Performing the Sea: Fortune, Risk, and Audience Engagement inPericles

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreePerforming the Sea: Fortune, Risk, and Audience Engagement in PericlesJane Hwang DegenhardtJane Hwang DegenhardtUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreGentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails.—The Tempest, Epilogue, 11–121After wielding the power to command storm and shipwreck throughout The Tempest, Prospero speaks an Epilogue in which he acknowledges how his manipulation of the sea has always been subject to the indulgence of the audience. In comparing the audience’s compliance to favorable sea winds, Prospero’s speech plays upon a familiar association between theatrical performance and seafaring in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Prologue to Thomas Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (1611) wonders “How is’t possible to please / Opinion tos’d in such wilde Seas?” given the sheer numbers of people who attend the theater and the diversity of their tastes.2 As Douglas Bruster has argued, The Tempest’s opening shipwreck can itself be read as an allegory for playhouse labor, since theatrical productions, like seafaring, required hard work and cooperation.3 Unwilling audiences interfered with this labor by disrupting the performance or its representational fictions, rather than helping to keep the ship afloat. Theater and seafaring also shared a precarious status as risky enterprises undergoing new forms of commercialization in early modern England. For early modern playwrights, the risks, dangers, and unpredictability of the sea offered an apt metaphor for the unprecedented practice of presenting theatrical entertainment as a commodity for paying audiences. The commercial theater’s transformation of playgoers into discriminating customers offers a crucial context for understanding Prospero’s anxious appeal to his audience and his acknowledgment that without their approval his “project fails.”Based on such sentiments, one might be tempted to conclude that playwrights and actors understood themselves to be completely at the mercy of their audiences. In the same moment, antitheatricalists of the period took an opposing view of the theater’s affinities with seafaring, highlighting the dangers that the theater posed to playgoers, who risked being swept away by the illusions of the stage and its questionable morals. Stephen Gosson peppered his writings with maritime metaphors that likened a playgoer’s exposure to risk in the theater to a ship leaving the safety of the harbor for the open sea. As Kent Lehnhof has shown, Gosson’s antitheatrical writings adopted a “resolutely antinautical” stance by associating both theatergoing and seafaring with “recklessness,” “folly,” and “licentiousness” and by suggesting that “those who entrust themselves to the seas are sure to be lost, either blown off course or drowned in the depths.”4 Such attitudes understood theatrical spectatorship to be a mindless form of viewing and regarded the stage as a place of untrustworthy and misleading appearances. These beliefs contributed to what Amy Rodgers has described as the construction of an early modern “discursive spectator,” which functions as the “repository of a culture’s ideas and anxiety about viewing and interpretive practices.”5 While not to be equated with actual audience practices, these ideas played a powerful role in shaping polemical debates about the theater and influencing the ways that plays and playwrights oriented themselves to their audiences. If early modern playwrights felt themselves to be dangerously imperiled by the whims of demanding audiences, antitheatricalists imagined audiences to be helplessly transported by the powerful sway of theatrical performance. And yet both perspectives rely on the metaphor of seafaring to express highly disempowering positions for either play or playgoer.But what if seafaring offered a model for success rather than for failure? By turning to the history of English economic expansion and its conjuncture with new philosophies of luck, chance, and risk, this essay draws attention to the more positive dimensions of the theatrical-maritime analogy and reveals its potential to model an interactive relationship between audience and play that is mutually enriching and empowering. Such a view emphasizes theater and seafaring to be not just dangerous, risky, and debasing enterprises but rather enjoyable, edifying, and uplifting ones. As I demonstrate below, positive interpretations of seafaring as a metaphor for theatrical performance understood both enterprises to be linked not simply by essential riskiness and unpredictability but rather by a new understanding of fortune, which was undergoing an evolution in meaning in early modern England under the influences of proto-capitalist development. While largely deprecated as a sinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune reemerged in the late sixteenth century as a conduit for opportunistic but also productive and virtuous action. Partly cultivated by the emergence of new commercial enterprises, including English global trade and the development of the professional for-profit theater, fortune encapsulated the role of luck and chance in guiding these ventures. But it also signified the opening of new opportunities for successful navigation and the fulfillment of human ambitions that could be considered consonant with God’s providence. By adopting this new and enabling understanding of fortune as a guiding principle for seafaring and theater, early moderns began to understand these ventures as empowering judicious human agency and as offering the potential for unforeseen and bounteous rewards. Critics of Renaissance drama have tended to downplay such an idealized perspective in their concern to capture the anxieties attendant upon theatrical commercialization, but in doing so they have perhaps oversimplified the ways that playwrights embraced the metaphor of seafaring to theorize an ideal relationship between audience and play and to advance a positive view of the effects of commercialization. Approaching the seafaring metaphor as a model for theatrical success, furthermore, yields insight into audience’s role not just as passive but as active participants in the making of performance. In this way we recover an interactive relationship between plays and their audiences, one in which audiences retain their own agency as discerning viewing subjects who decide when to detach or to give over to the sway of performance, and playwrights, for their part, retain agency in helping to guide their audiences through these interactions by entraining and rewarding certain viewing practices. Finally, a fortune-driven view of the maritime-theatrical analogy illuminates the potential for theatrical commerce to play a virtuous role in cultivating audiences who were discriminating customers and producing commodities that granted pleasure to their audiences while simultaneously edifying and uplifting them.To offer a particularly compelling example of how the early modern theater embraced its affinities with a fortune-driven view of seafaring, I turn in what follows to Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles (1608), a play that mobilizes a sea-tossed protagonist to model a lesson about fortune and simultaneously cultivate a certain form of audience engagement. Unlike The Tempest, Pericles is episodic in structure and flagrantly disregards the Aristotelian unities. In compelling its audience to follow its protagonist from place to place without knowing what lies ahead, the play actively importunes its audience to sustain a willing engagement characterized by patience and trust. Fittingly, Pericles pursues this objective through its distinct dramaturgical strategies for representing the sea, a seemingly impossible task on stage. Rather than attempt to mimetically represent the sea, the play depicts the action of sea travel, storms, and shipwrecks through the choral narration of an actor playing John Gower, the fourteenth-century author of one of the play’s chief sources. In doing so, the play exposes the performative and representational mechanics behind the stage’s conjuration of the sea and foregrounds the audience’s interactive role in producing and navigating the effects of theatrical performance. As Pericles clearly demonstrates, the protagonist’s traversal of the sea relies upon the audience’s cognitive and embodied responses, which are directly solicited by Gower in the form of patience, attention, and imagination. By elucidating the particular challenges that the play poses to audiences through its representation of seafaring, I demonstrate how Pericles offers a meditation and an experiential exposition on the risks and potential pleasures of performance unique to the newly commercialized public theater. In addition, I show how the play employs a thematic concern with the nature of fortune (both metaphysical and economic), which it construes through the dangers of early modern sea venturing, to characterize the unpredictable nature of commercial performance and also to contemplate the agency that lies behind its potential success or failure.Seafaring, Fortune, and the Audience’s FavorThe theater’s use of the metaphor of seafaring to characterize performance seizes upon the unpredictability of oceanic travel, cultivated by a long-standing cultural association of the sea with the whims of fortune. The trope of the supreme yet arbitrary sea was centrally employed as a narrative device in the genres of romance and epic to structure the hero’s journey, and thus its roots go back to classical and medieval traditions. Suparna Roychoudhury sheds light on a broad discursive history in which the swirling sea signifies mental perturbation and affective distress.6 More expansively, Hans Blumenberg’s Shipwreck with Spectator offers a philosophical history of the seafaring metaphor, tracing its multiple, interrelated actualizations from Lucretius through the Enlightenment.7 Intriguingly, if Blumenberg locates a shift between “the ancient suspicion that underlies the metaphorics of shipwreck” and the Enlightenment view that “shipwreck is the price that must be paid” for progress and reason, he understands the nature of the sea—its turbulence and risks—to be historically stable.8 However, as Steve Mentz and Dan Brayton have shown, the early modern period witnessed a profound shift in the perceived significance of the ocean’s dangers, largely due to the expansion of trade and transoceanic shipping.9 As has now been well documented, England underwent a large-scale economic transformation beginning in the mid–sixteenth century as it belatedly joined a long-established global network of trade centered in the Mediterranean.10 England’s increasing economic reliance on overseas commerce spawned a new awareness of the ocean’s massive scale and power. The uncertainty of the fluctuating sea offered both a metaphor and a literal explanation for the vicissitudes of early English commercial and colonial expansion. Journeys were long and arduous, and the chances of getting lost, thrown off course, or shipwrecked were high. In addition, seafarers confronted the risks of disease, starvation, conflict over victuals, mutiny, and threats of piracy, plunder, and captivity. In turn, the London theater capitalized upon the dramatic potential of sea travel in plays such as The Merchant of Venice (1596), Old Fortunatus (1600), The Fair Maid of the West (1600), Fortune by Land and Sea (1607), The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), and of course Pericles. The storms that play such pivotal roles in the plots of Pericles and The Tempest, as well as in The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and Othello, held a topical relevance for the English because of the prevalence of contemporary reports of shipwrecks and other seaborne accidents.Responding to reignited interests in the force of the sea across English literature more broadly, Mentz’s methodology for a “blue cultural studies” posits the agency of the ocean, a medium of “chaos” and “pure alterity,” and in turn decenters the subjecthood of humans and their “orderly” land-based habitat.11 His maritime reorientation reminds us of a worldview in which humans did not presume themselves to be dominant over nature and helps us to better appreciate the pervasive role that oceanic settings and tropes play in early modern literature. At the same time, the economic developments that helped to shift early modern conceptions of the ocean, and that I argue crucially informed the stage’s interest in sea travel, foregrounded a relationship between humans and sea that depended upon successful navigation and human initiative. English advancements in maritime technology—including navigational and cartographical improvements, as well as a more informed knowledge of the earth’s geography—were part of a new humanistic enterprise led by John Dee, Walter Raleigh, and others to know and navigate the world. These enterprises valued knowledge not for its own sake but for its potential financial payoffs. The uncontainable agency of the ocean loomed large precisely because economic expansion demanded that humans contend with it.Evolving understandings of fortune are reflected in English emblem books that conflate the iconographical figure of Fortune with that of Occasio, signifying postitive opportunity. Geffrey Whitney’s 1586 Choice of Emblems relocates Fortuna’s wheel from the land-based orientation of its medieval context to the open sea, where it serves as flotation device for a naked figure that symbolizes both fortune and occasion (fig. 1). George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635) features a similar figure holding a sail like the mast of a ship, accompanied by the motto “Vncertaine, Fortunes Favors, bee, And, as the Moone, so changeth Shee” (fig. 2). While this motto may seem to harken back to Boethius’ warnings about the dangers of being seduced and betrayed by Fortune’s inconstancy, the conflated figure of Fortune and Occasio more typically conveyed the notion of a beneficial opportunity that should not be allowed to pass. Her naked body and long forelock solicit human engagement and call out to be seized. The idea that embracing such opportunity is both morally imperative and pressured by time is signaled through the figure’s bald head, for if she passes by you cannot grasp her from behind because her head is too slippery. Such an understanding shared something in common with Machiavelli’s conception of a fortune-driven world that could be conquered or advantageously navigated through virtù, or masculine human prowess. However, whereas Machiavelli advocated the use of violence to subdue fortune at the expense of moral considerations, the understanding of fortune that developed in relation to early modern seafaring invites actions and consequences that might be considered virtuous, in effect marrying virtù with virtue. If the changing iconography of fortune seemed to promote well-timed decisive action, it also encouraged a stance of patient waiting and the biding of one’s time. Such a stance was not so much equivalent to one of passivity or stoicism but rather to active engagement. Within this context, fortune represented not just a force of adversity but also one of opportunity, which could be applied to individualistic pursuits but which could also be used to characterize larger corporate, national, and even imperial initiatives. In addition, this new discourse of fortune became fused with a moral and even religious purpose in early modern England, in which the human pursuit of economic fortune was perceived to be honorable and fructifying.Figure 1. Geffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblems (1586)View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFigure 2. George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (1635).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointIf opportunistic responses to the challenges of sea travel contributed to what was becoming a more interactive and empowering orientation to fortune, they also helped to produce a new understanding of economic “fortune” earned through risky investment. Economic risk was of course directly linked to the material and bodily losses of sea travel, but it was also associated with the new economic model of venture capitalism that was introduced to the English through overseas trade.12 Such a model promoted long-term investment that required patience to wait out initial losses and well-timed action to eventually recuperate large gains. Valerie Forman has influentially argued that the newly emergent genre of tragicomedy offered a model for managing the risk of overseas investment by showing initial loss to lead to unexpected gain.13 By aligning comic redemption with economic profit, tragicomedy rendered profit morally virtuous and modeled a reassuring return on overseas investment for English audiences. By contrast, Jonathan Gil Harris has argued that the stage expressed ambivalence about the risks of global commerce by merging economic discourse with metaphors of disease characterized by invasion, drainage, and imbalance.14 In foregrounding the unpredictable turnings of fortune and its generation of new opportunities, I bring to the forefront another influential discourse that was employed by the stage to address the risks associated with global commerce. The etymological expansion of “fortune” right around the turn of the seventeenth century to denote not just metaphysical chance or luck but also “a position determined by wealth,” coterminous with the phrase “to make a fortune,” illustrates how economic gain and loss were becoming associated with the elusive mechanism of cosmic fortune.15 Fortune denoted the unpredictable fluctuations induced by high-risk conditions, such as those associated with overseas investment and unregulated “free trade.” It also signaled a scope of new opportunity for human agency, often held in tension with inexplicable rewards or punishments, created by these conditions. While the mysterious source of fortune’s fluctuations and reversals may have eluded human comprehension or control, it did not foreclose successful human engagement.Closely intertwined with the early modern discourse of fortune was a related and sometimes competing discourse of divine providence, which sought to explain away fortune’s incomprehensible arbitrariness by attributing it to God’s will. Though for Calvin, everything perceived as fortune was actually directly attributable to divine providence, for many members of the English laity, fortune and providence coexisted in a slippery and unstable relationship. Brian Cumming’s reading of “luck” in Hamlet argues for a certain equivalence between luck and providentialism, the difference being a matter of interpretation: “one man’s chance is another man’s providence.”16 Somewhat similarly, Michael Witmore’s study of the cultural significance of early modern accidents asserts that “Providentialism did not wipe out accidents; rather, it fostered a culture-wide enterprise of narrating these unexpected events with an eye toward their intrinsic drama and providential meaning.”17 In time, and with patience, faith, and appropriate action, in other words, fortune could become providence. The ability to successfully navigate the relationship between fortune and providence was thus a matter of proper orientation, as well as of interpretation and discernment. For those attempting to make sense of the accidents and failures of English expansionism, the idea that fortune might in time prove provident offered a source of immense comfort. Further, the idea that one might contribute to a providential outcome by remaining patiently engaged and judiciously embracing the opportunities of fortune offered an interactive role for human agency.In turning to the newly apprehended risks of maritime travel and investment to characterize the risks of theatrical performance, the stage appropriated the discourse of fortune and its dynamic relationship to providence to contemplate its own economic risks. In certain basic respects, the financial risks of the commercial theater resembled those of sea venturing. Just as global trade introduced a new economic model, the emergence of the commercial theater occasioned radically new economic practices. At a time prior to financial institutionalism, theatrical entrepreneurialism and overseas speculation offered similarly high-risk opportunities for business people to invest their cash surpluses.18 The naming of the Fortune Theater, a large public amphitheater built in 1600, demonstrates as clearly as we could wish the complex contingencies and unpredictability of theatrical investment. Success depended on the ability to discern and answer consumer demand, and yet there was no certain way to reliably anticipate this demand. In the metaphorical seafaring of the public theater, the audience assumed the role of fickle fortune. At the same time, theatrical practitioners appealed to the audience as a potential source of benevolent providence, a position bolstered by their surrounding presence in the theater and their interactive relationship with the performance. The Prologue to Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (ca. 1610) envisages the audience presiding over the play like fair weather over the sea, while also likening the audience’s “helping hands” to the “hand” of providence: “Our ship’s afloat; we fear nor rocks nor sands, / Knowing we are environed with your helping hands.”19 As my discussion of Pericles aims to demonstrate, theatrical practitioners could choose to reconcile these divergent views of the audience as unpredictable and providential by embracing an interactive relationship with theatergoers and actively cultivating certain viewing practices that supported their objectives and understanding of theatrical value. What is sometimes chalked up by modern critics as Pericles’s clunkiness or representational failures can be seen as strategies that address the challenges of the newly commercialized theater by teaching audiences how to read theatrical performance. We can come to understand Pericles’s unique dramaturgical choices by perceiving how they lay bare the role of audience participation and also attempt to cultivate a viewing practice characterized by long-term investment and “patience,” as well as “attention,” “imagination,” and “supposing,” all key terms of Gower’s that invoke the audience’s active participation in sustaining the performance.The Fortunes of Seafaring in PericlesOne of the chief ways that Pericles fosters patient viewing practices is through its thematic dramatization of the lessons of fortune, which are directly associated with the agency of the sea and reinforced by the play’s visual and aural methods for representing sea travel. Flowing through each of the play’s episodes, the sea is directly responsible for driving the fortunes of the play’s protagonists, and showing their movements and destinies to be outside of their own control. Pericles’s marriage to Thaisa, Marina’s birth, the family’s separation, Thaisa’s landing in Ephesus, Marina’s abduction by pirates and landing in Mytilene, Pericles’s landing in Mytilene, and the family’s eventual reunion are all directly facilitated by the mobility of the sea. And in each of these eventualities, the play explicitly identifies the sea with the force of fortune. “Fortune” (or “misfortune”) is referenced by name twenty-one times in the play (compared with five times in The Tempest, a land-based drama), reflecting its explicit and pervasive authority in Pericles. For example, in describing how Pericles’s inability to control his course at sea lands him at Pentapolis, Gower explains how… he, good prince, having all lost,By waves from coast to coast is tossed.All perishen of man, of pelf,Ne aught escapend but himself;Till Fortune, tired with doing bad,Threw him ashore to give him glad.20(2.0.33–38)Here, “Fortune” personifies the sea, whose apparent moods or whims lead to the loss of Pericles’s ship and entire crew, sparing only his life and randomly throwing him onto the shore of Pentapolis. It is as though Fortune employs the sea as her own personal stage and medium. The image of Pericles being “tossed” between coasts by the waves emphasizes his lack of agency, an effect reinforced by Gower’s archaisms; in the midst of the sea, he is not a character who acts but rather one who is acted upon. Death and life, “perishen” and “escapend,” his own or those of his crew, are emphatically not in Pericles’s control but under the command of the sea and/as Fortune.21The sea’s undoing of Pericles’s noble status underscores fortune’s unassailable power, likening the agency of the sea to the arbitrary turning of fortune’s wheel, which ensures that the ascendant position of a prince can only be temporary. Washed onto shore, Pericles rails against the “angry stars of heaven,” agents of fate commonly associated with cosmic fortune, who command “wind, rain and thunder,” for seeming not to recognize the helplessness of “earthly man,” who is “but a substance that must yield to you” (2.1.1–3). Thus, his railing suggests not an act of defiance that empowers him but rather an acknowledgment of the stars’ indifference to “earthly man’s” fundamental lack of agency and vulnerability to their determinations. Pericles’s helplessness illustrates the leveling effects of fortune, which reduce all humans to the same mortal condition, and reveal degrees of earthly status to be superficial contingencies that are easily lost. Entering the scene “naked,” he is literally stripped of the clothing that identifies his princely status; he then laments the reversal of his fortune, as one that “never used to beg,” who is now beholden to the “pity” of fisherman (2.1.60–61). Evocative of Boethius’s warnings against placing faith in the whims of fortune, Pericles’s undoing compels him to comprehend the impermanence of his earthly status. Apprehending his diminishment, he describes himself as a prince “bereft … of all his fortunes” (2.1.9), “whom both the waters and the wind / In that vast tennis court hath made the ball / For them to play upon” (2.1.58–60). Pericles’s comparison of himself to a tennis ball employs a common metaphor for fortune that emphasizes its motivation as a form of “play,” or recreational sport, as opposed to serious purpose.22 And yet, fortune’s effects on him are momentous: they involve a complete undoing of his noble identity.While Pericles’s undoing may seem arbitrary, the continual turn of his fortunes gradually hints at a larger plan or cosmic order at work. For reasons initially illegible to him, Pericles is spared the death of his other shipmates. Then, soon after his landing on Pentapolis, the sea inexplicably belches up his dead father’s suit of armor, providing an outfit that will allow him to earn back his noble status. To this remarkable development, he responds, “Thanks, Fortune, yet, that after all thy crosses / Thou givest me somewhat to repair myself” (2.1.117–18). Notably, Pericles thanks “Fortune,” and not divine providence, for helping to restore him; the word “providence” never appears in the play, suggesting that its presence can only be apprehended in time and by means of an interpretive process through which fortune’s “crosses” come to reveal a larger design. As we shall see, the play’s thematization of how patience reveals the fortunes of the sea to be provident also seeks to model a playgoing practice of patient engagement that leads in time to a conjunction of pleasure and virtue. The pun on “crosses” captures the temporal relationship between the adversities of fortune and the underlying presence of a divine plan, the comprehension of which is not just a matter of perspective but one of time. If fortune may appear to be an end in itself, meting out meaningless and unexplainable outcomes, it masks an underlying providence that comes into view with patient waiting and faith.The providential fortune that guides Pericles’s travels is most fully revealed through the eventual reunion of his family, which in turn enables him to reclaim his throne in Tyre and cements his claims to Pentapolis and Mytilene, thus facilitating the expansion of Pericles’s empire. Through its depiction of an underlying providence guiding travel, the play models lessons about virtuous travel and its potential rewards that apply to both sea travel and to play-watching. Patience, the play suggests, offers the best course of action for navigating seas that appear to be governed by arbitrary fortune. Evoking the Athenian statesman of the Golden Age, the name Pericles, changed from Apollonius in the play’s sources, may reflect the play’s investment in valorizing patience: whereas Plutarch stresses the patience (as well as the naval and imperial accomplishments) of the Athenian Pericles, patience is not a key characteristic of Gower’s Apollonius.23 So, too, in Shakespeare’s play, Pericles does not attempt to fight the fortunes of the sea but rides them out. At the same time, the play seems to counsel an active, rather than a passive form of patient engagement, which differs from the lessons of stoicism, which insist upon the relinquishment and devaluation of all earthly rewards. After losing his wife Thaisa to the sea, Pericles travels to Tarsus with the newborn Marina. In response to Cleon’s comment that the “shafts of fortune / … have hurt [him] mortally” (3.3.5–6) and Dionyza’s anguished reference to the “strict fates” (3.3.8), he responds, “We cannot but obey / The powers above us. Could I rage and roar / As doth the sea she lies in, yet the end / Must be as ’tis” (3.3.9–12). For Pericles, patience acknowledges and helps to f