to the 1798 edition, Malthus records his turn away fkom

the debates and dialogues of philosophical speculation and toward the facts and laws of

necessity determining population restraint. With this turn, economic science finally lays

claim to complete discursive transparency, or, as Malthus calls it, "candour" (3). But

Malthus' strangely self-conscious linguistic turn unhinges his dismissive claim that poverty

is a mathematically calculable result of inevitable overpopulation. Malthus' support for

the complete repeal of poor relief was not motivated by pure vindictiveness, but rather by

his belief in the predictive power of his own mathematical formulae. Nevertheless, one of

the most apparent and compelling features of the l kay is the rhetorical and argumentative

conviction behind its theory, though far more space is devoted in the 1798 version to

criticising the rhetorical flaws of other population theories than to the evidence supporting

the Malthusian formula. Malthus' main disputant in this period, Wfim Godwin, also

admits that the existence of beggars challenges the theoretical consistency of any

speculative science. In the third of the economic essays in fie Enquirer (1 797)' Godwin

recalls his many encounters with those in due need, and reflects that neither utilitarian

abandonment nor sentimental identification will redly satisfy material need and moral

ideals. These reflections focus on how the sight of vagrancy disturbs the comprehensivity

of rational conclusions. "Nothing is more suspicious7" he writes, "than a system of

conduct, which, forming itself inflexibly on general rules, refbses to take the impression,

and yield to the dictates or circumstances as they may arise ... the case of the man who

240

demands my charity in the streets, is often of the most pressing nature, and is therefore no

proper field for experimentsy7 (cited in Reiman 73).

Like Wealth of Nolionr, Godwin's major philosophical work of the period, An

Enquiry Concerning Politiwi J i c e (1793), is only tangentially concerned with poverty

and mendicity. Malthus virulently attacked Godwin's thesis of the perfectibility of man in

PoliticalJurrie. Even a completely just rational utilitarianism would always have to

contend with the vast numbers of people in the world prepared to seek decidedly irrational

actions to alleviate their hunger. In ZXe Preltrde, Wordsworth criticizes the Godwin circle

in which he moved in the mid4 790s for "speaking more in charity" rather than doing

anything to solve real problems of over-population, hunger, and violence (1 805 lO:8 14).

Indeed, Wordsworth's association of Godwin's extreme rationalism with rhetoric and

language throughout his account of it in The Prelucie points to Godwin's own

preoccupation with language and its economic significance in Political Justice. For

instance, Godwin's belief in the perfectibility of the human race hinges on the idea that

language, the means of expressing our needs and excitations, can be gradually refined to

proportion those demands and crises to what is reasonably necessary to fulfill or correct

them (1 57-58). The end of the historical "labyrinth" (160), fkom "comparison" to

"imperfect abstraction" and fiom speech to alphabetical and hieroglyphic forms of writing,

is abstraction: the identification of certain necessary material and ethical principles.

Godwin agrees with the Lockean injunction against innate ideas, but believes the mind is a

conglomerate of powers, a vigilant attention to which will lead to the amassing of proper

standards. All this implies that there is a trajectory to acquisition. Gain and accumulation

operate according to a temporal process. But this process is based on a mode of linguistic

action (the cry of desire, the principles of mind) which already fbnctions prior to

acquisition.

This is a serious problem for Godwin, for his allegiance in PoZitimZ Jusrice to the

idea that rational necessity is manifest in logical truth implies that language is only the

associative vehicle for acquisition, and not its mode of existence. Godwin's chapter, "Of

Promises," can be shown to exemplify the perfonnativity of verbal obligation, even though

its intent is to prove that promises contradict the bdamental justice of the nec~ssary

truths which language describes.'' Godwin promotes a constative theory of language: the

purpose of communication is to signify and clarify thoi which is immediately beneficial to

myself and my neighbours. Any institutionillized obligation to act over and above this

utilitarian principle is a distracting and arbitrary imposition: "[promises] depose us, as to

the particular to which they relate, fiom the use of our own understanding; they call off

our attention f?om the direct tendencies of our conduct, and fix it upon a merely local and

precarious consideration7' (222). Promises are admittedly usell on occasion, but only

when "the declaration of intention is made by me, for the express purpose of serving as a

ground of expectation to my neighbour respecting my fbture conducty' can the promise be

ailowable (223). This prescription of the form of allowable promises resembles, for

instance, Searle's sincerity condition, and proves that Godwin understood that even the

most rational and explicit intentions demand a communicative, verbal constitution.

Godwin does not wish to deny the existence of promises; he only atIirms that they are of

secondary ethical importance to the dictates of reason and the demands of public utility.

Yet, it is the very condition of engagement through a signified manifestation of a future

expectation that renders the promise so disarming to Godwin's constative understanding

of the relation between language and conduct. Promises represent, as de Man argues, the

temporal condition of understanding as the attempt to bind possibility to a signifying

hnction which makes systems of obligation and relationality possible in the first place.

" For extensive discussions of Godwin's political theory from the point of view of speech-act theory, see Ballbur 227-34 and Esterhammer, Romuntic Per fmaale , chapter 7.

242

Instead of dismissing institutionality from his system of self-governance, Godwin's

allegiance to the "decree" of rational law and necessity indicate the perfonnative impulse

latent within his own politically motivated distrust.

Godwin thus tries to exclude the materiality of the event of uttering a promise

while he insists on the inviolability of the rational obligations and necessary institutions

which he posits in the place of these localized contracts. Godwin's examples of this

cunditionality are, sipficantly, forms of wages. It is u n l a d and immoral not to be paid

a sum contracted once the work has been completed. But although personal economic

independence is essential to the survival of the individual, and thus the morality of any

social system, that personal wealth remains for Godwin basically contingent:

Property is sacred: there is but one way in which duty requires the

possessor to dispose of it, but I may not forcibly interfere, and dispose of it

in the best way in his stead. This is the ordinary law of property, as derived

fkom the principles of morality. But there are cases that supersede this law.

The principle that attributes to every man the disposal of his property, as

well as that distributes to every man his sphere of discretion, derives its

force in both instances fiom the consideration that a greater sum of

happiness will result £?om its observance than its &gement. Wherever

therefore the contraq to this is clearly the case, there the force of the

principle is suspended. What shall prevent me from taking by force from

my neighbow's store, if the alternative be that I must otherwise perish with

hunger? What shall prevent me fiom supplying the distress ofmy

neighbour from property that, strictly speaking, is not my own, if the

emergence be terrible, and will not admit of delay? Nothing; unless is be

the punishment that is reserved for such conduct in some instances; since it

is no more fitting that I should bring myself calamity and death than that I

243

should suffer them to f d upon another. (225)

Godwin insists that the sanctity of property is only inviolable to the point that it does not

conflict with the greater motivation of necessity. What makes Godwin's treatise

compelling for an understanding of the place of linguistic performance in political

economy is his awareness that the "principles" of property relations "are calculated to set

in a clearer light than they have often been exhibited the cases that authorize the violation

of promises." But it is in his defence of the relative violability of promises that Godwin

points to the contingency of his constative system. For the inviolability of absolute utility

is based on a general standard of hman conduct which can only be established through an

estimation offuure human necessity, and specificalIy Godwin's estimation. "The

adherence to promises, therefore, as well as their employment in the first instance, must be

decided by the general criterion, and maintained only so fw as, upon a comprehensive

view, it shall be found productive of a balance of happiness" (227). The profound

implication of this passage is that it excuses both Godwin and his readers fkom the

responsibility of believing that their constant vigilance over what is right or just has any

direct bearing on the object of their own speculation.

While Godwin's direct consideration of promises is limited to one chapter, his

anxiety over performativity, and his attempt to remove himself and his readers from the

liability of discursive implication, continues into the body of Political Justice. When he

comes to consider economic questions of labour, property rights, and sigmficantiy,

poverty and population growth, he has already anticipated his readers' distrust of any

legislated or institutionalized version of these processes, and posits in their place-or rather

promises--systems of fair utilitarian equilibrium fiee fiom the seductive taint of selfishness

which the Enlightenment economists considered to be the Mcrum of the social contract.

L i e Smith, Malthus, and Burke, Godwin blames the apparent hopelessness of the poor on

the imbalances in the system of poor relief. There are many more people in need of relief

than could be supported by the funds the British government was willing to spend on

them; Godwin comments that this imbalance leads to seething discontentment along those

who need relief but who do not receive it: "A perpetual struggle," he contends, ''with the

evils of poverty, if fiequedtiy ineffectual, must necessarily render many of the sufferers

desperate" (90). The struggle is not simply with hunger and homelessness, but with the

very institutions intended to deviate them. Furthermore, since government charity comes

f?om the franchised classes, whose pretensions and diversions-not to mention the political

and economic institutions which support the circulation of luxury commodities-are on

constant display, the poor are forced to recognize their place outside this system: "it is a

bitter aggravation of their own calamity to have the privileges of others forced on their

observation, and, while they are perpetually and vainly endeavouring to secure for

themselves and their families the poorest conveniences, to find others revelling in the h i t

of their labour. This aggravation is assiduously administered to them under most of the

political establishments at present in existence" (9 1). Ultimately, Godwin encourages a

complete reform of social attitudes so that poor relief will simply become unnecessary.

Yet, Godwin also recommends that the poor man "compose himself in philosophic

indifference," but admits that such an attitude is difficult because the "envy" and

"spectacle" of his neighbow will always incorporate him into a competitive view of

economic satisfaction. Godwin is aware of the presence of certain unproductive elements

within the economic system which it tends to incorporate in an effort to make them

disappear. What he does not understand at this stage is his own dependence on the

promise of truth, necessity, and perfectibility in his own insistent rhetoric. For Godwin,

immediate acquisitions of property or conventions of language use are always ethically

secondary to the greater "law" of general distribution. Thus, as with Smith, Godwin's

distrust of human institutions intended to regulate or legislate human labour according to

the demands of immediate circumstances (such as "government") is itself subtended by his

245

belief in the law which "the nature of things7' has already "decreed": the law of general

necessity rather than individual want.

Burke and Godwin sit at opposite ends of the debate over the nature of the

performative in this period. And yet, their economic application of such concepts as the

promise and the decree suggest that they both believed in the existence of a utilitarian "ur-

~ontract'~ which will take care of society as long as society takes care of it. The poor,

however, do not quite fit this equilibrium because they sit on the border, so to spe& of its

exclusivity. When Wordsworth comes to write of the poor, he is far more aware of the

implications of their material condition for the epistemology which tries to class@ or

incorporate them into economic systems of labour, exchange, and necessity. On the one

hand, Rivers' devotion to his own intellectual powers is thoroughly Godwinian, while the

sympathetic aspects of Mortimer's and Herbert's humane "honour" are characteristically

Burkean. At the same time, the play holds the institutional devotions of Mortimer and

Herbert suspect-if not in contempt--just as Godwin had blamed the continuation of

poverty on the social and fashionable pretensions of those who distributed charity. It is

possible to step back f?om the terms of the debate, however, to suggest that poverty for

both Burke and Godwin exists only in relation to a system of property accumulation which

at the same time fails to recognize the discrete rhetorical and verbally material foundation

of that system, such that the poverty which these economists try to correct is, for

Wordsworth at least, an impression of the material contingency of linguistic performance

which these same economists try to excuse. In what follows I want to examine the way

Wordsworth dramatizes this conundrum in the dramaturgy of The Bor&rers.

Deids: Managing the Economic Skene

The disturbing combination of vacuity and materialify in Wordsworth's

dramatizations of poverty might be said to be the ' ~acGUfEn" of his play. None of the

characters is really poor, but the condition of utter abandonment which is associated

throughout the play with hunger and destitution represents their obsession, which is thus

also an obsession with something which by their own train ofthought cannot be there. In

what remains of this chapter I want to suggest that this thematic MacGu3i.n is rendered

palpable in the experience of seeing Tihe Bor&rers, or rather, since it is such a verbose

play, of hearing it. Poverty in The Bor&rers also signals the poverty, the incapacity or

unproductivity, of the language of the economics which tries to systematize it. The active

verbal management of this economic system, both internal to its distributive logic and

external to its performative appearance on stage, constitutes the regulative conditions of

utility and productivity its seeks to elaborate. By staging this regdative effort as theatre,

Wordsworth underscores its seminal unproductivity.

Wordsworth's verbal dramaturgy converges with the materiality of linguistic

performance at a point of elementary syntax: deixis. Deictics include demonstrative

pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs, this, that, here, there, now, then, personal pronouns, I.

you, we, me, possessive adjectives my, yours, and certain tenses and numbers of verbs. In

traditional logic, deictics distinguish abstract reasoning, which can only be proven

indirectly through names and symbols, &om material facts, which can be proven directly

simply by pointing to them. Commonly used to organize objects into the temporal and

spatial arrangements of and relations which constitute social reality, deictics posit the

relevance or meaning of the thing or experience in relation to something else, usually by

"pointing to" or "indicating" (the meanings of the Greek root of deixis, deikmrmi, "to

show") objects or people.19 Linguistic performance is an action done in language by

someone in order for it to be a social fact that that person has promised, or bequeathed, or

l9 The clearest semantic definition of the hnction of deixis is John Lyons' : "the location and identification of persons, objects, events, processes, and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatiotemporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance" (cited in Garner 124).

commanded. Roman Jakobson's synonym for deictics, "shifters," underscores the fact

that their enunciation is a transformational act (388). Because of this active dimension,

shifters have special si@cance in theatre studies. As Elam suggests, shifters on stage

demarcate characters as persons in relation to others, these and those, i s and yous; they

also render dramatic personification meanin@ to the here and now of the performance.

Shiflers generate meaningfid ideas for an audience out of the social relations arranged

temporally and spatially between objects and characters on stage. The stage ceases to be

simply a pretend space and becomes a hypothetical world. Only as a result of such a

transformation can rnise en sc2ne be understood by an audience as a symbolic unity rather

than simply a collection of properties (Semiotics 73).

TestifLing to Wordsworth's theatrical sense, most of the important scenes in The

Borukrers hinge on the deictical organization of characters, what he called in 1843, "the

position in which the persons in the Drama stood relatively to each other" (814). A

passage fiom early in the play illustrates this deictical "stage" management. Herbert and

Matilda appear for the first time at the end of their long walk through the heath. Herbert

is weary, and Matilda, regretting that they did not stop at a small hut she spied along the

way, encourages her father to rest:

That staff of yours, I could almost have heart

To fling't away fiorn you; you make no use

Of me, or of my strength; come, let me fed

That you do press upon me. There.- Indeed,

You are quite exhausted. -- Here is a green bank,

Let us repose a little. [He sits dawn. (1.1.97- 103)

Matilda's directives highlight how spatialidng deictical utterances transform social

relations. The opening clause announces Herbert's dependence on the staff. By

substituting her strength for the s t a Matilda encourages Herbert to transfer this

248

dependence on her. The single-word sentence, 'There," points to the t r ader of weight a s

it occurs and announces that the transfer is satisfacorily complete. Matilda can now

speak for both of them: she pronounces her father's exhaustion, directs them to the "green

banlg" and commands that they rest?

The relationship between Herbert and Uatilda established in this deictical exchange

is subtly economic. Herbert owns his &, substituting herself for the staff , Matitda in

effect gives herselfover to Herbert's ownership. She becomes, as she says, an item of

'bse"; indeed, she presents herself as "no use" to him without subordinating herself to his

possession. However, by the same act, he becomes dependent on her, as he was formerly

dependent on the staff. Thus, while Matilda nominates herself as his property, his slave in

effect, she also becomes his master. First she threatens to remove the staff and 'Ving't

away," and then she directs him, posits him deictically, as the object of her enunciated

intention. Wordsworth's dramatization of this incident shows that the determining factor

of possession, and its inter-human counterpart, obligation, is verbal action. By organizing

their social dynamic around their declarations to each other, father and daughter give the

impression that their power relationship is fluid. Matilda and Herbert are both master and

slave, implying that their relationship is dialectical, competitive, but at the same mutually

affirming.

Werbert" and "'Matilda" do not s i m abstract concepts or personality types, and

are not experienced as such in this moment. Rather they emct subjectivity as a dialogical

event. As Benveniste suggests, dialecticat fluidity registers the subject's "consciousness of

The theatrid importance of these deictics is evident in the fact that in revising this passage, Wordsworth wnflated the final sentence into ""Let us rest awhile/ On this green bank." In the theatre, the bank would have to be pointed to in order to be registered as something other than just a place on the stage or a prop. The stage directions are not in ~ordsworth's hand, and were probably added by one of his fair copyists when the manuscript was being prepared for submission to the theatres. I have followed Osbom's editorial procedure in citing the directions. See 41.

249

self" corning into existence exclusively in relation to other people: "I use I only when I am

speaking to someone who will be ayou in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that

is constitutive ofperson, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the

one who in his turn designates himself as r' (224-5). For Habermas, this discursive action

has direct politid significance. In negotiating the demarcated significance of one

another's positions in a communicative situation, speakers and hearers wmplementady

strive for mutual understanding in tandem with arguments for the significance of other

meaningfirlly designated entities. Deictics thus realize the extent to which subjects can be

identified as "free" though they obey, in a Kantian sense, a system of categorical norms.

The importance of the opening Herbert-Matilda scene is not simply that it stages an ideal

economy of familial affection and love, tempered by individual conviction (as figured, for

instance, in Hume's Treatise) but that it also intensifies the deictical basis for those

sentimental economic relations. Tibe Borderers participates in the emerging understanding

of economic reality as a manifestation of mental propensities embodied in preference,

choice, and estimation and balanced against comprehended needs: the emergence, that is,

of the classical economic mode1 of the viability of exchange value governed by perceived

utility. However, The Borakrers also dramatizes the intellectual conundrum that the

market or the public sphere remains a product of a theoretical act. Romantic economics

extends this difficulty by showing that exchange is not only an aspect of social relations

but also a product of performative enunciation.

Wordsworth's use of deixis corresponds to its specific point of interest for many

semioticians. Though not concerned with performativity as such, Jakobson classifies

shifiers as words for which the arbitrary, symbolic association of signifier to signified (the

verbal "code") pertsins only "in existential relation to the object it represents" at the

moment it refers, or points, to that object (the "message"). Thus, the sign of a personal

pronoun exists in differential relation to others, I as opposed to you or me. But there is no

referential object outside of the immediate deictical articulation of the indexical relation.

As Jakobson states, "the general meaning of a shifter cannot be dehed without a

reference to the message7' (388). On the one hand, shifters designate meanings and

significance to other words and objects which, no matter how contested those meanings

are, are still posited as meaningfbl in the here and now. On the other hand, shifiers

themselves have no meaning other than their position within the semantic structure of the

utterance. I am I when I say I, but I am you when you refer to me. Xhis desk is my desk

now, but I cannot assume that any desk is my desk whenever I refer to a desk as "this

desk." Shifters not only register the fluidity of meanings from agent to agent, but also

demonstrate that the reason for this fluidity is the non-referential existence of these active

words in the first place, which jeopardizes the viability of the assumption that acts of

speech are necessarily effective in the larger perlocutionary sense, even if they achieve

illocutionary felicity in a speech situation. Habermas agrees that the process of

demarcating subjectivity within a fluid field of mutual understanding involves the exclusion

of "the medium of language itself" (Evolution 66).

Austin's interest in the phenomenon of ordinary language hinges on exactly the

contingency of these kinds of managerial designations, though he never discusses deixis

itself Wittgenstein, however, makes the troublesome non-referentiality of deictics a

central element of his critique of philosophical reasoning:

It is quite true that, in giving an ostensive definition for instance, we

often point to the object named and say the name. And similarly, in giving

an ostensive definition for instance, we say the word "this" while pointing

to a thing. And also the word "this" and a name often occupy the same

position in a sentence. But it is precisely characteristic of a name that it is

defined by means of the demonstrative expression "That is N" (or "That is

called 'N"'). But do we also give the definitions: 'That is called 'this"', or

25 1

"This is d e d 'this"'?

This is connected with the conception of naming as, so to speak, an

occult process. Naming appears as a queer comexion of a word with an

object. - And you really get such a queer co~exion when the philosopher

tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an

object in fiont of him and repeating a name or even the word "this"

innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes

on holidqy. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable

act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object. And we can also say the

word ''this" to the object, as it were &ess the object as "this" - a queer

use of this word, which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy. ($38)

W~ttgenstein's philosopher is rnarvellously histrionic. We see the philosopher engaged in a

pleasurable "holiday" ritual, such as a baptism, by which a material object is classified

according to some accessible general meaning or law, but which classification is itselfa

repetition, an iteration, as Derrida calls it in his critique of Austin The philosopher here

resembles the bourgeois economist who "celebrates" the division of labour in Marx's

Cqital. But Wittgenstein's philosopher is more farcically repetitive and self-reflexively

meaningless in a specifically linguistic way, which Wittgenstein underscores by the circular

deicticd rubric, "this is called this." To posit, even to imagine, I as an economic agent in a

particular socio-economic relation is to participate in the 'lnhappy" contingent relation of

Uocutionary force to periocutionary effect intrinsic to the experience of exchange, as

Smith does, for instance when he writes in Wealth of Nations: "Whoever offers to another

a bargain of any kind offers to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this

which you want, is the meaning of every such offer" (1.2; emphasis added) By this Smith

refers back to the notion that economic exchange depends on an appeal to the "self-

interest" of another agent; but, as we have seen, Smith does not realize the self-referential

252

ambiguity of "I" and to his own rhetorical situation as an economist. In other

words, economic theory averdeternines the subject as the motivational force behind

exchange by positing it within the relational setting the theory itself deicticdy prescribes.

In Wordsworth's play, Matilda's requests and commands to her fde r , even the simple

utterance "there," repeat both the physical and symbolic traasfer of Herbert's weight onto

her, rendering it at once meaningfbl and overdetermined.

Such moments register within an act of signification the materiality of the speech

act. This materiality marks the complicating economic significance of deictical non-

referentiality. Deictics "perish in the instant of performance," as Smith said: they are

unproductive; yet, they constitute the force internal to philosophy itself which compels

economic activity. Deictics mark the condition of "supererogation," common to language,

subjectivity, and economics which Lamb indentifies in his reading of Hamlet and the

irreducible materiality of speech which Austin at first accounts for negatively by its

potential to go hombly wrong, and then as the force of a word to perform an act without

ensuring its completion. As Felman contends this material unproductivity is the pleasure

of language allowing us to promise without holding to our promises: this certainly recalls

the comic joie de vivre of The School for Scanubl. But in The Borderers this facet of

deixis painfUlly registers the phenomenal limit of pragmatic attempts to organize social

behaviour into duties and obligations. In the context of the Herbert-Matilda "pre-plot"-

the narrative of their life together which Rivers interprets as a tale of incest to inspire

Mortimer's vengeance-the introduction of this melancholy dynamic elucidates the

significance of the Herbert-Matilda scenes for the idea of the forgotten materiality of

poverty which Wordsworth traces in his play. Herbert's abdication constitutes a wiull

self-negation of authority, while Herbert's manipulative narration indicates that this is

exactly the opposite of his intention with regards to his family. It is therefore interesting

to note how Wordsworth manifests this self-usurpation in the deictical structure of the

253

narrative iW Herbert's narrative of the loss of Matilda's mother and the bond it created

between him and his daughter recounts a disrupted family romaace:

HERBERT. Thy mother too-scarce had I gained the door-

I caught her voice, she threw herself upon me,

I felt thy infftnt brother in her arms'

She saw my blasted face-a tide of soldiers

That instant rushed between us, and I heard

Her last death-shriek, distinct among a thousand.

Matilda Nay, father, stop not, let me hear it all;

'Twill do me good

HERBERT Dear daughter, dearest love - For my old age it doth remain with thee

To make it what thou wilt.-Thou hast been told

That when, on ow return &om Palestine,

I found that my domains had been usurped,

I took thee in my arms, and we began

Our wanderings together. (1.1.150-66)

Herbert's account of the rescue conflates, through its deictical intensity, the clasping of

the Antioch scene with the reinstatement of the power structure in the retelling itself

Mother and brother belong to Matilda ("thy mother.. . thy infant brother"), as if Herbert's

heroism in the fire registers an obligation to her as a woman now, despite the fact that she

was only an infant at the time of the fire. The subtle repetition of the visual image of the

babe in arms fbrther decentres the nexus of familial roles and obligations which make up

the pathos of the narrative itseE since Matilda's obligation to her father for rescuing her

from the fire is thrown completely out of kilter by the fact that she has become his

surrogate wife. The "stick" scene seems to reverse the trajectory of obligation in

254

Herbert's narrative and correct the corruption to a regulated sense of domestic

productivity which that narrative indicates. I . nominating herself as an object of use,

Matilda associates her indexical status as "me," that is, a shifting, transforming self-

identification, with the exchange situation of 4'that" for "me" and thus the supposedly

wnstative category of use-value. But there is assuredly an erotic undercurrent to

Matilda's already overdetermined but climactic exclamations: "come, let me fed That you

do press upon me.-There. Indeed/ You are quite exhausted." Certainly, there is no

suggestion that Matilda m e m to encourage a sexual advance or that her words somehow

"symbolize" her desire for her father. My point is that Matilda's slippery deixis manifests

a disruption in the perfonnative efficacy of her words which fiom a meta-dramatic

perspective participates in the potential disruption to the social and economic viability of

the family unit.

Herbert's and Matilda's dialogues are melancholy because they enact the constant

struggle to create some cogent level of social stability through a verbal confrontation with

death and fear, a codiontation which is accentuated and deferred by the contingencies of

language understood as a material act. In Herbert's narrative, this verbal unproductivity is

fiuther symbolized by "the tide of soldiers" who rush between Herbert and his wife in their

last embrace. The symbolic importance of the "tide of soldiers" is not immediately evident.

Interestingly, the metaphor doesn't quite work: the immediately annihilative power of the

soldiers is clarified through a benign metaphor of the erosive power of the sea. In a

similar way, the incestuousness of Herbert's love for his daughter and the connection

between the recollection of the Crusades and the economic context of the whole play are

not immediately apparent. If anything, these connections are umikraletemined. But that

underdetermination is part of Wordsworth's point concerning the relation between

language as a presumed mode of reference and as an ultimately unproductive, self-

consuming, act. The tide of soldiers registers a disruption of meaning: their violence is

~e~reflexive, since Herbert too was part of a "tide of soldiers" who fought uselessly as

part of the elaborate but fictitious scheme to rescue the Holy Land. fiom this

metadramatic perspective, the narrative signals a recognition of its internal non-meaning,

or unproductivity, which also applies to the very language of Herbert's narrative, hiding its

non-m&g by assuming self-substantiation.

Wordsworth builds his mise en &ne around these moments of ~e~reflexive

ambivalences of reference and syntax in the structure of the dialogue. Parker and Liu are

right to regard Herbert's tale as a kind of spot of time, the thematic implications of which

are echoed throughout the play. Twice in his lengthy disclosure to Mortimer of why he

cumpelled the young brigand to murder, Rivers mentions a connection to Syria, recalling

the setting of Herbert's narrative, the city of Antioch. Rivers' original downfall, his

betrayal by his fellow shipmates in the "foul conspiracy" to abandon the captain occurred

as he "embarked for Syria" (4.2.8-9). After the captain is left alive on a desolate island-

rock, and Rivers is driven mad with remorse and despair, he is released fiom his "retreat"

by a %esh tide ofcrusaders" (99-100) who, with him, "drove to Syria" (127). Toward

the end of the play, after Mortimer has confessed to Matilda his own abandonment of

Herbert, Rivers cajoles him into another crusade: 'Zet us to Syria/ This is a paltry field for

enterprise" (5.3.239-40). In the 1842 version, this last "Syria" becomes "Palestine," most

likely to strengthen the parallel between Rivers and the "tide of Crusaders" of Herbert's

frightful tale and to downplay the parallel between Rivers and Herbert himself But in the

earlier 1797 version, that parallel is seK-evident. Reading the tide of soldiers as a figure

for the linguistic materiality appearing and re-appearing in Herbert's tale and indicating at

once its iUocutionary power and its perlocutionary impotence, Rivers' direct association

with the tide of soldiers indicates that such interruptions are very much Wordsworth's

main interest in the composition of his tragedy.

With such parallels in mind, it is not surprising to see Rivers too mastering the

256

control of meaning through the cunning use of debis. When he speaks to Herbert, in the

guise of his %end," Rivers demonstrates exactly the same kind of seIfaeating

economizing that Herbert and Matilda manifest in their relations to one another: "that

place" he says to the old man at the gates ofthe dungeon where he is to be killed, "When

the tempestuous wind first drove us thither,/ Felt warm as a wren's nest.-My good old

brother/ You had better step in again" (2.3.139-41). This is an innocuous statement, but

dramatically clever since it forces Rivers to lead Herbert toward the threshold of his own

death while claiming, ironically, that it is the border of his deliverance, and thus repeats the

sign5cant threshold in Antioch where Herbert had abandoned his wife and son. Derxls

also plays an important part in the debates between Mortimer and Rivers over the justice

of murdering Herbert; importantly, these deictical moments not only restage yet another

scene of verbal contestation but also combine with sigruficantly subject-determining

speech acts:

MORTIMER The blind man lying in that dungeon is alive.

M R S . Then curse me, if ever in camp or field, I obey an order of yours

again-I will proclaim you, and before the whole body--they shall

hear it all.--You a protector of humanity! an avenger of innocence!

MORTIMER 'Twas dark, dark as hell.-yet I saw him-I tell thee I saw

him, his face towards me-the very looks of Matilda sent there by

some fiend to baffle me.-It put me to my prayers-I cast my eyes

upwards, and through a crevice in the roof I beheld a star twinkling

over my head, and by the Living God, I could not do it- [Sinkr

against the scene exhausted.]

RIVERS (sfier some time). Now may I perish if this be not joy to me.

A meaner spirit would be overwhelmed.

. (turns to him) My dear Mortimer,

257

Those words were rashly spoken-I would recall them:

I feel my error.-Shedding human blood,

It is a serious thing-

MORTIMER. Not I alone--

Thou, too, art deep in guilt.

RPVERS. W e have indeed

Been most presumptuous.-There is guilt in this,

Else could so strong a mind have ever known

These strange idkmities? 'Tis plain that heaven

Has marked out this foul wretch as one whose crimes

Must never come before a mortal judgement seat

Or be chastized by mortal instruments-

MORTIMER A thought that's worth a thousand worlds! 'Tis past,

And I am saved fiom tortures

To which the agonies of hell are mercy. (2.3.283-307)

What is missing firom these proclamations and descriptions is some sense of what is

actually being described, even though the diction itself draws attention to their

performative and, subsidiarily, deictical basis. Wlth telling sarcasm, Rivers tells Mortimer

to curse him, conditionally, ifhe ever obeys him again, and then can only disclaim against

his captain by ironically declaring what he once was. Parallelling the circular self-

consciousness of Rivers's semi-curse, Mortimer says he sees Herbert through the dark, but

what he sees is not Herbert, but some entity which "puts" him "'to his prayers," that is,

which defines for him his feelings of psychological resignation and subse~ence.

Mortimer no longer looks at the power, which would imply some kind of mutual

recognition, but away from it, and upwards. Rivers then, very cleverly, shifts Mortimer's

feelings of guilt away %om him and himself and onto "this"-that is the idea of Herbert as

258

the target of vengeance which heaven has "marked"-replaying the look which forced

Mortimer's guilt in the first place to be turned back on itself The dialogue in this way

figures the social relationality which it at the same time exposes as founded on the

melancholia of deixis.

Wordsworth's use of deixis thus replays the cycle of rhetorical self-justification

apparent in contemporary economic attitudes toward poverty. This is significantly

apparent in Mortimer's reasoning behind the decision to abandon Herbert on the heath:

Look there! he prays!

The name of daughter in his mouth, he prays!

W~th nerves so steady that the very flies

Sit undisturbed upon his stdF-Innocent!

If he were innocent--then he wouId tremble

And be disturbed as I am--It might be proved,

My eyes are weak-there is a judge above-

It dawns on me-I see the end for which

An arm invisibIe hath led me hither. -

He heard a voice-a shepherd's lad came

And was his guide-if once-why not again?

And in this desert? If never, then is he damned

Beyond a madman's dream!-Here will I leave him,

Here where no foot of man is found, no ear

Can hear his cries--it is a f e d 1 ordeal!

But God is everywhere.

Here (Iwking round) cold and hunger! Pain is of the heart.

And what are the throes of bodily suffering

If they can waken one pang of remorse? (3.3.1 15-33)

259

Herbert's innocence is attributed to him by Mortimer's indexical gesture ("Look there!"),

and then refbted by Modmer's reversing construction of his own anxiety in comparison

with that idea of faithfirl resignation. The sequence of ambivalent assertions, "It might be

proved.. . there is a judge ... it dawns on me ..." testifies to an unseen and unveritied

standard of judgement or value. Mortimer's claim that Herbert is guided through life by an

"invisible arm," is surely a subtle reference to Smith's invisible hand. As an excuse for his

own actions, however, that reference is complicated by the recurrent, desperate image of

the outstretched hand. That such a power might be in some mysterious way systematic is

Mortimer's hope, since it means that Herbert will be saved by charity, and Mortimer will

be free of any crime, while teaching Herbert the very lesson of resignation which Mortimer

also points to in him. In abandoning Herbert to his "bodily suffering," for the sake of

remorse, Mortimer neglects the scrip of food. At the same time, in justifying his own

verbal action in coming to that conclusion by bearing supposed witness to a ubiquitous

deity, Mortimer abjects the material performative substratum of that rationale. At the

centre of the play, Wordsworth ironically brings together both his economic and his

linguistic arguments.

Economies of Enjoyment in the Theatre of the 1790s

Wordsworth's dramaturgy and its economic significance are built around these

deictical "exchangesy' and, more particularly, the metadramatic (rnis)recognition of

illocutionary contingency in the context of an intended application of illocutionary acts to

the construction of a functioning exchange economy. To see poverty and yet to accept

that it is an exceptional but at the same time negligible aspect of the economy, is to give

credence to a stoical, or even cynical, acceptance of "things as they are" that Zizek calls

"enjoyment." The exposure of this misrecognition represents a radical critique of the

economic debates contemporary with the play and concerning the question of poverty.

Balancing the depiction of misrecognition in the play with the audience's recognition of

that rnisrecognition means that Wordsworth's dramaturgy must isolate its episodes of

aberrative unproductivity within the dramatic context of the play. Deixis, being one of the

most theatrical-in the material seoseelements of syntax, represents one important

incident of this recognized mis-recognition- Just as deixis foregrounds the materiality of

speech, so Wordsworth's dramaturgy is highly conscious of its theatrical context. This

may be in part because in an effort to comprehend and utilize theatrical conventions

effectively, Wordsworth had to bring them fiont and centre.21 The result however, is that

such elements of theatrical performance as a gesture, the use of properties, intertextual

references to other popular plays (primarily to Shakespeare), and popular settings and

images (primarily of the Gothic), also bring to light the materiality of the theatrical act.

21~ordsworth insisted that he was not disappointed with the Covent Garden rejection, though he also admitted somewhat hesitantly after hearing of the great success of Monk Lewis' ghastly Gothic showcase, me Castle Spectre, that hod he "no other method of employing myself, Mr. Lewis's success would have thrown me into despair" (Letters 210). At about the same time, Wordsworth confided to fiends that "he expects a reform to take place in the Stage," after which The Borderers "may be brought forward to great advantagey7 (Letters 197 nl). Coleridge suggested that they publish their tragedies in a single volume; this was abandoned when Joseph Cottle suggested that it would not sell. Subsequently, as a Robert Osborn surmises, Wordsworth may have even resubmitted Be Borderers to Drury-Lane when he returned from Germany in 1799 (Wordsworth, Borderers 6-7). In 1843, commenting on the play for Isabella Fenwick. Wordsworth is still ambivalent about his commercial playwrighting career: "I had no hope nor even a wish (tho' a successll Play would in the then state of my finances have been a most welcome piece of good fortune) that he should accept my performance so that I incurred no disappointment when the piece was judicims2y returned as a not calculated for the stagey' (Wordsworth, Borderers, 8 14). What makes these double gestures so compelling is that they realize the strangely pleasurable experience of expenditure, of giving away, within the apparently utilitarian, systematic, and serious economic processes of supply and demand, contract negotiation, and commodity exchange. They also complicate the image of Wordsworth as a Burkean anti-theatricalist, fightend of the potential of theatre to overwhelm the stability of productive systems of sympathetic understanding. Rather, Wordsworth rebukes of his dramatic effort, even in 1843, make him appear quite theatrical: theatre is a mariifestation of an imaginary ~e~possess ion that cannot attain cohesiveness.

Set against Wordsworth's dramatization of the economics of poverty, then, his theatrical

dramaturgy again attempts to bring to the swfke that which is hidden by the presumed

of economic systems to represent, constatively, the correctable economic truth:

the performative creation of those very systems.

I Revolutionary Properties

From its Hmn[e-&e opening to its Shrnn und D r a g M e , me Borderers

parades its most important literary influences: Shakespeare and Schiller. Critics have

noted for some time that Wordsworth's use of these dramatic precursors is filtered

through their prior adaptation to the English stage and in English dramatic criticism in the

1780s and 90s. Readers of The Bor&rers have developed its intertextual (or inter-

theatrical) references into illuminating readings of the play's thematic complexities and

have arrived at similar conclusions regarding the significance of this intertextuality to those

ascribed (rightly) to the dramatic theory of Lamb and Hazlitt . For instance, Parker

defends his reading of the Herbert pre-plot by outlining the changes that OtheIIo and The

Tempest underwent in the Parisian theatres coincident with Wordsworth's residence in

~rance? Corresponding to Herbert's internal struggle between his desire to retain his

daughter's allegiance and the sub-conscious corruption of that desire, including the

possibility that Herbert is not even Matilda's father-the possibility exploited by Rivers--is

the problematic relationship between Prospero and Miranda developed in the early scenes

of the Tempest and the subtle allusions to Prospero's illegitimacy as a Duke of Milan and

=As a altered by Jean-Franqois Ducis, the revolutionary Orhello features a much diminished Iago and a much more prominent Brabantio, Desdemona's father. The marriage of Desdemona to OtheUo is deferred in this version of the play, so that it becomes a sentimental allegory for divided loyalties, the rivalry of Othello and Brabantio equalling the vicious struggles for power which followed the deposition of Louis XVI in the autumn of 1792. It thus highlights the rivalry between Mortimer and Herbert for Matilda's affecfions, which Parker contends is the countercurrent of the main plot of fie Borderers.

the possibility of his paternity of Caliban ~'Reading Wordsworth's Power" 3 17-22). Most

of the major plot elements, the "rivalry" h e e n Herbert and Moxtimer for Matilda,

Mortimer's questionable social standing and recklessness, and the Gothic setting and

action were inspired by Schiller's Die RCiuber. Mortimer's own struggle between affective

and political bonds, Parker argues, derives fiom the shocking conclusion of Die Rtiuber, in

which the brigand-hero, Karl Moor, kilis his young lover Amelia to prove his self-

proclaimed allegiance to his den of thieves. As read by Henry Mackenzie in his 1788

lecture on new German tragedy' which introduced Die Rduber to English audiences and

inspired Alexander Tytler's translation, read by both Wordsworth and Coleridge, and as a

popularly adapted to the French Revolutionary stage, Moor's dramatic power is wrapped

up in his implacable faith in the sublime power of words and imagination above and

beyond compromises to social custom and decorum, a faith which leads him to

"invent" the final bloody coup de theabe (Tpectacles of Paris" 3 7 1-79). Jacobus has

proposed a similar reading of Mortimer's self-division through its parallels to

Wordsworth's account of the French Revolution in me PreIude, book VII and to its

references to Macbeth ('Where Senators Perform" 354-58). The parricidal thrust of the

main plot of The Borderers undoubtedly recalls Macbeth, especially given the

Revolutionary climate and the deep political anxieties in France and Britain which

followed the execution of Louis XVI. In the crucial dagger scene, Jacobus argues,

Macbeth's hesitating questioning of the ghostly dagger's presence leads to the moment of

reflection in which Duncan's murder can be justified as a fatalistic inevitability. Macbeth's

own words, the carriers of his imaginative reflection, produce the homfLing reality of self-

empowerment, beyond simply ambition, which is his ultimate tragedy .

Parker and Jacobus are right to see in these correspondences a "critique of

revolutionary heroism and the sentimental theater" rooted in "the notion of the hero as the

embodiment of vocal power, of capable speech as the index of moral and political

263

presence" (5pectacIes of Paris" 389). Karl Moor's and Macbeth's, and to a lesser but

still palpable extent, Prospero's and Brabantio's, displays of linguistic energy and

imaginative excess are the result of a "self;d~ision'~ which leaves space for the unleashing

of immediate physical desires (Where Senators Perform" 384). Just as a the iilocutionsry

suggestiveness of deids can posit performance in the world, the immediacy of these

ambitious anti-heroes registers the danger of the very boniliness of theatre itself. What was

needed, it is frequently proposed, was a vehicle of comprehensive containment: a Burkean

sublime to restore contemplative delight at a comfortable aesthetic or signifying distance,

following the terror of verbal power and revolutionary spectacle. For Jacobus,

Wordsworth eventually found this containment in the poetic form of The Prelude itself,

which converts self-usurpation (as similarly experienced in the Alps and at Simplon) into

the remorsell history of a complete, reflective self But we should be careli not to

overlook the theatrical seKconsciousness of The Borderers. Wrapped up in

Wordsworth' s meta-theatrical dramaturgy, the references to earlier stage horrors, with all

their political overtones, ask to be read directly as interruptions of the complacency of

referential containment. Figures like Macbeth or Karl Moor are fightening because not

only do the decisions they make seem to defy moral sense, but also they disobey the

empirical rubric that words signify states of being or intentions and should not, therefore,

be followed willy-nilly without due consideration of the worthiness of those underlying

convictions. The climax of Die Riiuber is a case in point: Moor must choose between his

oath to Amelia and his oath to his band; his oath to the band stipulated (literally) that

nothing would impede his allegiance to them; thus the oath to Amelia must be rendered

void; since the very existence of Amelia herself is the only stipulation of that oath, Amelia

must cease to exist: QED. No frame of reference outside the logic of the words offers

itself, so in Moor's moment of reflection their abstract conclusion must be the right one, a

dangerous problem if one is trying to avoid the problem of "actors"' words and deeds, and

deedwords, always being taken literally. In Tytler's translation, Moor declares "There!"

the second he plunges his sword into Amelia's breast. This deicticd exclamation is

echoed in the first scene of The Borhrers when Matilda substitutes herself for her father's

staff: "Come, let me f e d That you do press upon me. There." The situations are

different, but the logic is the same; each woman is subordinated to the verbal economy

enacted through the very presence of their lovedfather's m t i v e s of subordination.

Sisnificandy, in The Borderers, the deictical unhappiness of MatildaMerbert's mat ive

renders itself immediately, anticipating its tragic collapse. This is not necessarily the case

in Die Rtiuber; its finale was treated as a a triumph of the independent revolutionary will in

1790s Paris. Its powerfully resonant demonstrative, "There! ", however, registers the

political critique of this German intertext. But the success of Die m b e r was also held as

a testimony to the dangerous spread of Revolutionary zeal. And though this success did

not in itself reach England, the equal success of German melodrama on the London stage

at the end of the 1790s was fkther lambasted for encouraging, on the one hand, silly

sentimentality, and on the other, Jacobin sympathy.

The case ofMacbeth is complicated by that fact that unlike Die Riiuber, it was a

standard of the English repertoire in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The dagger

scene was its major set piece, the centre of commentary for critics writing on the play,

reviewers writing on its performances, and acton-notably both Kemble and Siddons-

writing on the effort of performing it." Highlighting the problem of representation as a

the key to questions of human motivation and ambition, the logic of the dagger speech is

the same as the logic of the climax of Die U b e r (most likely because Shakespeare

inspired SchiUer at least as a much as a he did Wordsworth):

a Donohue 253-69 provides an excellent summary of the response to Kemble's and Siddon's performances in.Macbeth. Kemble's essay "in defense of Macbeth" can be found in Vickers ed, Shakepare 6: 430-35. For Siddons' "Remarks on the Character of Lady Macb-' see Burroughs 53-7; Carlson, In the neatre 165; Donkin.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my haad? Come, let me clutch thee:

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as a to sight? Or art thou but

a dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding fiom the h e a t - o p p r d brain?

I see thee yet, in form as pdpable

As this which I now draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going,

And such an instrument 1 was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o'th'other senses,

Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There's no such thing:

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes.

. . . Thou sure and h - s e t earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabouts,

And take the very present horror fiom the time,

Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives;

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

a bell rings.

I go and it is done. The bell invites me. (2.1 -33-62)

Macbeth's hesitation, Iacobus argues, allows the ghostly form of the floating dagger to be

266

filtered through his imagination as a "palpable" but nevertheless "disowned. .. aspectn of

the supernatural, so that Macbeth is no longer responsible for what he does. The speech

suggests, moreover, that the imagination is a process of self-justification also made

possible by the tangible quality of words. Hence, "[w]ords to the heat of deeds too cold

breath @ves." The success of the scene depends on the deictical ambivalence of the well

known query: "Is this a dagger that I see before me?" Pointing to the apparition, the

indexical function of the words hides the fact that it is a creation of the linguistic power of

the "thisn itself, an ambivalence rendered all the more problematic on the late-eighteenth-

century stage because there would have been no visible dagger, just a space. Since, as a

Benveniste proposed, the subject position is defined in dialogical opposition to what it

posits as its other, the I of Macbeth is in this moment created through this encounter with

the dagger. What troubles this formulation is that Macbeth identifies with the entity he

has imagined into existence, so ultimately, the play suggests, Macbeth's self-justification in

the name of destiny is likewise a complete fabrication.

Given this Schillerian pose, why was Macberh allowed to be performed? Because,

as interpreted off stage by Hazlitt and Lamb, and on stage by Kemble and Siddons, this

selfsbjectification was received with what can only be considered a restraining

ambivalence. The "competitive" fluidity of these identities in relation to the facts of other

identities, the dialogical formation of "it" and "I" but also the "real" name of the actor, the

ilIusoriness of stage-props, against their hypothetical existence can be monopolized by

stage performance to register the similarly relational fact of identity itself, subordinated to

an economy of mutual identification and value. Persistent in the acting styles of Kemble

and Siddons was what Donohue labels a ''Romantic" emphasis on the subjective and often

irrational responses of individuals to sudden, unforseen situations. The moment of this

response was a "transition" or "~hif i ."~ The audiences recognized in these actors' quick

transitions of expression, voice, and gesture the epitomizing signs of fimdamental human

struggle: good and evil, ambition and resignation, arnning and merit. Donohue's

archetype for this mode of transitional performance is Garrick's Macbeth, but he shows

how Garrick's dynamic shifts of expression influenced the highly deliberate styles of

Kemble and Siddons, and his analysis explicates exactly the kind of reaction to the part

recorded by Lamb in his "Essay on Shakespeare." Kemble7s Macbeth was primarily noble

in his demeanour, so that the sudden shock of the dagger (along with the cajoling of Lady

Macbeth) asserts a moral complication in Macbeth's self-conception, but not necessarily a

self-creation. The character "Macbeth" is far greater than the sum of his acted parts.

Kemble particularly, but also Ganick and, in the role of Lady Macbeth, Siddons, depicted

the Scottish regicide and his wife as a both ambitious and loyal, both venomous and

remorsefd. Siddons effectively subordinated Lady Macbeth's transitions £tom "fiagile"

femininity to murderous and erotic passion to an overall interpretation of sympathetic

human response. What the Romantic critics appreciate (a position Siddons herself seems

to have expressed) is that Lady Macbeth characterizes not the material power of desire,

but a dialectic of desire and remorse which was taken to be the archetypal sensation of

"genius." The deictical transition of the dagger scene sublimates the basically needless

violence of the murder into the moral ambivalence of the whole play. This ambiguous

24 Donohue suggests that Garrick first developed the moment of facial, physical, and psychological transition as a revision of the declamation styles of the period before him. Garrick would suddenly stop on a word and change his facial expression completely before continuing the scene. The reviewers, Donohue shows, were impressed, and Garrick's transitional style was held as the model of natural acting. But the technique is deeply studied as the essays on Garrick and the acting manuals based on his style reveal. My reading of Garrick's, Kemble's, and Siddon's style follows Donohue 229-79, particularly his conclusion that the transitional style exemplified the age's fascination with "subjective response" or sudden sympathetic feeling, an attitude of calculated sentiment I associate with the psychology of Smithian economics.

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meaning becomes thereby the perlocutionary effect of the performance. Through the

s p e c t a m h transitions of mien, Macbeth and his wife are horrifyiog but they also impress

on the audience a sympathetic admiration embodied by their worthy faith in each other and

their desire for personal and familial ascendency. In a profoundly sentimental way,

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth provide a locus for the activation of seKreflexive and

impartial spectatorship which regulates, through the understanding of suffering and

remorse, the ethical standards of comunai relations.

My point in labouring this Shakespearean context is that the deicticd interrelation

of props, characters, actors, and audience in the Macbeth of the 1790s is fbndamentally

economic in its significance. The imagined dagger comes to represent the use value of the

dagger, its ascribed qualitative function of a thing as a proven by its hction. The

ascription of use value is the promise of a thing's potential function, which allows it then

to have exchange value. The overtly theatrical status of the dagger--the fact that it is not

there--signifies at the same moment that the value of the dagger-and of the murder--is

illusory. Its use is in fact that product of the situation of the object in the circulation of the

words which define it as usefbl. The dagger scene signals the justification of capital in

ascriptions of use. The horror of the murder and correspondingly the temfylng

ghostliness of the dagger signal the inherent valuelessness of exchange without a genuine

cycle of sanctioned productivity. llte Borderers has no dagger scene. Yet, Macbeth's

perverted identification with the object of the "marshalling7' apparition resonates in

Matilda's substitution of herself for her father's staff analysed in the previous section. The

difference is that neither Matilda nor Herbert are overtly cast as a paragons of a latent, and

ultimately "human" ethical dilemma. Rather, their competitive determination hides a

material energy (incest, lust, vigilantism) which ultimately destroys the fluid system of

relational identity. When the staff returns, that irony is compounded. Having finally

decided to leave Herbert to the "mercy" of circumstance on the heath, Mortimer spies

Matilda's writing on the same staffwhich she had threatened to Wing away":

Thou wilt have many guides ifthou art innocent.

Yea, &om the utmost corners of the world

That woman will come o'er this heath to save thee.

[He pmrses and liwh steudJastly at Herbert's

Ha! what's here! carved by her hand ( r e d upon the st@):

"I am Eyes to the blind saith the Lord,

"He that puts his trust in me shall not fail."

Yes, be it so - repent and be forgiven - God and that staf f are now thy onIy guides.

we leaves him on the he&]

(3.3-146-53)

The staff is layered with symbolic ironies. It stands for Matilda in a way that reverses her

own previous substitution. The inscribed biblical message gives credence to Mortimer's

own rationalization of his abandonment of Herbert. But that codinnation itself is troubled

by the suggestion of the insufkiency of these exchange values: writings, words,

perceptions, even the staff, which the audience knows from the first scene is insufficient to

support Herbert. "I sm the Eyes to the blind" takes on a whole substitutive fragility, the

fhgility, that is, of meaning ascribed to an iteration, when read against that fact that

Mortirner has just betrayed Herbert's trust in him. My point is that the supposed use value

of the dagger and the staff is itself an invention of deictical speech and theatrical effect and

thus comes to represent the nothingness at the heart of that system of justification.

In a sense, the status of these objects as props mirrors the constitutive propriety of

economic rhetoric which has nothing to do with the material condition of that rhetoric,

and the people and world it hopes to reflect. These props serve the same purpose as a the

old man in "Description of a Beggar" and the soldier in 'Discharged Soldier," so it is

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perhaps not surprising that the refication of objects into systems of utility and order is

further apparent in the play's obsession with faces. Throughout the play, faces are

conceived as a signs of essential worth, particularly in conjunction with powem voices.

Thus, for instance7 when Matilda describes M o h e r ' s eloquence ("oh could you hear his

voice!" (1.1.134))' she also exclaims that "D]is f a bespeaks/ a deep and simple

meekness" (1 36-3 7). Having just learned (falsely) that the beggar-woman who has told

him of hlatilda's fate is actually her "real" mother, Mortimer exclaims: "You are MatiIda's

mother?/ Nay, be not terrified - it does me good/ To look upon you" (1 -3.16365). The

value of Mortimer's gaze is not only realized as the product of the "looking," but also,

intermediating that association, the situation of the "look" within a self-justifling

dialogical act of transferring value: looking on you understood as an icon of goodness

does me the same good. This circularity, like Macbeth's tautological association of his

own dagger with its mental image, points to the whofly internal identification of codes and

meanings. When, in the castle ruin, Mortimer cannot kill Herbert, he justifies his inaction

by a sense of passive compulsion attributed to a mysterious external force: "I tell thee I

saw him, his face toward methe very looks of Matilda sent there by some fiend to bafne

me.--It put me to my prayers--I cast my eyes upwards, and through a crevice in the roof I

beheld a star twinkling over my head, and by the living God, I could not do it" (2.3.287-

91). Mortimer's oath here marks exactly the process he wants to say is happening in spite

of him and his agency. To speak the oath is to call into being the verification for the oath

itself, a circular process which is made palpable by Mortimer searching for some source of

identification for Herbert's look: Matilda, "some fiend," the star, "the living God." Over

the course of the play, that force-commonly signalled by Herbert's supposed "goodness"

or more specifically ccbenevolence"--comes to be recognized to be the product of that

which has declared it, detaching thereby the significance of the utterance from its

identification of its own validity from the object it supposedly describes as a valuable. The

271

non-meaning of Herbert's face comes into final ibll view at the very end of the play, when

Mortimer, now at least conscious of his real crime-the crime of abandonment-declares

that ?he Dead have but one face," that fiice' perhaps of their own eminent distinction as a

"object" &om any ascription of meaning.

II Gothic Spectacles

The dynamic importance of stage properties in this play demonstrates

Wordsworth's undervalued dramaturgical sense. Evocative mise en sckne is also vital to

the performative power and thematic sophistication of 7 k Borderen. John Rieder has

shown, the play is Littered with ominous background scenes of social ritual: the wedding in

1.2, the announcement of Herbert's restoration in 2.2, the h e r d which intempts Matilda

and Margaret in 4.3. Wordsworth's "source" for these significant scenic moments is the

conventions of Gothic theatre, specifically its dramatizations of religious and political

rituals. Corresponding to the implications of Wordsworth's attention to the deictical

aspects of dialogue and the adaptation of the performative ambivalences of deixis to

significant gestural action on stage, Wordsworth's interest in the Gothic while composing

me Borderers sterns from its ritual reenactments of the processes by which subjectivity is

constituted socially.2s The virgin is brought before the altar and made a bride and a wife.

The old man is buried and becomes a memory or a model. But in constantly reiterating

the ritualism of these acts of social constitutioq and also in presenting them as violently

oppressive or occasionally comic or nonsensical (or both, as a in Walpole's Castle of

Otrunto), the Gothic also helps to define an emerging concept of subjectivity which is

These conventions mark one of the firmest links between 27ze Borderers and its contemporary dramaturgy. The earliest drafts of me Borderers, included in Osborn's edition of the play, evince the influence of the Gothic on its composition; see, for instance, the Churchyard Scene (Wordsworth, The Bordkrers, 49-53), featuring the burial of an old beggar.

272

defined in opposition to that social constitution. Gothic parodies are common in nte

Borclerers: the narrative complications of Matil&-as-ince~fuouS-dau&ter-and-wife, the

ominous suggestion of "sacrificen following the mock-trial of Herbert by Mortimer's band,

the strange hereal ring of the mother around her dead child as a reported by Rivers and

Mortimer in the first act, a woman whom Mortimer says reminds him of a "skeletal"

Matilda, parodying but also emblematizing the perpetual deferment of his own marriage to

her. Such scenes heighten the sense of doom which haunts the fringes of the ritual acts of

subjective creation. The medieval setting of 17re Borcierers, apart *om the ideological

overtones of its allusions to the Crusades, is a common aspect of a Gothic nostalgia for

some intrinsic subjectivity behind a constitutive forum of violence and oppression, which is

thus also set at a safe historical or fantastical distance. The prisons beneath every Gothic

castle thus come to represent the hidden depth of the subject which is repressed by

attempts to constitute it socially, or, often, verbally. Thus, Rivers and Mortimer tell

Herbert that they have led him to the safety of a castle when in fact they are planning to

murder him in the dungeon of an old ruin. But it is in carving out this depth in which to

torment the subject for what the social forces-that-be consider to be aberrations, usually

sexual in nature--as in the suggestion of incest in the Beggarwoman's tale which so

confounds Mortimer and the band--that the Gothic creates the space in which a concept

like the psyche can be said to have material as a well as a conceptual reality. The

psychological torment of the hero or heroine against the oppressions of the ritual-obsessed

villain is a creation of those same villainous deeds. Hence the emphasis in the Gothic on

doppelgdngers, ghosts, and demons: these are "border" creatures existing in states

between the phenomenal vicariousness of pure forms or psychotic energies on the one

hand and a mirroring of the more homfying aspects of psychological and religious

compulsion (pathology or sin) which the psychological standards of normality and the

273

religious standards of morality seek to eradicate?

The prominence of Gothic themes and conventions in the literature of the 1790s

and the commercial success of the theatre of this period are inseparable. The popularity of

Lewis' The Carte Specae and Reynolds' l k CasrIe as well as the amount of theatrical

revenues re-invested in the manufkture of spectacular and realistic Gothic sets, which

included collapsing bridges and real waterfalls, testifies to the success of the Gothic genre

in London theatres. Kemble's antiquariao interests led to the construction of some of the

most elaborate sets ever conceived. What made the Gothic successll was its novelty and

shock-value; what made it a continued success was the f a that the need to keep it novel

led to the building of ever more fantastic stage effects." Wordsworth himself hints in the

26 Rieder 126-27 suggests that in The Borderers these parodies are charged with "a double meaning": on the one hand they represent foms of communal action; on the other they represent "the morbid repetition" of those foms, undermining their presumed communal efficacy. This reading corresponds to Sedgwick, Coherence 12-28 elaboration of the "coherence" of Gothic conventions, whereby the Gothic seeks to encourage standards of normal behaviour by suppressing those elements of experience which it cannot explain but which constitute its vicarious success. Hogle, "Gothic Ghosts" 285-86 has recently correlated the doubleness of the Gothic with Baudrillard's account of the transition from a "counterfeit" economy, nostalgic for some correspondence between symbols of wealth and real value, and the simulacra of capital, by which value and symbol are synonymous. Hogle contends that the counterfeit returns with the simulacra as an awareness of the fictionality of suppression which the Gothic paradoxically seeks to suppress.

Henderson provides an excellent summation of this ideological reading of the Gothic which corresponds to the dichotomies of Siddons' acting style::

The peculiar "femininity" of the Gothic arises in part as the result of the intersection of gender and economic paradigms; the Gothic expresses a concern with relations, extrinsic signs and indeterminate value-qualities associated with the feminine but also associated with an aspect of market relations (exchange value uncomected to utility) that the capitalist class has continually to repress. Traditional complaints about the Gothic, although usually presented as strictly aesthetic complaints, often reflect impatience with its emphasis on relational value and betray an unconscious recognition of its palpably "bourgeois" character. (56-7)

I '

l8OO P r e h to Lyrical S a l M at his dissatisfaction with this aspect of "theatrical

exhibitions" when he suggests that "the most effective cause7' of the debilitation of active

readerly discrimhation is "the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the

d o r m i t y of their occupations produck a craving for extraordinary incident which the

rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies" (Prose 128). Wordsworth's own

disdaidd comments on the commercial success of ihe Castle Spectre suggest his own

seminally Gothic attitude toward its own vicariousness. Yet that repetition, whether in the

form of spectral doubles or seemingly mindless iteration, serves a purpose; in attracting a

commercial audience by appealing to their desire to be shocked and thrilled, the Gothic

also serves to sustain the idea of an economy of equilibrium and stability, by disdaining

those repetitions as vicarious aberrations.

This double gesture of nostalgia and commercialism in the Gothic is crucial to

understanding the ideological complexities of its contemporary economics. Wordsworth's

play consistently presents these conventions as unsuccessll, as in themselves part of a

theatrical economy that fails. For instance, emblematic of mysterious interpellative power

in the Gothic tradition is "the irregular smnd of a bell" heard at the opening of act N, as

Herbert struggles across the stage: "That bell-if1 have strength-to reach it-oh!/

(Stretching mf his hand)/ This wall of rocks - and the sound never nearer/ Hear me ye

men upon the cliflFs that pray/ To God the father of all mercy - hear me" (4.1.1-4).

Gothic bells are conventionally doubled signs: they mark the impending doom of some

horrirjing appointment, but they also signal potential redemption, a call to prayer, the

sound of hope. The tolling midnight bell in Cinderella is a familiar but exact example:

while it threatens the end of the heroine's venture at the ball by putting her at the mercy of

magical forces beyond her or even her fajr-godmother's control, it also signals the

beginning of her Prince's quest. In B e Bor&rers, that internal typology is reversed.

Herbert deictically interpellates "that bell" into his promise to himself of salvation by what

he imagines is the call to vespers at a monastery. The stage directions indicate that the

bell is supposed to be sounded haphazardly. Robert will later explain that the so-called

"bell" is little more than white noise, the remainder of a "lonesome chapel ... which no one

dare remove/ And when the stormy wind blows o'er the peak/ It rings as ifa human hand

were there7' (5.2.23-26). As Rider points out, the bell is "the best image [in the play] of

the way abandonment and deception are insinuated into the signs of civil society" (127).

The beII is, in other words, a mis-interpellation of sounds and images, repeated or iterated

signs, into illocutionary conventionality by the assignment of meaning to them. It is

imperative that Herbert has not been regarded wholly as a victim in this process; he

deceives himself that the bell is a sign of hope and civility simply by calling it "that bell."

In an earlier scene, Herbert had rebuked the sound of wedding music as "this noise!"

(1.2.37, 57). The irony is palpable: Herbert disdains the joyll exuberance of the wedding

ritual, just as he rebukes the arbitrary power of aristocrats like Lord CWord and King

Henry. And yet, he fails to recognize the theatrical cunning of his '%end" Rivers.

Ironically, in calling the wedding music "this noise," Herbert calls it what it actually is; he

points to the carnivalesque interruption of normal order signalled by these moments of

celebration, while his own directing separation of it from the 'bpeace7' and order he seeks

repeats the very interpellation of noise into harmony, or rather of carnival into the implicit

oppressiveness of social convention.

The significance of the Gothic to the economics of poverty lies in the way the

Gothic creates these absences as absences only to absorb them into a broader conception

of ambiguities and aberrations. The Bor&rers, by contrast, stages these scenes of

abjection as aspects of a process of rationalization. Mortimer's c r u d inaction is itself a

parody of the Burkean virtues he begins the play by embodying, and this too has a

significant Gothic resonance. The mock trial of Herbert at the end of Act 2, for instance,

with its primitive evocation of ritual "sacrifice," has much in common with the trials and

judgements which litter the Gothic. But there is a distinct invocation of a political

circumference for this primitivist circle. The trial opens with Lacy's announcement that

King Henry has "reinstate[dIy' Herbert's lands, f i e r challenging the moral authority of

the band, to which Mortimer replies with his famous observation:

Lacy! We look

But at the surfaces of things, we hear

Of towns in flames, fields ravaged, young and old

Driven out in flocks to want and nakedness,

Then grasp our swords and rush upon a cure

That flatters us, because it asks not thought.

The deeper malady is better hid

The world is poisoned at the heart. (2.3 -33 7-44)

Mortimer's raging cynical declarations, while largely justified in the context of his own

experiences, nevertheless betray an exaggerated ruminative self-consciousness

characteristic of the worst moralizing platitudes of popular fiction and drama. Lacy's

reply, "What mean you?'tuming Mortimer's self-creating truisms back onto their source,

thus articulates the very conundrum which Mortimer seems to face. The cure for the

disease is the disease itself. The way to achieve an end to evil, luxury, and promising, is to

destroy, luxuriate, and promise. At this point, Mortimer catalogues Herbert's crimes;

what finally persuades the band to destroy him for his treatment of his daughter is that "he

should give her up, a woman grown,/ To him who bid the highest in the market/ Of foul

pollution" (36264). Nevertheless, this is exactly the "crime" which Lacy hirnseK in a

contradictory fashion, reveals they are perpetrating both for and against the ideology of

honour and prerogative, represented in the arbitrary power of the king and in their

"magical" acceptance of it: "The genuine owners of such Lands and Baronies1 As in these

long commotions have been seized./ His power is this way tending. It befits us/ To stand

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upon our guard, and with our swords/ Defend the innocent" (333-37). Leave it to Rivers,

of course, to step in and sublimate this conundrum into a tidy, self-justifying package:

"Justice J Admitting no resistance, binds alike/ The feeble and the strong. -- She wants not

herd Her bonds and chains which make the Mighty feeble" (396-99). What Rivers calls,

compellingly, "the voice of Justice" (386) points to the bind of his own abstraction, even

though his call for "justice" is a claim against the abstraction of Christian doctrine.

Poverty itself is also an important conceptual trope in the Gothic. The peasant

stock fkom which the gothic heroine usually comes (as in RadcWeY s Mysteries of

Udobho, for instance) comes to signify a domestic innocence threatened by the

oppressive, sometimes violent, and usually sexual ritualism of the villain-lover. But, as

Henderson further suggests, the female characters of the Gothic tend to emanate a

"theatricality" (56) more characteristicalIy associated with their demonic suitors. This

theatrical energy, figured in the novel as profoundly feminine, opens the way the virtuous

masculine subjective presence (in the form of the hero) can stand opposed to it. In Zke

Bordkrers this defining rescue does not come. Henderson comments that the ambivalent

discovery at the conclusion of most gothic novels that the heroine is actually noble-giving

further credence to the intrinsic value also apparent in the honourable hero- "generally

tends to be 'mechanically' tossed in and anti-climadc," thus embodying '%he tendency of

bourgeois thought towards an empty formalism" (57). In me Borderers this emptiness is

front and centre, while at the same time the tragic reality of its justifiable effectiveness is

critically disturbed. Matilda ends the play being carried off in a fit of torment, having

realized that her lover is also the self-proclaimed murderer of her father simply because, in

a moment of rather barren self-justifjing rationabtion, he forgot to give the old man

back his simple scrip of food. A basic local act of exchange is neglected for the sake of an

elaborate system. And yet Matilda also curses the murderer of her fatheronan

uncharacteristic gesture for a Gothic heroine, though eminently theatrical-as Mortirner

278

looks on in agreement, only to procIaim himself the vev object which she curses. If the

key to the success of the Gothic is suspense and ilfilment, then The Borderers effectively

cheats its audience out of the satisfaction. In suspending its own suspense, the play also

offers a criticism of the ideological completion which the Gothic embodies.

IXI Wordsworth and 2 ' k Gamester

The pleasures of seeing and speaking become intertwined under the joint

determining power of what we should call their value-an ascription which is itself

performatively enacted by the voice which says they have that value. This, I believe, is the

basic premise of both Wordsworth's dramaturgical experiments and his critique of

economics. Indeed, this interest in pleasure lingers into his poetry and his poetic mandate,

an important overlap considering the economic importance of that poetic oeuvre.

Wordsworth makes this point in the 1802 Preface to L M a l Ball&:

The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an over-

balance of pleasure. Now, by the supposition, excitement is an unusual and

irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not in that state succeed

each other in accustomed order. But, if the words by which this

excitement is produced are in themselves powerful, or the images and

feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is

some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its proper bounds.

Now, the co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind

has been accustomed when in various moods and in a less excited state,

cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by

an intertexture of ordinary feeling.. . This may be illustrated by appealing to

the Reader's own experience of the reluctance with which he comes to the

re-perusal of the distress11 parts of Clarissa Harlowe or The Gamester.

(Prose 146)

Given Wordsworth's antipathy for "sickly and stupid German Tragedies" (128), his

choice of Edward Moore's outlandish sentimental melodrama, The Gamester, to exemplify

readerly over-excitation may seem surprising. Considering, however, the resemblance of

Moore's play to Wordsworth's own tragedy, rite Borderers, and the formative iduence

of thor play and its economic sub-text on many of the Lyrical BaZJads, the appeal to nte

Gomesfer is highly significant. The reference to Tk Gamester foregrounds Wordsworth's

interest in certain controversial elements of political economy: poverty, credit, gambling,

waste, and chance. The play recounts the last days of Beverley, a compulsive gambler,

persuaded by a fellow gamester, Stukely, to swindle his wife out of her family jewels, the

only source of b d s Beverley has not already depleted. Against the advice of family and

fiends, Mrs. Beverley gives her desperate husband the jewels, which he then pawns, only

to lose all at the gaming table. Beverley returns home in a state of remorse and despair

and resolved to commit suicide by taking poison. Suddenly, the family receives word of

the death of Beverley's uncle, who has bequeathed to him his entire estate. But the

message is too late; Beverley has already taken the deadly potion and dies on stage

surrounded by his grieving but forgiving family.

The plot of 7he Gamester manifests a sentimental-and nearly gothic-fascination

with expenditure of both a financial and an emotional kind. More than its story, however,

what may have attracted Wordsworth to it was its theatrical and commercial success.

First performed in February 1753, The Gamester was initially a success, owing to

Garrick's appearance in the role of the hero, the London audiences' growing predilection

for "pathetic tragedy," and the increasing repugnance among its steadily more visible

professional members for the vices of the garning table. The first run of The Gamester

was stopped short after ten nightspartly because, as Wordsworth comments, it is an

overwheImingly affective play, but more likely because a good many aristocratic audience

members were also gamblers who found the ethical position of the play offensive? The

real theatrical triumphs of 7he Gamester came in the last two decades of the century.

Drury Lane and Covent Garden produced the play a total of 66 times between 1779 and

1800; two of those pe~ormances, Apd 4, 179 1 and March 24, 1795, coincide with

Wordsworth's short residences in Z?ze Gamester also achieved moderate

success in publication Considering his advocacy of plain diction, Wordsworth likely

appreciated the fhct that The Gamester is almost entirely prose. One important result of

this direct diction is the characters' heightened, almost hyperbolic, awareness of their

inability to keep up with the rapidity of time, that though their intentions are volitional,

there is something involuntary and compulsive about action itself. Even the play's

virtuous characters, especially Mrs. Beverley, are ill-prepared for the sudden shocks which

assail them, like the creditors knocking on the Beverleys' door in Act I. Yet, also like

Beverley and the other gamblers, they are always prepared to enter into new schemes to

alleviate their suffering, for the moment, and hope for the best in the long run, rather than

confkont one another with the roots of their difliculties. "Your Chidings hurt me," says

Mrs. Beverley to her th0ughtfL.l sister-in-law, Charlotte. "And come too late" is the reply

(233). Banking on the allusion to gambling in the word "play," the action of this play

develops a combative urgency reminiscent of the gaming table.

As horrifying as its ending is, a horror that for Wordsworth rivals that of gothic

ritual, The Gamester nevertheless lacks any real sense of its own implications for the

radical interplay between meaning and non-meaning, productivity and waste, economic

" Amberg, "introduction" to The Gumester, 98-101 provides a full account of the initial success and subsequent cancellation of Moore's tragedy.

" Johnston 25 1-2 recounts Wordsworth's fondness for the theatre during his 1791 stay in London. Wordsworth would probably have been particularly attracted-to the Covent Garden performance that year, which featured Kemble and Siddons, the leading acton of the day and the favourite Shakespearean paragons of all the Romantics, as Mr. and Mrs. Beverley. See Hogan ed, London Sage Part 5,2: 1338.

ethics and rituaf abandonment that its plot suggests. It is an exemplary play of the classical

economic ideology, in spite of its "distressfirl parts." By presenting itself as a dramatic

allegory for gambling, llre Gamester serves as a moral allegory for the virtues of honesty,

patience, and bard work- Mrs. Beverley, patiently resigned to her husband's essential

virtue, to the social potential of their son, to the moral worth of the society which

disapproves of his wastell conduct, but automatically accepts his remorse, is thus an

exemplary believer in the sentimental cycle of economic recuperation and self-investment:

Want shall teach him Industry. From his Father's Mistakes he shall learn

Prudence, and fiom his Mother's Resignation, Patience. Poverty has no

such Terrors in it as you imagine. There's no Condition of Life, Sickness

and Pain excepted, where Happiness is excluded. The needy Peasant, who

rises early to his Labour, enjoys more welcome Rest at N~ght for't. His

Bread is sweeter to him; The Sun that rouses him in the Morning sets in the

Evening to release him. All Situations have their Comforts, if sweet

Contentment dwell in the Heart. (208)

Beverley's affliction is a sickness, which time, and the convenient death of his rich uncle,

will not ultimately allow to infect his f d y , despite Mrs. Beverley's torment at the sight

of her husband's suicide. The didactic sentiments of the play's conclusion again insist that

gambling and other such wasteful acts are the ultimate vices. The point is made fist in

prose C u t frailer minds take Warning: and fiom Example learn, that Want of Prudence is

Want of Virtue7'(270)), next in verse ("Follies, if uncontral't( of every Kind,/ Grow into

Passionsp mtd subdue the Mind;/ With S e w and Reason hold superior Strife*/ And

conquer Honour. Fame and Life) , and finally in the epilogue ("From Good to Bad how

easy fhe tramition!/ For what was Pleasure once, is now Perditiud Fair Ladies then

these wicked GAMESTERS shun./ Whoever we& one, is, you see, undone"(27 1)). Like

the Gothic, The Gumester stages economic irresponsibility in order to ritualisticalIy

282

chastise it. At the heart of The Gumester is an existential conflict between the capacity to

control agency and the irrational energies of pleasure and waste which constantly

undermine that intentionality.

I would argue that the way this conflict plays itself out in The Gamester is what

impressed and fightend Wordsworth in his reading (or possibly his viewing) of the play,

and that he channelled that horror into Z k Borukrers. Moreover, the direct, often brazen,

explication of that theme through the tensions inherent in the prose-dialogue of 7 k

Gamester-that is, the tension between the supposed power of language to organize and

channel the world and agency in it, and the fact that language is a form of action in the

world against which agency struggles-is transformed by Wordsworth in n e Borderers

into the tension between the fimctional efficacy and the aesthetic materiality of the speech

act. This transfornation is particularly evident if the reflections of Moore's villain,

Stukely, on the motives for his treachery are compared with the speeches of

Wordsworth's Rivers. Here is Stukely, reflecting on the reasons for his seduction of

Beverley :

Fools are the natural Prey of Knaves: Nature design'd them so, when she

made Lambs for Wolves. The Laws that Fear and Policy have fiam'd,

Nature disclaims: She knows but two; and those are Force and Cunning.

The nobler Law is Force; but then there's Danger in't; while Cunning, like

a s W 1 Miner, works safely and unseen ... Conscience is Weakness; Fear

made, and Fear maintains it. The Dread of Shame, inward Reproaches, and

Fictitious Burnings swell out the Phantom. Nature knows none of this; Her

Laws are Freedom. (230)

Here is Wo:d=~orth7s Rivers reflecting on his own seductive appeal:

Carry him to the camp! Yes, to the camp:

0 Wisdom! a most wise resolve - and then

That halfa word should blow it to the winds!

This last device mud end my work - methinks

It were a pleasant pastime to construct

A scale and table of belief-as thus-

Two columns, one for passion, one for prooc

Each rising as the other falls: and, fist,

Passion a unit, and against us--Proof!

Nay, we must travel in another path

Or we're stuck fast for ever-passion, then,

Shall be a unit for us-proof, oh no,

We'll not insult her majesty by time

And place-the where, the when, the how, and all

The dull particulars whose intrusion mars

The dignity of demonstration. Well,

A whipping to the moralists who preach

That misery is a sacred thing! For me,

I know no cheaper engine to degrade a man,

Nor any half so sure. (3 -2.1-20)

The speeches are similar not only in the vituperative power of their delivery, but also in

their indictments of institutional morality and the apprehensions which inspire it. Stukely

and Rivers Live in contempt of those institutions, and relish the experience of almost

maniacal independence which that self-alienation provides. But Stukely declares quasi-

religious fealty to abstractions such as "Nature," '%orce," and "Fear," the mainstays of the

poetry of sensibility and enlightenment political economy alike. His metaphors, "Lambs

and Wolves" and the "slcilfirl Miner" demonstrate a compliance with the principles of use

and productivity, "unseen" but effective within the day-today hctioning of the economic

system. Rivers, by contrast, draws direct attention to that process of self-justifying

abstraction As James Chandler has suggested, Rivers obviates the calculating process

behind Mortimer's perception in the form of a ledger ( S e c o n d N i e 228). What is

interesting about this ledger is that Rivers abandons the standards of deduction and

common-sense7 and chooses instead to ground his manipulation of Mortimer soleIy in

"passion." Put another way, Rivers rejects constative truth in favour of performative

effkct; bis relish for this existence tums back on Stuke1y9s interpellative gestures to

proclaim the genuine power of persuasion in the "passion" or perhaps the ccforce" of

utterance itself. Ifthat materiality of speaking is what is to be omitted f?om considerations

of illocutionary force, then Rivers here declares that such excess is the very condition by

which illocutions happen. In an earlier soliloquy Rivers eschews even allegiance as "base

surrender"; in a clever ironic twist on what he proceeds to call "'the feeble propsyy of

abstract Nature worship. To feel shame or approval for one's actions in the world is to

give credence to the "ignorance" of normative standards. To really know the world is to

move beyond all relations of merit and approbation, to be loathed and rejected and thus

stand as a testament to the abjective tendencies of a system which underlie the universality

of the ethical conduct it proposes. To live, is to Live for the pleasure--homfying as that is-

-of performing.

lhe Borderers exemplifies a dramaturgy of dis-identification; it forces a

spectatorial alienation of viewer &om object, even while that object is forced into an

identification with the values of the viewer. To identi@ or sympathize with the

conventions of Gothic horrors is to iden* with the competitive psychological struggles

which the eighteenth-century philosophy of sympathy (underwriting its economics) has

already posited as the norms of conduct, that is, posited as meaningfbl. When

Wordsworth stages this interpellating gaze, he renders it culpable to its own

performatively determined standard. "Sounds" and voice^'^ are invoked repeatedly

285

throughout the play as if they held a certain meanin- validating power, a power which

actually emerges from the invocation itself The suspensefid pleasures of theatre serve the

ideological aim of heightening desire for resolution and then justify that desire by resolving

it. In The Borderers this process is left painfully unresolved. It is as if the pleasure of

theatre is wasted in Wordsworth's drama, as if it is bereft of value and made poor.

Pleannes of the Independent Inleikct

This chapter began with the suggestion that ZRe Borderers is a tragedy of despair.

But, given its engagement with the sentimental aesthetics of Shakespearean,

Revolutionary, and gothic theatre, it is possible to say that me Borderers stages that

despair through a dramaturgy which embodies the exact opposite of despair: pleasure.

The resulting ambivalence is fisher apparent at the level of dialogue. The play is littered

with pithy declarations which elegantly summarize states of absolute mental devastation

which reflect back the material contingency of declarative utterances. This mirroring of

pleasure and despair in the play's overwhelmingly verbal dramaturgy-itself a parody of its

own theatrical misfiring-registers the link between the problem of the performative in

economic theory and the concern of that theory with the problem of poverty. On the one

hand, the condition of despondency is characterized as indulgence, or even as disguise or

fakery, as Burke had claimed while arguing that the category of poverty is a hopeless

creation of those who would deny the perpetual efficacy of the social contract. On the

other hand, bourgeois charity is seen to be empty gestures of flippant luxuriance and

condescension when it conf?onts the kcts of hunger and misery, as Godwin observes in his

description of the encounter between the rich and the poor, though Godwin does not

recognize-as in his chapter on promises-that his own utilitarianism is dependent on the

circulation of rhetorical gestures of posited truth. The perpetuation of poverty is a result

of this theoretical vicariousness: the economic implication of Wordsworth's play is that

poverty also stands as a disturbing and largely ufl~ynthesizable "other" within theory, its

waste or expenditure, the material experience ofpejomunce.

Wordsworth's restaging of economic theory is not simply an ethical complaint

against the abandonment of the poor, but is rather a rigorous dramatbation of the

dialectics within theory conceived as a performative act expending its reactions to

conditions of expenditure which it seeks to deny have anything to do with it and its claims

to truth. The characters and their relationships dramatize those difficult ironies and their

significance to the economics of poverty. But the problematic role of pleasure in those

ambivalences is also rendered explicit in the language of the play, language which the play

itself dramatizes as pleasurable in exactly this deconstructive way. In the opening scene of

the play Rivers comments on Herbert's "strange aversion" (1.1 -226) to Mortimer, having

just noted the "strange pleasures7' (1.1.2 13) Herbert seems to take in dominating Matilda.

Typically, that doubleness of aversion and pleasure also defines Rivers, who in that way is

a mirror of Herbert. In the Preface which he composed for the play's initial projected

publication of 1798, Wordsworth explains the character of Rivers very much in these

terms. Rivers is in general described there as "perverted," though the nature of that

perversion is in no way reducible to a single general state (Wordsworth, Borderers. 65).

The Preface begins with a direct statement concerning Rivers' antagonism to charity. '2et

us suppose," Wordsworth writes, "a Young Man of great Intellectual powers yet without

any solid principles of genuine benevolence." Having been "betrayed into a great crime,"

this young man abandons society:

In his retirement, he is impelled to examine the reasonableness of

estabtished opinions and the force of his mind exhausts itselfin constant

efforts to separate the elements of virtue and vice. It is his pleasure and his

consolation to hunt out whatever is bad in actions usually esteemed

virtuous and to detect the good in actions which the universal sense of

mankind teaches us to reprobate. While the general exertion of his intellect

seduces him fiom the remembrance of his own crime, the particular c

conclusions to which he is led have a tendency to reconcile him to himself

His feelings are interested in making him a moral skeptic and as his

scepticism increases he is raised in his own esteem. (62)

Rivers' pleasure lies in excusing himseE as it were, &om his own actions. His life

becomes a fluid progression of events the continuousness of which, as opposed to any

ethical implications of each individual event, stands as its own justification. But like

Austin, Wordsworth suggests that this excuse is also a discrete utterance act within the

continuum of experience which it creates. Hence, the epistemological attitude is

simultaneous self-loathing and self-assurance: theory in the mirror of its own poverty.

The verbal circulation of intellectual pleasures translates in the play into a nexus of

self-defining declarations, which, by being staged, also reveal their crucial and ultimately

destructive power. Consider, for instance, Rivers' exclamation just after Mortimer W l y

abandons Herbert :

I feel

That I am bound to you by links of adamant.

You have taught mankind to see the measure of justice

By diving for it into their own bosoms.

To day you have thrown off a tyranny

That lives but by the torpid acquiescence

Of our emasculated souls, the tyranny

Of moralists and saints and lawgivers.

You have obeyed the only law that wisdom

Can ever recognize: the immediate law

Flashed by the light of circumstances

Upon an independent intellect.

The homo-eroticisn of the Riven and Mortirner scenes, corresponding to the difEcult

homosexual tensions of the Gothic as theorized by Sedgwick, lends dramatic palpability to

the fimdamental notion that Morther's sense of self is underwritten by an equally palpable

verbal energ$" Rivers congratulates Mortimer for the apparently success murder of

Herbert (Rivers does not know that Mortimer has only abandoned Herbert on the heath at

this point) with characteristic doublespealr, and Wordsworth once again draws attention to

this ironic intersection of an absolutely internal individual agency and an external verbal

compulsion through a self-reflexive attention to stage deixis. Mortimer ("You") has

achieved utter eeedom from any (speci6cdly) written moral law; yet, that fieedom realizes

Mortimer's allegiance to "the immediate &nu,'' just as Mortimer ("You") is a posited

construction of Rivers' ("I") deictical act, just as Rivers (T") is "linked" to Mortimer

through that same web of verbal acts, just as Mortimer has "taught mankind" to be

independent of all learned or guided behaviour. Even though he credits it to Mortimer's

own understanding of the flashing brilliance of self-recognition in the midst of an

accidental universe, that Rivers must expZari.1 Mortimer's independence proves the

contradiction implicit in his claim. That is, Rivers seduces Mortimer into believing in his

subjective agency by invoking or conjuring a system of natural retribution and positing

Mortirner, quite Literally, at its centre.

The implications of Rivers' pleasurable language for the economics of poverty

traced in the play are best elucidated by setting them against Godwin's own utilitarian

conception of pleasure and pain, and the way his writing of the 1790s after Political

Justice came to problernatize that distinction. Enid Welsford first pointed out that the

In his 1988 Yale production, Murray Biggs had Rivers continually drape himself around Mortimer to accentuate the physicality, and more evidently, the latent sexuajity, of their relationship. For a discussion of such scenes of physical attachment in Z%e Borderers and in Biggs' production see Carlson, 'mew Stage," 423.

. .

289

phrase "an independent intellect" has a specific source: book 5, chapter 23 of PoliticaI

Jiatice:

The genuine and wholesome state of mind is, to be unloosed fiom shackles,

and to expand every fibre of its h e according to the independent and

individual impressions of truth upon that mind. How great would be the

progress of intellectual improvement, if men were unfettered by the

prejudices of education, unseduced by the influence of a corrupt state of

society, and accustomed to yield without fear to the guidance of truth,

however unexplored might be the regions and unexpected the conclusions

to which she conducted us? (548)

With this messianic declaration of the empiricist mandate, Godwin proclaims that absolute

clear-headedness is the key to perfect social harmony. But the passage is blatantly

contradictory. Godwin's ideal, intellectual h e spirit, "unfettered by the prejudices of

education," is also "accustomed to yield without fear to the guidance of truth" (emphasis

added). Freedom is truth, and truth is a constraint. Godwin's metaphors, "expanding ...

fibres" and c'unexpIoredred.. . regions," similarly realize the physical, even gendered,

muscularity of Godwin's virile rationalist, as well as his imperial aspirations. Godwin

seduces himself, as it were, into a violent suppression of contingency in the name of an

abstract truth, a truth which seeks to repudiate seductiveness as a moral, physical, and

even national weakness. Embodying in every way these seKantradicting positions,

Wordsworth's Rivers does not simply echo Godwinian concepts, nor in any real sense

does he critique them. Rather, Wordsworth's dramaturgical handling of the scene is

directed specifically at the self-deconstructing fallacies implicit in Godwinian politics.

There is no counter-position in Wordsworth's play, but rather a radical restaging of the

dialectic within Godwin's argument, and the way that that dialectic collapses under the

weight of its own self- cancellations.

290

The economic implications of this contradictory proposition emerge in Godwin's

own conception of pleasure, the satiskction of desire and, therefore, the reason for the

acquisition of property and the acquisition of language. In the last book of Political

J i c e , "OfProperty," Godwin finalIy applies his political ideas to economics. The aim

there, as it was in the chapter on promises, is to repudiate the idea of surplus as

fimdamentaly irrational. The goal of accumdation of property, like the acquisition of

language, is to reach a state of abstract rational sufficiency which he divides into three

classes: "subsistence; the means of intellectual and moral improvement; inexpensive

gratificationsy' (704). The fourth class, what Godwin calls "costly gratifications ... are by

no means essential to hea1th.W and vigorous existence, and c a ~ o t be purchased but with

considerable labour and indusuy" (704-05). These are to be rejected. The division of

labour "is the offspring of avarice.. . . The utility of such a saving of labour, where labour

shall be changed from a burthen into an amusement, will scarcely balance the evils of so

extensive a co-operationy' (767). The result is that the pleasures aroused by the

consumption of luxury goods are to be ejected ftom the economy and replaced with a

rational construct of general equality. But Godwin insists that certain conditions and laws

always apply in order for these institutional occurrences to have validity while at the same

time declaring that institutional standards are always false.

Godwin's disdain for the pleasures of the division of labour parallells his

repudiation of the assumed inviolability of promises. There are simply greater needs than

the accumulation of goods and the obligations of business. And yet, in the chapter "On

Promises," Godwin demarcates pleasure as the basic principle behind the acquisition of

property and its rational distribution:

Pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, constitute the whole ultimate

subject of moral enquiry. There is nothing desirable but the obtaining of

the one and the avoiding of the other. All the researches of human

29 1

imagination cannot add a single article to this summary of good. Hence it

follows that wherever pain exists there is evil. Were it othenvise, there

would be no such thing as evil. If pain in one individual be not an evil, then

it would not be an evil for pain to be felt by every individual that exists, and

forever. The universe is no more than a collection of individuals. (22 1)

This is a wondeMy deidcal passage. "There is nothing desirable but ..." posits an

absolute meaning for desire in pleasure and happiness. And, by the logic of language itself

(''there and here"), the opposite of that desire is its prevention, the taking away of

happiness fiom others, which is to be counted an evil. The omnipotence of the desirability

of pleasure and the undesirability of pain forms the linchpin between promising and

economics. For Godwin, "promises are, absolutely considered, an ewl, and stand in

opposition to the genuine foundations of morality" (2 18). They are comparable, he

mysteriously claims, to an amputation, an evil necessmy for the preservation of the whole

body politic. Political Justice cannot allow the evil of promises to be mistaken for the

actual means to generai happiness, rational reflection on the ethical validity of motives and

intentions, by which standards verbal promises are to be judged perfect or imperfect,

usefbl or viotable.

Godwin soon came to realize the implications of this contradiction between a

trenchant belief in truth and the social reality of performance, and it became a central

theme of his first novel Xhings a They Are: or The Adwnhrres of Caleb Williams

( 1 794). A number of excellent readings of this novel have recently shown how much this

novel is a revision of the narrative drive of Political Justice. As Balfour argues, where

Politicui Jusfice advocates or seeks a new Jerusalem of utilitarian right-mindedness, Culeb

WilZiiomr rewrites that story as a tale of "trials and error." At the beginning of the novel,

Wfiams is employed by a dashing but melancholy young aristocrat, Falkland, as a

secretary. After a series of mysterious and violent run-ins with his employer over the

292

contents of a trunk in a &met room, Wfiarns learns thiit FaMand had killed a neighbour,

Tyrrel, in a fit of passion aroused by Tyrrel's unjust treatment of the local population.

Wfiams swears never to repeat the story, but unable to resist the curiosity to discover the

contents of the trunk, is ford to flee, and is pursued mercilessly by F a a n d . F i y ,

both men, disheartened and exhausted by the chase, confkont one another in a last

judiciary meeting, arranged by Wfiams to explain his innocence and expose Falkland's

guilt, which he has & W y never revealed. Godwin wrote two endings for the novel. In

the original ending, which was never published, Caleb exposes Falldand, but to no avail,

and he is thrown into prison, the ultimate martyr of the arbitrary system of tyrannous

institutionality which first imprisoned him by his oath to his employer. Dissatisfied with

this melodramatic conclusion, Godwin rewrote it: Williams takes pity on Falkland, and

praises his honour before the court, in exchange for which Falldand confesses his crime,

blesses Williams, and dies,

The novel is replete with Gothic-inspired trials, in which the characters are held

under institutional regulations of conduct and decorum, to obey the conventional dictates

of what figures of authority deem to be right, rather than what is known to be true. What

makes the novel so stirring, however, is that it never allows the clarity of absolute truth,

which Godwin had insisted, in Political Justice. was the only possible perspective with

which to understand the world, to have its say. As Tilottama Rajan demonstrates, while

most of the novel critiques institutional systems of political morality, Godwin's revised

ending ironically suggests that that institutionalism--thematized by William's praise of his

pursuer-was the ground for the entire critical narrative (Suppement 186-87). The

economic implications of this reversal, and indeed of its deconstructive implications for the

whole novel are subtle, but very significant. For instance, Williams sells his simple family

home to become Falkland' s secretary. The pastoral Life W a r n s had led with his f d y

was somehow betrayed by his self-incorporation into the world of contracts of honour,

293

capital, and arbitration (Fatktand's lawyer, Collias, also tells Wiams of FaIkland7s

possible murder of Tyrrel). And yet, Williams spent the better part of this early life

reading romances of chivalry and honour. It is no coincidence that Wrlliarns' most

prominent disguises during his flight fiom Falkland are as a thief and a Jew- outlaws of

the established economy-but at the same time the mirroring denizens of economics's own

i n t e d corruptibility, and the logic of counterfeiting exchange it-and Godwin-

continually deny.

Robert Osbom has pointed to the similarities between the mysterious bond

between Williams and FalkIand in Godwin's novel and the "links of adamant" by which

Rivers declares himself attached to Mortirner. For example, when Williams learns of

Falkland's apparent crime, he cajoles his employer into feelings of guilt. "The instant I

had chosen this employment for myseE I found a strange sort of pleasure in it" (107).

Taken as the theme for this entire reading of fie Borderers, the notion of a strange

pleasure in aversion defines in both the play and in the novel the passive allegiance of

agents to systems of understanding which they know, or discover, are materially self-

creating. More directly, there is I think a deliberate echo of CaZeb WilIims in the play's

two important confessional moments. Falkland confesses his crime directly to Wdiams

and makes him swear not to repeat it. "I am the murderer of Tyrrel. I am the assassin of

the Hawkinses" (1 3 5). When Rivers relates his own story to Mortimer he begins by

saying "I am a murderer" (4.2.4). When Mortimer &ally confesses to Matilda he says "I

am the murderer of thy father" (5.3 -99). Confession is a critically important speech act.

Ostensibly the revelation of a cruciai, or speakerdefining truth, by positing the uttered 'T'

of confession as the fulcrum for a narrated act, the confessor ultimately removes himself

from the responsibility for the act itse& putting himself instead in the institutional circuit

of retributive justice. In The Borderers, however, Wordsworth extends the philosophical

implications of this perfortnative paradigm for the confession into a further manifestation

294

of the process of justification characteristic of political economy. Rivers begins his tale by

confessing his guilt, but, as he later says, there is no "remorse7' (4.2.139). Rather, Rivers'

compulsive and almost sellscongratulatory appraisal of his own deeds situates the

recurrent "I" of his tale as its own spectatorid interpreter, in effect suggesting that the

abandonment of the captain was neither crime nor just act, but rather a kind of show.

When he has abandoned Herbert on the heath, Mortirner goes through a similar process of

self-justification. But when he comes to coafess the crime to Matilda, he is not even sure

what it is he did. Matilda for her part curses her father's killer, not knowing of course that

it is Mortimer. And yet, what is uncanny about these moments of self-reflexivity is that

while they seem to have no immediate effect (neither Mortimer during Rivers'

confessional narrative, nor Matilda during Mortimer's seems to have any real sense of

what is actually happening) they do have residual effects. In staging Mortirner's (and

Rivers') crimes as crimes of abandonment rather than active or wilhl destruction, the play

actually exposes the unhappy fact that perfonnative language does work, but more by the

speaker excusing culpability than by denying perlocutionary intention.

It is thus important that Wordsworth should construct his play around staged

proclamations by which the characters declare their own individual self-conceptions even

as those conceptions are in the process of being constructed performatively by others-

including the actors who play them. Though he espouses the most categorically

individualist principles of any character in the play, by the time Rivers has congratulated

Mortimer for debunking the tyrannical excess of verbal law, he has already admitted in

soliloquy his "pleasure" in the power of words to stimulate and in effect create a desire for

that veq rational individuality. Wordsworth will, famously, reiterate that irony of reason

and pleasure when he copies Rivers' seductive appeal to the "independent intellect" into 1

his account of the Godwin circle:

This was the time when, all things tending fast

To deprivation, the philosophy

That promised to abstract the hopes of man

Out of his feeling, to be fixed thenceforth

For ever in a purer element,

Found ready welcome. Tempting region that

For zeal to enter and refiesh herself,

Where passion had the privilege to work.

And never hear the sound of their own names - But speaking more in charity, the dream

Was flattering to the young ingenuous mind

Pleased with extremes, and not the least with that

Which makes the human reason's naked self

The object of its fervour. What deIight!-

How glorious! -in self-knowledge and self-rule

To look through all the fhilties of the world,

And, with a resolute mastery shaking off

The accidents of nature7 time, and place,

That make up the weak being of the past,

Build social freedom on its only basis:

The fieedom of the individual mind,

Which, to the blind restraints of general laws

Superior, magisterially adopts

One guide -- the Light of circumstances, flashed

Upon an independent intellect. (1 805; X 805-29)

7he PreIuCte portrays Godwin's abstract rationalism in seductive erotic terms. Contrary to

the "nakedness" of its espoused materialism, there is something salacious about the

296

"tempting region" of this circle of men, whose "zeaJ" and "passion" are significantly

feminized in order to be "refieshed" and &om then to "work." Figured thus as a

temptress, the bkel~ming'7 arms of Godwin's philosophy are a summary disfiguration of

its own exemplary repudiations of marriage and commercial exchange, not to mention the

fiercely masculine posturing of its own reason. It is also signiscant that this contentious

zone of naked abstraction and seductive rhetoric is figured by Wordsworth as a threshold-

-as it were, as a border-for the subjects of these abstractions are "deprivation" and

"charity." This border is the limit of abstraction which Austin, in his polemical way, had

urged philosophy to cross. For Wordsworth, the border between reason and its own

lunatic pleasures was always something frightening; Like the calm waters of his beloved

Lakes hiding some inconceivable terror, rationality is only the sheen on its verbal

materiality. Like Austin, Wordsworth seems to have come face to face with this

materiality on the stage. It is not until Shelley, however, that this codtontation with

materiality becomes the grounds for a positive economy of its own.

Chapter 4

Controversies of Bullion: Gold, Money, and Language in The Cenci

On February 18, i 797, a group of Yorkshire farmers, fearing an immanent French

invasion, and having sold their livestock at Newcastle market, went to the local bank and

converted all their notes into gold bullion. In doing so, they precipitated a run on bank

specie so alarming that, in a matter of days, nortbcountry banks were forced to suspend

all gold conversion. By February 24, the demand for bullion had spread to London. The

directors of the Bank of England, responsible for supplying the country banks with notes

directly convertible into gold, announced to the government that they could not supply the

current demand. By opening of business on Monday, February 27, the Bank, the

government, the King, and the merchants of the City had agreed that the demand for gold

would jeopardize the financial stability of the Bank.' On May 3, Parliament passed the

'Bank Restriction Act" forbidding the conversion of bank notes into bullion. The

Restriction was supposed to last six weeks. It lasted twenty-four years.

It is tempting to see in the Restriction a historical correllative for Romanticism.

The Romantic subject, Wordsworth's wandering poet for instance, would thus exempe

the intellectual coming-o f-age of what Jean-Christop h Agnew (citing Hobbes) calls the

"bubble man," the man of credit who invents himself out of what he might be worth, rather

than what actually owns (1 3). As such, the period of restriction signals a monetary

economy more like that of our own age, the age of simulation, as Jean Baudrillard calls it,

A similar emergency in 1793 had been averted when government loans and financial associations had succeeded in restoring general confidence in the availability of gold into which the paper notes could be converted on demand. This time, the government was not in a position to offer adequate relief on credit alone. For accounts of the panic of February 1797 and the government's decision to proceed with the restriction, see Cannaq The Paper Pound, vii-xvii and Fetter 19-25.

wherein fictions of value circulate on the pages of bank-books, "signifying nothing," with

our universal consent (Symbolic Exchange 5 1-2).~ As Jean-Joseph Gow has suggested,

convertibility illustrates not simply a step toward some abstract conception of the social

economy which will repIace the contingencies of barter, but, at the same time, the

"degradation" of some mysterious contact 4th material reality which the use of gold

money represents (Coiners 15-6). This view reads the long and complex history of money

from the perspective of a psychological anxiety about identity and repre~entation.~ But, as

Peter de Bolla argues, the lateeighteenth and early-nineteenth-century thought itself does

not register a consistent enough set of epistemological and political assumptions to

correlate with a comprehensive psychological interpretation (1 04-05). The Restriction

meant that it was impossible to exchange paper notes for gold on demand, but it did not

mean that Britain was off the gold standard. Gold guineas circulated widely. Britain

continued to ship bullion to the Continent and the prices of other commodities rose and

fell accordingly, with a direct impact on the value of the circulating money. But while the

trade economy chugged along more or less normally, most people were dead-set against

the Restriction, including many of the Parliamentarians who passed it. A majority of

political economists of the day regarded it as a sure sign that the Bank of England was out

to monopolize domestic finance. Most of the Romantics, their radical associates, and

many of their conservative contemporaries, hated the idea of a paper pound with its value

controlled by a central Bank. The notable exception is Coleridge, who supported the

Restriction-but his is a special case, as I will show. Pamphlets and articles were published

continuously from all quarters representing all varieties of sensible and lunatic theories on

For an elaboration of the relation between Romantic conceptions of vagrancy and the intricacies of debit and credit see Langan 62-72.

For the application of this interpretation of the transformation of money during the Romantic period see Shell, Money 13 1-55 and Economy 113-51 and Goux, Symbolic 88-1 13.

how to handle the monetary crisis. For what we monolithically caIl "the Romantic

period," economic historians have a more contentious name: "the Bullionist Controversy."

In this chapter, I want to examine in detail one of the Romantic responses to the

Bullionist Controversy: Shelley's 17ae Cenci. This may seem to be a surprising move. But

as is well known, The Cenci concerns the tension between material experience and

theoretical conceptuabation. This concern is essential to understanding the philosophical

and historical implications of the money problem The sadistic hedonist Count Francesco

Cenci of Rome rapes his own daughter, Beatrice. Beatrice in turn has her father

murdered, and although the Papacy had intended to convict Cenci for his unspeakable

crimes, Beatrice is tried and convicted. Given its relatively straightforward story, the

critical interest of the play Lies in the subtlety and dramatic power of Beatrice's transition

fiom victim to manipulator-the image of the father she so detests. Like The Borderers,

T%e Cenci ostensibly stages the tragic impossibility of reaching beyond the institutional

framework of custom, language, and law, so easily converted into forms of ideological

oppression. In psychological terms, the energy of the unconscious, shocked into self-

realization by unspeakable horrors, becomes the impulse of psychological domination once

it is represented in some objectifying rational form. Beatrice's involvement in the murder

of her father is not in question. The rape is an unspeakable crime, literally, for it is never

mentioned by name in the play. Once it enters into the circulation of representations and

rationales in its oblique form, it ceases to maintain its immediate honifLing resilience.

Thus, though Beatrice convinces the papal judiciary which tries her that her crime was

justified by her victimization, the Pope commands her execution on the grounds that

othenvise she will establish a precedent for parricide. What is at issue is the extent to

which the effective presence of the unspeakable in the world is excused by the

contemplative scrutiny of theory: "It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with

which men seek the justification of Beatrice," Shelley writes in his Preface to the play, yet

feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which

they contemplate alike her wrongs and her revenge" (PP 240).

But as with Xhe Borderers, the implications of that dramatic interest extend

beyond general reflections of the problematics of representation, criminality, and

revolution. The Cenci contains many direct correspondences with the important

developments of the Bullionkt Controversy and the Restriction.' The play opens with

Cenci negotiating a financial "association" with the Papacy: in exchange for a portion of

his lands he will be authorized to carry on with impunity his murderous pleasures. When

Beatrice announces to an assembled party of Roman citizens that much of this rapine is

directed at the Count's own family and pleads for direct assistance, rather like a local

trader attempting to convert threateningly unstable government bonds into hard cash, or

even an economist warning the central bank and the government against the dangers of

continued suspension, Cenci intensifies his malevolent and criminal actions, as the Bank of

England did to the panicking public by suspending payment in gold. Three times between

1797 and 18 19, the year The Cenci was written, the government was warned by a chorus

of political economists and concerned pamphleteers to return to a convertible currency.

And though a Parliamentary Bullion Committee, established in 1 8 1 1, recommended that

the restriction on conversion be lifted, the government continued to stall the conversion on

' To date the only thorough reading of this connection is Brigham. Brigham contends that Shelley was inspired to write me Cenci in part by Hunt's descriptions to him in his letters of ensuing trials over the question of counterfeit. Because of the uneasy political situation exacerbated by the restriction, forgery was made a capital offence. In late 18 18, two forgers were acquitted on the grounds that since the Bank of England was producing paper money at an alarming rate, and these were essentially forgeries of real money (gold), then to punish counterfeters for forgery would mean that the Bank too would be liable to prosecution. (340-41). The irony is clear, as is the significance to Xhe Cenci. But Brigham converts the economic resonance in the play into a general question of identity and representation. She does not provide any detailed discussion of the larger epistemological and political economic issues raised by Shelley's dramatization of the BuUionist Controversy.

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the technical ground that only by maintaining complete control over the flow of currency

would it be allowed to carry on its increasingly unpopular military campaign. W~th such

topical resonances in mind, it is possible to argue that The Cenci dramatizes the process by

which locally criminal actions become justified by the conceptual abstraction of their

motives and effbcts, as is also apparent in the economics of the Restriction and its political

economy.

This chapter will elaborate the way the play reflects on the Bullion Controversy in

certain important scenes directly involving money, credit, gold, and banking. The Cenci is

fiercely theatrical even while it is both critically resistant to the conventionalism of

"theatricality" and practically f i c u l t to stage. Shelley, we know, did not particularly like

the theatre, though he wrote four dramas and had high hopes that Xhe Cenci in particular

would make a successfLl stage play. The resolution to this seeming conundrum offered by

such critics as Julie Carlson, Wfiam Jewett, and Roger Blood, among others, is that the

melodramatic hyperbole and poetic, or even verbal, excess of the play represents a

challenge to the sentimental ideals of the theatrical establishment, in line with the

philosophical challenge of Prometheus Unbound and the satirical challenge of Swellfwr

the Tyrant. But the overwhelming emphasis on language, as well as the overwhelming

nature of language in The Cenci points to the shocking immediacy of verbal interaction

which the institutional apparatus of established norms of verbal productivity attempts to

subdue, as in the Bank of England's decision to regulate the exchange of gold and notes

by converting that local mode of exchange into a normatively valued paper pound note.

The Cenci offers itself in the public sphere of economic debate as a manifestation of the

non-seriousness or unproductive labour value latent in arguments both for and against the

credit economy, realized as the material force of performance.

It is precisely because of a radical divergence in the language of the play between

its historical topicality and its fancifbl histrionics that it is especially suited to reading in

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terms of the speech-ad theory adjusted here by its contact with Romantic drama.5 As a

number of recent critics have claimed, the "things" most often "done" in The Cenci are

words. "Something must be done/ What, yet I know not," says Beatrice at the moment of

her resolve to revenge like "dread lightning" her father's horrendous wrongs (3.1 -86-7).

For the most part, these readings indicate that Shelley's dramatiraton of the sorial and

political hction of speech acts is limited to a banal understanding of the performative as a

transcendental system of intentional subjectivity, beyond which is a more naive and

"radically innocent" form of liberal humanist eman~ipation.~ Shelley's own citation of

Hogle, Shelley's Process 147-62 offers an erudite reading of the play which, while not specifically engaged with speech-act theory, comes closest to uncovering the intersubjective dynamics central to Shelley's dramaturgical, philosop h i d , and economic aims in this play. For instance, Hogle argues that Cenci's dramatized power depends on "[t]heatrical mirroring .... He is so much a theatrical character that his very significance- and certainly his continued power over others-depends on the reaction of an auditor to his aggression, on a reflection that appears to recognize his self-assertion and so allows him to seem a figure who causes fear instead of one who might feel it himself,. (150). Beatrice too, Hogle argues, gradually comes to achieve that same power, ''wilhlly, almost ruthlessly, adopting one mimed posture after another for the sake of the supremacy and distance fiom responsibility that each one seems to provide" (159). This sense of the exchangeability of character is key to the phenomenal uncanniness of performative language in social relations, a point that is clarified by Hogle's suggestion that Cenci's victim is also his "auditor."

Worton set this argument going by suggesting that Shelley's purpose in ihe Cenci was to bring a mass audience to "self-analysis" concerning language and its potential insufficiency as a mode of political or subjective justification but at the same time to insist upon the generally necessary "dependence on language as a purveyor of truth" (107). Other readings of language-as-problem in The Cenci are either extensions or refinements of Worton's claim. McWhir argues that Cenci is a kind of anti-prophet for his daughter's rebellion against his patriarchy and that consequently, "the real evil in this play is typified not by actions but by the use of words" (153). Michael O'NeU similarly states that "by exposing the dependence of awareness on language, with all its pitfalls and treacheries, the play codonts the audience with the impossibility of arriving at a stable sense of self" (75). Peterfkeund contends that Beatrice's mistake or flaw in the play is her "adoption of the metonymic language of reification and self-empowerment spoken by her patriarchal society.. . ber] seduction illustrates how, in Shelley's poetry, one may easily be led astray by language used habitually and unreflectively by a speaker not fully aware that language is as much the agent that constitutes the objezt as the referential apparatus that

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these lines in his letter to Leigh Hunt responding to the news of the Peterloo massacre

compellingly indicates that Shelley did have a historical-political purpose in mind when he

chose to dramatize a world of corrupted verbal interpellation. But Shelley's sceptical

understanding of the relation between language and action goes W e r than that proposed

by most critics. For Shelley the performative does not serve ideology, but is the material

condition of social relations. Not only does Shelley demonstrate the fictiodty of the

money form and the gold standard-a condition agreed upon by political economists of all

perspectives and political inclinations-but also he challenges the assumption that these

fictions are the social manifestations of a natural sympathetic rationality which exists prior

to the fact of social relations and language. This challenge is essential to Shelley's

dramaturgy. As a play which transgresses alI n o m of decorum and taste common to the

theatre of its day, as is especially apparent in its overwhelming verbosity, i%e Cenci resists

its own perlocutionary llfilment and even, in a number of instances, its "uptake." The

relation between this emphasis on the material instance of discourse and its subtle allusions

to gold and the system of trust and faith underlying the operation of banks and hnds in the

Restriction period, The Cenci represents a significant contribution to the Bullion debates.

This study has already referred to money as a special instance of economic

behaviour. This final chapter will thus adapt the non-seriousness and unproductivity

traced in the language of The School for ScandirI and me Bordkrers to theorize in a

substantial way the link between Romantic drama and monetary economics. As money is

perhaps the ultimate economic speech act, making many things happen and creating that

thing or value which it is supposed to name, an account of The Cenci and Shelley's

political prose writing in the context of the monetary economics of the Romantic period

will also reiterate the larger question of the place of performative language in the discipline

of political economy and its blindness to its own unproductivity. Shelley's difficult -- -

points to it" (185).

304

dramatization of monetary economics critiques the sublimation of linguistic performance

into a rational or causal history which seeks to explain and thus justifj the material

circumstances of monetary exchange. In this way B e Cenci represents one of the most

developed articulations of Romantic economics.

Sigeech Acts, Hisiory, and md Money Form

If the contract is the quintessential performative "speech situation," then money is

the essential speech act. Nothing else in the universe of social exchange creates things out

of nothings the way money does. If1 give you a five dollar bill, the value of what I give

you, the five dollars, signifies nothing but that the transfer of hnds fiom me to you is

taking place. Said transaction is potentially fraught with all kinds of infelicities, but

regardless, the act of giving and recognizing h d s monetarily depends on the mutual

recognition of the conventional validity of those hnds and not on any direct referential

correspondence between them and some thing. Money names the thing it also creates in

naming. Although Austin himself does not engage with the question of the money form,

the perfonnative problematic of the relative status of discrete illocutionary acts and the

systems of constituent rules and conventions which give those acts social validity

represents a poignant touchstone for understanding the ditFculties and contradictions of

monetary economics. Austin's argument, ultimately, is that the illocutionary act comprises

a phenomenal level of discourse which cannot be understood in that regulative manner,

and that such an attempt at comprehension creates the very criteria of validity it presumes

to describe, thus itself proving Austin' s argument for the "general" substratum of

performance within discourse. A performative m u n t of money moves beyond Marx'

repudiation of the fiscal inmuments of commodity fetishization-an argument that many

scholars believe Shelley anticipates-to a critical understanding of the tenuous relation

between the material value of any item of exchange and the theoretical attempt to

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comprehend discrete acts of exchange as instances within a d o r m system

In Z k Co-ction of Social Reality, Searle illustrates how language actually

H e s t s the collective sanctioning of individual intentions by examining money. For

Searle, money is a "status hction," a special kind of intentional or "agentive" action

which produces some kind of change or event in the world by m e w of a c'collective

understanding" that it has that ability. Money is not simply a representation of an other

value or thing. Rather, it has "deontic power" (70); it obliges us to act in a certain way in

relation to one another. In the context of Searle's belief that p e r f o d v e language

embodies certain universal patterns of social behaviour, money is an exemplary speech act.

That money exists, Searle claims, requires some form of language because it is language

which actually constitutes the fact of the existence of money: "The thoughts that this is a

twenty-dollar bill and that this is my property require a language as a matter of conceptual

necessity" (65). Money must be real-it cannot be counterfeit -- in order to count as the

status function "money" with such deontic power. But there is nothing in the physical

make-up of money which makes it real in this way. Rather, the fact that money can

symbolize value is the result of a general agreement that such a symbol has that power.

Money, as opposed to the substances which embody it, is a social reality, not a material

fact.

Money for Searle is an aspect of the linguistic institutions which make up this

social reality. In this conception, however, this institutionality implies that the existence

and function of money also participate in a reality which is in large part based not on a

relation of word to world, or even of world to word, but of word to word, that is, the

tautological fantasy of social reality itseK For Searle, the institutionally creative power of

language is "eo @so" tautological. Searle argues that language does not require language

because it "is precisely defined to be a self-identifying category of institutional facts ...

language doesn't require language in order to be language because it already is language"

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(73). What Searle means by this is that language is a special case of institutional reality:

events or objects need to be accorded a conventionally agreed-upon meaning in order to

have a fimction beyond "the physics" of their material existence. But since language is, by

and large, the manner in which such rnescnings and bctions are conferred, language is "by

design" self-referential. This tautology "language is language because it is already

language" is not exactly the same kind of metaphysical tautology as God is God. In his

taxonomy of speech acts, Searle had introduced the creative power of divine speech as a

special and exceedingly rare, if not strictly hypothetical example of illocutionary force

which was not in some way authorized by the existence of conventional standards. Yet,

Searle's "institutional reality" rooted in the necessity for concepts and thoughts to be

linguistic, constitutes the verbal predicate for a tautology implied in Searle's description of

linguistic behaviour. Money, then, is also implicitly tautological. Money has the same

characteristics as language because its status function as a deontic power has nothing to

do with its material nature: "we can treat coins as money ... because the objects now are

conventional public symbols of something beyond themselves; they symbolize a deontic

status beyond the physics" (74). The conferral of value on money is a linguistic act, and

thus money, itselfa representational symbol, in practice refers to that value which gives it

its function. Money is language. Language constitutes money. Therefore, money is

money. QED.

For Searle, the tautological existence of language and its various instantiations in

social reality comprise certain basic standards of human activity complicit with ethical and

cultural and even class categories. The notion of monetary value functions by virtue of

certain unwritten rules of human behaviour which are linguistic in character but which

might be said to be a kind of metalanguage exclusive of the problematic of its signification,

its relation to the action it supposedly is. Eighteenth-century accounts of the money

system articulated a similarly tautological reconciliation between perceived value and

normative behaviour. Locke, for instance, in his S h r t Observotrionr on a PrintedPclper

opposed attempts by the government to reduce the amount of silver in coins to better

sustain the vaIue of stamped coins and bank notes, claiming tautologically that "[aln

Ounce of Silver will always be equal in value to an Ounce of Silver" (354). But, he

continued, the amount of silver in circulation that is produced by the labour of mining will

change the value of the metal relative to prices: the stamp only serves as a regulating

device for the greater convenience of the circulation of goods relative to metal. In other

words, as Locke argued in Further Co~~deratiom concerning Raising the Value of

Money, precious metals have "intrinsick value9* but that value is "that estimate which

common consent has placed on it, whereby it is made Equivalent to all other things, and

consequently the universal Barter or Exchange which Men give and receive for other

things" (4 10). Locke argued for the subordination of immediate negotiations over value

and prices--including the relative value of metal coins-to a regulative standard based on a

mutually sympathetic acknowledgement of the authority of that standard, in essence, the

social contract: "Men in their bargains contract not for denominations or sounds, but for

the intrinsick value; which is the quantity of Silver by publick Authority warranted to be in

pieces of such denominations" (4 1 5). As Searle admits, then, the conventional and indeed

the material dimension of money leaves a trace in the sublimation of money and speech

into the economies of exchange and communication. "If it is true," Searle agrees, "as it

surely is, that there is nothing in the physical structure of the piece of paper that makes it a

he-dollar bill. .. then it is also true that there is nothing in the acoustics of the sounds that

come out of my mouth or the physics of the marks that I make on paper that makes them

into words or other sorts of symbols" (73). For Searle, the distinction between money and

its material existence suggests that money in its active form is not to be associated with its

material form, but that the idea of money is a symbolic instance of social reality quite

distinct fiom the brute fact of its physics. The verifiable existence of certain conventions

validates the illocutionary force of an utterance, or, in the case of money, its deontic

power.

Searie recognizes that these are conventions and that their accession into social

reality is a historical process. In Searle's account, the transition firom commodity money,

gold and silver, to fiat money, purely symbolic representations of value-in-exchange, is a

process of "collective agreement" as to how the social reality of exchange mechanisms is

to be most conveniently reproduced. There is no question in Searle's writing that there is,

or should be, any dissent to this collective agreement, an underlying implication for which

S a l e has been often maligned. This should not take away from the importance of the

realization that money is a speech act and that therefore speech-act theory might open the

way for significant advances in the philosophical understanding of money. Significantly,

Searle's Lockean belief that collective agreement is logically a proper part of social

behaviour is subtended by the same tautological assumption as the concept of money:

language always functions as a social reality of which all forms of representation are only

self-identifying instances. Searle' s history of money thus develops from an inconvenient to

a convenient version of the same act:

The use of commodity money, such as gold and silver, is, in effect, a form

of barter, because the form that the money takes is regarded as itself

valuable. Thus the substance in question performs the hc t ion of money

solely because of its physical nature, which will typically already have some

fbnction imposed on it. Thus, gold coins are valuable not because they are

coins but because they are made of gold, and the value attached to the coin

is exactly equal to the value attached to the gold in it. We impose the

hc t ion of 'Wue" on the substance gold because we desire to possess that

kind of substance. Because the h a i o n of value has already been imposed

on gold, it is easy to impose the function of money on top of the function

309

of value. And that is just a faocy way of saying that because people already

regard gold as valuable because of its physical nature, they are willing to

accept it as a medium of exchange. (42)

Even the most primordial form of monetary exchange, that of precious metals, is

conceived of in a linguistic character, even though that characterization is admittedly an

imposition Searle does clarify the important distinction between the symbolic "use" of

money as a unit of barter and its more elusive status as a material object, as art, jewellery,

or show-piece. But that valuation is for Searie an imposition of a supposedly general

tendency which serves to justify logically the next step: the transmutation of that physical

nature into the symbolic. Searle then quickly reviews the origins of banking in the middle

ages, and introduces the idea of convertibility, the notion that gold and silver were not

necessary for the long term transfer of commodities because a buyer could simply offer a

pledge signifying the same value in its stead, which the seller could then exchange for

precious metals on demand. From convertibility, Searle narrztes, came the realization that

as long as sufficient metals were available in some depository to be referred to, trading and

lending could take place exclusively by use of the nominal representation of monetary

values:

A stroke of genius occurred when somebody figured out that we can

increase the supply of money simply by issuing more certificates than we

have gold. As long as the certificates continue to finction, as long as they

have a collectively imposed function that continues to be collectively

accepted, the certificates are, as they say, as good as gold. The next stroke

of genius came when somebody figured out -- and it took a long time for

people to figure this out -- we can forget about the gold and just have the

certificates. With this change we have arrived at fiat money, and that is the

situation we are in today. On old Federal Reserve notes it said we could

take the bill to the Treasury and they would "pay the bearer" the equivalent

in "dollars." But suppose we gave them a twenty-dollar Federal Reserve

note, what exactly would they give us? Another twenty dollar Federal

Reserve note! (43)

We are back where we started: a "system" of give and take, the efficacy of which is

guaranteed by the efficacy of genuine social institutions, the exchange mechanism as

barter. Fiat money as absolute formal tautology (twenty dollars is twenty dollars) is

historically imagined to be the llfilment of what was always evident in even outlandish

uses of money as gold: the identification of the fimction of value with the consolidation of

subjective authority and knowledge, the idea of the guaranteed performative utterance.

Neither Locke nor Searle takes into account the fact that to articuIate such a

concept of social reality, and especially to rest it logically on tautological syllogisms, is to

posit their existence in a performative and therefore social sense. This is the position of

post-Mamist critical theory on the philosophical implications of the money form. To

Zizek, for instance, tautologies Oce Searle's manifest the assumed completeness of what

he calls a symbolic circuit, the persistence of the posited world of ideas which are

imagined to exist in conjunction with the world but are not directly responsible for its

existence or its continuation (Sublime Object 92-4). Money has the name, or status, of

money because rhar is its name. Money is the transcendental form of value because we

believe that it is so, and this collective social fantasy is essentially a performative act,

designating and iterating certain metaphysical qualities onto physical objects and products

which come to inhabit those objects. They have been posited there, because in a social

sense, they have been named.' It is therefore possible to conceive of a different history of

' In Symbolic Economies, Goux clarifies the simultaneous development of the subject in philosophy with the development of the money form as the social accession of the Name-of-the-Father, the Lacanian trope of sublimated domination, through which a metaphysical notion of power replaces physical domination or sexual licence through the

the money form fiom the one propagated by SearIe's c o d t m e n t to a universal "social

reality" but one which still demonstrates an important performative dimension.

For this conception, I turn to the work of Alfred Soh-RetheI, an associate of the

Fr- School of Critical Theory. In his IntPlechral rmdM-I Labour, Soh-Rethel

argues that the idea that money has a transkendental relation power--a deontic power, that

is-displaces the fact that the equation of a value with a circulating medium was achieved

by a conventional act of agreement which historically, but also logically, predates any

general symbolic authorization. What makes Sohn-Rethel's version of the process of the

abstraction of the money form pertinent to Romantic economics is his conviction, similar

to Shelley's, that the original act of monetary exchange needs no metaphorical elaboration,

because it is, in itseE hdamentally real and vital, though stiU, also fbndarnentally,

linguistic. Sohn-Rethel reverses Searle's standard history of the money form from the

realization of a social reality potential in commodity forms Like barter and gold to the idea

that these forms of immediate social effectivity actually precede the transcendental notion

of social reality as behaviourally conditioned by certain apriori truths which are

represented by the language of propositions and statements. Sohn-Rethel calls the social

act of "postulating" the value of an object equated with the supposed value of another

object for which it can then be exchanged, "real abstraction." He distinguishes real

abstraction--essentially the act of abstracting--from "thought abstraction," the belief that

objects or ideas in themselves bear this exchangeable value. In the history of money, gold

is first abstracted in its own right into an exchangeable commodity while it still exists in

material form, and only later is that social mode of abstraction made permanent in the

murder of the father-figure or his castration, which is then ritualistically reiterated through the emergence of the phallus as a socio-symbolic entity. As a result, the m e of the dead father and his material existence, his non-identity, are indistinct. The fact remains, however, that by isolating the performative nature of these ritual iterations of primitive violence, their fantastic, in the literal sense, power is made manifest as the basis for the social reality which they might also be said (in realist fashion) to exemplifjl.

3 12

social scene by the use of a stamp to mark value on the gold, changing it into a coin, a

value-thought .

The point is this: real abstraction occurs when an object of whatever function or

use-value is located or positioned in such a way that value is articulated in relation to the

needs, m o m , or desires of a potential buyer, the idea of exchange value is thus a

perfomance of value limited to the expectations and conventions at work at that specif~c

time and place. A rationalist or transcended philosophy will find this red abstraction

unbearable because it suggests that the idea of the value of any object is not something

which social actions like speech and advertising represent or s i m , but is the result of

that social articulation:

Anybody who carries coins in his pockets and understands their functions

bears in his mind, whether or not he is aware of it, ideas which, no matter

how hazily, reflect the postulates of the exchange abstraction. To go about

his marketing activities of buying and selling and to take advantage of the

power of his money no clearer awareness is required. But to reflect upon

the ideas involved, to become conscious of them, to formulate them, to

take stock of them and to work out their interrelations, to probe into their

uses and their implications, to recognise their authentic contrast to the

world of the senses and yet their intrinsic reference to it, etc.--this does not

follow automatically £?om the use of coined money, it constitutes a clearly

definable conditioned potentiality inherent in a monetary economy. (60)

Sob-Rethet thus comes to the same conclusion about value that Austin does about

language: the concept of reality as a collection of ideas and categorical forms depends on

an active process of positing that reality in strategic situations and in accordance with

manipulable conventional standards. Exchange value is a non-referential action which

then becomes habituated into a representable idea which then hides or displaces that

3 13

historical per fodvi ty through a process of philosophical and cultural justification.

Austin's linguistic phenomenology teaches that the distinction between constative

and perfonaafive utterances (corresponding, in Searle's terms, to brute f m s and

iostitutiomi facts) "stands to the doctrine of locutionary and illocutionary acts in the total

speech act as the special theory to the general theory. And," Austin continues, "the need

for the general theory arises simply because the traditional 'statement' is an abstraction, an

ideal, and so is its traditional truth or fasity" (Haw to 148). Such "hopefbf fireworks" as

Austin calls them, explode precisely the philosophical realist fantasy that even

performative utterances lo@& rely on certain wnstative conditions, as Searle so

adamantly wants to maintain. Austin's radical notion of performance intimates, self-

reflexively, that there is a dialectical confirontation to be observed in a philosopher's-or an

economist's-declaration of what comprises either constative truth or perfonnative action,

according to the dictates of the special theory, and the possible infelicity of that declared

statement, according to the general theory. This means that the abstraction or ideal of a

wntinuous intrinsic value in a commodity like gold or even in a transaction of credit, must

be set in dialectical relation both to the invention of the fantasy of value and,

correspondingly, to the abstract examination of all of these processes by an economist or

philosopher who might easily equate that fantasy with "social r d ty . " The recognition of

perfonnative contingency thus throws into relief the contingency of metaphysical truths,

such as the transcendence of the money form, and thus isolates the social character of

language and the exchange process as opposed to simply restating their alienated

fetishized manifestation.

Bullionism and the Signs of Lubour

In terms of its own conceptualization of the relation between money, gold7 and

credit and the dynamics of social exchange in which and for which they exist, the

development of monetary economics after Locke and behind the bullionist controversy

follows Searle's narrative of the history of money. That is to say, the development of

monetary economics in the eighteenth century provides the justifying backbone of Searle's

own argument, which he takes to be historical fkt. Though fiat money did not become

the permanent legal standard of exchange in Britain until after the First World War, the

acceptability of credit was more or less universal by the turn of the nineteenth century. At

the same the , Bri* like the rest of Europe, was still reliant on international trade for

the consistency of domestic prices, which rose and fell relative to the rate of export and

import. The increased acceptability of credit is thus commensurate with the expansion of

the British economy during that period: the demand and influx of luxury goods from India

and elsewhere-as we have seen in Chapter 2-necessitated a fiarnework of monetary

thought which would at once allow credit to circulate freely but not abandon the idea of a

strong commodity base. Convertibility, then, was a way of ensuring that the circulation of

paper money with a total value well in excess of the available quantity of gold would not

result in a threat to what the economist Henry Thornton called the "confidence" of

commerce and trade ( P p r Credit 75).

As a number of scholars have shown, the idea of an autonomous subject grew

contemporaneously with the development of the conceptual economics of regulated debt,

public credit, and a theoretically prescribed free-market. The idea of a person was no

longer limited to the immediate material contingencies of property or trade, but was

delineated as an entity in itself whose characteristics-a capacity to learn, to revise, to

think, to imagine, to understand his or her position in and against a fearsomely contingent

world--could be classified according to the internal logic of narrative record and

prediction. David Ricardo's contributions to these debates provide an excellent example

of the dissemination of these principles into the monetary economics of the Restriction

period. Key to Ricardo's 181 1 pamphlet, "The High Price of Bullion," for instance, is the

315

idea, inherited fiom Hume and Smith but filtered through the inductive argument for

general principles Ricardo inherited fiom James Mill, that money itself has no creative

influence over the relative'changs in the price of commodities and thus in the overall

condition of the economy. Money exists either as a commodity (gold) universally

recognized because of its utility and scarcity to be the best measure of values in trade or as

credit (notes) the purpose of which is to h e commodity money to be used as capital in

the flow of exports and imports that, Hume showed, controlled domestic prices. If notes

were issued by a financial institution (such as the Bank of England) in excess of the

available commodity money, the price of gold would rise relative to the demand for its

exportation that would incur. But if it were not possible for independent gold traders to

have access to bullion, then the corresponding easing of prices would not result, and,

moreover, the price of Bullion would remain dangerously high relative to the standard

value of gold embodied in the Pound Sterling. Recognizing that the reserves of gold were

Limited, Ricardo contended that some legislated form of regulation of the amount of

circulating currency relative to the quantity of precious metals was required.

Ricardo's writings are important not only because they were among the most

immediately influential contributions to the Controversy but also because they demonstrate

the way in which the performative contingency of the economic system in general was

sublimated into a Common-Sense conception of collective understanding. Like Reid,

Ricardo admitted that there was no consistent measure of natural price (3: 149), but he

was more positive than Reid that even within this fluctuating system there could be some

permanent conventional guide for the increases and decreases in price and trade to follow.

Ricardo's monetary arguments suggest that it is exactly because of the general principle of

the fluidity of individual contract-making that government control over the quantity of the

circulating fiscal medium is undesirable:

The exportation of the specie may at all times be safely left to the discretion

3 16

of individuals; it will not be exported more than any other commodity,

d e s s its exportation should be advantageous to the country. If it be

advantageous to export it, no laws can effectually prevent its exportation.

Happily in this case, as well as in most others in commerce where there is

free competition, the interests of the individual and that of the community

are never at variance. (3 : 55-6)

As Stephen Gudernan has explained, Ricardo's "derivational model" of economic

exchange assumes a direct correlation between logical principles of individual behaviour

and the needs of the greater community (50-2). Certainly, society required law-making

bodies, like Parliament, to create and administer policies in response to the inevitable

contingencies of social life. But the role of policy, Ricardo believed, was to bring the

political domain "into accord with the mechanistically governed economy" (52). Thus

individual contracts, as Reid demonstrated, follow the logic of obligation inherent in the

expression of that obligation. This correlation is the ground for what Reid called "a

sphere of law" maintaining the deontic powers of speech and exchange to calibrate social

responsibilities to one another. It is in this way that Ricardo's thought extends the basic

principles of Common-Sense philosophy.

Few contributions to the Bullionkt Controversy were as systematic as Ricardo's,

though Ricardo's "moderate bulli~nism'~-the argument that prices could be kept relatively

consistent by reducing the quantity of notes in circulation relative to the quantity of gold-

was by far the most commonly held position. Ricardo himself admired (and cited)

pamphlets by Walter Boyd and Lord Peter King, who claimed that since the stability of the

"purchasing power" of precious metals had been the reason for using them as a circulating

medium of value in the first place, then obviously the Bank had a responsibility to allow

that purchasing power to hct ion fieely in the market. Nevertheless this power exists

relative to the fbnctions of the sphere of trade and exchange of which it is also an instance

(Hollander 385). As with Searle's tautological correlation of speech acts and money, the

performance of monetary exchange is sublimated into a set of universal laws, the

c o d v e validity of which is demonstrated by their own medium, precious metals. Some

contributions to the debate were quite radical in their allegiance to this deontic correlation.

One economist, with the astoundingly coincidental name of Wtlliam Blake, suggested that

if all the guineas were collected and melted back into bullion, then there would be no

confusion over what constituted "good" and "bad" money. There would be gold, which

controlled value, and paper which represented it: a natural sign and a social act

(Heinzelman 1 17). The almost mystical belief in the correspondence between economic

agency and the purchasing power of metals is not readily apparent in the economic

writings. Nevertheless, the radical William Frend, whom Coleridge had known at

Cambridge, argued that the Bank's arbitrary designation of value in notes "act upon the

distempered mind of the nation; they bear on their front the words, Ipromise topay on

demand.... but if the acquisition of this dreaming paper cost you less labour than that of

hard solid guineas, or good [convertible] notes formerly, be not offended that a smaller

quantity of solid food is exchanged for your nominal pounds" (12). In opposition to the

dream-promise, Frend recalls nostalgically a ''good" promise, one which anticipates its

own uptake and effkct in a market ''tempered" by the constative or "real" value of the

guinea.

Coleridge's contribution to the Bullion debate, a series of editorials written for fie

Carrier between May and August 18 1 1, resemble Frend's and Ricardo's in a number of

important ways, with the important proviso that Coleridge actually supported the

Restriction. The editorials present no "theory of money" for scholars to productively

compare to the theories of poetry, language, or politics that Coleridge expounds and

combines in his more ambitious philosophical works &om the same period like The Friend

(1 809- lo), The Statesman 's MmaI (1 8 16), and Biographia Literaria (1 8 17)' not to

318

mention the letters and notebooks. The bullion editorials might be used to clarifL

Coleridge's steadily more trenchant conservatism in this later period of his career.

Moreover, the editorials also show Coleridge in a polemical, rather than a poetical mood;

they mainly refbte the claims and suppositions of other monetary economists, and offer, in

typically Coieridgean style, only hints and promises of a fUer explication of the issue,

which of course never comes. To be sure, many of the same philosophical assumptions

apparent in the poetry and theological writings are also at work in the Bullion editorials,

especially as they pertain to language. Coleridge's theory of language is based on a

continual and vigilant participation of individual speakers and auditor-interpreters in the

development of a universal system of Linguistic meaning in accordance with the supreme

creative power of the original logos, but Coleridge also acknowledges that the recognition

of this original power comes from the differential analysis of words and their associative

relations to one another. Thus, while Coleridge's philosophy of language is in accordance

with the common-sense view that words and social action are logically commensurate

according to general logical principles inductively understood, for Coleridge those

principles remain indeterminate, constantly reinterpreted by the continuation of verbal

production, what Jerome Christensen calls Coleridge's "machine of language." The

editorials are important because they illustrate not only Coleridge's opposition to most of

the opinions offered by economists on the best solution to the currency question, but also

(and more significantly) his unease with the determinism reflected in those opinions, even

those which, like Coleridge's, supported the government's decision to ignore the report

fiom the Bullion Committee and extend the Restriction. The performative nature of

Coleridge's philosophical perspective on the money question demonstrates a dialectical

approach to the relation between subjective intentions and material conditions apparent in

the money question.

Consider, for instance, Coleridge's account of a typical agreement between a

landlord and a tenant involving an exchange of monetary funds. Both parties agree drat

whatever the tenant raises on his rented land and sells for money in the market, a portion

of that money will be paid to the landlord.

Now is it not broad and glaring to common sense, that the tenant must

bring back what be receives? that if he carries the Lord's corn to the buyer,

he must bring back the buyer's money to the Lord! Is it not the confiest

nature of a promise, that it is morally binding on the promiser in the sense,

in which he knew that thepromisee understood it, and permitted him to

continue so to understand it? If we except ideotry or derangement, the

land-owner must have known that the tenant expected to pay his rent by

the sale of his produce; of course then, in the money for which alone he

could sell it (lkzys 2: 253).

Money realizes the t e r n and intentions of the contract between farmer and tenant. In

principle, therefore, money is an institutional fact among others, including promising and

contract making, the continuity of which binds communities together. Coleridge here

suggests, with many economists of the eighteenth century and the Bullionkt Controversy,

that the criterion for the value of money is a mutually understood set of normative

standards applied to everyday actions. Coleridge equates the respect for consistent

monetary value with the obligation of each party in the exchange to respect the rights and

privileges of the other and to abide by the communally agreed standards of conduct, which

in this case would imply the vaiue of whatever money the tenant was able to procure, gold

or paper, at its institutionally prescribed value.* Money is no longer to be measured by the

' Also apparent here is Coleridge's sense that a theory of money must illustrate the way individual agents should align their desire for property (accessed through exchange) with the interests of the nation as a whole (Morrow 113). This is not blind allegiance to institutional conventions, as it seems to have been for Burke and other adherents of the social contract, but rather a commitment to a mode of socially responsible philosophical reflection which "displaces" the quantifying atomism of Thornton's, Ricardo's, and other

equivalent value of some thing, but by an intentional promise based on the parameters of

an observed institutional standard.

Nevertheless, as in his theory of language, Coleridge insists that value is

determined by an engagement with the operations of the utterance at the moment and in

the context of its utterance, and only a constant vigilance to these operations and

"synonymies'' between word, meaning, and effect, can realize the ultimate fidtihent of the

symbolic money form Coleridge's argument on behalf of the contractual validity of a

proriiise-to-pay in the form of paper money is situated in a direct attack on Lord King's

vigorous defense of convertibility during the Parliamentary Bullion debate. On July 2,

18 1 1, Lord King, not only a well-known author on money matters but also a prodigious

landowner, rose in opposition to the extension of the Restriction. He declared that he was

so convinced of the necessity of convertibility to stabilize prices that he himselfwould

accept only goid specie as rent payments fiom his tenants. He justified this immodest

stringency by claiming that he had a large family to support and needed to maintain the

confidence in his financial matters that only a commodity-based fiscal standard could give

him. The public outcry was resounding, not so much against King's bullionism, but

against his justification for restricting his tenants to gold payments. A Carrier article of

July 5 boldly rebuked King's assertion: "[tlhere was a time when Legislator's on the

popular side of politics, would have disdained such a justification; when they would have

blushed at hearing their own conduct on a great public measwe, fiaught with the most

gigantic consequences to their country, vindicated on the ground of 'their f w y , ' of

preserving their property, of protecting their own private interests" (Coleridge, Essays

political economist's supposition that intrinsic value lies in an idea of the objective value of a substance, to discover in social practice Christian ideals of faith, mutual obligation, and patriotic allegiance. The idealist strain in Coleridge's economic writings, and their similarities to the economics of Mill and Keynes is surveyed by Kennedy. For a discussion of Coleridge's relation to common-sense philosophy, see Simpson, Romanticism 59-63 and Leask 68-74.

3: 1 18-9).' The implications of such a declaration are paramount: King justifies his defense

of a supposedly universal and objective standard of value, as he himself called it in his

bullionist pamphlet of 1803, with a clear statement of exclusively personal interest and

ambition.

King's defense, in other words, mis-fired because it exposed the performative

dimension of the value OF gold in which he had such Gth- The next day, King apologized

for his assertion (1 18). Coleridge's own attack on King brings this performative nexus to

the fore. Indeed, Coleridge's discussion of King's arguments are not only polemical, but

also comical and theatrical in a way that draws specific attention to the theatrical nature

of the money question as it was debated in Parliament, and the rhetoric of newspaper

journalism and pamphlet debate. King's allegiance to the intrinsic value of gold becomes

in Coleridge's sardonic terms the ravings of the economically-inclined brothers "Crow

King, Jo. King, and No. King" against whom Coleridge pits the more insightful opinions

of their enlightened cousin ''Thyme King."

Crow, Joseph, and Noah afhn, that Bank-notes are depreciated. That I

deny quoth Thynne King: I aflhn that Bank-notes are not depreciated.

What! exclaim the three brothers, will you aErm, that you can purchase

the weight of gold contained in four good guineas for four one-pound

Bank-notes, and four shillings? No! replies their opponent: I not only

admit, but we all know, and.have long known, that we cannot. Well then,

rejoin the former, and this is what we mean by the word "Depreciation."

Nay, retorts Thynne, but that is not what I mean by the word. If1 went

into any shop in London to pay the tradesman a bill of seventeen shillings,

' Coleridge probably co-authored the 5 July editorial. See David Erdman's notes to Coleridge, Essays, 3 3: 1 18, 1 19, 1 22. The remarks against King go on to disdain King' s self-interest as a sign of the weakening of patriotism-a popular Coleridgean rebuke during the war years.

and offered him a one-pound note; and if he said, "I must have two

shillings more: the note, I take for meen shillings." -- This I should call a

depreciation of Bank-paper. But instead of this, the tradesman takes my

one-pound, gives me three shillings in change, thanks me, and requests the

favour of my f h r e custom Can you deny this to be the fact? No; they

reply, - this we all know. Well then, since there is no difference in point of

fms, wherein lies the dispute? Simply in this, whether the word applies

more properly to this fact, or to that fact, both facts being equally admitted

by both sides! ! ! (25 1-2)

Coleridge de-naturalizes, or perhaps, de-universalizes, the claims made in buiIionist

pamphlets like King's that the ''universally" agreed-upon value of gold represents the

natural or "healthy" standard of consistent value which economic policy must sustain and

which the policy of inconvertibility has rendered liable to dangerous Incidents of deflation.

In opposition, Coleridge-in the role of Thynne King, or ~h.inkingY'-argues for the validity

of the conventional authority of the pound, taken to be the basis for the system of pounds,

shillings, and pence, used to maintain and regulate commerce irrespective of the value of

the pound in gold dust, or the price of gold on the European market. But more

importantly this open advocacy of the normative standard of money is also used to attack

King's own mode of "affirmation." The bullionist argument stated that bank notes were

depreciated relative to the price of gold because the price of gold (measured in gold

guineas) had risen above the value of the pound. Doubtless, as Thynne King agrees, such

an argument is mathematically true, but only in the context of a constituted rational

alignment of a set of n o d values into mathematical relation to one another. These are

" ~ a t i o n s " necessitating a context of understanding or reading which, Thynne King

also suggests, is not uniform or predictable.

Thus Thynne King's appeal to a specific illustration of discursive engagement

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between a buyer and a seller as a behaviouraI justification for the value of the pound is

itself confounded by its drsunaturgical association. More poignantly, Coleridge rests the

validity of this appeal on a further agreement about the meaning of a word, "depreciation,"

as either the abstract application of a theoretical possibility to the perception of a state of

affairs7 or, more favorably, an "actual" social event. That is to say, Coleridge relies on a

performatively defended wnstafive definition (depreciation is a social phenomenoq not a

theoretical one) to refbte the validity of an alternative definition. It is in this way that

Coleridge's polernic subtends his broader philosophy of language and theoretical argument

about the nature of money. This dialectic between the applicability of the constative

meaning of a word to a performative use, and the performative critique of constative

consistency recurs in the context of Coleridge's own "common-sensical" account of the

monetary promise, and in a significantly dramatic manner: "the words of the lease--aye,

aye, the letter of the bond-a plea, no doubt, that would be allowed even in the court of

conscience, provided only that it were the conscience of Shylock! But in point of morai

obligation, words meaning things known to be unattainable, are either to all practical

purposes senseless, or must be interpreted to mean the best possible substitute of the thing

no longer attainable" (fisclys 2: 253). To demand gold for this "money" as King stated he

would is to posit a limited definition of a word for which there are many possible readings.

At the same time, Coleridge's refutation of this plea on the grounds of the validity of the

promise as uttered relies on the same presumption of meaning where meaning is known to

be ambiguous.

While Coleridge defended the restriction, Shelley opposed it. But Shelley also

offers a performative critique of the economic justification of the money form which

continues and in many ways accentuates Coleridge7s. Shelley's response to the

Restriction, in A Phiiosophicai View of Refonn, written just after he had completed The

Cenci in the autumn of 18 19, demonstrates a keener sceptical energy, such that the

324

polemical deconstructive impetus only latent in Coleridge's bullion editorials is the critical

foundation for Shelley's economic ideas. As summarized by Terence Hoagwood, the first

and second parts of the View present analogous accounts of the progress of philosophy

(Part 1) and the political situation in Britain (Part 2). A good deal of Shellefs

commentary on British politics is devoted to a consideration of the banking system and its

effects. With this parallel S h e w hoped to clarify that the tyranny of bourgeois banking

practices was ideologically subtended by the rise of the same Enlightenment stringency

that had suppressed Bacon and Montaigne two centuries before (Skepticism 167-96). But

apart fiom its indictment of ideological formation, the Viov also offers an internal theory

of monetary exchange based on the fact that human labour and its commodities, including

precious metals, exhibit a significative relationship. The arbitrary accumulation of these

signs creates the illusion-the "collective delusion," Terence Hoagwood calls it

(Skpticim 190)-that the signs of labour-value exist in a separable stratum of circulating

values apart from labour itself Public credit, Shelley argues, is a "far subtler and more

complicated contrivance of misrule" than that provoked by the circulation of coin. With

Cobbett, whose Paper Against Gold Shelley had received in Italy from the Hunts, Shelley

argues that those who easily distribute paper notes "defraud those who have gold and

silver and goods of the advantages legally attached to the possession of them, and they

defkaud the labourer and the artisan of the advantage attached to increasing the nominal

price of labor, and such a participation in them as their industry might command, while

they render wages fluctuating and add to the toil of the cultivator and manufacturer"

(244). Cobbett had argued that the system of convertibility represented a "promise" that if

needed, the bank would pay back what it had borrowed in the form of taxation. And yet,

in "declaring," as Shelley says, that convertibility is no longer necessary, the Bank invents

the constituent rules by which paper currency is always valid, thus not only withholding

the repayment of taxation but also driving the prices of goods up, for the benefit of the

325

interested bankers:

The existing govemment of England in substituting a currency of paper

[for] one ofgold has had no need to depreciate the currency by alloying the

coin of the country; they have merely fabricated pieces of paper on which

they promise to pay a certain sum. The holds of these papers came for

payment in some representation of property universally exchange.le.

They then declared that the persons who held the office for that payment

could not be forced by law to pay. They declared subsequently that these

pieces of paper were the legal coin of the country. Of this nature are all

such transactions of companies and banks as consist in the circulation of

promissory notes to a greater amount than the actual property possessed by

those whose names they bear. They have the effect of augmenting the

prices of provision and of benefitting at the expense of the community the

speculators in this traffic. (Prose 244)

Shelley's polemical attack on the restriction underlies his indictment of what he calls "the

new aristocracy," a fitting epithet not simply because this class of "attorneys and

excisemen and directors and government pensioners, usurers, stock jobbers, country

bankers, with their dependents and descendants" represents an emerging social class, but

also because their influence depends on the success of international mercantilism and its

trade in novelty goods. Importantly, however, Shelley's discussion of the two orders of

aristocracy (the old and the new) is underwritten by a conflict of performative dynamics7

one phenomenal and indeterminate, the other theatrical and absorptive. The old

aristocracy, Shelley says, "signifies that class of persons who possess a right to the

produce of the labour of others, without dedicating to the common service any labour in

return7' (245). The aristocracy epitomizes, in others words, unproductive labour. Shelley

does not deny the need to have some way of monitoring the behaviour of these wealthy

326

profligates. Their "existence is a prodigious anomaly in the social system," but they have

"ever constituted an inseparable portion of it, and there has never been an approach in

practice towards any plan of political society modelled on equal justice, at least in the

complicated mechanism of modem lifey' (245).

Shelley agrees with Ricardo that precious metals represent the most acceptable

form of money standard with which to maintain a fair economy because gold is a product

ofthe same human labour that goes into the production of distributed commodities. But

he does not agree that the conceptual money form that derives from the power of gold to

stand as a general equivalent of these other commodities must be mediated by an

entrenched institutional agreement over the price of that gold relative to the price of

commodities. Ethere is to be fiscal regulation, its purpose is to sustain the purity of the

discrete act of producing those signs:

...p recious metals have been from the earliest records of civilization

employed as the signs of labour and the titles to an unequal distribution of

its produce. The [government of] a country is necessarily entrusted with

the afExing to certain portions of these metals a stamp by which to mark

their genuineness; no other is considered as current coin, nor can be legal

tender. The reason is that no alloyed coin should pass current and thereby

depreciate the genuine and by augmenting the price of the articles which

are the product of labor, defraud the holders of that which is genuine of the

advantages legally belonging to them. If' the government itself abuses the

trust reposed in it to debase the coin in order that it may derive advantage

Erom the unlimited multiplication of the mark entitling the holder to

command the labor and property of others, the gradations by which it sinks

as labour rises, to the level of their comparative values, produces public

confbsion and misery. (243-44)

327

Shelley's remarks on money here are fundamentally Linguistic, but they also align

themselves with the problematics of Linguistic representation and Linguistic action evident

in pefiormative language theory. On the one hand, Shelley's theory of money as sign

betrays a certain nostalgia for the real vdue of labour understood as the natural value of

all commodities. A coin, like a word, is a "sign of labour" which is nevertheless also the

prodm of labour. But Shelley's point is that as both a sign of labour and a product of

labour, the application of these signs in exchange situations, the ''command" of labour, is

naturally limited by the contingencies of availability-the material quantity of metal in

circulation. But Shelley's quantity theory is not posited as a system of certain principles of

exchange; rather, it manifests Shelley's sense that signs are themselves instances of

instantaneous creation which only achieve sigdicance through their association with other

signs. As Shelley states in On L i f , %y signs, I would be understood in a wide sense,

including what is properly meant by that term, and what I peculiarly mean. In this latter

sense all familiar objects are signs, standing not for themselves but for others, in their

capacity of suggesting one thought, which shall lead to a train of thoughts.-Our whole

life," he concludes, "is thus an education of error" (Poetry rmd Prose 477). Thus,

Shelley's monetary theory runs counter not to bullionism as such, but to the assumption

that the conversion of gold &om commodity to unit of exchange and back is circumscribed

by a what Reid called the "sphere of law" surrounding human action.

Cenci 's Gold

References to gold and money in B e Cenci are slight and indirect, so it is

inaccurate to say that The Cenci is in its entirety an historical allegory for the bullionist

controversy. Yet, it is also inaccurate to say that the only substantial connection between

early nineteenth-century debates over the validity of the credit system and the dramaturgy

and plot of 7he Cenci is a like concern for the problems of identity, representation, or

otherness. Rather, Shelley's subtle allusions to the question of the nature of currency

augment his critique of the sublimation of the verbal materiality of exchange into a

theorized social network maintained by a "confident" bureaucracy. In almost the exact

middle of the play, immediately following Beatrice's decision to have her father murdered,

Shelley includes what can only be called a parable of the Bank of England. The language

of this parable combines the self-justifying posture of the bank with the performative

language of fiscal exchange to expose their problematic synonymity in the reification of

the monetary system. As Giacomo relates to Orsino, Cenci first '%orrowed the dowry"

(3.1.300) Giawmo had received fiom his wife, "and then denied the loan" (301). and

second arranged to have a government office which Giacomo had been "promised" (304)

and on the trust of which Giacomo "bought new clothing for F s ] ragged babes7' (305),

granted to "a wretch, whom thud He paid for vilest service" (308-9). Cenci then visits the

forlorn household of his son "to upbraid and curse,/ Mocking [their] poverty, and telling

us/ Such was God's scourge for disobedient sons."

To make even clearer the significance of this process of theoretical rescation to

the banking question, Shelley has Giacomo interfuse the language of justification with the

language of money:

I spoke of my wife's dowry; but he coined

A brief yet spciious tale, how I had wasted

The sum in secret riot; and he saw

My wife was touched, and he went smiling forth,

And when I knew the impression he had made,

And felt my wife insult with silent scorn

My ardent truth, and look averse and cold,

I went forth too: but soon returned again;

Yet not so soon but that my wife had taught

My children h=r harsh thoughts, and they all cried,

"Give us clothes father! Give us better food!

What you in one night squander were enough

For months!" I looked, and saw that home was he4

And to that hell will I return no more

Until mine enemy has rendered up

Atonement, or, as he gave life to me

I will, reversing nature's law.. . (3.1 -3 18-340; emphasis added)

The problem here is not, exclusively, representation. As in Cobbett's attack on the Bank

of England, the problem is unfulfilled promises. At first Giacomo agrees to give Cenci a

loan., to which Cenci then denies ever agreeing. Instead of the Ioan-which amounts to

taxing his own son-Cenci gives back a "coined.. .specious tale" of dissipation, effectively

blaming Giacomo's financial troubles on his own unbalanced and self-absorbed

psychological weakness. A discrete negotiated contract between father and son is thus

turned into a testimony which at once denies the existence of the contract and creates the

psychological reality of Giacomo's behaviour. The social nexus of Giacomo's f d y is

then grounded on that delineated psychological reality, rather than on its own specific

terms, which are figured in the vanished dowry and the children's' cries for food. The

parallel is clear: Parliament levies taxes which go to the bank to pay its interest; instead of

paying back this taxation to the people as is promised by the taxation system itse& the

bank converts those hnds into paper currency; at the same time it claims that the value of

this paper is based on the "confidence" of the economy and not the actual contract

between people and state, which the bank conveniently forgets. The subtle allusions to

"coins" and "specie"-there was no paper money in sixteenth-century Rome-heighten the

irony of these topical allusions. The greater irony of this scene is that Giacomo accepts

this immaterial standard of appropriate conduct which is both created by and invoked by

330

Cenci and the bank. When Orsino tells Giacomo that Beatrice is already planning to

avenge herseE Giacomo replies, "[m]y doubts are weli appeased;/ There is a higher reason

for the act/ Than mine; there is a holier judge than me,/ A more unblamed avenger" (362-

65), and finally, "0 heart, I ask no more/ Justification!" (372-3).

Shelley's reference to the Bank of England's justification of its continued

suspension of payment in gold is significant not simply because of its historical allusiveness

but more, as in Sheridan's references to the Annuity Act in School for SCmabZ, because of

its demonstration of the mechanics of verbal action underlying that justification. That is, in

7he Cenci, Shelley extends his "philosophical view7' of monetary economics to a

philosophical parody of the behaviour of the Bank. At the same time, while the

Philosophical View offers a direct attack on the historical forces and ideological

assumptions underlying the continuation of the suspension, B e Cenci displaces its attack

on the Bank into the historical context of the Cenci story in late sixteenth-century Rome

and, more specifically, its deep Catholic convictions. Yet, Shelley's account of those

convictions in the Preface to The Cenci, ostensibly contrasted to the Protestant habits of

Regency England, also offers a subtle and cunning interpretation of the ideals of

philosophical empiricism underlying much of the Bullionist Controversy:

To a Protestant apprehension there will appear something unnatural in the

earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and man

which pervade the tragedy of the Cenci. It will especially be startled at the

combination of an undoubting persuasion of the truth of the popular

religion with a cool and determined perseverance in enormous guilt. But

religion in Italy is not as in Protestant countries, a cloak to be worn on

particular days; or a passport which those who do not wish to be railed at

carry with them to exhibit; or a gloomy passion for penetrating the

impenetrable mysteries of our beiig, which terrifies its possessor at the

33 1

darkness of the abyss to the brink of which it has conducted him. Religion

coexists, as it were, in the mind of an Italian Catholic with a faith in that of

which all men have the most certain knowledge. It is intenvoven with the

whole fabric of We. It is adoration, fiiith, submission, penitence, blind

admiration, not a rule for moral conduct. It has no necessary connexion

with any one virtue. The most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and

without any shock to established fkith, confess himself to be so. Religion

pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the

temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a

refbge; never a check. (240-4 1)

Shelley's notion that Catholicism represents "an excuse" for the vicissitudes of action, or

perhaps of compulsion, connects his depiction of Renaissance Rome with the complex

performative dynamics of the Enlightenment. With Hume, Shelley is highly sceptical of

Protestant religious behaviour, and particularly the belief that going through the motions

on Sunday morning in any way leads to eternal salvation. Humean scepticism, the "gloomy

passion," a h i d of its own apprehensions, is also here open to revision. What is

interesting about this passage however is that Shelley uses Catholic religious conviction to

reflect the Common-Sense philosophy which was so influential on Ricardo and other

economists of his and Shelley's generation. Shelley seems to echo Reid when he defines

the Italian Catholic temperament as "the most certain knowledge." And both Hume and

Reid come under scrutiny in Shelley's suggestion that Catholicism is "not a rule for moral

conduct" and "has no necessary comexion with any one virtue." Most scathing, however,

is Shelley's realization here that such systems of belief serve as ' a persuasion, an excuse, a

refbge" for the most fearsome injustices. It is as though Shelley's own didectical

refornulation of scepticism and transcendentalism is calibrated according to its divisions

here between the espoused distrust of the imagination on the one hand and an absolute

332

f%th on the other.''

Accordingly, what is missing fiom the cultural world of the play is some realization

of the material conditions and contingencies of individual existence against or within

mental calculations of social purpose. Mostly, gold is mentioned in The Cenci in relation

to an exchange of funds, or more precisely, a promised exchange of funds. Many of the

references to economic exchange in the play, and in particular, to gold, intertwine with

highly fomdized, and often religious or mystical utterances: prayers and oaths, mainly,

but also curses, demands, commands, declarations, and judgements. But Shelley also

underlines the extent to which the Catholic Church's investment in its rituals is directed

more toward the cultivation of a general ideology of compliance than it is to the fostering

of spiritual reflection. The play's opening dialogue scene between Count Cenci and

Cardinal Carnillo, for example, in which Cenci gives up a third of his land holdings in

return for the papacy's silence in the "matter of the murder" (1.1. I), is fmous for the way

the business of buying Church indulgences is ironically parallelled both to the profit gained

by the Church in the process and to Cenci's perversions. Shelley weaves images of

banking and investment into Carnillo's recitation of the deal he managed between Cenci

and the Pope:

It needed all my interest in the conclave

To bend him to this point: he said that you

Bought perilous impunity with your gold;

That crimes like yours if once or twice compounded

Enriched the Church, and respited &om he1

lo Shelley delineates the two sides of his dialecticism most clearly in the 'Zssay on Life." He rejects the seductions of "materialismyy because it "allows its disciples to talk and dispenses them fiom thinking," which also clarifies his distance from the dogmas of Christian faith (Poetry and Prose 476).

An erring soul which might repent and live:-

But that the glory and the interest

Of the high throne he fills, W e consist

With making it a daily market of guilt

As manifold and hideous as the deeds

Which you scarce hide fiom men's revolted eyes. (1.1 -4- 14)

While the proximity of Cenci's and the Pope's methods of manipulating influence is clear,

it should also be noted that it is the Pope's own reasoning and judgement as reported by

Carnillo ("he said. ..") which realize that paraIIel. The Pope, the Father-representative of

God on earth, and also the illegitimate father of the "nephews" who eagerly await the sale

of Cenci's lands, pardons ("hushed up") by decree Cenci's more public versions of the

Pope's own crimes toward his religious and social family. The Pope balances the payment

with the crimes in such a way that it equivocates on the nature of the Church's judgement.

At the end of the play, Cardo will compare the Pope to "marble" and suggest that he is

"not a man."

The ritualistic atmosphere of the celebration scene at the end of Act I also provides

an opportunity for Shelley to refer to the sublimation of effective speech and its economic

correlative, the genuine contract of commodity exchange, within a set of broad and

circulating socialfictions. When Cenci announces that his sons have been killed and that

'Weaven has special care of me" because he had prayed for their deaths, his guests initially

react in shocked amazement. One of them insists that Cenci is not being serious, that the

idea of praying for the death of your own sons is preposterous, and that something else,

something more plausible, must have happened:

I do believe it is some jest; though fhith!

'Tis mocking us somewhat too solemnly.

I think his son has married the Infanta,

Or found a mine of gold in El Dorado;

'Tis but to season some such news; stay, stay!

I see 'tis only raillery by his smile. (1 -3 -7 1-6)

ihe reason this reaction is important is that it draws attention to the fictionality of Cenc

prayer, that is, its uncanny accord with the social h t a s y of divine sanction and ritual

though it offers alternatives to Cenci's jest which are just as fantastic. The important

instance of this is the mine. El Dodo is of course a pure fiction, the great hoard of

precious metals which the Spanish Conquistadores believed was somewhere in Mexico.

This is pardelled with the suggestion that the son has married the infant daughter of the

Spanish King. The arranged mamage points to the social organization of the mamage

contract and the whole absence of immediate human contact in such political affairs.

Notably, it also alludes to the comption of Cenci' s own crimes against his family, which

may or may not be incestuous, by highlighting the incorporation of children into such

political machinations as dynastic marriages.

What makes Count Cenci such a compelling figure, however, is not that his

manipulations of the institutions of his culture are fictional, but quite the opposite, that

they take effect in partly horrifjing, and, as with Rivers and in a gothic sense, also partly

pleasurable ways. Cenci stands as a truly sadistic figure, in an economic sense perhaps, as

the "use value" of de Sade himself has been interpreted by Bataille. The hyper-rational

convertibility of matter fiom one state to another, without fear or possibility of increased

reproduction in de Sade's terrible universe of sexual gratikation, is, Bataille argues, a

parody of the economic appropriation of any form of human excretion, the materid effort

of any act of Iabour, deliberate or instinctive, into a system of identities which can then be

mandactured according to mechanical standards of dissemination (Visons 94-5). Cenci's

pleasure, similarly, is not so much the imparting of violence, but the reflection in the face

of his victim of the terror of being pursued. Cenci is a dramatized comption, or

exaggeration of a system of mutual spectatorship, impartially cultivated to a point beyond

balance, beyond even inindifference, to utter seK-gmtXcation in its own emptiness. Cenci is

an arch-ewnomist, and as an image of the Bank, he is a dark reflection not only of its

empty promises, but also of the exacerbation of violence (the continuation of war which

the restriction crisis supposedly maintained) these uollfilled appropriations allowed to

continue. Even in death, then, Cenci has already orchestrated the circulation of a

conceptualization of power to haunt the generations to come. "When all is done," Cenci

declares

I will pile up my silver and my gold;

My costly robes, paintings and tapestries;

My parchments and all records of my wealth,

And make a bonfire in my joy and leave

Of my possessions nothing but my name;

Which shall be an inheritance to strip

Its wearer bare as infamy. (4.1.5 5-62)

The passage bears a striking resemblance to Cobbett's definition of the National Debt: a

h d for the propagation of "luxuries" supplied by taxation (26). This fbnd, and the stock

of the nation it is calculated to represent, have "no bodily existence, either in the shape of

money or of bonds or of certificates or of anything else that can be seen or touched. They

have a being merely in m e " (2 1).

The play's dramatization of the corruption of a material act of performative

exchange into a system of self-justified, restrictive circulation includes, certainly, Cenci's

rape of his daughter Beatrice. A number of critics have drawn particular attention to the

way the dramaturgy of the play heightens Beatrice's dissociation from her own body. Key

to this dramatization, however, is the mediating power of language. Certainly, this

dissociation intimates Shelley's canny sensitivity to the psychology of rape: once the

horror of the moment of violence is past, any articulation of that violence is just t h a an

articulation, and can be absorbed into the rhetorics of victimization or sexual

manipulation Thus, Shelley's decision to exclude any direct discussion of the event itself

is not simply an attempt to avoid censorship, but a dramatization of the very process of

rhetorical sublimation which excludes the material presence of immediate and often

aberrant acts fiom systematic conceptions of normal human behaviour. Significantly, as

Carlson notes, The Cenci, of all plays in the Romantic drama, contains the greatest

quantity of public, feminine self-expression (Theatre 197). Yet the failure of Beatrice's

own articulation of the crime, the lyrical but fiantic testimony of horror she delivers at the

beginning of the third act, is in part a melodramatic parody of theoretical dis-articulation

or, to use Austin's term, "misfiring." The f i c u l t y of Beatrice's characterization rests

with her caught and divided sense of herself; on the one hand, as a social entity, a

daughter, a sister, a lover, a victim, and on the other, or as Cenci calls her, "this most

specious mass of flesh" (4.1.1 1 5). Missing from Beatrice's sense of se& especially after

the rape, is some contact with some essential sense of her own value. In a complicated

sense, Beatrice is depicted as the manipulatable, material shell which she inhabits, but she

also is that shell." The echo of the word "specie," the proper name for metal money, is

significant, as much of the debate against the BuIlionist Controversy by the Romantics,

including Shelley, rests on the question of the relative value of objects and thoughts.

Shelley establishes a parallel between the materiality of Beatrice's body and its sublimation

into the social nexus of what Shelley calls "superstitious horror" but which is in fact an

There is a theatrical dimension to this division of Beatrice's character. Shelley based his characterization of Beatrice on the performance style of Eliza O'Neill, whom Shelley had in seen and admired in London and whom he hoped would be cast as Beatrice at Convent Garden O'Neill was renowned for ability to appear both beautifidly contemplative and passionately hysterical, as Cenki says of Beatrice, "fhk and yet terrible" (1.3.166). See Carlson 197-99; Cox 140-4 1; Donohue 1-72; Henderson 96- 129; Jewett 139-45.

337

ideology of guaranteed verbal action This is the ideological horror manifested in the

conversion of the materiality of precious metals not simply into commodity forms but into

monetary equivalence as the transcendental force behind the concept of value.

The shift in Beatrice's character is particularly apparent when she chastises the two

assassins she has hired for fearing to murder her father. Nevertheless, Shelley again

ironically associates Beatrice's justification of the murder with the dissociation of

commodity exchange, including gold, and the money form. The assassin scene, in fact,

repeats the theme of material dissociation and interchange which runs through the entire

play. At first, money is admitted by the two murderers to be equivalent to the value of the

murderer and thus serves as ample justification for the rightness of the deed. "A thousand

crowns [is] excellent market price/ For an old murderer's life," muses Marzio (4.2.19-20).

"If one should bribe me with a thousand crowd To kill a serpent which had stung my

child/ I could not be more willing," Olympio replies (26-8). But when they are unable to

complete the murder, the character of money as a promise which demands, by its own

illocutionary formulation, to be hlflled, but which is intempted by the restrictive

impositions of genera justification, emerges. Marzio explains to Beatrice that when he

went to plunge the dagger in Cenci's throat, he "[s]timd in his sleep, and said, 'God!

hear, 0 hear,/ A father's curse! What art thou not our father?'/ And then he laughed. I

knew it was the ghost Of my dead fat her" (4 -3.1 8-2 1). Michael Sirnpson has argued that

the scene demonstrates the "assimilation"of characters into one another's roIes and that

this circulation of socialized identities signals the abstraction of individual identity.

Beatrice takes on the "psychology" of a murderous outlaw as she engages the two

assassins. The relatively minor figures of the hired assassins suddenly become "characters7'

by being addressed as a son and not simply as a human vehicle of someone else's desires

(3 80- 1). This deictical mode of intersubjective creation extends, moreover, as it does in

both Sheridan's and Wordsworth's dramaturgies, to the theatrical aspects of the scene.

338

Beatrice repudiates Mardo's hesitation in a way that recalls Lady Macbeth's repudiation

of her husband at the murder of Duncan. That is, the audience's conception of "Beatrice"

at this point is not simply augmented but actually formed by their familiarity with the

conventions of the dagger scene in Macbeth. In The Cenci, however, Beatrice's

repudiation of her father's killer hinges precisely on a matter of monetary value:

Cowards and Traitors! Why, the very conscience

Which ye would sell for gold and for revenge

Is an equivocation: it sleeps over

A thousand daily acts disgracing men;

And when a deed where mercy insults heaven.. .

Why do I tallc?

[Snatching a kggerfiom one of them and raising it

Hadst thou a tongue to say,

"She murdered her own father," I must do it! (4.3 -26-32)

Recalling Hamlet as well as Lady Macbeth, Beatrice chides the two assassins with the

notion that conscience should be an antidote for active vengeance. By formulating the

equation wnscience=gold+revenge, however, Beatrice alludes both to the mediating

power of gold, as the basis for a system of relational values, and to its status as an

independent commodity distinct from the items it helps to equate. Conscience itself is "an

equivocation," but importantly here Beatrice cannot complete her own equation. Instead,

she invents a generally exchangeable report of the scene, and takes the dagger into the

bargain.

After the murder, Beatrice does in fact pay the assassins, unlike her father who

simply turns his financial associations with others into the basis for his own sadistic

expenditures. The stage directions are very explicit about what exactly it is that Beatrice

is giving them, that it is not gold as such, but money and other signs of wealth, while

Beatrice herselfsays that what she gives them is gold:

BEATRICE (giving them a bag of coin). Here take this gold, and hasten

to your homes.

And Marzio, because thou wast only awed

By that which made me tremble, wear thou this!

(Clothes him in a rich mantle.

It was the mantle that my grandfhther

Wore in his high prosperity, and men

Envied his state: so may they envy thine.

Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God

To a just use. Live long and thrive! And, mark

If thou hast crimes, repent: this deed is none. (48-56)

Beatrice's equivocal advice to the assassins parallels the equivocation of her saying take

this gold, when she gives them coins. There may, in fkct, be a subtle play on words in

Beatrice's command to "mark" her words, since the value of coin originates from the

arbitrary signification of value fiom a stamp, not fiom the metal itself. It is also

significant that repentance like her command and like the value of coin, is a speech act

which derives its force from the authority of an official power. This is a social

phenomenon, just as the prosperity of Beatrice's grandfather is a social phenomenon

determined by the reaction and envy of his peers. What has been excluded fiom the office

of money making and religion alike is the material creation of that wealth, the labour

underlying riches, or in this case, crime which might also be indirectly associated with the

Cenci genealogy. '2et us retire to counterfeit deep rest" Beatrice remarks paradoxically;

"I scarcely need to counterfeit it now" (6 1-2).

These references to gold in the play point to the dissociation of money from its

material commodity form, by which it is involved in a mediation between verbal

340

communication and spatial and temporal contingency rather than simply being the

reflection of some mental idea. The fact that SheUey would use the word "gold" instead

of money, and set his play at a time when metal was often accepted in forms other than

stamped win, suggests a disjunction between money as an abstract measure of value and

money as a vehicle of commodity transaction. Thus what the audience and the characters

hear and see in these staged transadons is not gold, but words and objects which have

economic value because of their association with precious metas. What that association

suggests, however, is precisely the central problem of the bullion debates. Money itself

has no value. Gold is a commodity like others which is to be considered valuable only in

relation to other commodities. It achieves its peculiar autonomous value by conventional

agreement, agreement which then has the dangerous potential to be validated as a

permanent form in itselfby habit and persuasive justification. References to gold in llte

Cenci underscore this complex disjunction between the materiality of gold in exchange

and the re-conceptualization of gold as one instance of exchange practices which also

include notes, bonds, and credit. It is fitting, therefore, that the final references to money

in the play should come in Manio's first, complicity testimony at Beatrice's trial: "The

ladies Beatrice and Lucretia1 Tempted me with a thousand crowns, and V And my

companion forthwith murdered him./ Now let me die" (5.2.16-9). All ambivalence

regarding the status of money, evident in every other reference to it in the play, is gone

and as part of Marzio's narrative, which also marks his willing subordination before the

law, money is conceived only in terms of the name of the circulating medium.

In as much as the Cenci story has been read as an allegorical retelling of the French

Revolution and other social reform movements of its day concerning economic issues like

the rise of the bourgeoisie and the expansion of capital, much like Wordsworth's gestures

to poverty in i%e Borderers, those few references to gold point to the problem of

representation within the political economy which the play also dramatizes. If the plot of

the play restages the Mure of revolutionary politics to escape fiom its own violent

commitment to "anatomizing casuistry"-Shelley's phrase in the Preface to The Cenci for

Beatrice's and the other characters' rationalized seK-justifxation for their behaviour as

exceptions to moral laws-then the references to gold madiest the fault of that

revolutionary logic: the lack of integration between the way human agency is

conceptualized and the materiality of that agency. But Shelley's play also insists, in a way

that Wordsworth's does not, on a solution, or at least the beginnings of a solution, to the

quandaries of the revolutionary cycle from emancipation to selfjustification to oppression.

That is, Shelleyan drama encourages a conf?ontation with the materiality of the speech

situation underlying monetary exchange rather than its reconceptualization in such a way

that the notion of "the concept" is itself called into question as a way of guaranteeing the

efficacy of transactional modes of understanding.

Shelley 's Cursed Stuge

If, as Shelley realizes, the subversive energy of critical perspicuity with regard to

the extent of reference beyond its own claims to theoretical consistency runs the danger of

reformulating itself into a self-justifying mechanism, as Ricardo and other economists

influenced by the common-sense school also believed, then it is as theatre that this energy

retains its contact with the positive insurgency of the materiality of social experience.

Shelley's conception of that theatre, in quintessentially Romantic fashion, is based on an

idea of an elemental theatrical experience, close to Nietzsche's tragedy in its openness to

the repetition and anti-mimetic obviousness of the drama, which constitutes the

breakdown of theatricality in its social sense. In the Defence, for instance, when Shelley

proclaims that 'Toetry, and the principle of Selt; of which money is the visible incarnation,

are the God and Mammon of the world" (503), he does not simply mean to distinguish

self-interest %om benevoIence, but rather to differentiate two fundamentally different

assumptions regarding the phenomenal dynamics of linguistic creation. Money signals the

establishment of a centralized determinate mechanism of incorporation in which

subjectivity is converted into a "principle of selP' by a process of philosophical induction.

P~efry, on the other hand, represeats the association of views, visions, and revisions which

meet in an energetic field of competitive insight but which at the same time resist any

collapse into standardized value.'* Shelley is, I think, paraphrasing a letter fiom Keats

which is not only compelling for its economic resonances, but also because it was written

as a response to me Cenci:

I received a copy of the Cenci, as fiom yourself from Hunt. There is only

one part of it I am judge of; the Poetry, and dramatic effect, which by many

spirits nowadays is considered the mammon. A modem work it is said

must have a purpose which may be the God- &st must serve

Mammon-he must have ' self concentration' selfishness perhaps. You 1 am

sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your

magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject

with ore. (Letters 2: 322-23)

Keats, I would argue, is wrong about the extent of the 'Toetry, and dramatic effect'' in

The Cenci: this is a powerfidIy theatrical play, but its theatrical power comes from its

demand for an audience prepared to consider the failure of its own dramatic effects even

as these are employed, by Cenci particularly, but also by Beatrice, in the performative

tension of "pleasure" and "casuistry" which marks the play's thematic counterpoint. It is

significant, nevertheless, that Keats would associate this supposedly missing effect with

l%jan summarizes this poetic associationism in the Defense as "a phenomenology of disarticulation, a deconstruction of transcendental signifieds that paradoxically remain a defence of poetry" (Supplement 278).

"ore," as well as with the self-interest of the artist, since it is the engagement between the

individual economic agent and the material conditions of his or her engagement with the

processes of exchange which is Shelley's main argument in the View. Indeed, as in the

Preface to The Cenci, the presentation of this performative conflict is offered in the

Defense not only as an alternative to the theatrical fare of Shelley's day, but also to the

philosophical complacency of the empirical f118ferialisrn against which he struggled. The

f-e of ancient drama, for Shelley, was this disquieting poetic charge. "The

tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the spectator beholds himself7

under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy

which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would

become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty,

that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived"

(490).

That said, there are nevertheless important dramatic, even theatrical, contexts for

Shelley's dramaturgy. Although Shelley probably did not know of Coleridge's editorials

(though there is no proof that he had not read them), there is a dramatic connection

between their thoughts on money, for Shelley did see, and admire, Coleridge's only staged

drama, Remorse. Based on an earlier work Osorio, which Coleridge wrote practically

alongside Wordsworth's composition of 7he Borderers in 1797, Remorse presents a

similarly ambivalent dramaturgy in which the materiality of the stage seems to undermine

and complicate the psychological dynamics it is intended to illustrate. Having had his play

rejected, as The Borderers was in 1798, Coleridge edited it between 1807 and 18 1 1, and

resubmitted it in 18 12. This time it was accepted, though even during rehearsals

Coleridge was compelled to make hdamental modifications, testifying to the revisionary

fluidity of his philosophical methodology. The historicity of Remorse exemplifies the

potential disjunction between performance as an instance of conceptual articulation and

theatre as its material actuality. But the pIay itself also embodies this difficulty. Set in

early seventeenth-century Spain, just after the uneasy end of the conflict between Christian

and Moslem Spain, the play recounts the return of Alvar from a long absence precipitated

by the betrayal of his brother Osorio, who not only presumes him dead, but also hopes to

marry Alvar's still devoted lover, Teresa, and the behest of their father, who is also

Teresa's guardian. Determined to make his brother repent his crimes, Alvar disguises

himself as a sorcerer, who Osorio believes will prove once and for all to Teresa that Alvar

was killed by pirates. In a brilliant scenic display, the Drury-Lane production of this scene

features a magnificent ring of fire, in which was depicted the image of Osorio's attempted

murder of Alvar, accompanied by tempestuous music sung by a male choir. The scene

was so sensational that the press' favorable reviews of the play commented on Little else,

and the production was a huge success. In the plot, the fiery image was supposed to instill

in Osorio remorse for his betrayal and convince Teresa that Alvar is alive. In fact, it does

neither, and it is only by chance late in the play that Osorio discovers Alvar and repents.

Remorse, central to Coleridge's political views of contemplative reflection, is also

troublingIy contingent and unreliable. On the other hand, in keeping with Coleridge's own

critique of theatrical sensationalism in the Biographia, it is possible to suggest that

spectacle represents for Coleridge the materiality which lingers within language to

challenge its imaginative ideality." What is significant about this dilemma is that the

problematics of understanding and communication affecting Coleridge's theatre are the

same as those at issue in his editorials on the bullion controversy: monetary value demands

vigilant critical attention not simply to an iwtitutionaiized idea of value, no matter how

progressive or mobile, but to its relation to the immediate material conditions of a discrete

instance of exchange.

l3 For more extensive readings of this scene, see Burkwick 268-69, Carlson 1 13- 15, and Parker, "Dark Employments."

345

Like Remorsey Shelley's magnificent and disturbing "lyrical drama" Prornethacs

U n w iacludes within its deconstruction of human knowledge some oblique references

to the bullionist controversy. Certainly there is something of the "new aristocracy" in

Jupiter, as there is of the old in Prometheus. But it is in its dialogical confrontation with

the experience of understanding that Prometheus Unbound engages with the

epistemological ambivalences which Shelley used to critique monetary theory. Asia's

(problematic) recollection of prehistory includes an important historical development of

the human economy fiom earth to gold to language to thought:

And he tamed fire, which Wce some beast of prey

Most terrible, but lovely, played beneath

The fiown of man, and tortured to his will

Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of power,

And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms

Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves.

He gave man speech, and speech created thought

Which is the measure of the Universe;

And Science struck the thrones of Earth and Heaven

Which shook but fell not; and the harmonious mind

Poured itself forth in all prophetic song,

And music lifted up the listening spirit

Until it walked, exempt f?om mortal care,

Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound,

And human hands first mimicked and then mocked

With moulded limbs more lovely than its own

The human form, till marble grew divine,

And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see

Reflected in their race, behold, and perish. (2.4.66-84)

The trajectory of Asia's narrative anticipates f ied Sohn-Rethel' s counter-history of the

development of the money form, in that it invites the suggestion that the concept is an

imposition upon a material mode of labour and exchange rather than the latter being

exemplScations of the conceptual economy. Beatrice's poetic speech about the abyss

below C d e Petrella, which Shelley points out in the Preface is the only real poew in Z k

Cenci, is reconceived in Prometheus LmbM as loaded with precious metals. Panthea

also refers to the abyss and says that the shafts of light "[m]ake bare the secrets of the

Earth's deep heart,/ Infinite mine of adamant and gold/ Valueless stones and unimagined

gems" (4.279-8 1). Gold is still part of the Earth, even though as Prometheus both taught

and decreed, it is one of the basic elements in the construction of human society as

catalogued by Asia. The abyss at Petrella is thus again recast at the end of Prometheus

Unbound as Demogorgon's "Abysm" into which he has hurtled Jupiter and which

swallows all human "Conquest" (4.554-56). The Cenci is a dramatic realization of the

sublimation of materiality into systems of thought and that the way to recognize this is to

appreciate how the language of the play performs that system (as play) and also its

deconstruction (as theatre, as word). Within the play, which is a turning point between

acts 3 and 4 of Prometheus Unmnd, and between Shelley's reading of Cobbett and

CoIeridge and his own script for economic reform, The Philosophical View presents that

shift in economic reasoning. It requires, therefore, exactly, the kind of phenomenological

reading offered to Romantic theatre by its correlation to performance theory and

performative language theory together.

The overarching speech act at issue in Prometheus Unbound is the curse, which

Prometheus repeats at the very beginning of the play. That Prometheus fiees himself by

repeating and then retracting his own hate-filled curse against Jupiter, his creation, son,

and imprisoner, suggests in the context of Shelley's ideas about epistemology that the

advance of knowledge represents an engagement with the phenomenal event of the

creation of concepts themselves. The retreat into the cave at the end of Act 3, Like the

Abyss, and like Demogorgon himseIfl represents the nothingness at the heart of

knowiedge. The ''epithalamioqn as M. H. Abrams called it, which ends the play is thus at

once a glorification of potential redemption and a consciousness of the fundamental

unprodudvity of that gesture. 2 ' 7 ~ Cenci, situated between these two contrapuntal

movements of celebration and conhion, is the Trauerqiel that Prometheus in part

redeems, by throwing its tyrant into the abyss of unknowing. Tilottarna Rajan has

commented that an important aspect of the distortive effect of Prometheus derives in part

from Shelley's keen sense that while poetry is "intentional and complex," performance is a

"concrete actualization, which succeeds in being such only by a deliberate act of

simplification: by repressing the traces of alternative performances that exist in the

intentional space of the script" (Supplemnt 3 17). Not quite knowing what it wants to be-

-poetry or drama-- the text of Prometheus (Inbound embodies that conflict of intentional

monological assurance and concrete dialogical materiality. The dialogical dynamics of the

curse at its dramatic centre, being consciously both an illocutionary act with

perlocutionary effects and a formal repetition of the same act but with diametrically

reversed results, is also then repeated in the perfonnative mode of the play's

outlandishness. B e Cenci embraces the same dynamic in a more forcefidly polemical way

by pitting itself against the perlocutionary rigidity of the London stage (in much the same

way that Wordsworth's me Borderers does) not only by challenging the standards of

subject matter but by extending the bounds of common theatrical taste in its very

dramaturgy. As in many Romantic plays, little happens except talk; The Cenci has often

been accused of being one of the worst culprits of this aesthetic Saction, especially in

comparison with Antonin Artaud's denser, but much less subtle and, I think, effective

adaptation. Yet the very problem of communicating i n h i o n or aberration without

challenging the standards which comprise "social reality" is not simply addressed but

concretely dramatized.

The economic significance of that deconstruction may not be immediately

apparent, except if we consider that the dynamic between the act of monetary exchange,

which is an oath, and the act of theoretical rationalization, which Shelley considers a

curse, are precisely at issue in The Cenci. This relation between the deconstruction of

performance and the probfematics of the curse and the oath is, moreover, the comecting

point between the verbal dramatur8y of The Cenci, similar to that of Prometheus

Unbound, and its dramatization of the bullionist controversy. Though neither directly

topical, like f i e School for S&I, nor metaphysically obscure, like The Borderers, m e

Cenci was like both these plays initially rejected and maligned by the theatre community.

After sending his play to the publishers, Shelley gave an anonymous fair-copy to Thomas

Love Peacock to submit to Harris at Covent Garden. As M d y n Gauli notes, Shelley

suspected that his well-known atheism would lead the managers to refuse it, but since the

play was submitted anonymously, its author's anti-religious convictions were not at issue

(103)." Shelley also womed that the success of his play would be jeopardized by "the

question as to whether any such a thing as incest in this shape however treated wd [sic] be

admitted on the stage" (Letters I1 102). This is not exactly the reason why Harris turned it

down. The official reason given by the managers for rejecting fie Cenci was its numerous

oaths evoking the name of God (Gad 103).15 This is a fair assessment; the characters in

l4 As Curran points out, Hams told Peacock that he would gladly produce any play by the author because it showed considerable dramatic talent, but not The Cenci (Shelley's Cenci 3).

l5 The Lifermy Mugazlfe for r c e bemoaned the play in its published form for "the perpetual use of the sacred name of God, and incessant appeals to the Saviour of the universe" (Shelley: Crifical Heritoge 164). The veneer of bourgeois morality of the Regency period probably helped to maintain a conventional ill-regard for any use of the Lord's name in vain and out of context (Conolly 139).

349

The Cenci, and especially its heroine Beatrice, repeatedly curse, vow, swear, pray, and

confess in the name of the Deity. Divine invocations turn out to be a special case of

speech acts with very specific requirements to guarantee their efficacy. Excessive cursing

or invokmg of the name of God in the theatre flattens that particularity, making a divine

invocation just another speech act, eveq to go the other way, a special speech act in the

sense of an empty or void one, like speech acts on stage are supposed to be. When an

actor swears, conventional wisdom would have it, she only imitates a real oath or prayer,

she does not actually perform it and so the conventiooal standards of social performance

do not apply. Such utterances throw into relief the conventional form of prayers and oaths

which is at odds with the special transcendent quaiities they are supposed to invoke.

This dilemma is explored in Beatrice's first scene. It opens in the middle of a

conversation between Beatrice and her former lover, now a priest, Orsino, who is trying to

convince Beatrice that even though he has taken religious vows, he can still be granted a

special "dispensation of the Pope to marry" (1.2.10). Beatrice insists that while such

dispensations may be normal for the Vatican hierarchy, Orsino's oath of celibacy before

God nevertheless takes precedence over any vow of earthly love: "Ours was a youthfid

contract, which you first, Broke, by assuming vows no Pope will (22-3). Because

Orsino's pledge invokes an absolute authority, the uptake of which is indisputable,

Beatrice respects the fact that Orsino's vow implicates all who are attached to him in the

same vow. To take a vow of celibacy also represents an act of personal transcendence

which removes the speaker from physical or social relations. Out of respect for that

spiritual ideal, Beatrice must pledge devotion to him likewise: "thus I love you still, but

hoWy,l Even as a sister or .a spirit might;/ And so I swear a cold fidelity" (24-6). What is

compelling about this scene is that Shelley dramatizes Beatrice's oath to Orsino in the

midst of an already very complicated discussion about the problem of how oaths are

binding. The fact that Vatican priests regularly break their vows of celibacy already

suggests that those vows are parts of ritual fantasies which the Priests perform but are not

obliged to keep. Beatrice's famous opening he, "Pervert not truth," seems to imply that

Orsino should not participate in the normal licentious behaviour of the other priests

because that would undexmine the truth of God's authority to which his vow refers. But,

in the context of the lines that follow, she intimates that their vow was at the time it was

made genuine and binding:

BEATRICE. Pervert not truth,

Orsino. You remember where we held

That conversation; - nay we see the spot

Even from this cypress; -- two long years are past

Since on an April midnight, underneath

The moon-light ruins of mount Palatine,

I did confess to you my secret mind.

ORSINO. You said you loved me then.

BEATRICE. You are a Priest,

Speak to me not of love. (1 -2.1-9)

Beatrice had confessed to Orsino her desire-clearly complementing the reversals of

perversion and saintliness already established in the opening line--and Orsino may well

have "taken up" that confession, r e n d e ~ g the illocution felicitous. The question opened

up by the fact of Orsino's vow of celibacy then is not whether or not this earlier pledge of

love was genuine or sincere, but whether its presumed perlocutionary effects (the

continuance of love, the consummation of desire, marriage, family) can in fact happen.

The intimations of pagan decadence replaced by Christian morality are apparent in

Beatrice's specification of the scene of confession: beneath a cypress tree, below the ruins

of the Palatine. Orsino's suggestion that he can get a dispensation to marry Beatrice in

spite of his vow of celibacy presumes that the vow is only binding to the extent that it

351

conforms to conventional standards of action, and, in fact, that the criterion of celibacy is

considerably looser than that presumed by Beatrice. That is, there is an implied

understanding in the vow of celibacy that it is not trascendentally binding. As a result,

Orsino can assume that Beatrice still loves him, even though her command to him not to

speak of love (though she just has) represents a willing suppression of the implied

perlocutionary effect that she has just elaborately recalled by re-confessing her earlier

confession.

These elaborate ambiguities of intention, meaning, and expectation are important

on two counts. Fist, Shelley highlights the abnormality of divine oaths by jwtaposing

them to the supposedly normal workings of day-to-day speech acts, Limited to immediate

contextual apparatuses and always attempting to manage the relation between what is

done in doing them and what is done by them. Divine invocations are a special case of

speech acts which presume the absolute authority of their purposive intention without

recourse to any social mediation. That assumption comes fkom a fkndamental faith in the

efficacy of God as a power, and it is this same assumption which had led Searle to exclude

divine creation from the normal conventional procedures of performative language. The

basis for that presumed efficacy is the tautological existence of God as God. God names

Himself eternally, and His proof of existence is that name. God, in other words, is God.

The tautological character which justifies the efficacy of the divine oath is itself reiterated

in the act of invocation. Divine oaths, therefore, do not so much call upon the truth of

God to substantiate the truth which their words represent, but recreate, by speaking His

name, the covenantal guarantee which the oath is supposed to represent: ''I swear this to

be true in the name of that which I name." But the underlying tautology of divinity also

underlies the presumption of the efficacy of an iuocutionary act to always produce a

perlocutionary effect which is the strategic commitment of any speech act. Why will this

utterance work? Because it works. Why is this law a law? Because it is law The

problems of this tautological logic are illustrated by Beatrice's own divine invocation later

in the scene. Expressing her dismay at having to attend a celebration which she believes,

rightly, is to commemorate the death of her brothers', she exclaims, "Great God! that such

a father should be mine!" (1 -2.54). The syntax here is very ambivalent, mainly because

Beatrice's apostrophe to God has replafed the subject and verb-necessary for clear

syntactical performaGvity--of the sentence. Thus, in the name of God, what? She could

simply be bemoaning that a man like Cenci is her fhther (I declare, pahiidly and scornfully,

that such a man as Count Cenci is my father); she could be hoping that Count Cenci is not

her father (I wish, that such a man were not my father). Out of context, the sentence is an

oath: she could be declaring an obligation to the man who is her father. In the context of

the commands she reiterates that she has been commanded as a daughter to appear at the

Count's festivities, the sentence sounds more like a wish: it implies that though he is her

father, she is prepared to undo any kind of obligation she may have to him as his daughter.

It is in this sense that Shelley's divine oaths are dangerous. They recognize the fictionality

of the great constative tautologies: God is God, father is father, truth is truth.

Beatrice's simultaneous defiance and fear of her father brings out the important

and related dimension of this dialogue: its decidedly un-spiritual reminders of materiality,

the existence of language and the people who use it as bodies, things, objects. The scene

above seems to present three versions of a concept of subjectivity in relation to its material

existence. First, it presents a divine subjectivity unencumbered by any kind of material or

social contingency. Second, it presents a socialized subject, one who is not sure that what

she says is what she means or that it will be interpreted as such, and who therefore doubts

that her words and their meanings actually come from her, but who at the same time wants

those actions and meanings to work. Third, and almost latently, it presents this concept of

subject in flight fiom its own bodily matter, the physical dimension of sexuality, the

violence of Cenci, the decay of Roman ruins. This is even more apparent when we

353

recollect that apart fiom being offended by the overuse of divine invocations, the critics of

The Cenci were mortified by the openness with which it treated such issues as incest and

sexual desire. In the same way, Beatrice seems to know that the chain of validity

established fkom God to the Pope to Orsino to herselfthrough the religious efficacy of

confession and faith is unstable. This is also why, to contradict h e r s a she will not marry

him:

And it is well perhaps we shall not many.

You have a sly, equivocating vein

That suits me not. -- Ah, wretch that I am!

Where shall I turn? Even now you look on me

As you were not my Wend, and as if you

Discovered that I thought so, with false smiles

Making my true suspicion seem your wrong.

Ah! No, forgive me, sorrow makes me seem

Sterner than else my nature might have been. (27-35)

Beatrice's ""as if" manifests exactly the kind of doubts about the continuity of illocutionary

force and perlocutionary effect which demand the fantastic reification of the special object

or cLTmth" validating religious powers, but which Beatrice, even though she asks

suggestively for forgiveness, cannot t~ust. Yet, she also persistently, and in spite of

herself, trusts Orsino. Together they have prepared a petition to the Pope to order the

arrest of Count Cenci. Orsino says that he is committed to the appeal: "You know/ My

zeal for all you wish, sweet Beatrice J Doubt not but I will use my utmost skill" (40-1)

She replies, hesitantly, "Your zeal for all I wish;-Ah me, you are cold" (43), implying

again a distrust in his sincerity and in the nature of his motives which contradicts the self-

authorizing truth of their shared fidelity to divine sanction. She accuses him of an illicit

calculating zealousness which she herself had admitted was necessary for her to put on

354

against her better nature to make her vow of spiritual deference to his status as a priest.

She also shows that she is aware that this duplicity is exactly what gives her father his

power in the suggestion that the murder of her brother's is the "happy news" for which

Cenci is holding a party: "with this outward shew of love he mocks/ His inward hate. 'Tis

bold hypocrisy/ For he would gladlier celebrate their deaths/ Which I have heard him pray

for on his knees:" (50-53). She wants to deny that these prayers have anything to do with

the deaths of her brothers (of which she is still not yet sure), though Cenci in the next

scene will declare that the latter is the effect of the former cause. Yet, most significantly,

Beatrice in the powerfbl climax of this scene makes another oath of her own, this time not

to Orsino, but to the Deity Himself: "Oh God! That I were buried with my brothers!/ And

that the flowers of th is departed spring/ Were fading on my grave! And that my father/

Were celebrating now one feast for all!" (1 -3.13740)- Such a prayer registers Beatrice's

sense of hers&--before the rape-as divided between her body (which she wishes to be

destroyed) and her soul (through which she has authoritative contact with God).

We must not conclude, therefore, that Beatrice's communication breakdown after

the rape constitutes a fall into a language of non-reason set apart from the real or

conversely an awakening of her real power which was previously constrained by the

dictates of conventional representation. It is true that Beatrice undergoes a

transformation. But the point of Shelley's ovenvhelmingly verbal dramaturgy and its

poetic excess is that this transformation takes place in an existence bounded by the

performative, a fact that Beatrice consistently misrecognizes even in her own bodily

predicament. Before the rape, Shelley presents a dialectical relation between performative

efficacy guaranteed by certain normative conditions, and performative contingency

intrinsic to the phenomenal situatedness of speech acts which subtend, at the same time,

those truths we think of as obligatory and eternal. This is a fairly standard view of a by

now appreciable paradox. How does Beatrice's final humiliation by her father transform

355

this dialectic? A more specific way to ask this in the immediate context is to ask why

Beatrice ciamot say that she was raped by her Mex? Or, even more sp&cally, why

can't Beatrice m e the deed? Because to do so would be to actually think of herself as

the unthinkable, a daughter raped by her own father, and thus force her to confiont the

inefficacy of the f d a l bond which sustains her patience and allows her to conceive of

herself as a victim with some meaningfid cause for redress, as she articulates to the

wedding guests and to her father himself As Jewett explains, Beatrice can imagiae herself

as the subject of "this woeM story" of torture and victimization only up to the point at

which, in a performative sense, it can posit some meaningful reason or cause for what she

has suffered. We can compare Beatrice's "story" here with the primitive scene of her

confession of love to Orsino among the cypress trees and ruins. That earlier confession is

also treated as a story external to the present action, a figure of the sublimation of

tautological nonsense into the fantasy of objectivity whose materiality is "sacrificed" for

the greater authority of the tautology. But that moment itself is underscored by the

understanding that though contingent, her soon to be ruinous confession at least made

sense. At least it had illocutionaq force, even if in the long run it proved to be

unsustainable. To confront herselfin the performance of her own violation, to say that she

was raped, would be to admit to the absolute materiality of her physical existence as an

object of desire, to tell herself, effectively, "I am not even valuable enough that my own

father wiil not violate me." She therefore must reinvent herself as an utterly performative

entity; she must create her own non-identity, as it were, f?om the death of her physical

body.

Compellingly, after having Beatrice tangentially contemplate her condition as at

once frenzied and unstable, and utterly suppressed and "choked," Shelley has Beatrice

move through her transformation fiom victim to avenger in a series of oaths. First, she

invokes the Deity to destroy her physical seK 'My God! I never knew what the mad felt/

356

Before; for I am mad beyond all doubt! (More w i u y ) No, I am dead! (24-26) ... 0 God!

What thing am I?" (38). Then she forces Lucretia to "swea r... ere I did W ~ t h f&

expeaation" (56-7) that she is her Mother, though both know she is not. When Lucretia

protests that she is not Beatrice's mother, Beatrice commands, "speak it not/ For then if

this be truth, that other too/ Must be a truth, a firm enduring truth,/ Linked with each

lasting circumstance of Life/ Never to change, never to pass away" (59-64). It is in the

declaration of truth that the truth comes to be. This has important political overtones in

the context of the trial scene, with its recurrent associations of testimony and torture.

Throughout the trial, the self-evident injustice of testifying under the threat of physical

pain is front and centre, as Beatrice herself explains in her defence (5.2.45-55). But

Beatrice's own oath has a torturous dimension, both in its excruciating hyperbole and in

the way it combines an assumption of agreement with a question of its veracity:

Hear me, great God! I swear, most innocent,

So that the world lose all discrimination

Between the sly, fierce, wild regard of guilt,

And that which now compels thee to reply

To what I ask: Am I, or am I not

A parricide?

MARZIO. Thou art not!

JUDGE. What is this?

MARZIO. I here declare those whom I did accuse

Are innocent. 'Tis I alone am grulty. (1 52-59)

Shelley's dramaturgy asks us to recognize in our own passive experience of his

characters' misrecognitions of their displacement of the untenable agency of language our

own sublimation of that performative contingency into fantasies of effect endowed with

irrefbtable causes. Beatrice herself becomes one of these fantastic objects. She is seen by

357

the other characters in the play, and ultimately by herself as both subject and predicate of

her own ambiguous tautological existence. She is, as Cenci says,"Fair and yet temble"

(1.3.166): she is terrifjing as an image of a persistently hctured and contingent existence,

a survivor, a masochistic body, but because of that status she is effectively sublimated, and

ultimately sublimates hem& into a power which transcends physical experience, as she

swears she will forget her rape, not into a Surviving body but into an intrinsic power. The

vehicle through which this sublimation takes place, most prominently, is language. Kf' it is

the gaze of Beatrice as a mirror of their own seK-division which "unnerves" her assailants

and her judges, it is their acts of speech in response which mark Beatrice as the effective

and objective cause of their ambition for personal fulfilment which she in turn seems to

threaten.

Austin's injunction against the seriousness of stage utterances because they are

"etiolations" or parasites of real speech is therefore completely appropriate for this reading

of the oaths in The Cenci. To recall, Austin proposed that utterances on stage are

"hollow" or "void" or non-serious, "in apeculiar way" parasitical on red speech, because

they are not acfuaIly intended to perform any real or legitimate social act. But the fantasy

of this reality can be seen in the tautological justification for the value of socially cohering

objects: God is God, mind is mind, law is law, and, to cite Locke in an especially apt

example here, "silver is silver." In the logic of performative language theory, the

recognition that such statements reveal the desire for order in the way human subjects try

to regulate the contingencies of social existence is in fact the fhdamental reason to

examine social relations as felicitous or infelicitous rather than true or false. Another way

to think about this is to say that illocutionary force, which is a philosophical abstraction

for the creative power of verbal exchange in a specific time and place under certain

conventional and other less cogent conditions, is grafted onto an object or idea which is

said to embody (true or false) exactly that power in some mysterious intrinsic way. Such

an empirical view of the relation of objects, ideas, and motives justifies this process by

citing seE&g and seE-authorizing tautologies of universal fact: God is God or silver is

silver. The performative efficacy of that speech situation is thus posited somewhere else, a

primitive scene of social formation, and invested in an object or an idea or substance, the

power or value of which is then referred to, as Austin lamented, only by statements.

Putting an oath to God on stage draws attention to the allegorical, fantastical, theatrical

nature of invocation, discrediting the constative truth implied by both the oath at hand and

its validating reifying scene. With the play's many references to gold, and with its

situation in an extensive debate over just how, exactly, to regulate the social efficacy of

theatrical aczs of monetary exchange, we can coaciude that Shelley's "excessive"

dramaturgy is itself an engagement with the phenomenal excess of all speech, and thus all

economics. To see the phenomenal efficacy of the contingent speech situation within or

against the universal efficacy of a meaning or motive engages the interpreter in a

dialectical examination of words as representation and words as utterances. This

recognition of the contingent perfonnative efficacy at the heart of day-to-day social

relations challenges the misrewgnition of the power of mind or object.

That Shelley would dramatize this misrmgnition to engage in an ongoing

economic debate about the nature and benefits of money suggests the seminal importance

ofperjmance to the critical mandate of Romanticism. Shelley stages money itself as a

debate, that is, as an intersection of discrete evaluations and utterances which do not

necessarily comprise a totality called the system of monetary exchange. In doing so,

Shelley restages the theoretical ground of the BulIionist Contoversy within the operation it

attempts to understand on the Romantic stage. It is wrong therefore to situate Romantic

plays exclusively within theatre or economic history, despite their historical stigma as

"closet theatre," conditioned by historical and economic forces. This assumes that

Romanticism can only be understood as a cultural product, an assemblage of luxurious and

359

ultimately unproductive texts. As reasonable as this assessment is, it also neglects the

powem polemic of closet theatre, especially as it attempts to de-closet itself, against such

economic acts of historical categorization. I suggest that the fdure of Romantic drama-if

it did fhd-demonstrates in itself the powem decanstnrctive agenda of the genre against

the "closet" with which it was and is frequently associated. Romantic economics,

similarly, opposes the determinist assumption of political economy by reperfonning in art,

poet^^, fiction, and, most evidently, theatre the performative contingency already apparent

in political economy. To understand the contentious role of Romantic economics in the

development of economics generally is to acknowledge Romanticism itsell: and

particularly, its recognition of the creative power and potential destructiveness of

performance.

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