TY - JOUR
AU1 - Ward,, Marchella
AB - Abstract The metaphors that we use to describe the relationships between texts often carry within them limitations on the relationships that they figure. Classical reception is perhaps the most dominant of these metaphors, structuring the way readers understand the relationships between texts. This is particularly problematic in the early modern period where it is often difficult to account for the relationships between texts using traditional models of influence (a problem that is further amplified in performance). This article uses the example of an Oedipus play written by Aristotle Knowsley sometime between 1596 and 1603 to ask whether thinking about what we more often call ‘receiving texts’ as ‘assemblages’ could offer the study of classical reception a way to confront the restrictions placed upon it by the linearity of literary history. Knowsley’s text — when it is discussed at all — is usually considered to be an amalgamation of Neville’s translation of Seneca’s Oedipus (1563) and Newton’s Thebais (1581), but this restrictive reading, based on assumptions latent in the metaphor ‘classical reception’, excludes a number of texts that participate in productive relationships with the play. “[Texts] are not Teflon coated baseballs hurtling through time and gazed at uncomprehendingly by the natives of various times and places until they reach our enlightened grasp; rather they are pliable and sticky artefacts gripped, molded and stamped with new meanings by every generation of readers, and they come to us irreversibly altered by their experience.”1 The language that we use to describe the ways in which ancient and modern texts relate to each other is deeply metaphorical. The phrase ‘classical reception’ is perhaps the most dominant metaphor, the artificial construction that one text (usually lower value, less canonical, passive, and later) receives, while another (usually higher value, canonical, active, and earlier) influences, shapes, and provides a stimulus for creation. Receiving is a metaphorical verb: if I receive a letter in the post, a newly elected politician receives her title, or a cashier in the supermarket receives the coins required to make a purchase, this is not an action but a metaphor. In the first case, what actually happens is that the postperson puts an envelope through my door — the verb contains only an illusion of activity, I myself do nothing. In the last case, at least, there is an action, but the cashier does not receive the money any more than he puts out his hand flat, palm up, and the customer places the coins into it. This metaphor of passive engagement structures the way that we understand the relationship between texts that we use the term ‘classical reception’ to describe. In these examples — as in textual relationships — it is equally difficult to ascertain when the moment of reception happens: when the letter leaves the postperson’s hand, hits my doormat, is opened, read, understood, responded to or something in between? If the connection between these examples of passive, everyday reception and reception as a metaphor for the relationship between two literary texts seems obvious, it is because the term ‘reception’ and its passivity has been problematic at least since Goldhill’s protestation that the word is ‘too blunt, too passive a term for the dynamics of resistance and appropriation, recognition and self-aggrandisement that make up this drama of cultural identity’.2 That reception was a term specifically chosen in order to emphasize the activity of readers (rather than the passivity of receiving texts) is hardly a counterargument to this problem: even if the relationships between texts are as dynamic as those who make this argument tell us they are,3 nothing about the metaphor by which the relationship is figured suggests this, and the relationship that is negotiated remains linear. This article will use the example of an Oedipus play written sometime between 1596 and 1603 to ask whether thinking about what we more often call receiving texts as ‘assemblages’ could offer the study of classical reception a way to confront the restrictions placed upon it by a predominantly linear understanding of literary history.4 Rather than the successions or lines of descent implied by the term ‘reception’, the metaphors used by assemblage-thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are of random multiplicities. Deleuze defines an ‘assemblage’: It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogenous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.5 Deleuze and Guattari begin Mille Plateaux with a book that is also an assemblage: A book has neither object or subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation of segmentarity, strata and territories but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity – but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive.6 This article begins, in many ways, where Deleuze and Guattari began Mille Plateaux; with a sense that to describe a book as anything other than multiple and unattributable is to inscribe that book within a hierarchy of knowledge structured so as to benefit a particular meaning and exclude or discredit all others. Unlike other models for theorizing classical reception, assemblage-thinking does not attempt to establish a fixed relationship between two texts; rather, by accepting that a text is essentially unattributable, it focusses on the process by which the assemblage of multiple potential relationships available within a text is focalized, from a particularly situated point of view, in order to inscribe it within a particular relationship. Assemblage-thinking, unlike source study or classical reception, can never be an archaeology of texts, seeking to establish a fixed canon of influences or sources. Instead, it accepts that a text is a multiplicity that has within it any number of discoverable ‘relations’ and ‘lines of articulation’ (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms) that are activated only for as long as they are productive in their ‘co-functioning’, and has as its object analysis of the function and focalization of that assemblage. In this article, Aristotle Knowsley’s Oedipus will replace the Anti-Oedipus on which Deleuze and Guattari focus in Mille Plateaux, but it will no less show itself to be multiple and unattributable when freed from the hierarchies of linear models of literary history and the tyranny of being called ‘classical’. Hierarchies vs. multiplicities Possible answers to the questions of what reception is and where it happens are informed by the idea that history (and literary history) is linear, and moves from past time to present time. Even Nietzsche’s famous attack on positivism in We Philologists does little to disturb its linearity: ‘antiquity has in fact always been understood from the perspective of the present – and should the present now be understood from the perspective of antiquity?’.7 Nietzsche brings a kind of presentism to the argument, arguing that the line of enquiry for students of classical antiquity can go in two directions, but relying on the line as a connector of two fixed points, chronologically distinct. Since its inception, the study of classical reception has pushed beyond Nietzsche: the central image in Martindale’s Redeeming the Text is a chain of receptions, not linear in the sense that it is the shortest distance between two points, as the chain creates new links at every mediating text, reflex or window allusion it encounters, but still a single, if meandering thread linking two texts — one earlier than the other.8 The idea of a classical tradition, even when expanded as it is in Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow’s volume to include not just engagements with antiquity but engagements with earlier engagements, relies on those engagements being part of a single chain.9 There have of course been objections to this linear way of structuring how texts interact, with Richardson’s problematizing of the singularity of a tradition in his book Classical Victorians, for example, acknowledging the wide-reaching scepticism towards linear ways of structuring interactions between texts.10 Indeed, most students of classical reception studies agree (in theory) that connections are usually fuzzy, but (in practice) attempt to establish proofs of allusion and influence that are plausible because of their linearity.11 The idea that literary history traces a single line from Homer to the present day also creates hierarchies that define both our relationship to texts and texts’ relationships to each other. To talk about a reception history as a chain or tradition distinguishes between the ‘classical’ and the ‘non-classical’ (even if the ‘classical tradition’ also includes all works inspired by the ancient world, this is a value-infused category); classics are old, canonical, influential, they are early, translatable and requiring translation, and (usually) written by men. Postclassical texts are young, new, influenced, have a varied demographic of authors, are written in the vernacular, modern and postmodern. There is a tacit judgement of quality in these hierarchies too: postclassical texts are derivative, whereas classical texts are original. The linear structure by which we conceive of reception is not just problematic because of these hierarchies in isolation, but because of the way that they qualify our readings. Aristotle Knowsley’s Oedipus is a text that has suffered from being read according to these hierarchies engendered by the linearity of literary history. Oedipus, written sometime between 1596 and 1603, is attributed to the otherwise obscure figure Aristotle Knowsley.12 Knowsley’s play begins in the pre-history of both Sophocles’ and Seneca’s Oedipus plays, opening with the discovery of the baby Oedipus by a shepherd, who sings him a lullaby (the score of which is preserved in the manuscript). In the acts that follow, the young Oedipus grows to adulthood onstage, and we witness the accusation that the King and Queen are not his parents, an accusation that in Knowsley’s version is attributed to his childhood friend Europhylus during a dice game. Knowsley’s Oedipus expands the temporal scope of both Sophocles and Seneca, and brings before its audience events (like the defeat of the Sphinx) that are experienced only as hearsay in both of the ancient versions. Just as the play is expansive across time (Oedipus is a baby in 1.1, a teenager in 1.3 and his sons Polyneices and Eteocles have grown to adulthood by 4.1), it equally expands the geographical range of the ancient versions, moving between Phocis, Corinth, and Thebes and referring to (among many other places) Banbury and Kingston-upon-Thames. Knowsley includes a large number of extra characters, not only bringing onstage those we assume must exist offstage in Sophocles and Seneca’s versions (Meg, the shepherd’s wife and the courts of Corinth and Thebes, for instance), but also inventing distinctly early modern characters (the constable of Thebes, and a number of Theban schoolboys and ghosts) that might seem more at home in the contemporary playhouse context than in a classically inspired play adapted for a school performance. Despite the numerous additions that Knowsley makes to the life of Oedipus as we know it from Sophocles and Seneca in his version, Wiggins describes the play not as Knowsley’s original work but as an amalgamation of Neville’s verse translation of Seneca’s Oedipus, printed in 1563 and Newton’s Thebais, the translation of Seneca’s Phoenissae he made for the 1581 volume of Seneca’s tragedies in which Neville’s Oedipus was also eventually published. Wiggins, in his catalogue of early modern British drama, lists these two Senecan plays as ‘narrative sources’, and includes in his ‘verbal sources’ category the following texts: the Bible, Book 4 of the Aeneid, Pliny’s Natural History, John Pickering’s The Interlude of Vice (the play often known as ‘Horestes’), a number of the plays of John Lyly, Abraham Fleming’s A Bright Burning Beacon, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and various others.13 Performed at Berwick Grammar School, it has been critically ignored, thought perhaps to be part of an educational tradition of performing ancient tragedy that had vertical relationships with Greek drama but no horizontal relationships with its more popular playhouse contemporaries. Sophocles does not feature in Wiggins’ list of ‘narrative’ sources influential on Knowsley’s Oedipus. Outside of generalized appeals to ‘Greek mood music’ and the use of Seneca as a window, very little is conventionally made of the relationship between early modern theatre and Sophocles until after the translation of the plays over half a century later.14 The perceived absence of Greek tragedy in the canon of texts thought to be influential on drama of this period is due to another metaphor, no less slippery than ‘reception’: the idea of the author. Jonson’s famous comment that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin and less Greek’ has conditioned our reading of Shakespeare’s texts, circumscribing (and limiting) possible interactions between texts with an imagined idea of the author’s education.15 Shortly after Colin Burrow’s Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity was published, a flurry of classicists rushed to the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement to complain that Burrow had claimed to know what Shakespeare had ‘read’ while writing his plays.16 But Burrow had simply laid bare the way that the author functions as a metaphor in classical reception studies. We cannot know what Shakespeare read or did not read; the idea of the author serves only to limit the field of texts deemed ‘possible’ or ‘plausible’ influences on Shakespeare’s plays. By reading Jonson’s famous comment that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin and less Greek’ as a counterfactual (reading Jonson’s ‘even though’ as ‘even if’), Burrow increased the number of classical texts to which Shakespeare and his contemporaries may have had access, by increasing our assessment of Shakespeare’s classical learning. To say that Shakespeare might have read Sophocles is only to say that the possible frame of reference of his work could include Sophocles, not to make a claim for either his actual reading ability or his personal library. The author here stands only as a metaphor, his language skills as a metaphor for the validation or invalidation of possible interactions between texts. Our linear instincts as well as the pervasive metaphor of authorial intent have occluded an entrance for Greek tragedy into the canon of texts influential on Knowsley’s Oedipus, however. Behind the obvious presence of Seneca in this play lurks Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, but this Sophocles becomes apparent when viewed through a particular early modern lens. In Knowsley’s version, like in Seneca’s Oedipus, Jocasta cannot decide the manner of her death: O deadlie pain Shall I quyte through my brest it drive or through my throte it thrust?17 and eventually concludes that Oedipus must strike her womb: this hatefull wombe, then wound o wretch this this with thine owne hand.18 As she says this, a ghostly voice is heard by Oedipus alone, named Echo in the text, but not echoing the thoughts either of Oedipus or of his mother, instead encouraging Oedipus to ‘forebeare’.19 As Jocasta continues her plea for Oedipus to end her life, the echo reveals her identity (to the reader, at least, though her identity must have been revealed onstage around this point). The voice we have heard belongs to Nature, who proceeds to plead her case against the impending matricide: Nature: Consyder first Oedipus mine     what paine for thee she tooke Oedipus: And of my father’s death againe     O nature do thou looke Nature: I do confesse an odious fact     thou didst that is most plaine   but this is worse from mothers bloud     thy hands not to restrayne   canst thou alack most wretched wight     consent until her death   whose pappes with foode, whose wombe with woo     did help to give thee breath   in whom I nature formed thee     as best I thought it good   Oh now requite her for her payne     with drawe thy hands from bloud.20 The argument Nature makes here is well-known among classicists: the same argument is used by Clytemnestra unsuccessfully in an attempt to prevent her murder by her son Orestes in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers.21 But the appearance of Natura onstage suggests a Sophoclean influence by way of Watson’s 1581 Latin Antigone, translated from Sophocles and attributed in the Stationer’s Register on 31 July 1581 to the suspiciously named ‘Aphocles’.22 Watson makes two sizeable additions to Sophocles that bookend the play: a 99-line poem in which Natura is allegorized and the moral of the action of the play debated, and a set of pompae, including various scenes of allegorical shows with masque-like characters such as Temerity, Impudence, Obstinacy, and Cupid. When Nature appears onstage here in Knowsley, debating the ethics of Oedipus’ proposed matricide, she no doubt recalls her Sophoclean—or Aphoclean—sister from 1581. Both Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus clearly belong to the canon of texts alongside which Knowsley’s Oedipus can productively be read, but to acknowledge their presence in Knowsley’s text requires the reception history of Greek tragedy in this period to be read horizontally as well as vertically; as a chainmail of receptions rather than a chain. Thinking of Knowsley’s Oedipus as an assemblage rather than the product of a linear descent from Seneca, which might include Sophocles via Seneca and other mediating texts but not directly or meaningfully, destabilizes ideas about the lack of transmission of Greek texts in this period, as well as the metaphor of the author. It rewrites the dominant idea that access to Greek tragedy would have been difficult until its translation by suggesting theatrical methods of dissemination, and diversifies the question from Sophocles or Seneca to allow the potential for both relationships to be available and activated in different readings. In response to criticism for ‘over-quoting’, Deleuze and Guattari develop the idea of machines into which the specific literary machine under scrutiny can and/or must be connected in order to work: … when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and the mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureacratic machine…. Literature is an assemblage.23 By plugging Knowsley’s Oedipus into the Greek-tragedy-machine, we see a lively performative relationship with Aeschylus, Aphocles, and Sophocles and by plugging it into the scholarly-translation-of-Latin machine, we see a play that fuses two translators of Seneca, Neville, and Newton, with new material. Further machines are always infinitely available: the social-realism-machine would no doubt highlight the importance of the scenes featuring Knowsley’s additional schoolboys, who rejoice that the plague has released them from school for the afternoon, whereas the geographical machine would explain the decision taken to cast Polybus and Merope not as rural shepherds but as King and Queen of Corinth. Understanding Knowsley’s Oedipus to be an assemblage rather than the Bloomian offspring of Seneca or Sophocles offers a solution to the long-standing assumption in early modern studies that some texts are more likely to allude to Greek sources than others, and offers ‘the classical’ not as an aspirational bench mark accessed only by elite, university-educated playwrights and those who benefitted from a privileged classical education like Jonson, but as a machine of interpretation into which Knowsley’s Oedipus can productively be plugged. The problem of intertext and the horizons of expectation This does not, however, constitute a convincing argument for the presence of Sophocles in Knowsley’s Senecan Oedipus. Proving an intertext cannot be the object of assemblage-thinking-inspired literary study, because assemblage-thinking requires the acknowledgement of simultaneous multiplicity. If Knowsley’s Nature/Natura can be called a Sophoclean device, it is precisely because she is a Aphoclean one; what Knowsley's Oedipus receives is not Sophocles, but the idea of Sophocles in the early modern imagination. Even as critics like Goldhill implore students of classical reception to move away from the study of intertext and towards the study of cultural influence, the dominant model used to describe relationships between texts remains a textual one.24 The common Hellenistic source is a familiar butt of the joke in Classics, but how classical reception studies might construe the relationship between a text and an absence of text remains problematic for theoretical models that rely on ideas of ‘intertextuality’ to describe relationships. Another text (or in this case, absence of text) that can obviously be read productively alongside Knowsley’s Oedipus is William Gager’s Oedipus.25 The Latin script — likely to have been performed at Christ Church in 1582 — survives only in a notebook in fragments.26 Like the additional schoolboys of Knowsley’s Oedipus, however, the large cast of extra-Senecan extras in Gager’s Oedipus frequently intervenes in the action. In a preliminary fragment, for example, the parental abandonment that causes the action of the Oedipus Tyrannus is translated to the opposite end of a young boy’s life, with a scene in which a citizen, unable to find enough wood to burn the bodies of both his father and son (both have died of the plague) throws his son onto a stranger’s pyre and sneaks away. Like Knowsley’s Oedipus, Gager’s earlier version shows a democratic interest in characters that are neither Sophoclean nor Senecan, but are certainly Oedipal. It is impossible to claim an intertextual relationship here, but it is clear that these scenes (and those that do not feature in the notebook, which are influential as absences) ought to form part of the assemblage that is our understanding of Knowsley’s Oedipus. That is, our relational understanding of the play must involve a consciousness of the situatedness of our knowledge and must be flexible enough to understand that relationships for which classical reception scholars can no longer account also define the assemblage that is our understanding of the text.27 If the relationship between a text and an absence is problematic for the study of relationships between texts, the necessary situatedness of assemblage-thinking offers a different kind of challenge to the linearity of literary history. No more than ten years (and perhaps far fewer) after the production of Knowsley’s Oedipus at Berwick Grammar School, the date 26 December 1606 is entered into the Stationer’s Register. Like Knowsley’s Oedipus, the play that is recorded features a prominent blinding scene and appeals to a personified Nature figure. This play is not (ostensibly) a play about Oedipus, however, but Shakespeare’s King Lear. The echoes between Sophocles’ and Seneca’s Oedipus plays and King Lear have not gone unnoticed, of course, but Shakespeare’s perceived lack of Greek language skills has led critics to argue for an inexplicable and non-specific ‘affinity between Shakespeare and Greek tragedy’ to explain the obvious echoes, though the relationship is only really inexplicable in as far as it is required to be chronological and textual.28 Burrow’s recent assessment bears witness both to the overwhelming pervasiveness of a hierarchy which allows Greek-readers a privileged relationship with ancient texts to the exclusion of others, as well as to the way that the metaphor of reading forces us to conceptualize a chronology of intertext: ‘Shakespeare […] probably read no Greek tragedy in Greek, though he may have read some Euripides in Latin translation’.29 Burrow’s statement reinforces the sense that a relationship between two texts must not only be textual (Shakespeare need not have read Sophocles’ Oedipus to receive it in King Lear; he need only have seen a version of it in a theatre, or heard about it from a friend), but also that it must be chronologically ordered, with the reading of one text influencing the writing of another, not the other way around. An assemblage-thinking-led examination need not be restricted by literary history: the assemblage theorist is not concerned with how Shakespeare came across Oedipus, but rather uses Oedipus (either as part of an early modern performance tradition, as a play by Sophocles or as an influence on King Lear) as a machine with which to read the play. In theory — at least for classicists — the inversion of the chronology of literary history has already happened. In Roman Constructions (2000), for example, Don Fowler demonstrated the importance of achronological readings. In practice, however, there are entire libraries full of books on the influence of Ovid on Shakespeare, but no mention at all of the influence of Shakespeare on Ovid.30 It has become the refrain of reception studies that ‘meaning is made at the point of reception’, but at the point of reception of Knowsley’s Oedipus, the chronology of literary history is inverted.31 When Yale’s Elizabethan Club bought the manuscript of Oedipus in 2011 in celebration of the centenary of its foundation in 1911, the play was relatively unknown. It had been transcribed in the 1960s by Ivor Collins and Derek Shorrocks, but had been and remains the subject of very little work by classicists or early modernists. At the point of any plausible reading or reception of Knowsley’s Oedipus, then, King Lear already forms part of the cultural apparatus with which the reader decodes the play. The horizon of expectation of the reader, if not of the text, includes the action of King Lear.32 The metaphor of reception is inverted, and with it the linear descent of literary history, perhaps best expressed by the example of a famous metaphor in King Lear: As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.33 The metaphorical schoolboys of King Lear are played out in Knowsley’s Oedipus, where actual schoolboys appear onstage, hoping that the deaths from the plague will continue so that they can continue to sport rather than returning to school. For reception studies this is problematic: a reception scholar could construct a chain of subterranean receptions which links Shakespeare with the performance of Knowsley’s Oedipus at Berwick Grammar School, but this is an authorial fiction, not a reception history.34 Establishing the influence of Knowsley’s Oedipus on Shakespeare’s King Lear means constructing a plausible persona for Shakespeare such that there is a possible intertext rather than examining the meaning made at the point of reception. The tyranny of literary history’s forward motion occludes the moment of actual reception, one in which it is King Lear that informs Knowsley’s Oedipus through its reader. Cui bono? Assemblage-thinking requires the reader-receiver to acknowledge their own situatedness, and to investigate the sociology of associations at play in any given reading. Since, as Müller explains, assemblages are only relational for as long as they are productive, the chronology of literary history is undercut by the plurality of productive relationships inherent in a point of reception.35King Lear can enter into a productive relationship with Oedipus temporarily, with Tiresias being permitted to recall Old Tom (rather than the other way around) for a particular reader and for as long as such a relationship is productive. When Alison Sharrock gave the Don Fowler Memorial Lecture in Oxford in 2016, she confronted classicists’ persistent unwillingness to take seriously the attempt made in Fowler’s Roman Constructions to escape chronological reading.36 She framed the final part of her lecture as an elaborate cui bono, asking what was at stake for classicists in ignoring the interpretative community’s own reading chronology (Ovid before Nonnus, for example) in understanding influence on a text. The metaphor of classical reception reinforces the idea of a classical text as something belonging to a particularly worthy canon, separate from the post-classical or, worse, the non-classical, because of its primacy. It forces a chronology which privileges relationships between texts that are textually plausible, rather than those apparent in reading; that is to say those relationships for which the fiction of the author suits the narrative about how the texts come into contact with one another, despite the theoretical importance of the reader to the development of reception theory.37Pro bono, perhaps, of the classicist, whose object of study is special and influential because it is classical, and whose access to the material is privileged through meticulous language learning and specialist knowledge of the historical context of the original. If it is not the Teflon coated baseball (as Gaisser has it) that is the object of study, but the meanings attributed to it by every generation of readers that has a relationship with it, then every reader’s perspective is just as situated, specific, and limited as every other’s.38 Assemblage-thinking takes the role of the reader’s own present in Jauss’ conception of reception seriously, validating non-privileged perspectives from outside of Classics.39 There is a real-life sociology at play here, as well as a sociology of association. If we think of King Lear as an assemblage containing within it a multiplicity of diachronic relationships that are activated at the moment of a particular situated reading, then there can be no excuse for excluding the grammar-school educated son of a West Midlands glove-maker from a conversation about early modern Greek tragedy which, structured by the chronology of literary history, would involve only performances at Oxbridge colleges and privileged, erudite playwrights like Chapman and Jonson. Assemblages not only acknowledge the death of the author, but they celebrate the possibilities this creates for interpretation. They situate readers’ knowledge of texts, and the way texts relate to other texts, and remove the idea — a hangover from source study — that relationships between texts are fixed, and that a canon of texts influential on, say, Shakespeare, can be established. They demand that readers openly declare their interests (like feminism, as Lively points out).40 Writing in the afterword to Classics and the Uses of Reception, Duncan Kennedy notes that Miriam Leonard reading Derrida and Vernant should herself be read.41 It is not only for this kind of self-awareness that assemblage-thinking is essential to classical reception studies, but also for the necessary multiplicity of readers that Kennedy is alluding to here. The metaphor of reception is a limiting one for the study of the relationships between texts not only because it is difficult to place and relies on a chronology and the idea of an author, but also because it is singular. By contrast, it is obvious to those working within studies of the afterlife of the classical world that its interactions are often simultaneous and multiple, and require a variety of skills to offer even the most situated of interpretations. While the classicist in the most traditional sense might reject the idea of assemblage-thinking because it effaces the special historical primacy of classical literature, for the post-classicist (or the student of ‘classical reception’) ‘assemblage’ is a more useful metaphor than ‘reception’ because it embraces the infinity of valid reactions to and interactions with the classical world. It acknowledges that the situatedness of one’s own response to a text is dependent on a partisan selection from within an infinite variety of valid approaches to the text. Not because it allows us to read a text as if it were an assemblage, but because it allows us to read a text as if we were one. Putting the actor in Actor Network Theory: a coda Writing of Actor Networks in 1996, Bruno Latour remarked on their special ability to collapse space: ‘I can be one metre away from someone in the next telephone booth, and be nevertheless more closely connected to my mother 6,000 miles away’.42 Latour’s project, to repackage sociology not as the science of the social but as a science of associations, requires a similar process of investigating the power structures at play in associations as is required by assemblage-thinking.43 Like Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages, Actor Networks establish relational models that prioritize productivity, function, and multiplicity over hierarchy and singularity, though Actor Network theorists (perhaps because of their concentration within geography and sociology) have tended to describe such relationships spatially, unlike assemblage-thinkers.44 Actor Networks differ from assemblages most importantly in that Actor Network Theory insists that agency is exclusively a mediated achievement, brought about through forging associations. There is nothing outside associations, and to become capable of action, entities need to form aggregates and find allies to produce an actor network.45 Like assemblage-thinkers, Actor Network theorists demand the dissolution of hierarchies, since associations are always forged and subjective, and result from an active process of gathering together that is situated in a particular way, and exists only for as long as it is productive.46 The process of gathering together for Actor Network theorists is a politicized one, and one which is required of researchers engaged in empirical work. Actor Network Theory, because of the way that it maps out the gathering together of actors to create meaning, has been explicitly adopted in various disciplines of the social sciences, and especially human geography, but is relevant here because it parallels the gathering together that is often acknowledged to be part of the role of the spectator in the early modern theatre. Although Actor Network theorists rarely mean the kind of ‘actor’ that performance theorists use the term to imply, it is precisely by the active gathering together of the multiple identities present in the body of an actor that the suspension of disbelief and process of identification required of audiences in the theatre is achieved. Just over a decade before the first performance of King Lear, Shakespeare made explicit the audience’s role in gathering actor, role, and identity in The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590). After Christopher Sly has fallen asleep (himself named for both his character and his own identity — William Sly was one of the most well-known actors of the King’s Men), the actor John Sinklo enters, named in the Folio. The same actor is named in 2 Henry IV and 3 Henry VI as the forester who arrests the King, and probably played the thin, ageing Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet and Faulconbridge, mocked mercilessly for his deficit of sex appeal in King John. An onstage Lord remembers the actor, seeming to recall him in some of his previous roles:  This fellow I remember Since once he played a farmer’s eldest son – ‘Twas where you wooed the gentlewoman so well – I have forgot your name, but sure that part Was aptly fitted and naturally performed.47 The theatre company in-jokes at the expense of the actors in this scene are drawn out by Dusinberre at much greater length than can be achieved here, but it is clear from this example that audiences were expected to treat the bodies of actors as Actor Networks containing within them multiplicities to be actively gathered in order to create meaning. Performance reception is often acknowledged as a special category of reception studies precisely because the sites that performance offers for the activation of relationships are more multiple: spectators of a performance can establish relationships that readers of its script alone may not have allowed for.48 In the early modern theatre, and particularly on the commercial, self-aware stage, this gathering together of identities is not the preserve of reception theorists or assemblage-thinkers, but is explicitly demanded of spectators. Assemblage-thinking and Actor Network Theory are important methodologies for performance reception in particular, then, because the explicit creation of meaning out of heterogeneous multiplicities read in non-hierarchical ways manner was as much an expectation of audiences in early modern theatres as it has been of classicists and post-classicists here. Marchella Ward is currently the Tinsley Outreach Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. She has recently completed her doctorate in Classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford on blindness in the theatre. Acknowledgement This article began its life as a conference paper presented at the Postclassicisms meeting in Cambridge. It appears here with huge thanks to all of those present who engaged generously with the ideas within it, and to Professor Fiona Macintosh. Footnotes 1 Gaisser (2002: 387). 2 Goldhill (2002: 297). 3 As Hopkins and Martindale (2012: 7) do. 4 On the play, see Wiggins (2014: 185–6). Both DeLanda (2016) and Sauvagnargues (2016) apply assemblage theory to literary study among other fields (cinema, ecology, war studies etc.), but no work has yet been published on assemblages and classical reception studies. 5 Deleuze and Parnet (1987: 69). 6 Deleuze and Guattari (1980: 3–4). 7 Nietzsche (1875), see Porter (2000: 15). 8 Martindale (1993). 9 Silk et al. (2014). 10 Richardson (2013). 11 See Hardwick (2011) for these ‘fuzzy connections’. 12 See Wiggins (2014: 185–6). Very little work has been done on this manuscript, which now belongs to the collection of The Elizabethan Club at Yale. It was the subject of a research seminar led by Glynne Wickham at the University of Bristol in 1960, explored briefly in Wiggins, ‘The Schoolboy’s Oedipus', Times Literary Supplement, 1 July 2011, and was the topic of a conference at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center on 30 September 2011. It has otherwise not been studied, but is available in its entirety online via Yale's Elizabethan Club: https://elizabethanclub.yale.edu/oedipus-manuscript [accessed 13 September 2019]. 13 Wiggins (2014: 187). 14 Burrow (2013: 13). 15 Burrow (2013: 12) provides a valuable corrective to this assumption. 16 See ‘Letters to the Editor’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 February 2014 and subsequent responses by Brian Vickers, Michael Silk, Peter Wiseman for this conversation. 17 MS Eliz 197 58r. 18 Ibid. 19 MS Eliz 197 58r; There is an obvious Hamlet III.4 echo in this ghostly appearance: the two plays are almost certainly direct contemporaries, and Hamlet is thought to have had a university performance context as well as a rich career with the Chamberlain’s Men (see title page of Q1). 20 MS Eliz 197 58v. 21 Cf. A.Cho.896ff, where Clytemnestra reminds Orestes that he ought to take pity on her since she breast-fed him as a baby. 22 Wiggins (2012: 277). 23 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 3), trans. Howard. See Deleuze and Guattari (1980: 4). Sauvagnargues (2016: 186) qualifies Deleuze and Guattari’s machines, explaining that ‘the machine henceforth serves to define the conditions of possibility of technical works (mises en oeuvres techniques), explaining how cultures modulate the biological, the sociopolitical and the material in their assemblages’. Guattari's last book, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1992) (Guattari, 2004) is his fullest examination of the concept of a machine and the importance of production to the assemblage. 24 Goldhill (2002). 25 Add. Ms 22583 57-63. 26 See Sutton (1994) and Wiggins (2012: 298–9). The fragments of this play have been discussed since Bowers (1949). 27 I adopt the concept of ‘situated knowledges’ from Haraway (1999) here. 28 Silk (2004: 241). 29 Burrow (2013: 13). 30 Fowler (2000: 115ff). 31 Repeated throughout Martindale (1993) from Jauss and Benzinger (1970) and Iser (1974). 32 See Whitmarsh (2006) for the Vera Historia’s foreshadowing of its own reception. For the term ‘horizon of expectation’, see Jauss and Benzinger (1970). 33 King Lear, 4.1.41-2 34 The concept of ‘subterranean’ receptions is advanced throughout Hall and Macintosh (2005) and underlined by Revermann (2008). 35 Müller (2015: 28–9). 36 Sharrock (2016). 37 Cf. the collaborative meaning-making between text and reader in Jauss and Benzinger (1970), for example. 38 Gaisser (2002: 387). 39 See Jauss and Benzinger (1970) and Fish (1967). 40 Lively (2006: 55ff). 41 Kennedy (2006: 290). See also Murnaghan (2007). 42 Latour (1996: 371). 43 See Latour (2005). 44 For a comparison of Actor Network Theory and assemblage-thinking, see Müller (2015), though Müller's interest is in the application of these ideas within the field of human geography. Within philosophy the relationship between the two is understood to be far less harmonious, with Harman (2009: 30) seeing assemblage-thinking and Actor Network Theory as incompatible methodologies. 45 Müller (2015: 30). 46 See also Haraway (2016) on ‘natural–cultural assemblages’ for another attempt to theorize this gathering together. 47 Taming of the Shrew, Induction 1.79; see Dusinberre (2002: 171–2) for this argument about the identities of the actors. 48 For example, throughout Hall and Harrop (2010) as well as by many others. References Aspinall D. 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TI - Assemblage theory and the uses of classical reception: the case of Aristotle Knowsley’s Oedipus
JF - Classical Receptions Journal
DO - 10.1093/crj/clz018
DA - 2019-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/assemblage-theory-and-the-uses-of-classical-reception-the-case-of-3KxwrwHz7R
SP - 508
VL - 11
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -