Watching flesh: poison and the fantasy of temporalcontrol in Renaissance England
Miranda Wilson
Toward the end of Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (1613–14/21),when many characters meet their deaths in rapid and flamboyant succession,one would-be poisoner, Bianca, endures a moment of consternation. Hermurderous plot seems to be taking a little longer than anticipated. Observingher intended victim, she says in an aside, ‘Not yet, no change? When falls heto the earth?’ and a few lines later, ‘Nor yet?’ (5.1.213, 221).1 Part of Bianca’sproblem arises from the fact she has poisoned the wrong man, a turn of eventsthe audience may or may not be aware of prior to the collapse of her lover, theDuke. But even if we suppose a knowing audience, one keenly observant of theactual victim (that is, the Duke), we still retain the impression that Bianca’spoison does not operate with the speed she expects. Only after she voices herimpatience does the Duke first express physical signs of what Bianca hasearlier described as a poison ‘laid surely’ (58) to take her intended victim, theCardinal, in ‘his time of frailty’ (63).
Middleton’s Bianca serves as a useful introduction to a larger tendency inwritings from the English Renaissance. While the period’s dramatic, prose,and poetic works exhibit a fascination with the potential of poison, they arealso replete with references to poisoning plots discarded in favour of moredirect methods of violence (as in Arden of Feversham (1592)), poisons that donot work as planned or at all (as in Gilbert Dugdale’s execution pamphlet, ATrue Discourse of the Practices of Elizabeth Caldwell (1604)), and shoddy or falsepotions passed off to the eager poisoner by shadowy figures such as apothecarycharlatans or doctors.2 The popularity of poisoners in literature may reflectthe notoriety attained by convicted poisoners like Dr Roderigo Lopez, Edward
I wish to thank Jacqueline Vanhoutte, Lois Potter, Julian Yates, and Tim Spaulding for their astute comments andsuggestions during the writing of this piece. I would also like to thank the University of Delaware for the GeneralUniversity Research Program grant which facilitated my research on clock and watch technologies.
1 In all citations of plays, numbers indicate, respectively, act, scene, and line. All citations of Middleton’s workcome from Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007).
2 This last possibility might even be reassuring, as we see in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in which Cornelius’distrust of the Queen leads him to substitute sleeping potions for the poisons she has requested (1.6.33–44). Allreferences to Shakespeare’s plays come from Stephen Greenblatt et al (eds.) The Norton Shakespeare, Based on theOxford Edition, 2nd edn., (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
Squire, and Frances Howard and Robert Carr, James I’s favourites.3 Suchwidely discussed poisoning cases established patterns of associations repro-duced in the literature of the period.4 But these cases, and their literaryechoes, also bring to attention the ways poisoning, whether fictive or actual,fails to live up to its promise as the perfect, invisible, and most subtle ofweapons. In the realm of Renaissance fiction, as in England’s actual courtsand kitchens, poison often proves an imperfect and frustrating method ofmurder. The disconnect between poison’s theoretical advantages and thepragmatic problems it frequently poses makes poison a vehicle for thinkingabout larger issues of temporal management in Renaissance England. Asdescribed in a range of documents – poems, pamphlets, courtroom accounts,and revenge tragedies – poisons promise control over not only the manner,but the moment, of a victim’s death. When these promises remain unrealized,they draw attention to the culture’s larger struggles over how to tell time welland accurately.
Persistent as they may be, the failures of poison have remained largelyobscured or passed over, both in Renaissance texts and in the work of thescholars who write about these texts. When critics have considered poison inthe period, they, like the would-be murderers of England’s stage, have tendedto concentrate on what works (or what should work) with poison. FromFredson T. Bowers to Jonathan Gil Harris and Tanya Pollard, literary scholarshave understandably been drawn to the ways representations of poison illu-minate the period’s fears of the new, the innovative, and the foreign. For thesecritics, what poisons suggest matters far more, finally, than whether theysucceed.5 Poison, at least in terms of its symbolic potential, always works toaccomplish something, even if this something simply gives a local habitationand a name to the diffuse anxieties of a cultural moment. Such readings of
3 Lopez faced execution in 1594 for his supposed role in a plot to poison Elizabeth I. Squire faced executionin 1598 for plotting to poison the pommel on Elizabeth I’s saddle. Carr and Howard were both convicted(although punished only lightly) for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury.
4 Squire’s poisoned pommel makes a later appearance in John Webster’s The White Devil, ed. Christina Luckyj(London: Methuen Drama, 2008), 5.1.68. Many critics see Lopez as inspiration for the non-poisonous Shylockin Merchant of Venice. See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),73. As Alastair Bellany argues, the Overbury affair reverberated, aesthetically and politically, for long after theconspirators were executed or disgraced. See The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Cultureand the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 251–78.
5 See Fredson T. Bowers, ‘The Audience and the Poisoners of Elizabethan Tragedy’, Journal of English andGermanic Philology 36 (1937), 491–504; Fredson T. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 (Gloucester,Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), 27–8, 51–7. For Jonathan Gil Harris’s discussion of politics, aliens, and poison, seeForeign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), 55–7. Tanya Pollard, while noting that real world poisons ‘seem to have been relativelyrare, and remarkably inefficient’ (8), likewise finds the imagery surrounding exotic poisons useful in exploringwhat theatre might do to the minds and bodies of those who consume it. See Drugs and Theater in Early ModernEngland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22. On intersections of gender, poison, and the foreign, seeAnnette Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions(Lewisburg: Bucknell, 1994), 58; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materialsof Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82–5.
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poison, however, tend to limit its function by rendering the symbolic, as acategory, distinct from questions of material success and failure. While Renais-sance writers do use poison as a marker for the strange and outlandish, theyalso categorize it as a highly unpredictable form of violence – one that, bothsymbolically and materially, precipitates blunders, magnifies errors, and insti-gates fantastic breakdowns between intention and action.
This essay considers how the correspondences writers drew between poison,bodies, and time-telling call attention to the elusive qualities of temporalcontrol in Renaissance England. I argue that poisoning can connect, in astriking and violent way, the corporeal stuff of bodies, the mechanisms ofclockwork (with its elements of distance, precision, and supervision), andtheoretical notions of the relationship between time and the material world.Indeed, the temporal qualities of poison emphasized in Renaissance workssuggest something unexpected about timekeeping projects of the period.While poisoners can function as nightmare images of the period’s worst fearsof the foreign, the feminine, the secret, and the invisible, when it comes totemporality, these would-be murderers also express the same unfulfilleddesires as many privileged, normative, and presumably non-murderousEnglish men and women. If the control offered by the watch and clock – theprecise demarcation of minute and hour – is attractive to the would-be poi-soner, the same could be said for many fashionable men and women of latesixteenth- and seventeenth-century London. The frustrations faced by failedpoisoners thus find a counterpart in the challenges faced on a daily basis bythose who could afford private clocks and watches and who looked to them totranslate solar, or natural, time into the more segmented, artificial, and ide-alized system of clock-time.6
Indeed, writers seized on such correspondences to consider the ways bodiesand clocks work together to promise and resist regulation. In the process,poisoning becomes a dark metaphor for the larger cultural impulse tomeasure (and control) the passage of the days, hours, and even minutes. Theartful, sophisticated murderers of Renaissance revenge tragedies serve asparticularly powerful representatives of this project. These dramatic poisonersgive us a way of imagining time as an intimate, if unpredictable, actor inhuman affairs. Their timed stage poisons recast the body as a secret timepiece,the movements of which are only visible to the poisoner and the watchfultheatre audience. When considered as one aspect of a larger interest intime-telling, the fantastical, and flawed, timed poisons of England’s stage
6 For ways critics differentiate between systems of time, see James Remington McCarthy, A Matter of Time, TheStory of the Watch (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 4–5. For different forms of time-consciousness, seeGerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3–4; Roland Racevskis, Time and Ways of Knowing under Louis XIV:Molière, Sévigné, Lafayette (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 16.
Poison and the fantasy of temporal control 3
bring to light the interdependence of bodies and horological devices, illumi-nating the irregularity of both.
POISONING TIME
In his Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (1644), the influentialJacobean Justice and legal scholar, Edward Coke, ponders what form ofmurder might be the most evil. He has several options from which to choose,ranging from the mundane homicide by ‘weapon sharp or blunt’ to the morecolourful tactic of ‘inciting a dog’. He concludes, however, ‘of all murders,murder by poysoning is the most detestable and fearfull to the nature of man’since it can be ‘least prevented by manhood or Providence’.7 Although pre-meditation and betrayal play a part in Renaissance descriptions of poisoning,the unease surrounding this particular weapon arises more specifically fromthe idea that poisonings thwart attempts at detection and investigation byseparating victim from attacker. The prevailing attitude held that in the moreusual, more naturally English sorts of violence, such as knifing, clubbing, andbattery, the crime and the criminal immediately announced themselves tovictims and observers. Poison, however, worked indirectly; victims might notfeel its effects until long after they had been attacked, and the pains caused bypoison could be masked as the symptoms of any number of diseases.8
The various dangers ascribed to poison, when taken together, suggest itoffered to some a fantasy of control. This control takes many forms, frompoisoners’ supposed ability to taint any familiar object with imperceptibletoxins, to the sense that a poisoner could lessen his or her victim’s chances ofsalvation by attacking when least expected.9 Writers also frequently imaginepoisoners who choose the specific moment when death overtakes theirvictims. In the anonymous tract known as Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584), ascurrilous attack on Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the Gentleman speakerwarns, ‘poison might be so tempered and given as it should not appearepresently, and yet should kill the party afterward at what time should beappointed.’10 Coke is more specific about this feature of the crime. He opinedduring the 1615 trial of Robert Weston that a good poisoner could time deathto occur ‘in one month, two, or three or more’.11 Throughout the sixteenth
7 Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: Concerning High Treason, and Other Pleas ofthe Crown, and Criminal Causes (London, 1644), 48. For similar perspectives, see ‘The Trial of Robert Carr, Earlof Somerset (1616),’ ed. Thomas Bayly Howell. Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for HighTreason and other Crimes and Misdemeanors. 33 vols. (London, 1809), 2:965–1004, 2:971; Henry Goodcole, TheAdultresses Funerall Day (London, 1635), B3v.
8 See D. C. Peck (ed.), Leicester’s Commonwealth: The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (1584)and Related Documents (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985), 82–3.
9 For a concise articulation of both aspects, see Webster, 5.1.67–72.10 Peck (ed.), Leicester’s Commonwealth, 82–3.11 ‘The Trial of Robert Weston (1615),’ ed. Thomas Bayly Howell. Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and
Proceedings for High Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanors. 33 vols (London, 1809), 2:911–30, 2:912.
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and seventeenth centuries, dramatists and poets endow poisoners with evengreater temporal control than did Coke; their characters imagine setting notonly the month and day, but even the hour of their victims’ deaths. SoMarlowe’s Barabas, in The Jew of Malta, gloats he will kill his daughter and herfellow nuns with a powder ‘Whose operation is to bind, infect,/ And poisondeeply, yet not appear/ In forty hours after it is ta’en’ (3.4.68–70).12 Haly, thevillainous courtier of John Denham’s The Sophy (1642), need only check hiswatch onstage to be assured ‘’Tis now about the houre the poyson/ Must takeeffect’ (5.1.179–80).13 Even as late as 1683, Robert Dixon, in a long poeticdescription of the multitudinous powers of witches, has his title character,Canidia, boast of her ability to ‘Poyson at an hour, day, or year,/ Whom youplease, far or near’.14 Whether the poisoner wishes a victim dead immediatelyor in ‘forty hours’, poison promises a seductive temporal precision.
As the above examples suggest, the notion that poisoners can control thetime of death remains remarkably consistent over a long period of time. Thisconsistency arises, in part, from the static, and imperfect, nature of Renais-sance horological technology. Between the publication of Leicester’s Common-wealth in 1584 and Canidia in 1683, England witnessed a proliferation of clocksand watches.15 Even before the 1631 establishment of the London Clockmak-er’s Company, London’s workshops produced goods to rival those of the greatworkshops of France and Germany.16 And yet, even as timepieces becamesmaller, more portable, more ornamental, and more widely available, thetechnologies of time remained largely the same from the sixteenth throughthe mid seventeenth centuries. Whether an English consumer chose to pur-chase an exquisite, enamelled watch in the 1590s or a plainer ‘lantern clock’in the 1630s, the mechanism beneath the casing still relied on the same oldtechnologies – either a mainspring (in the case of watches) or weights (in thecase of most clocks). While both of these technologies offered more regularitythan sundials or water clocks, they both also needed constant adjustments tocompensate for their tendency to slow over time. The technologies of time-keeping would not significantly advance until Christiaan Huygens’ inventionof the pendulum clock (1656) and Robert Hooke’s invention of the hair-spring (circa 1650s) and anchor escapement (1650s?–1670s?).17 With theseinnovations, clocks and watches suddenly acquired the potential (if not always
12 Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. James R. Siemon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).13 John Denham, The Sophy, ed. Parvin Loloi (Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg, 1998). The stage
direction here reads, ‘He looks upon a watch.’14 Robert Dixon, Canidia, Or The Witches. A Rhapsody (London, 1683), 32.15 Moira Donald, ‘“The Greatest Necessity for Every Rank of Men”: Gender, Clocks and Watches’, in Moira
Donald and Linda Hurcombe (eds.), Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective (New York: St Martin’sPress, 2000), 54–75.
16 Eric Bruton, Clocks and Watches, 1400–1900 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 138, 142, 191–2; F. J.Britten, Britten’s Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers, ed. Cecil Clutton, G. H. Baillie, and C. A. Ilbert, 8th edn.(New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1973), 43–6.
17 While Hooke is generally credited with the creation of the hairspring, Huygens built the first watch toincorporate the new device in the 1660s.
Poison and the fantasy of temporal control 5
the capacity) for far greater accuracy, a trait reflected in the addition of firstminute, and then second hands, to the dial. Prior to these horologicaladvances, however, writers and readers were free to use cultural fears of theperfect poison to explore both the allure and the difficulty of temporalcontrol. Technical stasis allowed for, and encouraged, strong associationsbetween the potent, secret poison and the perfect, secret timepiece.
Links between poison and temporal control grow tighter when we considerEnglish suspicions that certain murderers were especially accurate readers,and manipulators, of the world. After all, not every Renaissance poisonerexpresses an interest in timing death. For many poisoners, real and imaginary,poisons prove attractive because of their secrecy and for the ways they trans-form a bowl of porridge, or a pair of gloves, into a weapon.18 As the examplesabove illustrate, however, many literary and non-literary texts propose that,with enough skill, knowledge, and cunning, a poisoner could take the messy,unpredictable material of the human body and recast it as a highly regulatedand predictable machine. For such poisoners, murder takes on the quality ofart; their attacks involve technical mastery, learning, and a sophisticated (ifcorrupt) understanding of the world.19 While a disgruntled and uneducatedEnglish housewife might turn to the rough-and-ready poisons of the hedge-row, a man like Robert Dudley, of ‘greedy imagination and subtile con-ceit . . . of so extreme ambition, pride, falsehood, and treachery’, finds hisproper weapon in the workshops of Elizabethan physicians like Dr Julio, DrLopez, and Dr Walter Bayley.20 Courtiers, men and women of power, educatedItalians, Jews, and physicians – these are the poisoners most often associatedwith temporal control in the political and court documents of RenaissanceEngland. They are also the groups most commonly seen as financially capableof purchasing and enjoying the expensive wares of French, German, andEnglish clockmakers.
On the stage, the trope of the poisoner-as-temporal-artist finds its mostpersistent expression in revenge tragedy, that genre so intimately connectedto the space of the court and to temporal projects of revelation and redress. Inplays such as Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), the aesthetic pleasuresof violence arise most exquisitely when Time, the revealer and destroyer,participates in the unfolding dramas. As Vindice exalts immediately prior tohis poisoning of the Duke, ‘Now nine years’ vengeance crowd into a minute’
18 On the secretive qualities of poison, see Howell (ed.), ‘Trial of Carr’, 2:971. English references to poisonson everyday objects abound. See, for instance, Francis Bacon, ‘A Letter Written out of England to an EnglishGentleman Remaining at Padua’ (London, 1599), n.p.; Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter. A Critical Edition, ed.Jim C. Pogue (New York: Garland, 1980), 130–33; Webster, 5.1.68–71.
19 For representative references to poisoning-as-art, see Webster, The White Devil, dumb show and 2.2.24–31;Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, The historie of Iudith in forme of a poeme, trans. Thomas Hudson. (Edinburgh,1584), F4v; Richard Niccols, Sir Thomas Ouerburies vision With the ghoasts of Weston, Mris. Turner, the late Lieftenantof the Tower, and Franklin (London, 1616), 34–5; Nathanael Richards, ‘The Vicious Courtier’, Seuen poems diuine,morall, and satyricall (London, 1631), n.p.
(3.5.122), a thought ‘ravishing’ enough to almost make him forget himself (1,28). Through their murderous actions, revengers stage the sins of their adver-saries, transforming the gorgeous, but false show of courtly bodies into themore instructive dramatic ‘property’ of the bare skull (100–01). For Vindiceand other revengers, their control over the pacing and manner of death, overtheir victims’ entrances and exits, relies on their special understanding of theways time operates in the world. Through the ‘quaintness of his malice’ (109)for instance, Vindice replaces the sinful perspective of the ‘bewitchingminute’ with a longer view of time in which the past can ‘bear a part/ E’en init own revenge’ (75, 101–03). In his capacity as revenger and director, Vindicereminds us of how time and flesh can interact, to the delight of ‘heaven’ andthe watching audience (5.3.47).
As artists and workers in the flesh, stage poisoners like Vindice, Bianca,Barabas, and Haly contribute to a temporal project distinctly early modern,both in its conception and its technology. Like the worthy members ofLondon’s Clockmakers guild, such poisoners attempt to translate the flow oftime into something physical, manipulatable, and personal. These poisoners,however, do not construct just any sort of timepiece. They are watchmakers.Unlike clockmakers’ stationary (and more mechanically stable) products,poisoners’ tiny timepieces move through space, transforming the victim’sbody into a dial by which the poisoner can read the approach of death.Whereas sophisticated watchmakers used springs, gears, and cogs to achieveever smaller and more portable devices for their clients, poisoners’ tiny time-pieces existed in the interactions between poison and their victim’s body.
While it may seem strange that poisoners, the most reviled of murderers,should be associated with the persistent, if unsuccessful, attempts to keep timewell, poisoners, in their most subtle manifestations, represent an attempt atregularization. In the logic of artful poisoners, as in the logic of other corpo-real specialists such as William Harvey and Santorio Santorio, all bodiesshould be subject to a set of general, predictable motions and transforma-tions, just as all clocks and watches should participate in a uniform display oftime.21 And, like other rarified workers in time (men like Galileo Galilei andChristiaan Huygens), those interested in poison work with an altered sense forwhat individuals might be capable of in terms of the temporal field in whichthey find themselves.22 As Stephen Bradwell writes in Helps for Suddain AccidentsEndangering Life (1633), the first third of which relates to treatments forpoison, ‘All our Gloryes are Sunne-beames but of waterish shining. Our Clocks
21 Even before Harvey’s 1616 work on circulation, writers routinely likened the pulse to a little watch or clockwithin the body. See, for instance, George Chapman’s ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ in Andromeda liberata. Or the nuptialsof Perseus and Andromeda (London, 1614), n.p. Harvey’s contemporary, Santorio, gained fame in 1614 when hepublished De Statica Medicina, his work on what he called perspiratio insensibilis (what we now call basal metabo-lism). His work was first translated into English in 1676.
22 Galileo’s work with pendulums and timekeeping laid the groundwork for Huygens’s practical invention ofthe pendulum clock in 1656.
Poison and the fantasy of temporal control 7
of health seldome goe true; those of Death, more certaine than believed.’23
That legal and literary writers render poisoners’ relationship to time infernaldoes not diminish the power of this vision; neither, however, does it ensurepoisoners’ ability to succeed.
Artful poisoners like Vindice, Bianca, Barabas, and even Shakespeare’sClaudius, construct plots that marshal time against their enemies. Time, as anabstract quality, becomes subordinate to time as a measured series of hours(or even minutes, in the case of Bianca’s plot), which are themselves num-bered by the poison supposedly at work in their victims’ bodies. This perspec-tive sets the poisoner apart from his or her victim in important ways. While atarget of poisoning may move blithely through the world as if his or her endhas not been set, poisoners know how to read time in and on the body.
Attuned to the passage of days and hours, poisoners can watch from adistance as their victims move ever closer to the moment when that ‘littlewatch’, the heart, stops forever. As poison disperses within a body, it marksand orders the moments of that body’s life, transforming the suffering objectinto a new sort of watch, one made of the corporeal stuff itself. The momen-tum of this watch is no less powerful for being so often imperceptible. In hispamphlet poem Sir Thomas Ouerburies vision (1616), Richard Niccols makesjust this point when he has the ghost of the poisoned Overbury describe the‘thousand deaths in one’ he endured in the Tower.
Month after month, they often did instillThe diuers natures of that banefull ill,Throughout these limbs: inducing me to thinke,That what I took in Physicke, meate, or drinke,Was to restore me to my health; when allWas but with lingring death to worke my fall . . .In vaine, my hand, were ye stretcht forth to heavenMy time was set, my life to death was giuen.24
From his vantage point in the beyond-time of the grave, the ghost of Overburysees his progress toward death as orderly and predictable. Whatever the livingOverbury might have believed about his ability to determine his life’s course,his end has already been fixed. The poisons he unwittingly ingests on a dailybasis ‘set’ Overbury’s time and ‘give’ his life over to death.
In contrast to popular renditions of poison, which regularly rehearse thesentiments found in Niccols’ poem, court documents pertaining to the Over-bury case reveal the conspirators’ own consternation at the leisurely andineffective progress of their poisons. One witness testified how Robert Carrcomplained of the slowness of Overbury’s decline: ‘I marvel at these delays
23 Stephen Bradwell, Helps for Suddain Accidents Endangering Life by which Those that liue farre from Physitions orChirurgions may happily preserue the Life of a poore Friend or Neighbour (London, 1633), A3r.
24 Niccols, Ouerburies vision, 10–2.
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that the business is not yet dispatched.’25 And Carr was not the only onedispleased. During Carr’s trial, prosecutors relate that when Frances Howardberated Robert Weston for not finishing the business, Weston protested hehad ‘given him [Overbury] a thing that would have killed twenty men’.26 It isthis disjunction – between hope and action, desire and possibility – thatcharacterizes the Renaissance understanding of time. In terms of the preva-lent imagery of the period, Howard and Carr had every reason to believe thatthey could, indeed, ‘set’ Overbury’s body for death. As a temporal object,however, the Overbury-watch failed to advance in the ways Carr and Howardanticipated. Overbury should have died in a timely manner. His protracteddeath only increased the risk and expense of the plot.
The theoretical, but faulty, regulation of time on the part of poisoners suchas Carr and Howard speaks to an important and ongoing temporal negotia-tion. The advancing technologies of Renaissance timekeeping offered thepossibility of temporal uniformity without providing a means for achieving it.In the course of a chapter devoted to the determination of longitude, Nathan-ael Carpenter offers one description of this situation in his 1625 Geographydelineated forth in two bookes:
You must get you a watch or clock, apt to run (if you can) 24 houres; this watchmust you, by the helpe of an Astrolabe, rectifie and set iust as such times as youdepart from the place you are, . . . your diligent care must be to preserue yourwatch in motion without intermission: being at last arriued at the place whereofyou inquire the longitude, you were best to stay until such times as the Indexshall precisely point out some perfect houre.27
Even if all the above criteria are met, Carpenter remains sceptical his methodwill succeed. He notes that, especially at sea, salt can quickly rust the watchmechanism, making it run ‘unequally’. He ends his chapter on a sombre note:‘If any certainty may bee this way, it must be by the helpe of the Automaton orperpetuall moueable, of whose inuention we may sooner despaire then offinding out this conclusion.’28 Carpenter’s words express more than the chal-lenges faced by those for whom the problem of longitude loomed large. Hiswords remind us that in an era in which clocks, whether private or communal,run at different rates and in which watches need to be wound throughout theday and reset constantly, clock-time rarely, if ever, attains the dangerousperfection represented by the cultural myths of the poisoner. Instead, clock-time remains palpable; it is clearly inaccurate, prone to error, and dependentupon the constant, physical intervention of the human hand.
25 Howell (ed.), ‘Trial of Carr’, 2:947.26 Howell (ed.), ‘Trial of Weston’, 2:947.27 Nathanael Carpenter, Geography delineated forth in two bookes Containing the sphaericall and topicall parts thereof
(London, 1625), 233.28 Ibid., 234.
Poison and the fantasy of temporal control 9
The interactions between bodies and timepieces suggest what we might,playfully, call a moment of horological cybernetics. The working, or running,mechanical watch exists only through the actions of its human component.Without the hand to wind and set, without the ear and eye to recalibrate andreposition, even the most sophisticated watch quickly becomes nothing morethan ornament. In one of his many quips against women, Love’s Labour’s Lost’s(1598) Berowne underscores the intimate and uncomfortable bond betweenthe telling of time and the technologies of time. ‘I seek a wife? –/ A womanthat is like a German clock,/ Still a-repairing, ever out frame,/ And nevergoing aright, being a watch/ But being watched that it may still go right’(3.1.174–78). On a semantic level, Berowne articulates the easy misogyny ofShakespeare’s England. On a poetic level, however, the chiasmus organizingBerowne’s jab creates a sense of marriage, or union, in which the dualismsof man/woman, watcher/watched, flesh/machine lose their distinctions.Berowne acknowledges that it is in the nature of a watch (and of women) tobe both ‘out of frame’ and within the frame of intense scrutiny. Only throughwatching does a watch become itself. Only through the constant regulation ofthe watch does the body arrive at a sense of time. If the body disappears, so toodoes Renaissance clock-time, and along with it goes any promised sense oftemporal regulation and control.
For Renaissance clock-watchers, however, the sense that ‘time is out ofjoint’29 or out-of synch, would have been the norm, although perhaps adisturbing one. That being out-of-synch could manifest as a problem for boththe virtuous and the villainous, that problems of time could hinder a mur-derer as easily as they could a lover or a geographer, illustrates the difficultiesfacing anyone in the Renaissance who sought temporal uniformity or whoyearned for a natural world in perfect alignment. When viewed in this way, thefailures of artful stage poisoners represent a heightened version of an everydayoccurrence. Having imbibed the cultural myths of poisoning, stage poisonersimagine themselves as in control of both time and their victims’ bodies, evenwhen they do not, in fact, have control. Their attempts to set their victims’bodies for death only draw attention to the divide between desires for tempo-ral control and the technological ability to realize such desires.
TELLING TIMES
By the end of the seventeenth century, advances in timekeeping such as thependulum and the hairspring had laid the groundwork for the great horo-logical achievements of the eighteenth century, including John Harrison’screation of the marine clock and his subsequent solution to the problem oflongitude. In a very real sense, Renaissance experiments with time and itstechnologies underpin our twenty-first century ideas of time marking and time
29 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.189.
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telling. For this reason, critics concerned with the emergence of modernityhave rightly seen clocks and watches as both signs of change and instigators ofit. Ricardo Quinones has argued that in the fourteenth century, clock tech-nologies and advances in the market economy transform older notions of‘abundant’, canonical time into a new, antagonistic model of time.30 This ‘war’with time, this ‘conquest’ in which hours are the prize, frames the regulationof daily life as a heroic, if tragic, enterprise through which individuals gain apowerful sense of identity.31 Picking up on Quinones’ sense of time as adver-sarial, Eric Brown argues that Renaissance writers take the classical doubletropes of ‘time-as-revealer’ and ‘time-as-devourer’ and modify them with a newsense of time as ‘an object of control, almost always debased or demoted fromits position as a force outside human influence’.32 For Brown and other critics,the violent subjugation of time presupposes control of the self and allowscontrol of others. According to Alfred Crosby, this shift occurs when time, asan ‘unsegmented flow’, becomes broken into regulated moments with theinvention of the escapement – the device allowing a clock’s regulator todescend or unwind at an even, measured rate through periodic halts inmotion. Once time falls into the regular patterns of tick and tock Crosbyargues, it becomes ‘domesticated’. Crosby, like Quinones and Brown, sees acost to this transformation, paid in the form of increasing anxiety regardingtime’s use.33 For these critics, our regret over the loss of a minute, or an hour,intensifies in the moment we are able to mark its passage precisely.
I would argue, however, that the adversarial relationship emphasized byrecent critics tends to obscure features of time central to Renaissance discus-sions of both poison and timekeeping. Even in their failures, the imaginativeattempts of horologists and poisoners suggest a desire to perceive time assomething that could be rendered mechanical and organic, rather than adesire to see time as an abstract and irresistible force encompassing humanityand shaping it. This desire arises out of and drives the technology of time inthe period, prompting increasingly sophisticated attempts to mark the rela-tionships between clock measurements, natural (or solar) time and bodilymechanisms.
In order to understand the problems facing Renaissance timekeepers,whether poisoners or otherwise, it is helpful to consider both the promisesoffered by horological technologies and just how frequently these promisesfell short. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries certainly did not see the
30 Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1972),3, 6–7.
31 Ibid., 3, 135–46.32 Eric C. Brown, ‘Violence, Ritual, and the Execution of Time in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’, Cahiers
Elisabéthains 58 (October 2000), 15–29.33 Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997), 80–81, 92.
Poison and the fantasy of temporal control 11
invention of mechanical timekeeping.34 Historians note the existence ofmassive mechanical clocks in St Paul’s Cathedral and Cambridge Cathedral asearly as the thirteenth century.35 Through first bells and later dials, theseclocks established temporal patterns for those who lived within sound or sightof their towers. As Julie Singer has recently argued, these temporal patternsshape not only the daily round of medieval life, but the imaginative landscapeof medieval allegory and representation.36 What is different, then, is the extentto which timepieces not only become more available, but also smaller, moreportable, or more exact.
From one angle, the proliferation and visibility of timekeeping devices inthe sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could suggest an emerging socialstructure of synchronism, a word first appearing in English in the late sixteenthcentury. With the help of an anonymous fifteenth-century writer, GerhardDohrn-van Rossum articulates just this possibility. Dohrn-van Rossum notesthat for this writer, ‘in cities and towns people ruled themselves by the clock.’37
The singularity of the ‘clock’ in this passage, however, also alerts us to astriking feature of early modern life, one that renders synchronism distinctlyproblematic. When clock becomes clocks, when the number of timekeepingdevices increases in a population, so too does the possibility for dispute overthe definition and meaning of the time being marked. As David Landes pointsout in Revolution in Time,
As long as there is only one time source, it does not have to be accurate; the houris what the source says it is. But multiply the signals, and the hour becomes amatter of dispute and a source of misunderstanding. There will always be peoplewho want to follow one signal rather than another.38
We need only consider the period’s iteration of the question ‘What’s a clock?’to see just how important the timepiece had become by the late sixteenthcentury, and just how uncertain its pronouncements.
‘What’s a clock?’ This question forms the basis of Shakespeare’s famousdiscussions of clocks and time in As You Like It (written circa 1599), Richard III(written circa 1591), and Henry IV, Part I (written no later than 1597). In theplay, The Puritaine (1607), this question, and the variety of its answers, promptsa brawl between soldiers.39 The actor and clown Robert Armin depicts thequestion itself as that of a fool in his short poem from 1600, ‘What’s a
34 Mechanical clocks differ from non-mechanical ones, such as the simple sundial, in their reliance on anescapement device along with weights or springs for power.
35 F. J. Britten, Former Clock and Watchmakers and Their Work (New York: Spon and Chamberlain, 1894), 6–11.36 Julie Singer, ‘Clockwork Genres: Temperance and the Articulated Text in Late Medieval France’, Exem-
plaria 21 (Fall 2009): 225–46.37 Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 1.38 David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, Revised and Enlarged Edition
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 76.39 W. S., The Puritaine or The widdovv of Watling-streete (London, 1607), D3r.
12 Miranda Wilson
clocke’.40 As I discuss below, Middleton’s Bianca also poses the question inorder to flaunt her lover’s, and by extension, her own power. While thequestion, ‘What’s o’clock?’ has obvious philosophical, social, and practicaldimensions, it also signals a problem with technology. As discussed above,English and Continental watchmakers could promise devices of beauty andwonder, but they could not promise accuracy.
In an important sense, the possession of timekeeping devices simplyattuned their owners to the difficulties, or impossibilities, of keeping time well.In his ‘Epilogue’ to the tragic version of Aglaura (1637), for instance, JohnSuckling notes the ways theatregoers adjust their personal assessments of artjust as they adjust their watches.
Our Play is done, and yours doth now begin:What different Fancies, people now are in? . . .But as when an authentique Watch is showne,Each man windes up, and rectifies his owne,So in our verie Judgements . . .41
Suckling here articulates a common notion; watches might be everywhere (atleast among the well off), but ownership of a watch could not guarantee amore accurate or valid sense of time for its owner. Watches exist in a socialframework even as they promise individual control. The ‘authentique’ watchis always held by someone else and one’s own sense of time’s passage needsconstant ‘rectification’. The imagined connections between poisoners andtimekeeping can thus be seen in two interconnected, but antagonistic, ways.As technically adept workers in the flesh, poisoners could be imagined as incontrol (or possession) of a secret, sinister, but ‘authentique watch’. Thecorporeality of this watch, however, would also militate strongly against thewatch’s self-sufficiency. If anything, the flesh-watch, as Berowne reminds us,requires more assiduous adjustment than the purely mechanical one. Inisolation, as a singularity without a referent against which it can be compared,the mechanical watch loses any claim to accuracy. Timepieces not only needthe human hand, they also need each other.
MISSING THE MOMENT
Renaissance timepieces are social. They also have an imperative to tell time,even as they fail to tell time accurately. These facts of Renaissance life can leadus to an expanded sense for the connections between poison and temporalityin the period. Marlowe’s Barabas may, as Brown argues, ‘bend . . . time as well
40 Robert Armin, ‘Whats a Clocke?’ Quips vpon Questions, or, A clownes conceite on occasion offered (London,1600), C3r.
41 John Suckling, ‘Epilogue’, Aglaura (London, 1638), 38.
Poison and the fantasy of temporal control 13
to his will, making it wait on him as he serves up his cold revenge’,42 but therelationship between Barabas and time also has elements far less coercive, farmore material, and, ultimately, far less satisfying for Barabas himself. WhereasBarabas’ potential victims ‘measure naught but by the present time’ (1.2.223),Barabas and other poisoners watch for the moment when ‘time may yield usan occasion/ Which on the sudden cannot serve the turn’ (242–43). In thissense, poisoners’ attention to the moment signals how they reshape therelationship between past and present, appearance and substance. HenryGoodcole describes, for instance, how poison allows murderers
modus posterior . . . by a secret intent to hide it [the crime] from God if it werepossible . . . or else to make a distance of time, either to excuse themselves, orflye away from the hands of Justice.43
The dream embedded in depictions of poison relies on an image of time asdistinctly conspiratorial and intimate, corporeal and malleable. As poisonersset and observe their secret bodily watches, time becomes more than anadversary, an abstract ideal, or even an experience. It becomes an accomplice.Renaissance legal documents commonly define accomplices as any partiesproved to be ‘ayders, abbetors, procurers and confessors’ of the deed.44 Inplays and pamphlets about poisoners, the only accomplice to be seen, themost powerful ‘ayder and abettor’ of the crime (beyond the always handySatan), is the quality of time itself. To put it in modern terms, poison and timework together to provide the murderer with opportunity, alibi and getaway car– at least theoretically.
As an abettor, however, time leaves quite a bit to be desired. Rather thanacting as a dependable ally of the poisoner, time often comes represented asan ironic player, acting a little too late or a little too aslant to help poisonersadvance their projects. Delay and inaccuracy plague even those for whompoison has proven effective in the past. For instance, when Barabas, theself-proclaimed expert in poisons and timing, relates to Ithamore his plan topoison Abigail and her sister nuns, he revels in the secrecy and violence of his‘precious powder’ whose effects will be to ‘envenom her/ That like a fiendhath left her father thus’ (3.4.68, 104–05). Yet, as the friars reveal whendiscussing the catastrophe at the convent, Abigail, the primary intendedvictim, is also among the last to die. Even worse for Barabas, her recognitionof her imminent death prompts her final confession and the revelation of herfather’s plots, thus giving the lie to Barabas’ notion of the perfect, andperfectly timed, poison. This pattern reoccurs later in the play when Barabasseeks to poison Ithamore, Pilla-Borza, and Bellamira. In the guise of a French
42 Brown, ‘Violence’, 23.43 Goodcole, Funerall Day, B3v.44 William Rastell, A Collection in English, of the Statutes in force, continued from the beginning of Magna Carta
(London, 1594), 171v.
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musician, Barabas presents the trio with a posy of poisoned flowers. Theseflowers, eventually, do the trick, but not before Bellamira and Ithamore havedenounced Barabas and detailed his crimes. Twice during this scene of rev-elation, Barabas, like Bianca of Women Beware Women, comments on the work-ings of his poison. In the first of these instances, he berates himself for usinga dosage too weak. ‘One dram of powder more had made all sure,/ What adamned slave was I!’ (5.1.22–23). As his situation grows more desperate,Barabas can only ‘hope the poisoned flowers will work anon’ (43). WhenIthamore, Bellamira, and Pilla-Borza finally expire, they, like Abigail, have saidfar too much to far too many.
The deaths of Abigail, Ithamore, Bellamira, and Pilla-Borza do, on onelevel, suggest poison’s power. On another level, however, these deaths alsounderscore the imprecision of this seemingly most precise of weapons. Stageexamples of ill-timed poisons find their corollaries in the confusion expressedby Carr and Howard. Artful poisoners, both real and imaginary, can find theirweapon a difficult one to control, their alibis unstable, and their ‘watches’plainly inaccurate. Part of the allure of poison resides in the promise it willwork to the poisoner’s final advantage. When it does not, when it insteadleaves a victim free to speak, free to act, and free to understand the approachof his or her end, one of the primary imagined virtues of the weapon remainsunrealized.
This volatile state of affairs leads us back to Middleton’s sordid Florence –a city inhabited by women for whom poison seems as natural a weapon asinnuendo. As Women Beware Women’s fourth act begins, we find Bianca and twocourt ladies discussing the time. In a few scenes, Bianca will determine topoison her adversary, the Cardinal. But at the moment, she is only a murderessin training, albeit one fully steeped in the corrupting practices of the court.She steps onstage with a question, ‘How goes your watches, ladies? What’so’clock now?’ (4.1.1). In the ensuing debate over the correct time (each of thewomen’s watches runs differently), the two Ladies suggest that their lovers’bodies, like proper clocks, help them set their own bodies (and watches)correctly. Using this analogy, Bianca trumps their temporal claims. ‘I set mineby the sun;/ I love to set by th’ best, one shall not then/ Be troubled to setoften’ (8–10). The high rank of her lover, the Duke, provides her body with anabsolute reference point for truth, just as she claims the sun provides her witha correct standard for time. Bianca has found Suckling’s ‘authentique watch.’
And yet, Bianca’s claims for a privileged position vis-à-vis time also remindus just how uncertain both her social and her temporal situation are. As anywatch-wearing member of the audience could attest, mechanical clocks andwatches promised to free men and women from reliance on the sun. Whetherat night, inside, or on the darkest of days, watches and clocks could mark thehours and their passing. By tying her watch to the older, and unequal, solarhour, Bianca magnifies its potential errors, even as she attempts to make itexpress the true time. Her physical reliance on the sun’s political counterpart,
Poison and the fantasy of temporal control 15
the Duke, proves equally suspect. In Middleton’s play, as in other Renaissanceworks, fleshy vicissitudes find their corollaries in horological ones. Even thesun cannot be relied upon to generate the proper time; even the mostpowerful of bodies cannot be regarded as orderly and true. Like Middleton’sother Duke in Revenger’s Tragedy, Bianca’s Duke is old in years, and yet his ‘sinsare green’ (Revenger’s Tragedy 2.3.130). He cannot, in the end, protect Biancafrom public censure or save her from herself.
In the logic of the play, and in the logic of the period, Bianca’s equationof sun, bodies, and watches also speaks to the problem of keeping time well.‘If I should set my watch, as some girls do/ By ev’ry clock i’th’town, ’twouldnev’r go true;/ And with too much turning of the dial’s point,/ Or tamper-ing with the spring, might in small time/ Spoil the whole work, too’ (4.1.11–15). Promiscuous though she is, Bianca still claims a sort of synecdotalchastity through her watch. They have both been ‘turned’, but not, sheinsists, turned ‘too much’. For Bianca, the important question becomes notwhether her body, like her watch, needs the intervention of another’s handin order to go true, but rather at what point the necessary interventionbecomes destructive. It seems a short step from this image of her own bodyas delicate watch to her reconstitution of the Cardinal as a body to be set byher hand for death. Revelling in her plot, Bianca says, ‘Cardinal, you dietonight . . . / For he that’s most religious, holy friend,/ Does not at all timesthink upon his end;/ He has his times of frailty, and his thoughts/ Theirtransportations too, through flesh and blood’ (5.1.58–64). Echoing Marloweand so many others, Middleton here offers the Cardinal as unknowing time-piece. While the Cardinal may forget the ways time works through his body,Bianca looks for the proper moment to ‘turn’ his body for death. Her finalinability to do so signals more than the problems posed by too-intricateplots. It underscores how the complicity between machines and flesh resultsin irregularity for both. Clock-time does indeed exist in Middleton’s Flo-rence, and men and women do have their ‘times of frailty’, however, timealso manifests as a multiplicity rather than a singularity. The question‘What’s a clock?’ will always generate more than one answer.
From the sixteenth through the mid seventeenth centuries, horologic tech-nologies might suggest or hint at uniform and transparent clock-time, butthese same technologies necessitate in their users an awareness of just howmalleable, physical, and irregular the practices of telling time are. As tech-nologies of telling time advanced in the latter part of the seventeenth century,as inventions like the hairspring, the anchor escapement, and the marinechronometer moved English society toward a more regularized notion ofuniversal time, the physical connotations of clock-time receded. During thelatter part of the seventeenth century, the growing regularity of timepiecetechnology also made clocks and watches increasingly attractive symbols of abenevolent, mechanically inclined deity. Robert Hooke, inventor of the hair-spring and the anchor escapement, gives hints in Micrographia (1665) of the
16 Miranda Wilson
watchmaker God in his discussion of the brush-horned gnat.45 In 1715,William Derham gives a fully articulated version of the image in Astro-theology.46
But in the sixteenth and for much of the seventeenth century, clocks andwatches serve a far more earthly symbolic function. As objects of wonder, asdevices requiring constant attention, as objects of frailty and uncertainty, theypoint to the mutability of the human rather than the perfection of the divine.And it is perhaps this, finally, which makes sense of the connections betweenpoisoners and clock-time. Poisoners in dramas and pamphlets, in court casesand poetry, remind us that the powerful Renaissance dream of perfect clock-time existed within and through the uncertain medium of the material world.
University of Delaware
45 Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or Some Minute Bodies Made By Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiriesthereupon (London, 1665), 193–4.
46 William Derham, Astro-theology: or, a demonstration of the being and attributes of God, from a survey of the heavens.Illustrated with copper-plates (London, 1715), 117–8.
Poison and the fantasy of temporal control 17
Abstract
miranda wilson, Watching flesh: poison and the fantasy of temporal control in Renais-sance England
During the Renaissance, English writers often depict poison as a weapon capable oftransforming a victim’s body into a timepiece, with death predictable to the year,month, day, and hour. English literary works, especially dramatic ones, however,contain numerous instances of poisons that fail to act precisely, or to act as intended.These failures serve as a useful departure point for exploring Renaissance ideas ofclock-time. The dream of temporal control represented by poison promises an align-ment between timepieces and bodies. When poisons fail to create this promisedsynchronicity, they reveal both the interdependence of bodies and horological devicesand the difficulties in regulating either one.
Keywords: poison; revenge tragedy; time technologies
