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Shakespeare Reread

Shakespeare
Reread
The Texts in New Contexts
Edited by Russ McDonald
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright© 1994 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for
brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca,
New York 14850.
First published 1994
by Cornell University Press.
Printed in the United States of America
@J The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information
Sciences-Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shakespeare reread : the texts in new contexts I edited by Russ
McDonald.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8014-2917-X. - ISBN 0-8014-8144-9
1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616-Criticism and interpretation.
I. McDonald, Russ, 1949-
PR2976. S3383 1994
822.3'3--dc20 93-40492

For Gail and Jack

Contents
Acknowledgments lX
Introduction by Russ McDonald I
PART ONE: Reflective Readers
I. Reading, Stage by Stage: Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Helen Vendler 23
2. Close Reading without Readings by Stephen Booth 42
3· Troubles of a Professional Meter Reader
by George T. Wright 56
PART Two: Reading Reflexively
4· Hydra and Rhizome by Harry Berger, Jr. 79
5· Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying,
and the "Secret Place
" of Woman by Patricia Parker 105
6. "To You I Give Myself, For I Am Yours": Erotic
Performance and Theatrical Performatives in
As You Like It
by Susanne L. Wofford 147
7-Pushing the Envelope: Supersonic Criticism
by David Willbern 170
PART THREE: Reflexive Readings
8. The Taming of the Shrew, Good Husbandry, and Enclosure
by Lynda E. Boose 193
9· "Word Itself against the Word": Close Reading after
Voloshinov
by James R. Siemon 226
10. The Critic, the Poor Player, Prince Hamlet,
and the Lady in the Dark by Barbara Hodgdon 259
Contributors 295
Index 297

Acknowledgments
This volume has two godparents, one individual and one corporate.
Conversations with my friend and former colleague James Langen
bach about the past and future of literary criticism-I recall one ex
change in a car on the New York State Thruway in February 1989
and an animated walk on upper Broadway in March 1988-led me to
believe that a collection such as this one might be useful. I am grateful
to him for that intellectual stimulus, although I'm grateful to him for
so
many things that to identify only one seems absurd. The trustees
of the Shakespeare Association of America charged me with organiz
ing the plenary session for the annual meeting in Austin in 1989, a
panel titled
"Close Reading Revisited." Their endorsement of my idea
and their suggestions for
implementing and improving it contributed
much to the present book. I especially thank Alan Dessen, the head of
the program committee for that year, and Nancy Hodge, Executive
Director of the Association, who helped with the ideas and the me
chanics of the panel and was pleasant while she did so.
The annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association is an excellent
forum for testing ideas and stealing good ones from other people, and
I am grateful to the membership for continued stimulation.
Conversations with Thomas Berger, Albert Braunmuller, Cyrus
Hoy, Dia Lawrence, Catherine Loomis, Margaret Maurer, Barbara
Mowat, Gail Paster, Jeanne Roberts, Meredith Skura, Bruce Smith,
Robert Y. Turner, George Walton Williams, and many of the con
tributors have helped make this book better than it would otherwise
have been. Patricia Parker gave sound practical advice on several occa
sions.

X Acknowledgments
My undergraduate and graduate students at the University of
Rochester and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro have
helped me to think contextually about texts and textually about con
texts. Members of my 1989 seminar in sixteenth-and seventeeth
century tragedy and my 1991 seminar in late Shakespeare, both at
Rochester, deserve particular mention. Regular participation as Resi
dent Scholar in the NEH-Folger Library Summer Institute, "Teaching
Shakespeare," has
taught me about the need for clarity and care in
teaching great texts
and the contexts that produced them. In thanking
Peggy O'Brien, I direct my gratitude through her to all the partici
pants, scholars, actors,
master teachers, and interns who have been
involved over the past decade.
I
am grateful to Massimo Bacigalupo for permission to reprint the
illustration
from his Ezra Pound: Una poeta a Rapallo (Genoa: San
Marco, 1982); to Routledge for permission to quote from the relevant
texts
in the New Arden Shakespeare series; and to Houghton Mifflin
for permission to quote from The Riverside Shakespeare.
Bernhard Kendler demonstrated to me, as he has to many others,
that he deserves his reputation as a fine editor. I wish to thank him
formally, as well as the staff at Cornell University Press. Most of the
readers he engaged offered helpful suggestions, but more than that
they understood immediately the motives of the project, and I appre
ciate their assistance and encouragement.
My debt to Gail McDonald, who has repeatedly put aside the de
mands of her own excellent work to help with mine, is too great to
be discharged in brief acknowledgments such as these.
R. McD.

Shakespeare Reread

Introduction
RUSS McDONALD
"The dominion of Exegesis is great: she is our Whore of Babylon,
sitting robed in Academic black on the great dragon of Criticism, and
dispensing a repetitive and soporific balm from her pedantic cup. "
1
So wrote Geoffrey Hartman in a relatively early exposition of the fail
ures
of both New Criticism and some of the attempts to displace it,
in this case the aggressive antiformalism of Georges Poulet. Hartman
was writing at a point-the mid-sixties-when the ideals and practices
of the original New Critics had contracted into a deplorably narrow
interpretive range, so that concentration on minute formal detail, usu
ally imagery and its contribution to theme, excluded virtually all other
topics of inquiry. The practical effect of this restricted approach was
that formulaic essays of a severely limited scope tended to tyrannize
academic
journals-many readers may supply from their own memo
ries several (usually alliterative) titles-and in no corner of the disci
pline
was this circumscription more apparent than in the study of
Shakespeare.
It is difficult to date precisely the metamorphosis that produced the
critical era
we now inhabit. Hartman himself, as the title of his book,
Beyond Formalism, suggests, was one of the leaders, along with several
I. Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven:
Yale
University Press, 1970), p. 57.

2 Russ McDonald
of his colleagues at Yale, in the attempt to move beyond the dead end
of formalist criticism, but the newer methodologies had relatively lit
tle direct impact on Shakespeare studies in the 1970s. Arguably the
crucial event was the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance
Self-Fashioning
(1980), a book that represents a milestone not just in
Shakespeare
and early modern studies but in postwar criticism as a
whole. Shaped by the more general literary, anthropological, and cul
tural criticism of Raymond Williams, Clifford Geertz, and Michel
Foucault,
and accompanied, or followed closely, by the similar work
of Stephen Orgel, Jonathan Goldberg, and the British cultural materi
alists, Greenblatt's approach was a self-conscious rejoinder to the cir
cumscribed and self-referring practices of New Criticism or autotelic
formalism. Generally speaking, his promotion of a "New Histori
cism" or a "cultural poetics" established the terms and set the direction
for a phase
in which context supplanted text and history dominated
poetry. The clarity of Greenblatt's critical voice also made it easier to
identify and to note the resemblances among other efforts to escape
the limits of formalist analysis, notably deconstruction and the various
strains
of feminist criticism, movements that suddenly seemed to
dominate the scene but had been quietly gaining adherents for at least
a decade.
Owing to the acceleration of critical cycles characteristic of the
academy in the second half of the twentieth century, the poststructura
list critique of exegesis has already fostered its own excesses and in
stances of blindness, as a number of commentators by the end of the
1980s had begun to observe. The mechanical readings of an exhausted
New Criticism have been supplanted by another formula discernible
especially
in New Historicism, contextual essays that begin with the
jar of the anecdote and then locate the text in a social or political frame
so as to expose "the half-hidden cultural transactions through which
great works of art are empowered. "2 Many New Historicists (I use
the term loosely and with the confidence that the reader will take it
synecdochically) are brilliant readers of culture and of the circulatory
role
of Shakespeare's texts in early modern England, but the capacious
angle
of vision from which they approach those texts has had major
critical and pedagogical consequences. The most notable result is that
the wide viewpoint has perforce diminished the details of the textual
2. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy
in Renaissance England
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 4·

Introduction 3
object. A return to the Shakespearean passage after a sojourn in the
realm of Elizabethan women's diaries or medical writing or records
of court conversation ought to afford an enriched understanding of
the nuances of that passage, but in recent years this recursion to the
text has often been perfunctory, and sometimes omitted altogether. In
the essay that introduces Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt con
fesses to an occasional urge "to recover the dose-grained formalism of
[his] own literary training" and declares his conviction "that sustained,
scrupulous attention to formal and linguistic design will remain at the
center of literary teaching and study. "
3 The book proper, however,
constitutes a suppression of such an impulse, for Greenblatt himself
declines to pay much notice to formal properties. The concomitant to
this diminution of the textual artifact, as Anne Barton has argued in
one of the most pointed critiques of the New Historicist project, is
that the triumph of context or social text tends to obscure the cultural
reader's awareness that "works of art have internal as well as external
'resonances. "'
4 The practice of reading culture requires a perspective
that produces a virtual disappearance of the particular and a devalu
ation of the "artistic." The empire of Context is now as vast as the
dominion of Exegesis ever was.
We are
in need of some means of reconciling the distant and recent
pasts.
This volume represents an attempt at a rapprochement between
the intrinsic and the external, the micro-and the macrotextual, the
celebratory and the suspicious. Its motive is not to deplore the new
methodologies which have done so much to alter the critical land
scape. Rather, it is to examine the ways in which the transformation
of that scene has affected attention to the formal properties of literary
texts. The contributors here seek new and potentially illuminating
ways of reading closely. Although it is true that most critics no longer
do "readings" of plays-the kind of totalizing interpretations to which
I referred earlier-it is equally true that all of us still do "reading" in
some form, whether the legible object is a play or a prince, and
whether we use the term "cultural poetics" or "poststructuralist cri
tique" or some other sophisticated label. We read Shakespeare differ
ently these days, and it is imperative that scholars devote some
thought to how and what we are reading. Patricia Parker, near the
end of her chapter on Shakespeare and rhetoric in Literary Fat Ladies,
3. Ibid., pp. 3 and 4·
4·
Anne Barton, "The Perils of Historicism," New York Review of Books, March
28, I99I, p. 53·

4 Russ McDonald
provides a thoughtful assessment of the relation between styles or sub
jects of reading: "To focus exclusively on questions of social and politi
cal
context-as one form of reaction to decades of formalism now
proposes to do--or to foreground the 'political Shakespeare' without
also taking seriously the linguistic one, is, for all its recontextualizing
value,
not just to work to the detriment of the kind of formal analysis
that still so much needs to be done but unnecessarily to short-circuit
or foreclose the process of moving from literary text to social text. "
5
The first step in reconceiving the possibilities of close reading is
to survey, if only briefly, some of the hostility to which it has been
subjected. A convenient source for such a review is Joel Fineman's
virtuoso sketch of critical tensions in the r98os:
We can add that the term "New Historicism" initially carried with it a
somewhat polemical air, for the literary criticism and literary histories
that pronounced themselves New Historicist, and that thereby under
stood their own critical practices to amount to actions performed, qui
etly enough, in the name of history, presented themselves as overdue
corrections of, or as morally and politically motivated reactions against,
the formalism-more precisely and more pejoratively, the "mere for
malism" (which, as such, as something merely or purely formal, was
thought to be apolitical, sexist, hermetic, elitist, etc. )-that, for one
good or bad reason or another, had come to be associated with every
thing from the kind of close, immanent textual readings said to be en
demic to the New Criticism, to the scientistic, agentless, essentialist,
cross-cultural typologizations said to be characteristic of what was
called Structuralism, to the kinds of deconstructive, but still mandarin
and still strictly textual, and therefore still formalist, and therefore
still objectionable, formulations-mere formulations-identified with
either the phenomenologically or the rhetorically conceived versions of
what came to be called Post-Structuralism: Jacques Derrida, for exam
ple, on the one hand, Paul de Man, for example, on the other, not that
these two hands did not let each other know what they were up to. 6
Rarely does poststructuralism declare outright antipathy to formal
s. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Meth
uen, 1987), p. 94·
6. Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote," in The New Historicism, ed. Aram
Veeser (London: Routledge, r 989), p. 5 r.

Introduction 5
analysis, for critics of every political stripe recognize its value and util
ity. Jonathan Dollimore, for example, disclaims hostility to close tex
tual study per se, insisting that, as a materialist critic, he rejects only
"the ahistorical and indeed antihistorical tendency of this analysis as it
has
sometimes been practised. "
7 But Fineman is especially acute at
identifying the need of some contextual critics to demonize or carica
ture the practice of formal study and to associate it with the least ac
ceptable features of a discredited ideology. Such an Oedipal assault on
the recent past is part of a familiar pattern in the history of literary
criticism; the New Critics twitted their historicist predecessors, after
all.
But the implications of this tendency to distort or disallow certain
critical practices,
whether predictable or not, should not go unre
marked.
The flavor of politically inspired objections to close reading is cap
tured in Paul Bove's Intellectuals in Power, where I. A. Richards's pro
gram of practical criticism is vilified as "conservative, even
reactionary. " 8 This suspicion of the micro textual became a staple of
critical discourse in the 1980s, and those properties that make formal
study especially liable to political complaint include its tendency to
favor individuation and discrimination; its interest in exclusion, pro
motion, and evaluation; its concern for effects such as beauty or plea
sure or complexity; and its centralization of authority in either the
passage under scrutiny or the critic performing the act.
9 John Barrell,
while apologizing for the crudeness and partiality of his summary of
British practical criticism, skewers the practice (he will not allow it
to be a methodology because it is "self-consciously untheoretical and
antitheoretical") as "middle-class." Assailing the New Critics' attach
ment to the correspondence between form and content, Barrell in
sists that
the balance and resolution which literary texts seek to achieve bear a
close resemblance to the political balance which, in England especially,
was both cause and effect
of the increasing power of the middle class,
and which has made the notion
of balance itself a term of value with
7· Jonathan Dollimore, "Critical Developments: Cultural Materialism, Feminism
and Gender Critique, and New Historicism," in Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide,
new edition, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 420.
8. Paul Bove, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 53·
g. For a polemical discussion of these issues, see ibid., pp. 52-66.

6 Russ McDonald
a crucial function in middle-class ideology, underwriting the political
authority
of "consensus," or the "middle ground," by representing as
irrational extremism whatever cannot, or whatever refuses to be, gath
ered into the middle ground.
10
"Balance" has become a term of opprobrium in the ideology of con
flict promoted by cultural materialism. Here one of its proponents
finds it convenient to permit a single principle of an attenuated version
of American New Criticism to stand for the entire enterprise of close
textual study, and to draw grand and dire conclusions from that move.
Much the same has been done with terms such as "ambiguity" and
"paradox." But even in its potentially subversive poststructuralist or
deconstructive forms, exegesis has frequently been written off as ir
relevant or politically dubious.
11
The close study of formal details, it is felt, is attended by philo
sophical risks: specifically, to focus the critical powers on textual mi
nutiae is to expose the mind to the false security of a hermetic
enterprise and, what is worse, to encourage an illusion of freedom
invidious to the consciousness of social and discursive constraints, a
state of mind deemed necessary for social change. Fredric Jameson
makes explicit the perceived connection between close textual scru
tiny and political blindness: "To imagine that, sheltered from the om
nipresence of history and the implacable influence of the social, there
already exists a realm of freedom-whether it be that of the micro
scopic experience of words in a text or the ecstasies and intensities of
the various private religions-is only to strengthen the grip of Neces
sity over all such blind zones in which the individual seeks refuge. "
12
It is hardly adventitious that formal pleasure should find itselflinked
with religious mystery: the association takes notice of and exploits a
historically demonstrable connection among the conservative politics,
Christian faith, and critical methodology of certain practitioners of
American New Criticism.
Some of the most successful close readers of texts, however-fig
ures such as R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and William Empson-
IO. John Barrell, Poetry, Language, and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, I988), pp. 5-6.
I I. Howard Felperin, writing from the standpoint of one sympathetic to decon
struction, complains about the tendency of political criticism to dismiss exegesis, in
his preface
to The Uses CJj the Canon: Elizabethan Literature and Contemporary Theory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, I990), pp. v-xiii.
I2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, I98I), p. 20.

Introduction 7
had no such ideological affiliations, and their work demonstrates, as
does
that of more recent readers, that close textual study is by no
means limited to, and ought not to be identified exclusively with, a
reactionary political agenda or philosophical reticulum. Catherine
Belsey, for instance, appropriating close reading to the aims of femi
nist argument, advocates textual analysis as a way to "generate a more
radical challenge to patriarchal values by disrupting sexual difference
itself. "
13 And in Malcolm Evans's Signifying Nothing, "a deconstruc
tion which may tend towards formalism is turned against the meta
physical assumptions of traditional Shakespeare criticism. " 14 Despite
the recognition by some critics that the instruments of close reading
are available for a multiplicity of political and critical ends, too many
still allow it to stand for the political and social iniquities of the past.
The farther we move from the period in which attention to form oc
cupied a central place in the critical enterprise, the easier it becomes
to promulgate a blunt and generalized construction of the nature and
contribution of formal study. Finer distinctions are needed. We must
discriminate as rigorously as we can between the method of exegesis
and the several interested critical attitudes with which, rightly or
wrongly, it has been identified: aestheticism, ahistoricism, formalism,
essentialism, humanist idealism, philosophical positivism, decon
struction, and-the bathwater with which the baby has been dis
carded-New Criticism.
15
A second step in restoring the utility of close reading is to histori
cize, and thus possibly to relieve, the conflict between critical genera
tions. Jameson's condescension to the imaginary comforts of "the
microscopic experience of words in a text" indicates the tendency of
every critical school to impeach the practices of the movement that
immediately preceded it; the slaughter of the critical parent is a prereq
uisite for growth, for the invention and development of fresh ways of
IJ. Catherine Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Gender and Meaning in the
Comedies," in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985),
p. 180.
14.
Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing: Truth's True Contents in Shakespeare's Texts,
2d ed. with foreword by Terry Eagleton (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp.
10-1 r. For a similar appropriation of textual analysis for leftist political purposes, see
Eagleton's William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
15.
See Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), esp. chap. J.

8 Russ McDonald
regarding the literary text.
16 At the same time, however, most critical
innovators find themselves reviving and depending on certain neces
sary practices associated with the previous era, although there is no
admission of such dependence, and the names of the practices are in
variably modified.
17 In The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor
and Stuart Literature and Culture,
Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier
introduce a group of papers that participate in the effort to discern
affiliations between the literary and the social texts of early modern
England; in so doing, the editors are leery of the temptation to distort
previous modes of criticism:
Concerned to distinguish their stance from that
of their predecessors,
contemporary critics often oversimplify the work they are rejecting,
much
as contemporary architects are prone to oversimplify the achieve
ments and the limitations
of the International Style. It is much easier to
supplant
or suppress the fathers if they can be parodied as bogeymen or
reduced to straw men. Despite the theoretical dogmas
of New Criti
cism, some
of its proponents did in fact comment acutely on social,
historical, and political issues; and many "new critics" resolutely re
fused to distinguish between "internal" and "external" approaches.
18
Such self-awareness is uncharacteristic of critical revisionism in any
period and thus of much recent historical and political criticism. Most
opposition to textual analysis, although grounded in a truth, depends
on a distortion of the critical positions of some very subtle thinkers or
a homogenization of the differences among some extremely independ
ent critics. In the central chapters of Professing Literature, Gerald Graff
repeatedly demonstrates that those people originally referred to as
New Critics regarded their work as politically engaged and histori
cally anchored, that they thought of their devotion to the intrinsic
operations of poetic texts not as retro-but as progressive. As he puts it:
First-generation
New Critics were neither aesthetes nor pure explica
tors but culture critics with a considerable "axe to grind" against the
16. Gerald Graff amply demonstrates the history of this pattern in the central chap
ters of Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987); see esp. pp. 121-94.
17.
See the essay by Howard Felperin, "'Cultural Poetics' versus 'Cultural Materi
alism': The Two New Historicisms in Renaissance Studies," in The Uses of the Canon,
pp. 142-69.
18. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds., "Introduction," in The Historical
Renaissance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 2.

Introduction
technocratic tendencies of modern mass civilization .... [E]ven at its
most "formalistic" (or especially then), the New Critical view of poetry
made a social and cultural point, rejecting the allegedly vitiated lan
guage of "a dehumanized society," as Allen Tate put it, in which men
may "communicate, but they cannot live in full communion." As Tate
saw it,
"the battle is now between the dehumanized society of secular
ism,
which imitates Descartes' mechanized nature, and the eternal soci
ety of the communion of the human spirit." Again, whatever one may
think of such a view, to label it formalist, aesthetic, or apolitical is mis
leading.19
9
A striking feature of this excerpt is, paradoxically, the resemblance of
Tate's language to Jamesonian rhetoric. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s,
the institutionalization of what came to be known as New Criticism
brought with it a narrowing of critical vision and an increasingly for
mulaic application of a few principles of literary analysis; moreover,
that process coincided with a general retreat among intellectuals and
humanist academicians from the perilous landscape of postwar poli
tics. Thus it is easy to appreciate the historical reasons for the identifi
cation
of a critical method with a political stance; it is less easy to
sympathize with the trivialization of the method and the caricaturing
of its political ramifications. Most of us have come to believe that all
literary criticism is
to some degree political, and it is now axiomatic
that critical practice is tied to the conditions of the historical moment.
But there is no necessary connection between formal analysis of a text
and any particular political valence.
The third precondition for renewing the process of critical explica
tion is that we approach it with an unprecedented self-consciousness,
an awareness
of the limitations of the practice and the abuses that can
arise
from it. One of the most important lessons deriving from
changes in critical thinking has to do with the historical specificity of
reading. Much more than their predecessors, most recent students of
the Shakespearean text are sensitive to the historicity of all reading,
and the perspective afforded by this recognition alters the way they
read. John Drakakis concludes the introduction to his Alternative
Shakespeares by seeking to modify the traditional definition:
Inevitably, all of these essays address themselves to questions of "read
ing," but they all reject the notion that reading is itself an exclusive
19. Graff, Professing Literature, p. 149.

10 Russ McDonald
effect of the text. Rather, what is proposed in a number of very different
ways
is a series of explorations of the ways in which historically specific
readings are generated, and which acknowledge the existence
of struc
tures within the text
as devices for exclusion and repression, while at
the same time insisting that the process
of "making sense" of a Shake
spearean text
is itself determined by a multiplicity of forces.
20
The consequence of such a redefinition is that the actual reading of
texts is subordinated to discussion of the larger processes of interpreta
tion. Most contributors to the present volume would readily concede
Drakakis's challenge to "the notion that reading is itself an exclusive
effect
of the text," agreeing that the quest for universal effects of an
unchanging form is erroneous and naive. And yet it is possible to ac
knowledge the partiality of one's historically conditioned reading
without automatically privileging historical process over the act of
reading and the insights it might produce. Whereas many recent crit
ics, p·rompted in part by the exhaustion of New Critical explications
of texts, have focused on "the ways in which historically specific read
ings are generated," we may now be in danger of wearing out, or at
least
overestimating the productivity of, such reflexive and theoretical
investigations. What seems desirable at present is a dual goal of per
forming textual study while at the same time commenting on the
theoretical implications of such a performance.
Greater self-consciousness about the process of close reading entails
not only an awareness of the abuse it has sustained but also an apprecia
tion that recent critical thought has created new possibilities for read
ing. Modifications in our understanding of the Shakespearean text, an
augmented field of collateral texts available for reading, a subtler sense
of the author and textual authority, the return of rhetorical study in a
new and more sophisticated guise, the increased importance of politics
in virtually all discussion of literature, the prominence of newly con
sidered topics such as race and gender-all these shifts in the critical
atmosphere make it necessary to reconsider how the close reading of
Shakespeare ought to be done and what results it might produce. The
readers represented in this volume examine the altered conditions
under which we now read while offering to retrain our critical vision
to include and account for our revised sense ofboth context and text.
20. John Drakakis, "Introduction," in Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen,
1985), pp. 23-24.

Introduction II
To start with, which Shakespearean text are we reading? One area
in which poststructuralist innovation has had relatively little effect on
Shakespeare studies is in the selection of texts to be read: these are
scarcely
neglected works. And yet the canon has to some small degree
been enlarged by the editorial work of Michael Warren, Steven Dr
kowitz, Leah Marcus, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, who have given
us significantly different texts of King Lear and, potentially, alternative
versions of Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and several other
plays. It may also be true that their work has correspondingly reduced
the canon, given the designation ofThomas Middleton as joint author
of Timon of Athens and possibly Macbeth.
What is more important is the way what might be called poststruct
uralist editing has altered our definition of the Shakespearean text.
21
Critics have come to admit more readily the collaborative nature of
the Renaissance theater and to take into account the contingent and
unfixed status of the printed texts we read. Scrutiny of the limits of
the traditional canon has given access to a few works not hitherto con
sidered, such as Elizabeth Carey's Tragedie of Mariam, and critics have
turned more willingly and frequently to dramatists who, if not previ
ously ignored, had long been relegated to secondary status as contem
poraries of Shakespeare, writers such as Dekker and Greene and
Heywood and Massinger. And, as I have indicated, the New Histori
cist redefinition of "text" and the assault on the category of the "liter
ary" have substantially amplified the field of intertextual possibilities.
Despite such new opportunities for cultural and (to a lesser degree)
literary recontextualization, we return ultimately to what is more or
less the same version of the same Shakespearean artifact. In confront
ing it anew, however, we find that we are different readers, that our
relation to that artifact has been reconstituted by the intellectual modi
fications generated in the changed critical climate. Thus, we are faced
with the problem ofhow to read familiar texts in ways that do more
than merely reproduce the approved insights and comfortable inter
pretations derived from earlier modes of reading.
Studies
of discourse and the range of cultural voices that go into the
making of Shakespeare's texts have augmented our sense of the ends
21. For an especially illuminating example, see Paul Werstine, "The Textual Mys
tery of Hamlet," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (r988): r-26. A useful summary of postmod
ern thinking about textual instability is found in Margreta de Grazia and Peter
Stallybrass,
"The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text," Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (Fall
!993): 255-83.

12 Russ McDonald
and strategies of close reading, specifically as a result of their having
modified received notions of creative agency and theatrical authority.
Perhaps more than any other feature of poststructuralist thought, this
attention to the cultural generation of the play has complicated the
critical scene by refiguring the role of the reader as well as the identity
of the author. When earlier practitioners sought to identify patterns of
imagery or to isolate prosodic structures in the work of an individual
dramatist and then to establish the contribution of such phenomena to
the creation of meaning, their endeavors were grounded in the as
sumption of a certain degree of authorial control, conscious or not.
Present readers, by contrast, are coming to subscribe to a broader con
ception of creative influence. As David Quint puts it, "The text no
longer seems to speak with a single voice of its own, the voice of an
individual
author with whom the reader might seek a common human
understanding. "
22 The familiar image of the speaking writer has been
supplanted by an understanding of authorship which tends to obscure
the historical person, to emphasize limits on the discursive freedom
exercised by the individual artist, and to disperse responsibility for
aesthetic
and significational effects among a broad range of cultural,
social, political,
and literary forces and pressures. The main result of
this modified conception has been to expand awareness of the work's
external affiliations, an awakening that has tilted us toward langue and
away from parole and that has given priority, for a time at least, to
what J. G . A. Pocock describes as mentalite over "individual move. "
23
Moreover, textual study has come to emphasize the significant degree
to which early modern theatrical texts represent the collaborative ef
forts
of playwrights, actors, reporters, scribes, compositors, and edi
tors from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. All these changes
have particular relevance
to that author of authors who is the subject
of the present collection.
This revisionist sense of textual genetics, however, has not canceled
the need for close attention to the Shakespearean play and its compo
nent parts. How the text got the way it is-how the numerous cultural
and intertextual voices intermingle-poses a new challenge to readers
22. David Quint, "Introduction," in Literary Theory I Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia
Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 7.
23. ]. G. A. Pocock, "The Concept of a Language and the Metier d'historien: Some
Considerations on Practice," in The Language cif Political Thought in Early Modern Eu
rope, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp.
29-30.

Introduction 13
who need to be encouraged to inspect the text both closely and from
a distance. The new concern with semiotic signals, textual codes, and
the interpenetration of competing or cooperating discourses instead
of an individual author's choices and tastes should refresh our enthusi
asm for the particulars of the text; expanding vocabularies and a varie
gated sense of textual identity provide new opportunities for reading.
Quint describes one of these openings when he asserts that "the task
of the reader or critic is to separate out the various cultural discourses
that intersect in the literary text, "
24 a recommendation that bespeaks
an admirable perspective on criticism past and present. Many of the
contributors to this volume are especially alert to the unstable state of
current critical discourse and practice and aware of the limitations to
which past readings have been subject, while they seek to adapt the
terms of the past to the requirements of the present.
The essays that follow, only one of which has been previously pub
lished, fall into three groups. The first is titled "Reflective Readers":
it
presents the work of three celebrated critics who describe how they
came to do what they do and how they seek to do it now. The second
section, "Reading Reflexively," contains essays that attempt both to
theorize and to practice close reading in a changed critical atmosphere.
The third group, "Reflexive Readings," is made up of essays that,
while they offer some commentary on the practices they employ, are
notable for the clarity and force with which they exemplify new strate
gies of reading.
Helen Vendler, Stephen Booth, and George T. Wright begin the
volume by describing autobiographically the intellectual conditions
and pedagogical attitudes that have shaped their views of textuality
and modes of reading, and they proceed to develop these confessional
remarks into critical justifications for those views. The three resulting
essays are further linked by their devotion to the intellectual and mate
rial pleasures of the text, a consideration that contextual criticism has
tended to scant. This is hardly the place to attempt a resurrection of
Roland Barthes or to rehearse at length his endorsement of textual
pleasure, but Barthes's complex and finally affirmative conception of
textual erotics is worth reasserting. The recent turn away from plea
sure is partly a function of a teleological shift, as the authors of a 1990
essay put it: "Critics now working on Renaissance literature are far
24. Quint, "Introduction," p. 7-

14 Russ McDonald
more likely than their predecessors to interpret their task as demysti
fication rather than celebration, maintaining a skeptical distance from
the belief structures of the writers they discuss. "
25 And a corollary to
this suspicion of "belief structures" is that the materiality of dramatic
language is also subjected to "skeptical distance." Wordplay, poetic
pattern, musical properties, and other pleasurable effects are too often
treated as if they were seductive or frivolous or dangerous, as if the
vitality of the word were potentially threatening to the serious busi
ness of the critical project. Harry Berger notes this tendency in de
scribing "the principle and injunction that mark one aspect of the
change from modernism to postmodernism: 'Only de-estheticize. "'26
And Robert Weimann has cautioned against the omission of Spass
fun, pleasure-from current work, urging that we "begin again to talk
about the enjoyment of Shakespeare's text. "
27
Helen Vendler, in "Reading, Stage by Stage: Shakespeare's Son
nets,"
begins Part One by reflecting on a lifetime of thinking about
Shakespeare's sonnets. Dissatisfied with the term reading-to her it
suggests "a one-time effort" and misrepresents the necessary repeti
tion involved in studying complex texts-Vendler watches herself ex
periencing the sonnets over time; in the process she comments on the
need to read "for difference," on reading texts in light of "adjunct
disciplines," and on the value of "an intellectual method that repre
sents the nonce quality of each aesthetic experience." Her sensitive
commentary, reemphasizing as it does the centrality of artistic con
cerns to the enterprise of literary criticism, particularly the study of
Shakespeare, reminds us of what we may lose when we de-aesthet
lClZe.
Stephen Booth cocks his famous ear for nuance at a passage in Mac
beth.
Ever an opponent of the limiting and reductive analysis to which
the less talented New Critical exegete was prone, he promotes "Close
Reading without Readings." His method connects the topic of verbal
design with the problem of value: the existence of "overlapping net-
25. Katharine Eisaman Maus and Elizabeth D. Harvey, "Introduction," in Solicit
ing Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry
(Chicago: Uni
versity of Chicago Press, 1990), p. xi.
26. Harry Berger, Jr., "'Kidnapped Romance': Discourse in The Faerie Queene," in
Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon
Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 208.
27.
Robert Weimann, "Towards a Literary Theory ofldeology: Mimesis, Repre
sentation,
Authority," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed.
Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 271-72.

Introduction I5
works of casual, substantively inconsequential relationship ex
plains why we like Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra and Much
Ado About Nothing and Pride and Prejudice and Shaw's Saint Joan and
the Gettysburg Address and all the other things we like." His approach
will be familiar to many readers, and Booth wittily plays on that famil
iarity while, at the same time, he manages to defamiliarize a major
speech in a well-known play.
George Wright has taught us, in Shakespeare's Metrical Art, how to
appreciate the effects of prosody and how to talk about those plea
sures.
More to the point, he has revealed that metrical analysis can
involve us directly in the political struggles at the heart of a play such
as
Coriolanus or As You Like It. Power relations are inscribed in iambic
pentameter, which is constructed on the interdependence of syllables,
an ordered struggle between stressed and unstressed units of sound.
28
In short, the dynamics of the verse provide us with another means of
access to that problem which, more than any other, has been the focus
of much recent critical inquiry, the question of difference. In "Trou
bles of a Professional Meter Reader," Wright considers the marginality
of metrical study, remarking on its unstable location between linguis
tic science
and music, and deploring the efforts of critics, editors,
actors, readers,
and others who would neglect or depreciate the contri
bution of sound to the experience of the Shakespearean dramatic text.
Prosody is one of those textual particulars that can sometimes be con
sidered outmoded or mystificatory or merely aesthetic, and yet our
enlarging sense of the implications of rhetorical forms should permit
reevaluation of such a constant and fundamental poetic instrument.
Part Two consists of four essays that seek theoretically and practi
cally to renovate the method of close reading and to liberate it from
its formalist associations. In the dialogue between new and old, Harry
Berger, Jr.'s, is a welcome and pertinent voice, especially given his
description of himself as one of the "reconstructed old New Critics
[who] don't find it all that hard to negotiate the leap from, say, the
Intentional Fallacy to the Author Function, from the work to the text,
from genre to intertextuality, from the virtual speaker or persona to
the virtual reader (a very small leap), or from ambiguity to undecid
ability. "
29 Here, in "Hydra and Rhizome," his piece on the two Henry
plays in the second tetralogy, Berger develops a thesis about "emplot-
28. George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of Califor
nia Press,
1988), pp. 257-58.
29. Berger, "Kidnapped Romance," p. 208.

16 Russ McDonald
ment": he sees Shakespeare's historical narrative of civil war as shaped
by the personal struggle between king and prince, which "is itself a
covert displacement of the private war, the conflict of discourses,
within each." The two nouns ofhis title serve as figures for the com
plex relation between text and dramatic action: "rhizome" stands for
the discursive latencies
of text, while "hydra" suggests the anamor
phic narrative manifestations of those concealed textual possibilities.
The value of Berger's contribution lies in his talent for complicating
our sense of"text" and for explaining the sources and results of textual
complexity in a perspicuous and convincing fashion.
Patricia
Parker has been a prime mover in the revival of rhetoric
from which Shakespeare criticism is beginning to benefit, and here
she aligns
text with context as she microscopically studies patterns of
Shakespearean wordplay. "Othello and Hamlet: Dilation, Spying, and
the 'Secret Place' of Woman" is a brilliant effort at "reading Shake
speare's plays closely
with an eye to the historical resonance of their
terms, not just for formal interpretation of the plays but as a way of
perceiving their links with much larger contemporary discursive net
works." The networks examined are the language of Elizabethan es
pionage and "the quasi-pornographic discourse of anatomy and an
early
modern gynecology." In showing how the verbal texture of
these two tragedies is permeated by such discourse, she demonstrates
fascinating links among the epistemological, judicial, sexual, and rhe
torical senses of"knowledge," "discovery," "opening" and "closing,"
"matter," "show," and "thing." Attitudes toward homonymy have
frequently served
as touchstones for larger critical views-neoclassical
complaints about the fatal Cleopatra are the most obvious example-
and Parker's work demonstrates the value of studying forms after for
malism as she moves back and forth between literary and social text.
The identification of multiple voices within texts has been accom
panied by attention to the theatrical text as a voice in the larger cultural
conversation. Susanne
L. Wofford's essay, '"To You I Give Myself,
For I Am Yours': Erotic Performance and Theatrical Performatives in
As You Like It," takes advantage of this expanded sense of voice in the
dramatic text, exploiting speech act theory in ways that J. L. Austin
himself seemed to proscribe. She manages thereby to use the play's
interest
in the language of proxies to complicate our sense of theatrical
performance, suggesting
that As You Like It "may in fact be partici
pating in a complex way in a cultural debate about the power offathers
and of the state to control the language that gives such actions a social

Introduction 17
reality-in other words, that makes the language truly performative."
Her reading clarifies for us Shakespeare's concerns about who is doing
what with words, and how it matters.
David Willbern concludes the middle section with what may be
the most self-conscious and theoretical of these essays, "Pushing the
Envelope: Supersonic Criticism," where he theorizes the process of
close reading in an attempt "to draw provisional lines around licit and
illicit uses of Shakespeare's language." Surveying a range of passages
from Troilus and Cressida, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter's Tale,
Measure for Measure,
and Twelfth Night, he explores how certain read
ers,
from Samuel Johnson to an unnamed naysayer at a scholarly con
ference, have responded to some crucial instances of Shakespearean
wordplay.
In Willbern's view, Malvolio's misconstruction of the
forged letter becomes a figure for the perils of willful reading. Two
features of the essay make it especially appropriate here. First, Will
bern's attempt to develop a model for productive reading leads him
to engage directly with Stephen Booth's essay in this volume, "Close
Reading without Readings," challenging Booth's refusal to assert a
theoretical basis for his style
of reading. Next, in place of what he calls
Booth's "motiveless criticism," Willbern argues for the role of the
unconscious in motivating the "play of language" that Shakespeare
initiates,
and in so doing he consciously seeks to push the discussion
beyond the New Critical principles in which he was trained.
The final three essays represent "Reflexive Readings": they empha
size practice, illustrating new uses for close reading and providing a
range
of possible interpretive, textual, and political approaches. His
torically informed critics, despite professions of interest in the political
possibilities
of close reading, have rarely been able to treat literary
texts
as sensitively as Lynda E. Boose does in" The Taming of the Shrew,
Good Husbandry, and Enclosure." She reads the narrative ofKate and
Petruchio with an eye for the issues of class and gender suggested by
the fictive frame and also in the context of historical episodes having
to do with the manipulation of the economically disenfranchised and
the enforcement ofhierarchical gender relations. As she describes her
method, "The issues of gender and hierarchy are pushed outside the
fictive frame of the Kate and Petruchio story in order to be searched
out again among a variety ofhistoricized construction sites, including,
most prominently, an overdue consideration of the ways in which the
material conditions of early modern England may be implicated in
this text." Boose is attentive to the play's exploitation of the discourses

18 Russ McDonald
of social and economic class, particularly in the early wooing scenes
where others have confined themselves to conflicts of gendered lan
guage;
moreover, she is especially adept at maintaining a balance be
tween her theatrical and historical texts as she argues that "this play is
every bit as much a dramatization of English history as are the Henry
VI plays, which were written at very nearly the same time."
The principal actor on the historical stage of early modern England
was Elizabeth Tudor, whose words may serve as a test case for an
expanded sense of text. According to Stephen Greenblatt, "If there is
any value to what has become known as the 'new historicism,' it must
be . . . in an intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces
of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary
texts. "
30 James R. Siemon, in "'Word Itself against the Word': Close
Reading after Voloshinov," undertakes to read Richard II against other
kinds of utterances: the supposedly familiar report of the conversation
between Elizabeth I and William Lambarde, John Hayward's History
of Henry !III, and documents having to do with the Essex uprising.
In
doing so, he shows how the practice of close reading "considered
according to certain underdeveloped implications ofBakhtinian socio
linguistics
... may yet prove useful to various forms of social analysis
while,
simultaneously and paradoxically, suggesting a possible alter
native
to current interpretive modes." Siemon might be said, in read
ing beyond conventional boundaries, to set the New Historicist Word
against itself as he delicately and surprisingly unpacks the queen's fa
mous identification of herself with Shakespeare's Richard.
If an expanded sense of what constitutes a legible text is one of the
most evident signs of the move beyond New Criticism, another is
attention to Shakespearean performance, and Barbara Hodgdon is one
of the liveliest readers of this new kind of text. In "The Critic, the
Poor Player, Prince Hamlet, and the Lady in the Dark," she takes up
the instruments traditionally associated with close reading and de
ploys them nontraditionally to examine the work of three notable
readers of Shakespeare, F. R. Leavis, Ian McKellen, and Mel Gibson.
Proposing "to examine how close reading constructs and accommo
dates the performing and performed body," she begins by scrutinizing
a lecture Leavis delivered in Belfast
in 1972, disclosing through a subtle
deconstruction the antitheatricalism on which his view of the text was
30. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London:
Routledge,
1990), p. 14.

Introduction 19
founded. She then teases out the critical and cultural implications of
McKellen's analysis and performance of Macbeth's "Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow," noticing particularly his efforts at "incor
porating" the dramatic text into the acting body. This concentration
on the body leads easily to Mel Gibson and a reading of Franco Zeffir
elli's
Hamlet, beginning with the design of the videocassette and its
location
in her local video store and advancing quickly to the latest
research in film theory. As its range
of reference suggests, this piece is
a
tour de force.
There is something in this book to offend almost everyone, and
yet the corollary is that there is something to please almost everyone.
Unlike some collections, this one promotes no consistent ideological
or thematic stance; its unity derives instead from a focus on the Shake
spearean
text and the relation of very different kinds of readers to that
text. Such an extraordinary critical range is beneficial in demonstrat
ing that close reading need not be narrow or homogeneous. The mul
tiple approaches, viewpoints, and conclusions combine to offer a
faithful and
coherent representation of the unsettled and eclectic nature
of Shakespeare studies at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover,
despite their differences,
they all help tq validate the principle articu
lated
by Geoffrey Hartman in urging a move beyond the confines of
the text itself: "There are many ways to transcend formalism, but the
worst is not to study forms. "
31
3 I. Hartman, Beyond Formalism, p. )6.

Part One
Reflective Readers

I
Reading, Stage by Stage:
Shakespeare's
Sonnets
HELEN VENDLER
Age: fifteen. Infatuation in search of its objective correlative finds the
Sonnets, first some, then all. A revelation, not so much of emotional
reality (of which I had enough and to spare) as of the sequence's power
to include and organize every scrap of the world: the sun, poison,
boats; infidelities, absences, griefs;
tombs, trophies, worms.
Age: fifteen and a half. A marathon of memorizing, forty or so
sonnets
learned by heart, their rhythms what I walked to. Passion was
what they had to teach, and I never doubted their lessons. They had
the lift of apostrophe and the glamour of metaphysics, excruciating
plainness
and a gorgeous fanciness. I couldn't have cared less to
whom, of which sex, they were addressed. They were words scored
for reciting.
Each sonnet had a different stock in trade. Not one was
dispensable.
Each "added up" to a different tone color.
Age: sixteen.
The long-internalized Shakespearean rhythms force
an exit for themselves. Five sonnets,
some Italian and some Shake
spearean,
surprisingly write themselves at the tip of my pencil. (For
the next eleven years I write poems, and think I might be a poet. After
the first ambush, none of the poems is a sonnet.) I go on learning
sonnets by heart-Ronsard, Du Bellay, Petrarch, Hopkins, Meredith
(I know French and Italian and Spanish from my father, and my
mother has always read poetry).
Age: seventeen
to twenty-two. Hiatus. Free verse bursts upon me
from the pages of Oscar Williams. The Waste Land drives out sonnets.

24 Helen Vendler
I don't even notice that Auden and Yeats and Frost write sonnets. Be
sides, I am busy in labs doing science.
Age:
twenty-two to twenty-seven. At Boston University, a course
in Renaissance nondramatic literature makes me realize that Shake
speare's sonnets are much better than anyone else's. (I still think so.)
As I read Sidney, Daniel,
Drayton, Spenser, I begin to wonder why
Shakespeare is better, and how he made his poems better than other
people's. Later, at Harvard, I look at the Rime Sparse to find out how
it all started.
Age:
twenty-seven to forty-five. Teaching and writing, but not
about Shakespeare. I wring my hands and say, "I wish I could teach
Shakespeare,"
to which my colleagues reply, "You know you can
teach Shakspeare
whenever you please"-but I am not ready.
Age: forty-six. I offer an
undergraduate seminar at Boston Univer
sity on the Sonnets, and begin a methodical reading of the editions, the
scholarship, the criticism. I realize, with trepidation, that the Sonnets
are a lightning rod for nuttiness. There is even a man in the Variorum
who thinks the Dark Lady was a wine bottle, and that the later sonnets
record Shakespeare's struggle with alcoholism. My seminar members
and I see feelingly our way through the Sonnets. I type all the sonnets
triple-spaced and interline them with queries. There is not enough
space for the queries.
Age: fifty.
At Harvard I give my first graduate seminar in the Son
nets,
and decide to try to write on them. I write two chapters. Each
treats three sonnets. At this rate, I realize, I will write either a book
on thirty sonnets or a book with fifty chapters. Faced with these unac
ceptable alternatives, I suspend decision and begin taking lengthy and
systematic notes on each sonnet. I buy three hardbound ledgers and
paste into them, on facing pages, the Quarto version and a modern
version of each sonnet. I decide to memorize each poem. When I can
not remember a word, it means I have not understood its function in
the poem. As soon as I grasp its function, the word does not leave me.
This is instructive.
Age: fifty-four. I finish
annotating, but not memorizing (that is still
going on). I decide to write a commentary rather than a book. The
Sonnets have had editions and annotations, but never a systematic
commentary giving each sonnet its due. I have been interested by how
rarely Shakespeare repeats himself; since each sonnet strikes me as a
little aesthetic
program worked out to Shakespeare's satisfaction, I
want to give each of his experiments its moment of attention.

Reading, Stage by Stage 25
Age: fifty-six. I have finished rough drafts of commentaries on the
first
hundred sonnets. More than ever, I feel like someone who has
come upon an extraterrestrial playing one strange game after another;
the task is to figure out the rules from watching the moves. Shake
speare's games are delightful,
but his rules are obscure and full of
cunmng.
Now. I am asked to look at myself reading the Sonnets and give a
report on what I find my procedures to be. A theory of reading might
begin: Know your texts for forty years. Recite many of them to your
self so often that they seem your own speech. Type them out, teach
them, annotate them. A critical "reading" is the end product of an
internalization so complete
that the word "reading" is not the right
one for what happens when a text is on your mind. The text is part of
what has made you who you are.
What I can say something about, perhaps, is my dissatisfaction with
current accounts of the Sonnets, and the procedures which have gener
ated
my (different) accounts of them. In my two abandoned chapters
I
had wanted to take anthology pieces (Sonnets 73, II6, 129) and to
see why available critical accounts of them seemed to me so feeble,
fiat,
and unsatisfactory, so foreign to Shakespeare's performance. I
had realized that I processed the Sonnets differently from most other
people. It seemed to me that others tended to read along a static axis
of similarity (generally a thematic axis, but sometimes a rhetorical or
linguistic one). They wanted to make each sonnet hang together as a
statement or a performance of an attitude. I too wanted to make the
sonnet hang together, but along a dynamic curve of emotional evolu
tion, so that if it began at point A, it ended, say, at point M. Others,
in searching for logical or rhetorical resemblances among the four
parts of a sonnet, produced an account of a sonnet that said (although
in
more exalted terminology), "Shakespeare says lust is bad. Shake
speare
shows how bad lust is. Shakespeare says lust always ends badly.
And it is bad for everyone always." Those were the thematic readings.
A slightly
more sophisticated criticism collected all of Shakespeare's
examples
of hyperbole, or polyptoton, in order to assimilate some
pieces of some sonnets to other pieces of other sonnets. These readings
made generalizations about Shakespeare's tropes. A yet more sophisti
cated criticism denied
that one could do a reading of the Sonnets at

26 Helen Vendler
all, given the polysemy of the language, and so produced atoms of
interpretation but refused to connect the pieces.
None of these, I realized, represented my way of reading. I did be
lieve one could come to a satisfactory reading of these poems, since
Shakespeare, for all his love
of puns and wordplay, knew very well
how to put contextual constraints on his lexicon. I am not of the
school that believes we read word by woro; by the time we arrive at
the period, we know what we've read, and what Shakespeare means.
"Meaning" is not the problem in the Sonnets (nor indeed in lyric poetry
in general). The problem is why'poems with such very banal apparent
meanings ("I love you; do you love me?"; "Lust is bad"; "The world
is evil") should seem so ravishing.
My way of reading the Sonnets (and other poems) is to read for
difference.
Not, "How does quatrain 2 resemble quatrain I?" but
"How does quatrain 2 differ from quatrain I?" What would make
someone who has just said he is a ruined choir say he is a twilight and
then say he is a glowing?
1 These betoken powerful changes of attitude.
Why would soemone define lust by nouns (expense, spirit, waste,
shame, lust, action, action, lust)
while talking about the act of lust, and
then switch to adjectives (perjured, murd'rous, bloody, foll of blame, sav
age, extreme, rude, cruel, not
to trust) when talking about the pursuit of
lust? This seemed to me a linguistic token of an implied mental
change. And so on.
The intent to assimilate--to gather information along an axis of
static similarity-is the proper intent in reading expository material.
This is how we are trained to read at school. This is also a "good
enough" technique for reading the subliterary and dispossessed narra
tive prose ("Spot runs. Dick sees Spot run.") on which children are
(disgracefully) trained in their increasingly sociological
"literary" in
doctrination during the elementary years. But this technique will not
do for genuinely literary narrative, where all the interest lies in how
one of the pitifully few archetypal plots (the marriage plot, the status
plot, the quest plot, the tragic plot) is being retold. And it certainly
will
not do for lyric poems, where all the interest lies in how some
recognizable emotion-love, grief, perplexity, rebellion-is being
analytically re-presented in means accessible to its culture.
It is, in fact, the analytic function oflyric which is forgotten when
r. Quotations from the Sonnets are taken from Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen
Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); subsequent references appear in
the text.

Reading, Stage by Stage 27
one reads along an axis of thematic or rhetorical similarity. A Shake
spearean sonnet is an ideal analytic vehicle, with its four movable parts
(twice as many as the Italian octave-sestet sonnet). Though the rhyme
scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet suggests one distribution of parts
(4-4-4-2), and its Petrarchan inheritance another (8-6 or 8-4-2), in fact
Shakespeare adapted it to any number of structural and logical sche
mata, such as the r-11-2 scheme of "Tired with all these" or the 4-6-
4 scheme of "So are you to my thoughts." These structures function
as ways to embody several responses to the issue at hand, responses
that cry out to be distinguished from one another.
I realize now that it was because I had possessed the Sonnets themati
cally for so many years that I tended naturally, as an adult, to read
them aesthetically, that is, for difference. Because I had so long known
everything they "said," I was ready to ask, "What is Shakespeare do
ing now? And now what? What is diverting him in the way of inven
tion in this line? in this couplet? in this quatrain?" I was writing about
what had become my own speech and thoughts, and I could ask,
"Why am I talking this way?" "What does it mean that these thoughts,
and not the sort I was uttering five lines back, are coming out of my
mouth?"
This oral model of discourse opens up useful questions of rhetoric,
speech acts, semantic and aural repetition, and so on (to which I will
return), but by itself it can't suffice. It tacitly agrees to forget that the
Sonnets are a printed book (whatever their dramatic, oral, and aural
dimensions). I found, as I read the poems on the page, that I was seeing
things that uttering the sonnets as my own speech had not revealed.
What I noticed on the page, especially in reading the Quarto version,
were the many meaningful repetitions of words, syllables, and even
letters. These last included symmetries lost in modern printing. In "Is
it
for fear to wet a widow's eye," for instance, a modern printing loses
the bilateral symmetry of"widdow" and the slightly less symmetrical
"issuelesse"; it loses, too, the visual proliferation of v (for u) and vv in
the poem, till that symbol becomes the arbitrary token of widow
hood: vvet, vviddovves, vvorld, vvill, vvaile, vvife, vvorld, vvilbe,
vviddovv, vveepe, vviddovv, vvell, vnthrift, vvorld, vvorld, vvaste,
vvorld, vnvfde, vfer,
tovvard.
On a larger scale, one perceives that many of the sonnets are orga
nized by arbitrary rules that Shakespeare seems to have relished setting
for himself. One such rule (apparent, by my count, in more than
twenty sonnets) is that each of the four parts of a sonnet had to exhibit

Helen Vendler
one use of the same word. In Sonnet 7, for instance, the word is look:
quatrain I has "looks," 2 "looks," 3 "look," and the couplet "unlooked
on"; in Sonnet 26 it is show. Shakespeare can enjoy playing games with
his key word: in Sonnet 55 the key word is live, palpably there in
quatrain I's "outlive," 2's "living," and the couplet's "live," but ap
parently "missing" in quatrain 3 until one's eye lights on "ob-liv
ious," and one is delighted by the secret play. Other kinds of secret
play
appear in the sequence. To mention only one example, Sonnet
87 secretes a king in "mistaking," "making," and "waking," thereby
rendering true the closing couplet,
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king,
but waking no such matter.
Often, the reason for Shakespeare's use of particular words (here, the
-aking words) is not evident from sound alone; one must have grasped
his scheme of written play. The Sonnets, then, need to be read as writ
ten documents as well as oral ones.
I discovered, too,
that the Sonnets need to be read as speech acts.
This is slightly different from reading them, as we are often enjoined
to do, "dramatically." That injunction has been applied chiefly to
those poems which appear to be directly addressed to another person,
such as "Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now." It has not been
applied to sonnets that seem to be philosophical meditations, such as
I I6 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds") or I29 ("Th' expense
of spirit"). Nor has it been applied to sonnets of apparently self
directed discourse, such
as "Why is my verse so barren of new pride?"
But error lies precisely in the prejudging of these sonnets (because they
do not immediately exhibit a direct address to another) as philosophi
cal meditations or soliloquies. The queries, "Why would someone be
talking like this?" "What sort of speech act is this: a rebuttal? an apol
ogy? a homily? a boast?" lead to a closer generic definition of a sonnet,
and to the revelation (in some cases) of an embedded anterior discourse
to which the given sonnet is addressed. When the young man says,
"Why do you always use the same old-fashioned form over and over;
why don't you ever vary it?" Shakespeare replies by echoing the ques
tion: "Why, you ask, is my verse so barren?" and then replies, with a
gentleness painful
to read, "0 know, sweet love, I only write of
you .... "
One is driven to the sort of speech act query I have instanced by

Reading, Stage by Stage 29
peculiarities
in the surface of the poem. For instance, Sonnet II6 ex
hibits a strange proliferation of negatives; this is the normal sign of a
rebuttal. Also, Shakespeare's iambic measure suggests
that a normal
reading of the opening line of I I 6 would emphasize the second word:
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds I Admit impediments."
"You may; but I won't." If we read Sonnet 116 not as a serene defini
tion of love but rather as the rebuttal of the embedded anterior dis
course
of another-the same way we necessarily read the sonnet that
follows it-we hear the anterior discourse that is being rebutted. The
faithless young man, we might deduce, has said something like: "You
would like the marriage of minds to have the same permanence as the
marriage of bodies; but even the church admits impediments which
are invoked to annul the marriage of bodies, and there are impedi
ments to a lifelong marriage of minds, too. After all, things alter; and
when love finds alteration, it alters in consequence; and things are re
moved; and love removes itself when it sees the remover. I did love
you once, but now that's ended." Shakespeare counters: "Let me not
to the marriage of true minds I Admit impediments. Love is not love I
Which alters etc. I Oh, no ... I [It] is never shaken. I Love's not Time's
fool; I Love alters not. I I never writ, nor no man ever loved." Any
short poem with four nots, two nevers, two nos, and one nor is refuting
something. Readers intent on what the sonnet seems to mean ("Love is
eternal
and immutable") have for almost three hundred years missed
the anger and scorn in the utterance, and the implication of its chosen
form, the rebuttal. (A rebuttal is neither serene nor unthreatened).
Such astonishing critical blindness is
to be found everywhere in ex
isting criticism of the Sonnets.
It is perhaps a modern impatience with rhetoric that leads to an
inability
to read the Sonnets. In the highly diverting, if appalling, his
tory of the reception of the Sonnets, one of the most shocking episodes
is
provided by Ezra Pound. Wanting to wring the neck of rhetoric, he
instructed Basil Bunting, one ofhis students at the "Ezuversity," to go
through Shakespeare's Sonnets deleting all the "superfluous words."
Massimo Bacigalupo, in his monograph Ezra Pound: Un poeta a Ra
pallo,
2 has reproduced a page from the edition "cleaned up" by Bun
ting under Pound's direction (see figure). Now, what was produced
by this process, however barbarous, certainly appears at first glance
2. Massimo Bacigalupo, Ezra Pound: Un poeta a Rapallo (Genoa: Edizioni San
Marco dei Giustiniani, 1985), p.
75·

I 8 A K a I P & A R &
10,1
..A-hA(!Jt, what poverty my Muse bring3 forth,
A '1:1aM having such a scope .... ahe• bes JH ldt!, ..
The argument. aU bare, is IK moro worth
_lhan wbr.n. it. hath my Mc!~e\ai~ besidf'!
"."-blame me not. iC Jl no more ~an wri~
J.ook ia your .glau. and there appears fac~
That over~ my blunt invention ...._
I)uiUDfJ Dl)' lhR!C, 2iiid 1iaiA,.. M8 .JiflpK~
\' «-rc it not ainful. &M«~g to mcmd
To mar the abject that was well?
Jiec .. M odie; ••• "'' • oa iiiE8 -.•
Thea of )Wf INCa and )Oat 1i8:t to tlltl:
/.A.Mt moft, much more, than-ill nty verse ~&It ait1
~ y~ .~ . gJas.~-·~~ws .. !5 ..... , ... lee), • a.
104
T
O MI.. fair fJiaall, you never can be old,
For u you were when first/Your efe\1 ol_'d,~,
Suc~tL®r beauty still. Threo winters eehl
llav · · i&Ms Uook.thrse summprs' pddt._
T~ kea••••• sprin u u tum'd
In ,. eu• 41f',al1 11•••• ll1;y ;-.. ,
"RM~t!P! ~pil llllf•••c;;Lt &;i Juiji!ilbym"dlr=
Sinn• first I qw ynu frf>Sb, which yet arc gr(>f'l\.
A h, yet 4«h beauty, lik<~ a di<JJ-hand,
Str.al from bJa figurf', and nu pact' rwrcc>iv'tJ;
S•) y(;ur .... bu~ .. whiM wth' •Is:• Mill doth l~ttl'ftl.
ll.tth motion, and mine ~ye may l.w dc.•ccived:
Fnr fear at· •hicb btir l~itt 1 •hc;a 1)<1 .. .snhr..d,
.,. ,.-eu WIN ~A WM l.eaway't summer dwrd.

105
L
ET not my lov~ be call'd kloiO ry,
Nor my bck>\'c:'dliiaii a•lo~sh:
Sl~ (If al~y fW?Q(lS and _rai:.._ be ··
'M IJII(, ot "'' Mttl' syc;b. and ever ao
Kind is my love to-day, to-mr)rrow kind,
.fit~~ coastant in a ee omh tJttS •·xn ':ll(~ct·;
Therefore -., U!IIIC a. eea"•"e)' uwdin ,
~~ ...... ..,J.••••• 1-.aw:• e .. ••••we.
~~; ~ad/~ q trUe." ia all my argument,
~Pair •. klad. ikftcl tru~:· varying to other worda;
AiiW• ia "-1• ehla11p is my Iii tHtttluu spaA.
~ themes in one, whieh lllltalrnftl' N!O'PfJ NL ck.
•Fair, ltind, and ttu('~" M"t elt• liw'll ... .,
Which thftle till now never kePt aoat in OM.
lo6
W
HEN ia ~~ tltreRlele ~ w••• MM
1 soo dtewiptioP• olaba '•'• wip•a_
.A.a4 br.auty makinlf&aullfu~ ri,!!S
In praile of~ and lovely 'kftfghts.
· n the blazon of M'f'Gt boan'}'''lf beet.
foot • .-f li -.. #f e C", fllf hrow,
I I()() thf'ir antique pc.•n would t..a ·(~ mq~
•
Even such a ~·auty a.~ ynu Milftlef~
~ thclr praise:~ are ~ prophecl•~
Of this nne \iAhiJ al~
And, or th<~ look 'd hut ·. . ,·ini
Th(•y hatl nnt ...rtf •·nou~h ;our \'(•rt ''\o10o',..:....,.~o~o 1
p wt'-, whicb J1PIN bl~ thus f rrr9'
4•P.
Have eyca to wondt.'1', but lack tongue. to praist'.

32 Helen Vendler
to preserve the theme or statement of any given sonnet. Are the de
leted words then "superfluous?" Is their function thematic, or other
than thematic? Let us take Sonnet I05 as our test case.
John Kerrigan, editor of the Sonnets for the New Penguin Shake
speare, finds I05 a boring sonnet. Like Bunting, and presumably
Pound, he regards it as "tautologous," as his commentary on it re
veals:
A poem like 105 is scrupulously and Shakespearianly dull, but it is dull
nonetheless
.... The text is stripped of metaphor; ... the result is a
poem which, for all its charm [which Kerrigan does not specify] (and
integrity) [the absence in it
of what Kerrigan calls "false comparisons"],
lacks the compelling excitement
of a metaphoric sonnet such as 6o,
"Like
as the waves make towards the pebbled shore." In so far as Shake
speare
... shun[ s] "variation" for the sake of tautologous recurrence,
his verse palls.
3
Of course, if one is "excited" only by metaphor, and can perceive
no other figure at work, one might find I o 5 "dull," its repetitions
"superfluous" or "tautologous." I believe such verdicts arise from
considering aesthetically desirable one thing only-unadorned state
ment in Pound's case, metaphor in Kerrigan's case.
Now, I05 is a poem that says, in mock refutation of an accusation,
"You, a
Christian worshipping one God in three persons, have called
me an idolator for worshipping my beloved. But don't you see that I
worship exactly as you do? My object of worship is also a Trinity;
like
yours, it combines one-ness and three-ness in a unique way." The
playful self-defense of the sonnet is framed in trinitarian imitation: the
octave is devoted to oneness, the next quatrain to threeness, and the
couplet to three-in-oneness. The Platonic triad (the beautiful, the
good, the true) is here translated into colloquial English: "fair,"
"kind," and "true." Besides enacting the one, the three, and the three
in-one (an enactment entirely destroyed by Bunting's deletion of"su
perfluities"), this sonnet plays in another way with one-ness, repeating
one in various literal and phonetic forms, two in each member of the
sonnet: in quatrain I "one" "one"; 2 "won-," "one"; 3 "one," "won-";
couplet "alone," "one." The joking ubiquity of two "one's" in each
member of a poem about a unique relation of one and three is one of
3· William Shakespeare, "Sonnets" and "A Lover's Complaint," ed. John Kerrigan
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 29.

Reading, Stage by Stage 33
Shakespeare's private divertissements. So is the joke with reference to
the young man's earlier accusation, in Sonnet 76, that Shakespeare's
verse
"one thing expressing, leaves out difference"; this highly inge
nious sonnet, playing with one, two, and three, is full of"difference."
It perplexes me that putatively competent readers have not seen
what Shakespeare is up to in this very accomplished jeu d'esprit,
which responds (as does sonnet 76) to an implicit accusation (here,
one of erotic "idolatry" made by a Christian objector). By pairing the
formula of trinitarian theology (three in one) with the Platonic for
mula for the Absolute (with the good ["kind"] placed foremost in the
octave,
the beautiful ["fair"] placed significantly foremost in the subse
quent quatrain), Shakespeare detaches the trinitarian structure from
its Christian significance (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) and wittily makes
a rejoinder
to the Christian, using his own triune formula while de
taching it from its divine dramatis personae. The Christian objector
has, of course, wanted Shakespeare to worship the "true" Trinity, but
the perfect structural similarity of the two objects of worship-Chris
tian and erotic-is what Shakespeare alleges to defend his choice. It is
outrageous, indeed blasphemous, of course, but it is a defense so
clever
that "even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer."
Or so it seems to me, if not to Pound or Bunting or Kerrigan.
In
the history of the sonnet, the trinitarian allusion of the couplet
has
of course been remarked (Booth, 1977), and some have noted, as
a separate phenomenon, the presence of the Platonic triad (with the
good, the true, and the beautiful replaced by "kind," "true," and
"fair") in the poem. But these separate facts have not been connected
to the structural relation of the octave's dedication to oneness, the
third quatrain's to threeness, and the couplet's to three-in-oneness.
Nor has anyone noticed the double presence of one (when one includes
the aural pun in "wondrous" and the orthographical pun in "alone") in
each
member of the sonnet. Even the most careful examination in
print of Sonnet IDS, by Peter Szondi (who is concerned with Celan's
translation of the poem), does not mention any of these things, nor
show how they are lost in translation.
4 Can we say that Bunting or
Booth or Kerrigan or Szondi-or for that matter Celan-has "read"
the poem Shakespeare wrote? Can we still "read" Shakespeare's rheto
ric? I wonder. But it seems to me that at the very least our working
4· Peter Szondi, "The Poetry of Constancy," in "On Textual Understanding" and
Other Essays,
trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), pp. 161-78.

34 Helen Vendler
assumption should be that there are no "superfluous words" in the
Sonnets, that Shakespeare is the least likely of our poets to be "dull" or
"tautologous," and that it is our own "estranged faces" rather than his
dullness
that we reveal when we disparage his invention.
I have
known most of the poets I have written at length on since my
teens. The one exception is Stevens, whom I first read at twenty-three.
The long subterranean process that goes on between one's first reading
of a poet and the decision to write a book on that poet has many stages,
which are different for each book. Sometimes (as with my wish to
write a book on Whitman) I have not been able to carry out the desire
to write at length because there is a gap in understanding which, for
all
my efforts, will not close. When I first began with Shakespeare
the intensive process of study that can lead to a book (memorizing,
annotating, typing out the poems, reading editions and criticism), I
had hoped, as I have said, to write a critical book on the Sonnets. But
as I read the poems with close attention, I realized that anything I
wrote about Shakespeare's compositional processes in, for example,
"Let not my love be called idolatry," had, strictly speaking, nothing
to do with the sort of work he was up to in, say, "That time of year
thou mayst in me behold." Remarks about one Shakespearean sonnet
are, on the whole, not transferable to another unless they are of a level
of generality that is totally banal. (This is the problem of "theory" as
applied to complex art objects: of course, one can sand down the Dis
cus Thrower until it resembles the Venus de Milo, but any remark
thereby made applicable to both statues is so broad that it illuminates
neither.)
Shakespeare,
it is clear, must have been the most easily bored poet
in the history of English lyric (closely followed by George Herbert).
Herbert avoided boredom by (almost) never repeating himself pro
sodically; he invented a new stanza form for almost every poem he
wrote, and his genius for stanzaic invention-matched,needless to
say, by corresponding rhythmic invention-has never been equaled
in English. Shakespeare, confined
by choice (if we except a couple
of anomalies in the sequence) to a single prosodic form-the iambic
pentameter "Shakespearean" sonnet-decided to restrict his invention
to things he could do within his "walls of glass":

Reading, Stage by Stage
Then, were not summer's distillation left
A
liquid pris'ner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
(Sonnet
5, 9-12)
35
The "walls of glass" were one of the many voluntary constraints he
accepted
for the sake of delight in inventing against the pressure of
form. The "liquid prisoner" inside each sonnet demands individual
description because, so far as I can see, Shakespeare has a horror of
repeating himself. Even when he "rewrites" a sonnet-as, for in
stance, in 68 he seems to rewrite 67-the refinement of the donnee
necessitates new invention. In 67 and 68 the donnee is the presence of
a person from the Golden Age in our decayed society. But whereas 67
foregrounds the decayed present, 68 portrays an effort, doubly
aborted, to dwell on praise of this Golden Age form, to turn back the
clock. The repeated attempts to return to Golden Age nature ("be
fore" X, "e'er" Y, "e'er" Z) collapse in successive returns to the
ghastly present and its "false art," represented by, of all things, wigs.
This is, so far as I now know, the only sonnet to attempt a rhetorical
representation of a common artistic blockage-the failure to be able
to sustain contemplation of an imaginary past ideal. Shakespeare's
figure
of invention here-successive rhetorical collapses into the de
based now-does not appear elsewhere, and so in a commentary it has
to be inventoried here. The inventory of rhetorical figuration made
for Sonnet 105 or 73 has no relevance for 68.
An inventory of the very numerous means of literary repre
sentation-grammatical, syntactic, logical, metaphorical, rhetorical,
poetic-which Shakespeare employed to do justice to human observa
tion, perception, thought, feeling, speech, and imagination is I think
the next critical step in gaining an accurate sense of his aesthetic work
in the Sonnets. But these means of representation are literally meaning
less, even if inventoried, unless they are perceived and described as
part of a functioning aesthetic dynamic generating the sonnet (as we
have seen with respect to 105). The failure to view Shakespeare's de
vices of language as functioning within such a dynamic accounts for
the relative uselessness of such inventories as exist. The imagery in
Shakespeare's plays has generally, from Spurgeon on, been inserted
into some such dynamic (the plays being obviously evolving entities).

Helen Vendler
But imagery in poetry likewise cannot be investigated by itself; it is
just one member of a complex functioning poetic system.
In deciding
to write what I can only describe as a functional com
mentary on each sonnet, I hope to show the meaningful and evolving
relation of parts within each sonnet. I am assuming a reader who has
passed
beyond the need for the usual semantic or syntactic editorial
annotation, a reader who is ready to ask not, "What does this sonnet
say?" but rather, "What is Shakespeare the inventor-in-language up to
here?" Reading in this sense asks not what the poem is saying but what
the poet is doing. "What is the problem of representation here?" "How
does the poet solve it?" One must allow each sonnet to provoke the
questions that, when answered, will show how it generates itself, by
what laws of inner form. This version of the hermeneutic circle is
aimed not at interpretation-a mistaken aim when predicated, as it usu
ally is, on the paraphrasable cultural content of a poem-but rather at
the probable JUnction of observable and significant linguistic activity.
It is true that linguistic activity is theoretically infinite. The problem
in "reading" is choosing which linguistic activities manifest in the
poem are significant ones. The objections voiced by me and by others
to Roman Jakobson's discussion of Sonnet I29 are grounded on the
randomness of his choice of things to compare.
5 Jakobson chose
(among other things) to compare line I of the sonnet with line 14,
then line 2 with line I 3, and so on, down to a com paris on of line 6
with line 7. Such a procedure violates the "instructions for reading"
encoded in the Shakespearean sonnet, which suggests by its structural
form that we make comparisons among its four parts, to start with.
It also suggests that we compare portions of the poem that repeat the
same word, vary a common figure, or reiterate a syntactic pattern. It
suggests that we compare the couplet (which often performs the func
tion of summarizing, epitomizing, or epigrammatizing) with the
body of the poem. There are many other "instructions" suggested
in a given sonnet: that we should compare (contrastively as well as
analogously) words that alliterate with one another, or words that pun
together, or groups of words (such as "never," "not," "nor," and "no"
in Sonnet I I6) that enact the same sort of refusal, or parts of speech
5· See Roman Jakobsen and Laurence Jones, Shakespeare's Verbal Art in "Th' Ex
pense of Spirit" (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), and Helen Vendler, "Jakobson, Richards,
and Shakespeare's Sonnet
CXXIX," in I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honour, ed. Reuben
Brower, Helen Vendler, and
John Hollander (New York: Oxford University Press,
1973), pp. 179--98.

Reading, Stage by Stage 37
(nouns versus adjectives in Sonnet 129) that describe different phases
of "the same thing" (in 129, sexual appetite).
These axioms of reading, however familiar, are often forgotten in
practice.
One of the cliches of critical discourse on the Sonnets, for
instance, is
the apparent superfluity of the couplet. This criticism is
sometimes phrased as the problem of the couplet's detachment from
the body of the poem, or its inconsistency with the body of the poem.
I decided to see in how many cases the couplet included an explicit
repetition,
from the body of the poem, of a significant word or words
(I excluded words such as and or thee or I, unless punned on with eye
and thereby foregrounded). I called this repeated word or words the
couplet tie.
It meant to me, when it was present, that Shakespeare was
making a distinct effort to create a visible verbal connection between
the body and the "tail" of his form. I discovered that only ten of the
154 sonnets (3, 34, 37, 65, 67, 126, I4I, 142, 147, and 150) lacked such
a
couplet tie; and even if one or two cases might be debatable, such a
statistic
means that in over 90 percent ofhis efforts, Shakespeare made
an identifiable verbal connection of the body with the couplet. To ex
plain
why the articulation of the couplet has seemed unsuccessful to
some readers requires a hypothesis other than that of verbal irrele
vance, especially since
the couplet tie is usually a word or group of
words with striking thematic significance within the given sonnet.
Perhaps dissatisfied readers are reading
not for "words" (by which I
mean linguistic play of all kinds) but for statement, and are unhappy
when they find reiteration "varying to other words": there are differ
ences in perspective, in expectation, and in satisfaction consequent
upon one's method of reading.
We
contributors have been asked by our editor not only to describe
our own methods of reading but to compare them with past and cur
rent methods. Although one is always tempted to quote Eliot on the
necessity of intelligence, the intelligence of a good reader is not only
talented but trained. The discipline of"English" goes through oscilla
tions
of intra-and extralinguistic concerns: from vie-et-oeuvre to the
New Criticism, from the New Criticism to the New Historicism.
Equally it goes. through a set of master narratives (currently Marx,
Freud, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan) from which it de
rives the individual and social psychology and philosophy it employs
to discuss experiential events and responses to them, whether in life

Helen Vendler
or in art. It also veers to and fro between metaphysical notions of the
literary object as unified (a view deriving ultimately from Aristotle)
or as ecstatically ungovernable (a view deriving ultimately from Plato,
visible most recently in deconstruction's attachment to theories of un
controllable linguistic events). Each of these strategies is only as good
as the results it produces with respect to a given work.
Because I believe Shakespeare's aesthetic in the composition of each
individual sonnet was an "Aristotelian" one of coherence along a dy
namic curve, I have not usually been concerned, in individual com
mentaries, with forces of dispersal. The forces of dispersal that
Shakespeare acknowledges here are rather to be found (and the decon
structive certainty that they lurk everywhere has certainly helped to
reveal them) in the troubling noncoherence of the psychological and
linguistic galaxies that go to make up the universe of the sequence.
The persistent wish to reorder the Sonnets testifies to their resistance
to any conclusive ordering (the reorderings having failed to convince
anyone but their originators). No reader of the Sonnets has been able
to establish a consistent psychology of the Young Man, the Poet, or
the Dark Lady; no one has been able to trace a coherent narrative; no
one has explained the presence of the anomalous mythological son
nets, nor those that are formally anomalous. Once one has memorized
many of the sonnets, even the quatrains begin to behave in a strangely
autonomous fashion, linking themselves into new sonnets that never
were on land or sea:
That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss
in love that touches me more nearly.
Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
And when a woman woos, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till he have prevailed?
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I
cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed, if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds,
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds.
6
6. I here restore the Quarto reading in line I I, "if thou this self deceivest." Booth
accepts the traditional emendation of "thyself" for "this self."

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II
COMPOSITION ET
FONCTIONNEMENT DU
CONSISTOIRE
Composition: Fonctions du «diacre» et de l’«ancien». Nombre des
membres du consistoire. Leur élection. Leur classe sociale. Oppositions.
Entrée en charge. Division du travail. Employés.
Fonctionnement: Séances ordinaires. Leurs dates. Leur présidence.
«Quorum» obligatoire. Séances de censure. «Consistoires
extraordinaires». Ce qu’on entend par «actes consistoriaux».
Un consistoire se compose de diacres et d’anciens. Ces noms
différents impliquaient à l’origine des fonctions distinctes. M. P. de
Felice a montré que les diacres furent caractérisés tout d’abord par
des devoirs pastoraux
[147]
. D’après un document attribué au
réformateur Viret
[148]
, leur charge «consiste à la réception,
distribution et administration des biens dediez aux povres et autres
destituez à l’usage de l’église, comme à la nourriture des ministres et
autres affaires ordinaires ou survenants
[149]
». Leur office est bien
distinct de celui des anciens qui ont à «veiller sur les vices et
scandales universellement de ceux qui sont du corps de
l’église
[150]
». La Discipline précise d’une façon analogue les
fonctions diaconales. «L’office des diacres (dit-elle) est de recueillir

et distribuer par l’avis du consistoire les deniers des pauvres, des
prisonniers et des malades, les visiter et en avoir soin
[151]
.»
Cependant, à Nîmes, à la fin du XVI
e
siècle, je ne trouve aucune
distinction entre les fonctions de diacre et d’ancien. Tout d’abord, les
diacres n’ont pas la direction des finances de l’église: en effet, les
receveurs des deniers des pauvres et des deniers de l’église sont, au
contraire, choisis parmi les anciens
[152]
; de plus, un synode
provincial déclare responsables de l’entretien du pasteur les diacres
et les anciens indistinctement
[153]
, et cette décision est acceptée
théoriquement par l’église de Nîmes
[154]
. Les diacres n’ont pas
davantage le devoir particulier de s’occuper des pauvres, car le 16
janvier 1602, le consistoire charge chaque «ancien» d’apporter le
rôle de ses pauvres
[155]
, et l’hôpital est visité par «ung ministre
accompagné d’aulcungz du concistoyre
[156]
», non pas spécialement
de diacres.—Quant aux fonctions pastorales dont nous parle Viret,
elles semblent passer aux proposants: la lecture en chaire est faite
par des écoliers
[157]
.—En outre, je ne trouve dans le registre aucune
mention des diacres-catéchistes dont parle M. de Felice
[158]
(et à
propos desquels il signale d’ailleurs que leurs fonctions tendent à
passer aux proposants
[159]
), ni aucune trace de charges spéciales
données aux diacres pendant la Cène
[160]
.—Enfin, ceux-ci sont
députés aux colloques et synodes au même titre que les
anciens
[161]
.
On peut conclure de tout cela que la distinction primitive entre
les deux charges de diacre et d’ancien est, à cette époque,
complètement abolie dans l’église de Nîmes.
Le nombre des membres d’un consistoire change suivant les lieux
et même suivant les époques. Ainsi, à Nîmes, en 1596, il y a
quatorze anciens
[162]
, mais les années suivantes, on en trouve
quinze
[163]
; à Codognan, il n’y a que six anciens
[164]
, de même à
Junas
[165]
; à La Salle, leur nombre oscille entre onze et quatorze,
suivant les années
[166]
. La proportion des diacres et des anciens est

variable également dans le consistoire. A Codognan, ils ne sont pas
distingués et les membres sont tous compris sous la dénomination
d’«anciens
[167]
». A Junas, il se trouve un seul diacre pour cinq
«surveillans
[168]
». A Nîmes, il y a régulièrement un diacre pour deux
anciens
[169]
.
Les élections se font à divers moments de l’année. A Codognan,
les membres nouveaux entrent en charge en juillet, en août, en
octobre, en novembre ou en décembre indifféremment, et ceci dans
un intervalle de treize ans
[170]
. A Montdardier, comme à Nîmes, c’est
à la fin et au commencement de l’année que se fait l’élection
[171]
. Le
5 janvier 1601, le consistoire de Nîmes décide qu’il est temps de
changer les anciens «suyvant la coustume»; on commence par
exhorter «tous ceulx du concistoire estans présens de demeurer
pour l’année prochaine»; ceux qui refusent donnent leurs raisons, et
on les remplace à la majorité des voix; les autres sont «continués»
dans leur charge
[172]
. Il est donc non seulement licite, mais encore
recommandé aux anciens de rester en charge pendant plusieurs
sessions. Et pourtant, l’on en voit assez rarement qui persistent plus
de deux ou trois ans dans leur emploi. Voici, il est vrai, à Codognan,
«le sieur Valete» qui reste au consistoire pendant quatorze années
consécutives
[173]
. Mais de pareils cas sont rares et il est à croire que
les fidèles ne tenaient pas, en général, à conserver une charge qui
ne laissait pas de nuire à leurs occupations.—A chaque nouvelle
session, quelques-uns des anciens «vieux» étaient «continués
[174]
»
dans le but de mettre les «nouveaux» au courant des affaires. C’est
du moins cette raison qu’alléguait le consistoire de La Salle pour,
deux fois l’an, se renouveler par moitié seulement
[175]
.
A Nîmes, la durée du mandat était de douze mois
[176]
. C’était les
membres sortants qui choisissaient les nouveaux à la majorité des
voix
[177]
. A l’origine, le peuple avait élu les anciens par
acclamations
[178]
. Puis, suivant une marche naturelle aux
institutions, l’élection était tombée aux mains d’une oligarchie: le
consistoire lui-même. Le très vague article du synode de Nîmes

(1601), recommandant aux consistoires d’user «de prudence en la
nomination des anciens, pour empescher l’ambition qui sourdroit en
l’église», s’ils ne procédaient «avec la discrétion qui y est
requise
[179]
», ne diminuait pas beaucoup leur liberté.
Les anciens étaient choisis dans toutes les classes de la société.
Chacun pouvait être élu à la condition de jouir d’une honorabilité
parfaite. J’ai recherché, d’après le livre de M. Puech, qui nous donne
une étude de l’état des personnes à Nîmes à la fin du XVI
e
siècle
[180]
, quelles étaient les professions des membres du
consistoire pendant les années 1596 à 1602. Il en est un certain
nombre dont je n’ai pu retrouver le rang social, c’est qu’ils ont passé
dans l’histoire sans laisser de traces. Mais quelque imparfait qu’il
soit, le tableau suivant peut servir à montrer que toutes les classes
de la société nîmoise concouraient à former le consistoire
[181]
.
Qualité dÉë mÉmbêÉë du cçnëiëtçiêÉ dÉ NîmÉë dÉ 1596 a 1602
[182]
.
2 nobles
Daniel Arnaud, sgr. de la Cassagne (p.
60); Pierre de Vestric, sgr. de {Favier (p.
107).
12 avocats
Le commis Jacques d’Agulhonet (p. 121);
Claude Blisson (p. 122); Jacques
Bonhomme (p. 125); Bosquier (p. 125);
Guillaume de Calvière, sgr. de Saint-
Cézaire de Gauzignan (p. 125
[183]
);
Jacques Deyron (p. 61); Anthoine Davin
p. 127); Falcon (pp. 60, 128
[184]
);
Pierre Lansard (pp. 60, 130); Maltrait
(p. 130); Mazaudier (p. 131); Pierre
Unal (p. 134).
7 bourgeois
Guidon Cheyron (p. 147); Pierre Dumas
(ib.); Antoine Duprix (ib.); Jean Gaissac
(p. 148); Vidal Martin (ib.); Laurens
Salveton (p. 60); Antoine du Vieulx (p.
147).

6 marchands
Jean Bourges (p. 152); Jean ou Philippe
Cappon (ib.
[185]
); sire Claude de
Combes (ib.); Jacques ou Antoine
[186]
Crozet (pp. 147, 152); Daniel Manuel (p.
152); Jean Surian (ib.).
Aucun médecin
Aucun chirurgien
1 apothicaire David Guiraud (p. 167).
2 praticiens
Claude Pujol (p. 194); Vidal de Salhens
(ib.).
2 greffiers
Jean Boschier (p. 194); Bauzile Fontfroide
(ib.).
2 notaires Dostaly (p. 194); Anthoine Sabatier (ib.).
3 «gens des
arts et métiers»
Louis Baudouin (p. 282); Jehan André, dit
Radel (p. 257); Veyras le vieux (p. 263).
1 ancien capitaine
de compagnies
franches
Balthezart Fournier (p. 117).
1 laboureur Jean Gril (p. 305).
2 jardiniers
Jehan Bourguet (p. 315-316); Georges
Grégoire (p. 316).
Aucun berger
Si incomplet que soit le tableau précédent, il permet de constater
que les membres du consistoire sont surtout pris dans la seconde
échelle, parmi les avocats, les bourgeois et les marchands. Les
nobles et les magistrats dédaignaient peut-être la charge d’ancien,
bien qu’à Nîmes la noblesse fût presque entière de robe, peu
nombreuse et assez récente. Quant aux gens de la troisième et de la
quatrième échelle, on les élit rarement, mais du moins ils sont
éligibles. Toutes les classes de la société, et surtout la classe
moyenne et aisée, sont donc représentées.
La Discipline et M. P. de Felice nous apprennent qu’une fois
nommés, nobles et bourgeois devaient encore accepter et jurer de
remplir leur charge
[187]
. Puis, on soumettait leur nomination au
peuple en publiant leurs noms trois, deux ou même un seul

dimanche après le prêche
[188]
, afin que les opposants pussent
soumettre leurs raisons. Ceux-ci étaient d’ailleurs fort rares et très
mal reçus
[189]
.
Après ces formalités, les anciens n’avaient plus qu’à entrer en
charge. A Nîmes, pour la première séance de l’année (qui avait lieu
un jour quelconque de la semaine
[190]
), le consistoire «vieux» et le
«nouveau» se réunissaient
[191]
. On lisait les «articles de l’ordre en
l’église
[192]
», c’est-à-dire la Discipline: en 1596, le synode national
de Saumur ordonne qu’on observe «mieux qu’il ne l’a été jusqu’à
présent» l’article «qui recommande la lecture de la Discipline dans
les consistoires
[193]
», ce qui laisse à supposer qu’on ne l’appliquait
pas toujours
[194]
. On continuait ensuite par la lecture des «articles
de l’ordre... du présent consistoire
[195]
», c’est-à-dire, peut-être, le
règlement qui doit se trouver dans le registre de l’année 1566,
transcrit de la main de Théodore de Bèze, comme le dit M.
Borrel
[196]
. Les anciens «nouveaux» devaient déclarer s’y soumettre
et alors ils étaient définitivement reçus
[197]
. On déléguait quelques
membres des deux consistoires «pour clorre les comptes
[198]
».
Souvent, on désignait les receveurs des deniers des pauvres et du
ministère
[199]
. On expédiait les affaires courantes comme aux
séances ordinaires
[200]
. Finalement, les membres sortants étaient
«remerciez et mis en liberté
[201]
».
Je n’ai trouvé aucune mention de la réception publique et
cérémonieuse dont M. de Felice dit qu’elle était nécessaire
[202]
. Les
«interrogats» paraissent avoir été faits en consistoire et s’être
réduits à une simple promesse d’observer la discipline de l’église.
Quant à la lecture du règlement particulier du consistoire, il me
semble que c’est là une coutume assez spéciale aux Nîmois.
La division du travail entre les anciens était bien définie. La cité
avait été partagée, en 1566, en neuf surveillances ou quartiers, ne
correspondant pas aux quartiers traditionnels. Plus tard, sans doute
à cause de l’accroissement de la population, on en fit un de

plus
[203]
. Or, chaque ancien était affecté spécialement à l’une de ces
parties de la ville et chaque diacre avait à s’occuper de deux d’entre
elles
[204]
. Ils étaient chargés de «surveiller» leurs quartiers et
devaient rapporter au consistoire tous les faits graves qui s’y
passaient. De même, les pasteurs se partageaient «la vizitation des
mallades et autres charges
[205]
».
Outre ces fonctions tenant essentiellement à leur qualité, les
anciens et diacres pouvaient être chargés de missions spéciales. Tels
étaient le receveur des deniers du ministère et le receveur des
deniers des pauvres qui géraient les finances consistoriales
[206]
.
Enfin, il y avait encore des employés généralement salariés, dont,
suivant les églises, variaient le nombre et la qualité.
L’avertisseur était le Maître Jacques du consistoire: il remplissait
les fonctions les plus diverses. Benoist nous dit qu’il avait «à donner
avis au ministre que l’heure est sonnée, ou aux membres du
consistoire du lieu et du jour de l’assemblée, ou de porter de divers
côtés les ordres de la compagnie
[207]
». Ailleurs, on lit qu’il devait
«appeler et adjourner au consistoire les délinquants», et encore
«exercer autres mandements du consistoire
[208]
». C’étaient là, en
effet, ses principales fonctions, celles dont il tirait son nom. A Nîmes,
l’avertisseur, «Maistre Guilhaumes Guiraud
[209]
», est une sorte de
personnage que l’on paye assez cher. Il convoque les pasteurs et les
anciens
[210]
et prévient les fidèles qu’ils aient à comparaître en
consistoire pour y répondre de leurs fautes contre la Discipline,
quand toutefois on ne délègue pas spécialement à cet effet un ou
plusieurs anciens
[211]
. Il inscrit sur un long registre les noms des
coupables avec, en regard, la faute dont on les accuse; et ce registre
passe d’avertisseur en avertisseur
[212]
. Il remplit des missions de
confiance: on le charge, par exemple, de vendre les meubles jadis
prêtés à une pauvre folle, nommée Jeanne la Simple, qui vient de
mourir
[213]
, ou de recouvrer certaines sommes dues par l’église de
Milhaud
[214]
. Enfin, il fait la police du temple
[215]
. Dans de plus
petites villes, où l’avertisseur est moins occupé, il cumule encore

d’autres métiers. Ainsi, au Vigan, il est à la fois «advertisseur du
consistoire, sonneur de cloches pour le presche et les prières
publiques, et tient le temple net
[216]
».
Pour ses gages, Maître Guillaume Guiraud reçoit 72 l. par an
[217]
.
De plus, le consistoire s’est engagé à lui laisser prélever des droits
sur divers de ses revenus. Il touche, par exemple, une certaine
somme sur les «legatz pies» faits à l’église
[218]
, et un écu pour son
«droit de leveure de l’argent deub par la ville pour l’entretenement
des escolliers proposans
[219]
». Enfin, il est à croire qu’il sait se créer
par ailleurs d’autres sources de revenu, car on voit le consistoire lui
défendre de louer plus d’un sol le drap mortuaire pour les
enterrements
[220]
, et lui enjoindre de le bailler gratis aux
pauvres
[221]
.
Pour rédiger les délibérations de l’assemblée, il y a un greffier. A
Nîmes, c’est un des notaires de la ville, et il change tous les ans
[222]
.
A Montdardier
[223]
, c’est le maître d’école
[224]
. A La Salle
[225]
, un
des anciens remplit les fonctions de secrétaire
[226]
. Il est en tout cas
défendu aux greffiers de prendre aucun argent pour les extraits
d’actes du consistoire que des particuliers peuvent leur demander;
s’ils sont pauvres, l’église doit avoir soin «de pourvoir à iceux
[227]
».
Le maître d’école dépend du consistoire et il faut qu’il ait été
approuvé par lui
[228]
, qu’il serve ou non de greffier. Le «magister»
du Vigan touche 100 l. que lui paye la ville
[229]
.
Quant au chantre, il reçoit à Nîmes 2 écus
[230]
. Il doit entonner
et diriger le chant des psaumes, car il n’y a pas d’orgue
[231]
; et ce
n’est peut-être pas une sinécure.
Le règlement de 1566, dont j’ai parlé, porte qu’à Nîmes les
séances consistoriales devaient se tenir chaque mercredi à midi
[232]
.
Parfois, néanmoins, il se passait un assez long intervalle sans qu’il y
en eût
[233]
. Inversement, on se réunissait en cas de besoin,

plusieurs fois dans la semaine, le mercredi et le vendredi ou un autre
jour
[234]
. L’assemblée avait lieu dans le temple
[235]
, «à l’yssue du
presche
[236]
».
Qui présidait? La Discipline veut que ce soit un pasteur, et, dans
les églises où il s’en trouve plusieurs, pour ne pas créer de
compétitions et de jalousies, elle ordonne sagement qu’ils
présideront tour à tour
[237]
. Ce dernier point n’était pas observé
rigoureusement: à Nîmes, tantôt chaque séance a comme
«modérateur» un ministre différent, mais sans que le tour de chacun
revienne à des intervalles réguliers, tantôt le même ministre préside
sans interruption un certain nombre de fois
[238]
. Je n’ai d’ailleurs
relevé aucune contestation à ce sujet.
Pour que les décisions prises soient valables, il faut que les deux
tiers des membres soient présents à l’assemblée
[239]
. On doit y
arriver «à midy précézément», à temps «pour mettre le genoul en
terre et fere la prière», sous peine d’une amende de 5 sols
[240]
. Le
pasteur présidant prononce la prière
[241]
. Puis, on règle les affaires
courantes: censures, «réceptions à la paix de l’église», abjurations,
finances du consistoire, et «charges» diverses données aux anciens.
Outre ces séances ordinaires, le règlement adopté par l’église en
1566 porte que, la veille de Noël, de Pâques et de la Pentecôte, le
consistoire se réunit pour censurer impartialement, s’il y a lieu, la
conduite de tous ses membres, y compris les pasteurs et les
employés, et pour désigner les anciens qui donneront la coupe, les
diacres qui tiendront les bassins aux portes, et celui qui recevra les
«méreaux
[242]
». Ces séances «de censure» ont lieu en 1560 et
1561: on en trouve des traces dans le registre
[243]
. Mais à l’époque
qui nous occupe on n’en rencontre plus aucune mention. Il est
difficile de dire si c’est qu’elles ont disparu ou qu’on néglige
simplement de les inscrire: M. de Felice constate d’ailleurs que,
d’une façon générale, il est très rare qu’elles soient relatées dans les
livres des consistoires
[244]
.

Le règlement de 1566 porte encore que, pour procéder à
l’élection des pasteurs, on doit envoyer une députation aux
magistrats et aux consuls, afin de les réunir en «assemblée mixte
des trois corps» avec les deux consistoires «vieux» et
«nouveau
[245]
». Au temps de l’édit de Nantes, on convoque aussi
ces assemblées, ou «consistoires extraordinaires
[246]
», pour décider
l’imposition des deniers du ministère
[247]
. Le consistoire ne trouve
sans doute pas inutile de s’adjoindre les notables de la ville pour
sanctionner une décision aussi désagréable aux habitants que celle-
là
[248]
. D’ailleurs, il réunit des assemblées mixtes au sujet du
«logement des pouvres
[249]
», du collège et «rectorat d’icelluy
[250]
»,
et de tous les événements importants.
D’autres personnes que les consuls, les magistrats et les anciens
vieux et nouveaux y prennent part: des «docteurs et advocatz
[251]
»
généralement, mais aussi des «bourgeois et marchans
[252]
». Le
nombre des assistants varie beaucoup. L’assemblée la plus
nombreuse que j’aie trouvé comprend le juge criminel Daniel de
Calvière, quatre conseillers, le lieutenant particulier de viguier, le
lieutenant de juge ordinaire, les quatre consuls, deux ministres, huit
avocats, dont quelques-uns membres du consistoire, un noble, et six
bourgeois, anciens ou non
[253]
. Elle se tient au temple, comme
presque tous les consistoires extraordinaires
[254]
; j’en note un,
cependant, qui a lieu «en la maison de M. le Juge Criminel
[255]
».
C’est ce magistrat qui préside toujours quand il est présent
[256]
; en
son absence, c’est l’un des pasteurs
[257]
.
Les délibérations des assemblées mixtes ne devaient pas être
inscrites dans le livre du consistoire, ou tout au moins n’avaient pas
la valeur officielle d’«actes consistoriaux». C’est ce que montre un
intéressant jugement du synode provincial de Nîmes par députés, en
1599, rendu au sujet d’un incident grave survenu entre le célèbre
jurisconsulte Julius Pacius de Beriga et un professeur de logique du
collège de Nîmes, Robert de Vismes
[258]
. Pacius avait fait extraire du
registre du consistoire, avec le consentement des anciens, puis

imprimer et publier, le procès-verbal d’une assemblée mixte tenue en
avril 1598. Cette affaire fut portée au synode qui censura
«griefvement» le consistoire de Nîmes «d’avoir faict coucher» dans
son livre «la conclusion d’une assemblée mixte
[259]
», et envoya
même deux ministres inscrire en marge du procès-verbal en
question la note suivante: «Déclairons ce présent acte... estre d’une
assemblée mixte et non consistoriale, et pourtant n’en pouvoir estre
despêché aucun extraict portant tiltre des actes consistoriaulx
[260]
».
Ainsi s’établit bien nettement la différence entre les assemblées
régulières, faites suivant la Discipline, et ces assemblées mixtes qui
sont parfaitement autorisées, mais non reconnues officiellement. A
Nîmes, on continue d’ailleurs, après l’incident soulevé par Pacius, à
inscrire dans le registre les procès-verbaux d’assemblées mixtes
[261]
,
comme on l’a toujours fait, mais, sans doute, on ne leur donne plus
la valeur d’actes consistoriaux.
Le «Livre» du consistoire devait, selon la Discipline, conserver la
mémoire des fautes qui, «étant conjointes avec rebellion, auroient
esté censurées de la suspension de la Cène ou excommunication»;
et les autres devaient théoriquement en être effacées
[262]
. En outre,
on y inscrivait les «décharges» des receveurs des deniers lorsque
leurs comptes avaient été arrêtés
[263]
, les «accords» faits par l’église
avec les pasteurs
[264]
, etc. C’était donc un témoin officiel pour
l’église, comme les registres de baptêmes et de décès. On pouvait
en certains cas délivrer copie d’actes consistoriaux
[265]
pour servir
de témoignages, d’attestations. Ceci explique pourquoi le synode
prov. de Nîmes tenait à maintenir bien nette la différence entre un
acte consistorial, procès-verbal d’une séance tenue selon les
prescriptions de la Discipline, et une simple relation authentique
d’assemblée mixte.
Il était utile d’exposer en détail la composition et le
fonctionnement du consistoire, car il faut bien connaître cette
assemblée, pour saisir comment elle remplit les deux fonctions si

importantes qui lui reviennent et qu’elle partagea à l’origine entre
ses diacres et ses anciens: 1
o
obtenir des subsides, 2
o
diriger la vie
«de ceux qui sont du corps de l’église
[266]
».
C’est par le consistoire, en effet, que le protestantisme officiel
communique avec la foule des fidèles. Les Nîmois entendent bien
parler du synode, mais cette assemblée est pour eux solennelle et
lointaine, au lieu qu’ils voient, qu’ils connaissent leurs anciens. Or, la
popularité des consistoires est nécessaire à la force du parti: si leur
influence périclite, les assemblées supérieures vont se trouver «en
l’air», si je puis dire. Je montrerai plus loin qu’à Nîmes, il n’en est
rien, et que le pouvoir du consistoire sur les fidèles fait de ceux-ci
des soldats disciplinés, et tout prêts à suivre les instructions que les
chefs du parti leur donneront.

III
LES FINANCES DU CONSISTOIRE
Les comptes du «receveur des deniers de l’église» et du «receveur des
deniers des pauvres».
Deniers des pauvres: Recettes. Qui on assiste. Secours en nature.
Tableau des secours délivrés par le consistoire de Nîmes entre janvier et
mars 1596. Visites de charité. Surveillance de l’hôpital des pauvres.
Deniers de l’église: Dépenses. Recettes: les imposés; la levée des
rôles. Églises «ingrates». Pension payée à l’église par la ville.
Il reste maintenant à étudier les finances du consistoire de Nîmes
et à montrer quels étaient ses revenus. Il lui en fallait d’importants
pour subvenir aux dépenses qui lui étaient imposées: entretien des
pasteurs et des proposants, gages de l’avertisseur et des autres
fonctionnaires, aumônes, pensions aux nouveaux convertis, enfin
dépenses des synodes et colloques, car chaque église doit solder les
frais de ses députations aux assemblées ecclésiastiques. En matière
de finances, comme en tout le reste, ce sont les consistoires qui
forment la base de l’édifice protestant: sans leur argent, pas
d’assemblées, et toute la hiérarchie du parti se trouve désagrégée.
A Nîmes, le budget de l’église se divise en deux parts distinctes:
les «deniers de l’église» et les «deniers des pauvres».
Chacune a son «receveur», son banquier, choisi chaque année
parmi les membres du consistoire, le plus souvent un ancien
[267]
.

Une délibération du 31 janvier 1601 montre que le receveur des
deniers du ministère touchait à cette époque des gages de 100 l.;
mais c’est le seul renseignement que j’aie trouvé sur ce point
[268]
.
Les receveurs ne devaient délivrer aucune somme que sur la
présentation de «mandements», tirés sur eux par les anciens
[269]
. Et
à l’expiration de leur charge, chaque année, il fallait qu’ils rendissent
compte de leur gestion devant une commission nommée par le
consistoire
[270]
.
Le «receveur des deniers de l’église» à Nîmes présentait: 1
o
les
pièces justificatives de ses comptes, comprenant, d’une part, les
mandements tirés sur lui, et d’autre part, les quittances de ses
payements, avec leur bordereau
[271]
; 2
o
le «livre des quitances des
paiements de nos pasteurs.....», comprenant les quittances des
pasteurs, proposants et autres salariés du consistoire, qui était en
quelque sorte la mise au net des pièces précédentes, dont il ne
comprenait pas le détail
[272]
; 3
o
un registre contenant les noms des
imposés pour l’entretien des ministres, avec le chiffre de leurs taxes,
et une liasse renfermant toutes les pièces relatives au recouvrement
de ces impositions
[273]
.
Le receveur des deniers des pauvres avait des comptes moins
compliqués: il ne présentait que les mandements tirés sur lui et les
quittances de ses paiements avec leur bordereau
[274]
. La
commission déléguée par le consistoire vérifiait tous ces comptes et
en donnait aux deux receveurs une «décharge» qu’elle inscrivait sur
un autre registre spécial
[275]
, et qu’on mentionnait souvent dans le
livre du consistoire
[276]
. Puis les comptes étaient renfermés dans un
coffre et formaient les archives de l’église
[277]
.
J’ai dit que les deniers des pauvres étaient tout à fait distincts
des deniers de l’église. Il arrive, en effet, qu’on fasse procès aux
«povres de l’église
[278]
», dont les revenus provenaient soit de legs
testamentaires, soit de quêtes faites par les diacres.

Les legs étaient assez fréquents et variaient beaucoup; je n’en ai
pas trouvé, néanmoins, de considérables: en 1598, un conseiller au
présidial, Antoine de Malmont, lègue 20 l., et le baile de Saint-Jean
de Valeriscle 25 l. aux pauvres de Nîmes
[279]
. En revanche, il y en a
un grand nombre de peu d’importance: voici, par exemple, à
Congeniès, un laboureur qui laisse 30 sols
[280]
; l’hôte du logis des
Arènes à Nîmes, Armand Gaubin, ne destine aux indigents que 10
sols
[281]
, et, même, un certain Jacques Malafosse, de Congeniès, ne
leur en donne pas plus de 5
[282]
. Ce ne sont pas d’ailleurs ces
«légatz pies» qui forment la plus grosse part du revenu des pauvres,
et heureusement, car ils ne doivent pas être fort exactement payés,
s’il arrive fréquemment, comme en 1597, que les magistrats se
permettent d’en disposer
[283]
. Au reste, une partie des legs est
consacrée à l’entretien des pasteurs, et ainsi les pauvres n’ont pas le
bénéfice de toute la charité des testateurs
[284]
.
Les quêtes faites par les anciens et les diacres formaient leur
principale ressource. Il n’y a que fort peu de renseignements sur ce
point. On faisait la quête au temple dans un «bassin
[285]
». En outre,
on plaçait des troncs «aux» boutiques des marchands, et on les
visitait, ce semble, au commencement de chaque année
[286]
. Enfin,
tous les ans, on réunissait les objets perdus dans le temple et non
réclamés, on les vendait, et l’on en versait le produit au bassin: en
1596, on retire ainsi 2 l. 14 sols, et en 1601, 2 l. 16 sols
[287]
.
Ces quêtes étaient les vraies ressources des pauvres. Elles
devaient fournir parfois des sommes importantes. Le synode national
de Montauban, en 1594, décide que, lorsqu’il se trouvera une
somme notable des deniers des pauvres «que l’urgente nécessité
n’obligera pas d’emploier pour leur subvention, les diacres, par l’avis
du consistoire, pourront en faire quelque prêt à des gens solvables
pour faire valoir cet argent à la plus grande utilité des pauvres...., à
la charge qu’on le puisse retirer promptement en cas de
nécessité
[288]
». C’était là une permission assez dangereuse, mais
ces spéculations paraissaient si séduisantes que, le synode national

de Saumur les ayant interdites en 1596
[289]
, celui de Montpellier les
autorisa de nouveau en 1598
[290]
. Il est peu probable que le
consistoire de Nîmes ait pu user de la permission à l’époque qui nous
occupe, car il avait grand mal à entretenir ses très nombreux
indigents
[291]
et, l’«urgente nécessité» ne devait pas lui permettre
d’amasser un capital pour le placer.
Il secourait non seulement les pauvres de la ville, mais encore
ceux des autres provinces. Ainsi, en 1597, l’église de Grenoble ayant
fait parvenir aux Nîmois une lettre réclamant secours, le consistoire
décide que «tout ce qui sera levé au bassin» lui sera envoyé, et que
l’on communiquera la lettre aux autres églises du colloque
[292]
. On
faisait également l’aumône aux pauvres étrangers à la cité qui se
présentaient avec des attestations de leur église d’origine. Cette
coutume, nommée la «passade
[293]
», prêtait à de nombreux abus.
Des vagabonds exploitaient les églises en exhibant de fausses
lettres de leurs prétendus consistoires. C’est en vain que, pour y
remédier, le synode national de Montpellier (1598) décide que l’on
ne devra accorder aucune attestation avant d’avoir examiné en
consistoire si les raisons données par l’intéressé pour partir au loin
sont plausibles; que ses «âge, poil, stature» devront être spécifiés;
et que les ministres auxquels il s’adressera en chemin devront garder
ou détruire l’attestation qu’il présentera et lui en donner une autre,
s’il y a lieu, «pour la prochaine église
[294]
». L’abus subsiste, et le
consistoire de Nîmes se voit forcé d’ordonner que, dorénavant, les
pasteurs comme les anciens ne pourront délivrer à ceux qui
«demandent la passade.... aucungz bilhetz de 5 solz.... qui n’aye
esté délibéré au consistoire, ou à l’yssue du presche, et signé par
quatre pour le moingz
[295]
».
Il ne leur enlevait point, ce semble, le droit de distribuer des
«bilhetz» de moins de 5 sols, payables par le receveur des deniers
des pauvres. Celui-ci, comme nous l’avons vu, conservait
précieusement tous ces mandements comme pièces justificatives de
ses dépenses. Ils pouvaient monter à des sommes variables. Par
exemple, du 1
er
janvier au 27 mai 1601, sire Dalbiac, à Nîmes, a

reçu des billets pour 52 l. 19 sols
[296]
, ce qui donne environ une
moyenne de 125 l. d’aumônes par an. Cela ne me paraît pas très
considérable, si l’on songe que chaque pasteur reçoit 600 l. de
traitement annuel
[297]
.
D’ailleurs, ces sommes, pour minimes qu’elles soient, semblent
distribuées avec équité. Marque d’une tolérance rare à cette époque,
on fait la charité même à des catholiques, et sans leur demander la
plus petite abjuration en retour. «Jane Varlède, papiste, sera assistée
de 10 souls pour une fois, atandu sa pouvretté
[298]
», décide le
consistoire. «La femme de Pierre Michel...., estant en extrême
pouvreté..., bien que soit papiste, luy sera assisté de 10 sols sans
conséquance
[299]
.»
Les nouveaux convertis sont entretenus pendant un certain
temps, quand ils sont incapables de gagner leur vie, comme il arrive
aux défroqués. On paye leur apprentissage: Pierre, fustier, réclame
au consistoire la dépense «que le novisse moyne a faict à sa maison
à raison de 5 sols chascung jour
[300]
». Si l’église ne peut placer son
converti, elle écrit à ses voisines et le leur adresse
[301]
. Le synode
provincial et le colloque en prennent «soing» et cherchent «si
quelque église le voudra entretenir
[302]
». D’ailleurs, ils se trouvent
souvent mal de leur bonté. Le colloque de Nîmes, par exemple, se
voit réclamer 400 l. par M
re
Mathieu Guilien, apothicaire, «qu’un
jadis moine, nommé François Hon», mis en apprentissage chez lui
pour trois ans par le colloque, «auroit dérobé
[303]
». Ailleurs, c’est un
ancien moine de Tournon, nommé Denys Enard, que le consistoire
de Nîmes envoie comme apprenti chez M
re
Noguier, chirurgien, au
prix de 8 l. par mois: «lequel apprenti s’en seroit allé sans luy rien
dire» au bout de onze jours, en emportant «deux couvre chefz de
valleur de 24 solz tous deux»; il faut donc payer les 24 sols et 3 l.
pour les onze jours d’apprentissage, plus 4 l. 10 sols pour deux
chemises que le consistoire avait fait acheter «pour bailher au susd.
Denys Enard
[304]
».

Car il remettait souvent les secours en nature. Je vois, en effet,
qu’il fait délivrer pour 20 l. de «cadis à la vefve de Parant pour lui
fere une robbe
[305]
»; qu’il assiste d’une «eymine de bled», valant 15
sols, Jean S
t
-Huict, serrurier
[306]
, etc. En tout cas, pour le principe,
lorsqu’il donne une somme d’argent, il spécifie presque toujours
l’emploi qu’en doit faire l’assisté: si Estienne Audiballe reçoit un écu,
c’est «pour achepter une robbe à la fripperye
[307]
».
Certains pauvres étaient en quelque sorte abonnés et touchaient
une certaine somme chaque semaine, tandis que d’autres étaient
secourus une fois pour toutes. Parmi les premiers se trouvaient les
malades, dont le consistoire prenait grand soin. Une pauvre femme,
Claude Deleuse, étant tombée «malade à l’extrémité», il décide que
l’ancien du quartier devra avertir ses parents tout d’abord, mais «en
cas de nécessité luy adressera avec son diacre
[308]
». Souvent, il
ordonne que certains pauvres recevront une somme remise à la
discrétion «du diacre et surveillant de leur cartier
[309]
». Le tableau
suivant renferme les noms des indigents assistés entre janvier et
mars 1596, avec la mention de ce qu’on leur a donné
[310]
.
NOMS SOMMES
«La femme demeurant au derrière de
la maison de M de Chasteauneuf»
10 sols par semaine
durant sa maladie.
V
ve
de M
re
Parant et ses enfants 10 sols par semaine.
Médecin demeurant chez M. Saint-
Estienne
somme remise au
jugement de son
ancien.
Bernardine Maure 4 l. 10 s. 6 d.
Anne Pagese 10 s.
Leonarde 1½ teston.
Guiraud 1 escu
Canonge 15 s.
Sezarde et Arnassane
somme remise au
jugement de leur
ancien.
Astruc 15 s.

Janon 7 s. 6 d.
Maurin et sa femme 10 s.
Astruc (de nouveau) 15 s.
De Montloy 15 s.
Veuve Augier 40 s.
Bourcas 2 escus
Bunye 10 francs.
Bunye 10 francs.
Vallonne 10 s.
Jean Astruc, dit Barbut (de nouveau) 1 chemise
Les parents de done Boutarde 20 s.
La femme et ses 4 enfants demeurant
à la maison de Bollanges, ensemble
un nommé Vidal
somme remise à la
discrétion de leur
diacre.
«Loyse Arsegnelle» 2 escus.
Marguerite Cloche 10 s.
Saurette Saujette
10 s. par semaine
durant sa maladie.
Saurette Saujette (de nouveau) 24 s.
«Loyse Segnelle» (de nouveau) 6 l.
Jean Astruc (de nouveau) 30 s.
Cathelin Bonhomme 15 l.
Claude de Cussy «pauvre passant» 1 escu.
Honnorade Rousse 5 s.
Gaspard, cardeur
somme remise à la
discrétion du
diacre.
Le consistoire avait donc, en l’espace de trois mois, fourni à 26
personnes différentes des secours variant entre 10 l. et 5 sols. Il est
juste de constater que ce tableau ne comprend que les aumônes
énumérées dans le livre du consistoire, et que les anciens et les
pasteurs avaient le droit de distribuer des bons pour des sommes
peu importantes.
Ce qu’il faut retenir, c’est le soin avec lequel l’église s’occupe des
indigents. Il ne se passe pas une séance sans qu’un des anciens

propose une infortune à soulager, et sans que le consistoire fasse la
charité suivant ses moyens, assez faibles à la vérité. En janvier 1602,
il décide de reprendre une ancienne coutume qui lui semble propre à
ranimer le zèle des dames de la ville: elle consiste à faire visiter les
pauvres chaque semaine, par des «damoiselles et autres
honnorables personnes
[311]
». Il fait donc dresser un rôle des
demoiselles «honnorables», et, tous les mercredis, il désigne deux
d’entre elles à cet effet. Ce sont les plus hautes dames de la ville:
M
me
d’Aubais et M
me
de Rochemore
[312]
, M
lle
la Criminelle et M
lle
la
lieutenante de Rozel
[313]
, M
lles
de la Rouvière
[314]
, de la Croix
[315]
,
etc. Elles sont chargées, notamment, d’aller voir les pensionnaires de
l’hôpital. Le consistoire semble avoir toujours exercé une surveillance
efficace sur cet hôpital. En 1597, il rappelle sévèrement à l’avocat
des pauvres que c’est son devoir de s’en occuper
[316]
. Il prie les
consuls de veiller à ce que «les serviteurs et servantes de l’hospital
traictent bien les povres
[317]
». Il leur recommande encore d’y
recevoir une malheureuse «femme boiteuse
[318]
». Enfin, il
s’assemble avec les consuls et les magistrats pour pourvoir au
logement des indigents
[319]
.
Voilà comment on employait les deniers des pauvres. Ce n’était
pas une grosse somme, et l’on en retenait encore un cinquième pour
l’entretien des proposants
[320]
. Mais tout au moins les aumônes
étaient distribuées équitablement.
La part la plus importante des revenus du consistoire était
comprise sous la dénomination: «deniers de l’église» ou encore
«deniers du ministère», parce qu’elle était surtout destinée aux
pasteurs.
Le «receveur des deniers de l’église» avait bien des dépenses à
couvrir: d’abord, les frais qu’entraînaient les longues négociations
auxquelles il fallait se livrer pour obtenir un pasteur «perpétuel»,
quand l’église s’en trouvait dépourvue; puis les gages des pasteurs
en exercice; en leur absence l’entretien des ministres «prêtés», et

après leur mort, la pension de leurs veuves
[321]
; enfin, il payait
l’avertisseur, les employés du consistoire
[322]
et les députations aux
colloques et aux synodes.
Celles-ci devaient être, autant que possible, nombreuses, «afin
de resserrer l’union des églises». Un synode national recommande
aux localités qui ont plusieurs pasteurs d’en envoyer
«alternativement... le plus grand nombre qu’elles pourront
[323]
».
Mais de telles délégations coûtaient cher, et d’autant plus cher
qu’elles étaient composées d’un plus grand nombre de personnes.
Certaines églises n’étaient pas assez riches pour les supporter; aussi
elles s’entendaient pour choisir le même représentant au synode
national et s’unissaient pour payer son entretien
[324]
.
Lorsqu’il s’agissait seulement d’un synode provincial, les frais de
voyage et de séjour des députés étaient moins élevés. C’est
pourquoi Nîmes y envoyait assez souvent, outre ses représentants
réguliers, des députations extraordinaires
[325]
.
La note présentée par Isaac Roux, ancien d’Aimargues, délégué
par son église au synode de Saint-Germain de Calberte, peut nous
donner une idée de ce que devaient dépenser les députés de Nîmes:
«Pour la disnée à Calvisson», on lui doit 1 l. 6 sols; «pour avoir
refferré la cavale à Canes», 2 sols; «pour la souppée et couchée à
Enduse», 1 l. 6 sols; «pour avoir fait raccoutrer la celle de la
cavale,» 5 sols; pour la ferrure «du petit bidet,» 1 sol 6 deniers;
«pour une guide de Saint-Étienne jusques à Saint-Jan», 1 sol; «item
1 sol en pain [sic] pour la cavalle
[326]
», etc. On rembourse aux
députés le prix de la location de leurs chevaux, et, pour aller au
colloque de Montpellier, un cheval loué par le pasteur, avec sa selle
et sa bride, se paye 30 sols
[327]
.
Généralement les délégations aux synodes coûtent plus cher que
les délégations aux colloques, car le voyage qu’ont à faire les
envoyés est plus long. Ainsi la députation de l’église de Nîmes au
synode de Sauve (1597) lui revient à 39 l. 12 s. tournois
[328]
; au lieu
que le consistoire ne débourse que 4 écus, soit 12 l., pour les frais

du pasteur Chambrun et de l’ancien De Vieulx au colloque
d’Aiguesmortes en novembre 1598
[329]
, et un seul écu pour les
dépenses de Falguerolles à celui de Vauvert, au mois d’août de la
même année
[330]
.—Jusqu’en 1599, la ville où se tenait le synode
était très favorisée puisque ses députés n’avaient pas à se déplacer;
mais à cette date on décida qu’elle aurait à «loger les pasteurs et
anciens [des autres localités], avec les montures, en maison
bourgeoise» et à ses dépens
[331]
. Malgré cette mesure, les frais de
délégation paraissaient encore trop lourds aux petites églises réunies
sous un seul pasteur: contrairement à la Discipline, elles
n’envoyaient qu’un ancien avec leur ministre pour les
représenter
[332]
et payaient chacune leur part des frais
[333]
.
Outre les députations aux assemblées, on prenait encore sur les
deniers du ministère l’achat des objets servant au culte, l’entretien
du temple
[334]
et de la bibliothèque.
L’église de Nîmes n’avait pas attendu les encouragements des
synodes nationaux de Saumur (1596), ou de Jargeau (1601) pour
«dresser» une bibliothèque propre à servir à ses ministres et à ses
proposants
[335]
. En janvier 1596, elle ne s’occupait plus déjà que de
la «parachever» et achetait pour 7 écus les livres qu’un libraire avait
apportés à Nîmes
[336]
; peu après, le pasteur Falguerolles et l’avocat
Chalas découvraient dans «la bibliothèque de feu M. de Saint-
Cézary... deux volumes de Concilles et la Response et examen du
concile de Trante, faictz par Rennitus», et les achetaient 3 écus pour
le consistoire
[337]
. Les livres étaient alors chez Chalas
[338]
, et il y en
avait un nombre suffisant pour que leur catalogue fût considéré
comme un travail nécessaire et assez important
[339]
. D’ailleurs, on
ne cessait d’en acheter de nouveaux. Ainsi, le 8 janvier 1597, on
paye «3 l. 8 sols tournois pour huit livres de M. de
Falguerolles
[340]
». Chalas partant en voyage, on le charge d’en
rapporter quelques-uns
[341]
. On presse, en 1597, la rédaction de
l’«inventaire et contrerollage» de la bibliothèque
[342]
, que le
nouveau consistoire de 1599 fait vérifier en entrant en charge
[343]
.

En octobre de cette même année, le synode ayant arrêté que «les
ministres seroyent tenuz tenir en leurs cheres une bible de la
nouvelle version», le consistoire se décide à vendre celle qui lui sert
actuellement. «Et au mesme instant, au consistoire, a este enchérie,
et, après plusieurs enchères, délivrée à M. Rostang du Vieux pour le
prix de 3 escus sol
[344]
». Puis, on achète une superbe bible «de la
nouvelle version..., dorée, lavée, réglée», que l’on paye 4 écus et
demi
[345]
. En 1601, la «Bibliotheca patrum par Marguarites de la
Bigne, impression de Paris de l’an 1589, en 9 tomes» est acquise
moyennant 18 écus, et sa reliure en «vert carton», plus le port,
revient à 5 écus 30 sols
[346]
. Enfin, il faut ajouter à cela qu’en 1600
on avait fait faire un «cabinet» pour les livres
[347]
.
Il est fort probable que les petites églises du colloque de Nîmes
ne devaient pas avoir de bibliothèques faute d’argent, puisque une
ville comme Montpellier, siège d’une académie, se voyait, en 1598,
exhortée par le synode à se faire «une collection de livres en
théologie
[348]
». Quoi qu’il en soit, ce ne fut pas, comme le dit M. de
Felice
[349]
, le synode nat. de La Rochelle, en 1607, qui encouragea
le premier les églises à se créer des bibliothèques, et Nîmes en
possédait une fort importante bien longtemps auparavant.
Les deniers du ministère devaient subvenir à toutes les dépenses
que je viens d’énumérer; voyons d’où ils provenaient.
Le roi promit aux églises, en 1598, de leur donner 45 000 écus.
Cette promesse ne fut pas tenue
[350]
, si bien que le consistoire de
Nîmes dut continuer à pourvoir à l’entretien des ministres par des
impositions sur les habitants. A l’époque qui nous occupe, on
décidait officiellement que ceux de la Religion seuls en auraient la
charge
[351]
; mais, vu les difficultés de toutes sortes qu’on avait à
recouvrer une subvention si nécessaire, on n’hésitait pas, en
pratique, à taxer les catholiques, et ce après comme avant l’édit de
Nantes
[352]
.

Chaque année, le consistoire extraordinaire, avec le concours des
magistrats et des consuls
[353]
, décidait quelle somme on prélèverait:
tantôt 500 écus comme en 1596
[354]
, tantôt 800 comme en
1601
[355]
. Il déléguait ensuite quelques membres des consistoires
vieux et nouveau, un des magistrats, un ou deux consuls, pour en
faire la répartition sur les habitants
[356]
. Cette répartition, inscrite
sur un livre long nommé «la tariffe
[357]
», était alors présentée au
magistrat pour qu’il en autorisât l’exaction
[358]
. Une fois le «livre
signé», on chargeait de lever l’imposition celui qui faisait «meilheure
condition», après avoir pris l’avis des consuls: ainsi, en 1600,
l’ancien Salveton ayant accepté «d’en fere l’exaction pour 100 l.
tournois», on décide «que le bail de lever led. libvre sera passé aud.
sire Salveton
[359]
». Mais on ne donnait pas toujours la levée à forfait
et le consistoire la confiait souvent à des agents qu’il surveillait lui-
même. Le 9 décembre 1598, en effet, nous le voyons décider que
«les diacres et anciens... poursuyvront ceulx quy sont commis à la
levée des rolles
[360]
»; et une autre fois, il ordonne qu’elle se fera
«par survelliances et ysles... par les nommés à cest effect..., suivant
les rolles
[361]
».
La levée a lieu d’ailleurs très malaisément et les petites églises
comme les grandes ne mettent aucun enthousiasme à entretenir
leurs pasteurs. A Nîmes, les uns se plaignent d’être trop imposés et
ne veulent pas payer intégralement leur taxe; les autres «ne veullent
payer rien du tout
[362]
» et il y réussissent: on décide de les
«adjouster» aux rôles de l’année suivante
[363]
, mais c’est toujours
un an de gagné, et pourquoi céderaient-ils davantage plus tard? Un
nommé Jehan de Vidalle déclare «qu’il yroit plus tost baptizer son
enfant à la messe que bailher rien à MM. les ministres
[364]
», et il est
probable que l’«exhortation pour l’entretenement des pasteurs» que
Chambrun fait en chaire après le prêche ne doit pas être sur lui d’un
effet puissant
[365]
.
Aussi, la levée est-elle loin de rendre ce qu’elle devrait et les
pasteurs ne peuvent-ils obtenir leurs gages. En mars 1598, il est dû

à Falguerolles, «oultre les arreyrages de l’année passée... ung cartier
de la présante
[366]
». En mai, le consistoire est forcé d’emprunter
300 l., remboursables dans trois mois et au taux de 12%, desquelles
Chambrun prend 100 l., Falguerolles 200 et Moynier rien
[367]
. Cela
ne remplit pas la bourse du ministère: en septembre, il ne s’y trouve
encore «pas d’argent, mesmes pour les pasteurs servans
[368]
». On
atteint ainsi l’époque
[369]
de la levée de l’imposition, que l’on décide
le 21 octobre. Naturellement, elle ne se fait pas mieux que
d’habitude; en décembre, on décide de «poursuyvre» ceux qui en
sont chargés
[370]
, car, sans doute, on la veut terminée pour la fin de
l’année. Les pasteurs sont tellement pressés qu’à peine quelque
argent se trouve-t-il entre les mains du receveur qu’ils demandent
qu’on leur délivre à chacun 12 écus
[371]
. D’ailleurs, c’est la coutume
de leur distribuer à mesure ce qui rentre
[372]
, car il est impossible de
réunir une somme suffisante pour les payer en une fois.
Cependant, en 1599, le consistoire semble vouloir se libérer à
l’égard des ministres. Il charge le sieur de Saint-Cézary de prévenir
le conseil de ville de la difficulté que présentent la levée des rôles et
l’entretien du ministère; il ordonne de poursuivre rigoureusement
«ceulx quy doibvent d’argent des bénéfices pour le payement» des
pasteurs
[373]
; le receveur déposera le compte de ce que les
ministres ont reçu sur leur assistance
[374]
; enfin, ceux qui refuseront
de payer seront traînés devant le juge criminel
[375]
. Malgré tout, en
juillet, il reste dû encore tellement d’argent aux pasteurs que l’un
d’eux, Falguerolles, prévient le consistoire qu’il s’en plaindra au
colloque
[376]
. Quelques mois plus tard, il mourait
[377]
sans avoir
jamais pu toucher les 200 écus qui lui étaient dus
[378]
.
Ainsi la ville de Nîmes ne pouvait arriver à fournir les sommes
nécessaires à «l’entretien de l’église». S’il en était ainsi dans la plus
riche et la plus puissante ville du colloque, on imagine ce qui se
passait dans les autres. Les assemblées sont remplies par les
querelles d’argent des pasteurs et des consistoires. D’ailleurs, que
pouvait-on sur les fidèles? La Discipline autorisait les colloques et les

synodes à procéder par des censures ecclésiastiques contre les
églises coupables d’«ingratitude» envers leurs ministres et à aller
même jusqu’à les priver du culte. Cette peine grave, la seule
efficace, on peut le dire, pouvait bien être prononcée contre des
églises de peu d’importance
[379]
, mais comment l’appliquer à des
villes comme Nîmes, exposée aux influences catholiques et où les
fidèles se trouvaient livrés aux «séductions» des prêtres et des
jésuites? Nous verrons que les pasteurs combattaient ces influences
à grand’peine. Ceux d’Alais, réclamant au synode leur ministre
Ferrier qui leur avait été emprunté pour quelque temps, se plaignent
que «plusieurs de la Religion, se voyantz sans preche, seroient alez
au sermon de Rhodes, jésuite
[380]
». On juge de ce qui se serait
passé dans les mêmes conditions à Nîmes, où le consistoire se
trouve forcé de sévir à chaque instant contre des fidèles et même
contre des proposants
[381]
, qui ont été «ouyr» le P. Coton.
Aussi ne songeait-on pas à appliquer de peines aussi radicales, ni
même à appliquer aucune peine. En voici la preuve. Un synode de
1594 avait ordonné que les diacres et anciens ne pourraient quitter
leurs charges avant d’avoir «satisffait à l’entretainement des
ministres
[382]
». Conformément à cette décision, on voit, en janvier
1597, le consistoire de Nîmes s’engager à ne pas se séparer avant
d’avoir soldé «ce que restera des gaiges deubz à MM. les
pasteurs
[383]
». Cependant, le 9 décembre, il décide de procéder à la
nomination des anciens pour l’année suivante. Les pasteurs en
appellent «d’aultant qu’ilz ne sont payés de leurs gaiges
[384]
»; mais
le consistoire nouveau n’en remplace pas moins tranquillement le
«vieux», et le règlement reste inappliqué.
La municipalité payait une pension à l’église, destinée notamment
à l’entretien des proposants. C’était, d’ailleurs, assez peu de chose et
insuffisant à sortir le consistoire de peine: en 1598, la pension se
monte à 86 l. 15 sols
[385]
. Elle était levée par un exacteur des
tailles
[386]
et portait sur tous les habitants, même les
catholiques
[387]
. De plus, le gouvernement communal aidait les

anciens à poursuivre le payement des impositions faites pour le
ministère
[388]
. Son intervention fut autorisée par l’édit de Nantes qui
donna le droit aux consistoires de citer en justice les huguenots se
refusant à payer leur taxe
[389]
.
L’église de Nîmes se résolut à employer ce moyen en février
1599
[390]
. Il ne paraît pas qu’elle en ait obtenu des résultats
excellents, si l’on on juge par les plaintes et les menaces de
Falguerolles en juillet 1599
[391]
et de Moynier en mai 1600
[392]
, qui
contraignirent le consistoire à faire des emprunts onéreux pour
fournir quelque argent à ses ministres
[393]
. C’était encore un moyen
inefficace. Les pasteurs durent se résigner à n’être pas payés.

IV
L’AUTORITÉ DU CONSISTOIRE SUR
LES FIDÈLES
Lutte du consistoire contre l’influence catholique. «Superstitions». La
tradition catholique.
Les «vices» qu’il combat: La «paillardise». Adultère et divorce.
Enquêtes de mœurs. La «coquetterie». Les censurés mécontents.
Son intervention dans les querelles de ménage. Les bancs du temple.
Réconciliations.
Plaisirs permis. Spectacles et jeux défendus. Le repos du dimanche.
Fêtes de corporations. La danse interdite. Les «charivaris».
Dénonciations. Police consistoriale.
Citations à comparaître; retards à s’y rendre. Enquêtes. Peines
décrétées; leur application. Les nobles et les notables. Entente des
consistoires pour la police.
Tout consistoire devait faire respecter par les fidèles la Discipline
ecclésiastique. Il faut entendre par là l’ensemble des règles suivant
lesquelles se gouvernait l’église réformée. Ce règlement, élaboré peu
à peu par les synodes nationaux, n’a reçu sa forme définitive qu’au
XVII
e
siècle
[394]
. Il régit le fonctionnement des assemblées
ecclésiastiques, les cérémonies du culte, et donne aux fidèles des
règles précises de conduite. Or, le consistoire de Nîmes, chargé de
faire appliquer la Discipline, a, par cela même, le devoir de surveiller
étroitement la vie de ses subordonnés. Il cite à comparaître devant
lui ceux qu’il estime avoir enfreint le règlement; il les juge, puis les

condamne, s’il y a lieu. On voit quelle autorité peut lui donner cette
juridiction sur la doctrine et les mœurs de chacun. Ses décisions sont
sanctionnées par celles des colloques et des synodes qu’il contribue
à former et qui agissent dans le même sens et dans le même esprit
que lui. Ainsi se forme l’unité de la morale et de l’esprit protestants.
Les articles de la Discipline promulgués avant 1598 semblent
avoir comme but principal de combattre l’influence catholique et
d’empêcher que les fidèles retombent dans «l’idolâtrie». L’on craint
que le peuple ne soit emporté par son amour des cérémonies et par
l’habitude des fêtes traditionnelles de l’église romaine. Aussi la
Discipline lutte-t-elle de toutes ses forces et non sans peine contre
les «superstitions».
Au sujet des enterrements, par exemple, le consistoire et les
synodes doivent intervenir continuellement. En 1597, on démontre
en chaire qu’il faut se garder de «ses seremonies et superstitions
quy commensent de glisser parmy nous comme en l’esglise
romaine..., comme de fere marcher des hommes vestus de drap au-
devant du corps et d’user de tant de fassons au convoy de
l’enterrement
[395]
». Il est encore défendu de faire porter un
«flambeau ardent
[396]
», ou, «au grand escandalle de plusieurs»,
d’employer des pleureuses
[397]
, de faire «donner l’advertissement de
la sépulture» par des veuves vêtues de noir
[398]
, de faire «porter les
corps des femmes et des filles décédées» par d’autres femmes
«ayants chapeaux de fleurs, bouquets et autres choses
[399]
», et
même de vêtir en aucune façon ceux qu’on mène au tombeau
[400]
.
Enfin, il est absolument interdit d’enterrer personne dans les
temples
[401]
.
Alors que les pasteurs eux-mêmes ont tendance à prêcher les
«jours chomables de la papauté» de préférence aux jours
ordinaires
[402]
, et que le recteur du collège de Nîmes, Pacius, donne
congé aux écoliers «le jour de Caramantran
[403]
», comment
s’étonner que l’on ait à censurer des bourgeois «quy font le Roy

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Shakespeare Reread The Texts In New Contexts Russ Mcdonald Editor

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