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Affecting Grace Theatre Subject and the Shakespearean
Paradox in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist 1st
Edition Kenneth S. Calhoon Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Kenneth S. Calhoon
ISBN(s): 9781442645998, 1442645997
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 3.18 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
 AFFECTING GRACE

Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox

in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist
GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES

General Editor: Rebecca Wittmann

 KENNETH S. CALHOON

Affecting Grace
Theatre, Subject, and the
Shakespearean Paradox in German
Literature from Lessing to Kleist

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
 © University of Toronto Press 2013
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-4426-4599-8 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper

with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Calhoon, Kenneth Scott, 1956–

Affecting grace : theatre, subject, and the Shakespearean paradox in
German literature from Lessing to Kleist / Kenneth S. Calhoon.
(German and European studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4599-8

1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Influence. 2. German

literature—English influences. 3. German literature—18th century—History
and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: German and European studies

PT313.C34 2013 830.9'006 C2012-908156-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the

Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund
for its publishing activities.
for Helmut Schneider
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3

1 Mercy and the Spirit of Commerce: Shylock’s Shadow

in the Age of Disinterest 26

2 Judging Adam: Theatre and the Fall into History 44

3 The Virtue of Things: Meissen Porcelain

and the Classical Object 65
4 Poison and the Language of Praise: From Hamlet
to Miss Sara Sampson 86

5 Architectural Fantasies: Bellotto in Dresden,

Goethe in Strasbourg 111
6 Sovereign Innocence: Schiller’s “Walk”
and the Naive Spectator 146

7 Caught in the Act: The Comedic Miscarriage

of Kleist’s Broken Jug 178

Epilogue 217

Notes 223
Bibliography 257
Index 271
This page intentionally left blank
 Illustrations

1 Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), Gala Concert in Honour of Princess

Maria Fedorowna in Venice (1782) 27
2 Johann-Joachim Kaendler (1706–1775), Dancer and Comic Actor with
Lute (1738) 66
3 Peter Reinicke (1711–1768), The Savoyard Beggar (ca. 1755) 85
4 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), Architectural Capriccio with a
Self-Portrait in the Costume of a Venetian Nobleman (1765–66) 115
5 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The New Market of Dresden Seen from
the Jüdenhof (ca. 1749) 117
6 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), Dresden from the Right Bank of the
Elbe above the Augustus Bridge (1747) 119
7 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The Boatmen’s Village at Pirna
(1753–55) 122
8 Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780), The Ruins of the Kreuzkirche in
Dresden (1765) 126
9 Adolph Menzel (1815–1905), Crown Prince Friedrich Pays a Visit to
the Painter Pesne on His Scaffold at Rheinsberg (1861) 134
10 Palace Gardens at Schwetzingen, “The End of the World” 150
11 Carl Blechen (1798–1840), The Construction of the Devil’s Bridge
(ca. 1830–32) 175
12 Jean-Jacques Le Veau (1729–1785), Le juge, ou la cruche cassée
(1782) 204
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for afford-

ing me several intervals of time for sustained reflection and writing.
I am likewise grateful to the University of Oregon for furnishing a hu-
mane environment and a healthy supply of supportive and stimulating
colleagues and students. Among these, the following deserve special
mention for their active and enduring interest in my work: Michael
Allan, Lisa Freinkel, Linda Kintz, Martin Klebes, Lesli Larson, Jeffrey
Librett, Enrique Lima, Massimo Lollini, F. Regina Psaki, Forest Pyle,
Moshe Rachmuth, Jamie Richards, George Rowe, Benjamin Saun-
ders and Sherwin Simmons. I have had the benefit of many friends
abroad as well, who have advised, suggested, and inspired: Richard
Block, Timothy Brennan, Peter Burgard, Gabriele Dürbeck, Keya Gan-
guly, Wolf Kittler, Martina Kolb, Thomas Pfau, Brigitte Prutti, Ashish
Roy, Thomas Schestag, Stephan Schindler, Wolf Sohlich, Carsten
Strathausen, David Wellbery, Deborah Elise White, and David Years-
ley. I thank my “Bonn faction” – Isolde Grabenmeyer, Claude Haas,
Olaf Kriszio, and Nils Reschke – for providing me with a cherished
home away from home. I gratefully remember Peter Pütz, for his
kindness and humour; Jörg Drews, for his critical energy and verbal
imagination; Murray Krieger, for encouraging me at a crucial stage in
my studies; and Bianca Theisen, whose premature passing still defies
credence. I thank Bob Hullot-Kentor for his years of friendship and
specifically for urging me, every once in a while, to “let a sentence slip
past without two turns and a twist.” I owe a life’s worth of gratitude
to Cristina Calhoon for her perseverance and for putting the Classical
world at my fingertips. Thanks to Carmen Hayes, my mother, who at
eighty-five proofreads my work as carefully (and caringly) as she did
xii Affecting Grace

when I was a youngster. Thanks to those at the University of Toronto

Press who have supported this project and assisted in preparation of
the final manuscript: Richard Ratzlaff, Frances Mundy, and Matthew
Kudelka. Finally, I dedicate this book to Helmut Schneider, friend and
mentor of three decades. His manner of gleaning philosophical history
from scenic miniatures remains my guiding ideal.
 AFFECTING GRACE

Theatre, Subject, and the Shakespearean Paradox

in German Literature from Lessing to Kleist
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

But since that I

Must die at last, ’tis best
To use myself in jest
Thus by feign’d deaths to die.
John Donne, “Song”1

Theatre and subject are virtual opposites, the latter (in its modern sense)
being a function of the ego, which arises in the interest of concealing a
division within the self. A psychological formation, the subject has its
aesthetic equivalent in the classical object, the plastic fulness of which
works to counteract that division. The antonym of the classical object
is a theatre predicated on the split between the self, which hides from
view, and that which steps readily into the light but is self-consciously
inauthentic. The theatre of Shakespeare is occupied throughout with
the mechanisms of self-presentation and with the dependence of the
self on presentation. A particular embodiment of this dependence is the
king, who draws his authority from an image cultivated for the pur-
pose of dazzling his public and cowing his adversaries. The source of
his power is a projected majesty that obliterates the fault that otherwise
stands between the subject and his sovereign grandeur. Shakespeare’s
Prince Hal – the eventual Henry V – pursues an avowed strategy de-
signed to eclipse the body natural and with it the corrupt legacy of the
Biblical Adam. Yet the “grace” that would send that legacy into remis-
sion is still embroiled in the machinery of Hal’s political theatre – a
baroque game of calculated contrasts. His staged emergence is a far cry
from the modern ideal of a performer who disappears naturally into
4 Affecting Grace

his role. Unreflected ease is part of a classical standard whose restora-

tion towards the end of the eighteenth century accompanies the sover-
eign’s decline. Grace separates out from the scenario involving, in the
extreme, tyrant and supplicant. Distinct from “mercy,” it becomes the
trait of an individual outwardly unencumbered by the ancient breach
that left the body an impediment to the soul. Innocence, which on the
stage takes the form of a practised oblivion where the presence of spec-
tators is concerned, masks a rift within a subject intent on effacing the-
atricality, which is no less inexorable than guilt. The tension between
theatre and subject is ingrained within the modern individual who,
in being subordinate to the sovereign he has effectively absorbed, is
splayed between the contrary senses of the English “subject.”
“Grace,” which names the state prior to the expulsion from Eden,
suspends the fallen condition that, in Hobbesian thought, necessitates
sovereign rule. In distinguishing between the subject of the king and
the subject of conscience, Hobbes carved out a space for the mod-
ern individual who, isolated within himself, takes possession of his
own guilt. The dualism of public and private, which is sustained within
the individual who is beholden at once (politically) to the monarch
and (privately) to his moral convictions, corresponds to a vital schism
within Shakespeare’s works, in which characters divide between out-
ward display and clandestine, at times self-castigating introversion.
This division parallels that between two competing modes of dramatic
practice: On the one hand, there is the popular theatre, which delights
in the trappings of festive and folk ceremony and ritual, in which roles
and types trump personal complexity or depth. On the other, there is
the more modern tradition, formalized by Diderot, in which a credible
illusion on the stage was tied to the self-sufficiency of psychologically
differentiated characters – an autonomy of performance fortified by
a feigned unawareness of the audience. Those behind Shakespeare’s
increasingly favourable reception during and after the Enlightenment
overlooked the manifestly theatrical aspects of his work, which could
even include direct appeals to the spectator. The one-sided emphasis
on the believability of his characters and their actions served to mask
the inherent theatricality of the modern subject, whose awakening his
plays document. When Hamlet is overheard overhearing Claudius’s
midnight confession – the effect of a play (within a play) designed to
“catch the conscience of the King” (Hamlet 2.2.94)2 – the pointed in-
dividuation of the monarch’s guilt is symmetrical with the hushed
proximity of the eavesdropping prince. Spectators recede and grow
 Introduction 5

superfluous as introspection intensifies; the modern person bears the

source of judgment within himself. The performer’s crafted innocence
of his audience is an affected grace – a means of counteracting the visual
exposure that is both the state of man and the condition of the theatre.
The structural paranoia of the subject, bedevilled by the sense of
being secretly observed, is offset by the image of the child, whose charm
lies in its genuine insouciance of the adoring gaze of others. The Rous-
seauean “discovery” of childhood ushered in a generation of aesthetic
notions thought to approximate the undivided self. Schiller’s das Naive
is a signature example. Schiller was clear that expressions or actions
deemed “naive” were not truly innocent but instead enabled virtue,
which is born of the will, to be apprehended spontaneously. Schiller
defined grace (Anmut) as a naturalized morality expressed as a beauty –
fleetingly glimpsed – of physical movement. The semantic reach of
“grace,” which refers to acts of clemency as well as to a state of divine
forgiveness, frames the antithetical character of Schiller’s Kantian, neo-
classical counterpart, which annuls the subjugation that is intrinsic to
the bestowal of gifts from above, whether by god or king. Anmut is an
aesthetic cognate of an autonomy grounded in the dissolution of the
Baroque tension between interior and façade. The sight of human limbs
turning and bending gracefully, their movements unbroken by indeci-
sion, supplies the beholder with a surrogate perfection – a corrective
to the disaggregation wrought by original sin. In giving visible form
to the absence of coercion, grace abates the post-Edenic condition that
situates the subject firmly and squarely before the law.
Scenes in which individuals plead or perform before a king or judge
furnish the present study with much of its material. The most funda-
mental of these is the courtroom episode in Shakespeare’s Merchant of
Venice, in which Shylock, the Jewish usurer, comes to claim his con-
tracted pound of flesh from Antonio. The bloody end, which Antonio
merely beseeches the court to hasten, is interdicted by the fair Portia,
who enters the proceedings disguised as a learned jurist. She intervenes
at the behest of Antonio’s friend Bassanio, to whom she is newly wed
but who is not privy to her disguise. Unrecognized by all but the audi-
ence, she bears secret witness to the mutual love the two men openly
display. While her advocacy for Antonio is thus slowed by a certain
reluctance, the final effect of her manoeuvres is to replace Antonio with
Shylock, installing the once brazen claimant as defeated supplicant –
relieved of his wealth and required to convert – before the presiding
Duke. This tableau of abject abasement, replete with baroque contrasts
6 Affecting Grace

and haunted by the spectre of sacrifice, restores coercion to the fore

while projecting grace onto the noble personage who is also grace’s
namesake.3
Comparable “trials” in Shakespeare include the scene in which King
Harry condemns three would-be assassins to a lingering death, as well
as that in which an aging Lear, preparing to abdicate, extorts profes-
sions of love from his three daughters. The triadic symmetry of these
two scenes is mirrored in The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia’s hand
in marriage is left to a lottery of three chests – “caskets” encased, re-
spectively, in gold, silver, and lead. The alchemy of Bassanio’s fortu-
itous selection, by which he brings the hidden virtue of lead to light,
is revived in the most emblematic text of the German Enlightenment,
the “Parable of the Ring” from Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (Nathan the
Wise [1779]): Nathan, a wealthy and sagacious Jew living in Jerusalem
during the Crusades, is summoned by Saladin, the reigning Sultan, and
pressed to pronounce which of the three Mosaic religions is the “true
faith.” Fearing for his life, the merchant evades the question by tell-
ing the story of three indistinguishable rings, two of them perfect cop-
ies of an ancient original, which was invested with the “secret power”
(geheime Kraft) to exalt whomever wore it. In the presence of a despot,
the trembling Nathan enunciates the arcanum that, under Absolutism,
served as the cloak of an incipient bourgeois emancipation. By the time
his tale is told, Nathan has become a creditor of the state, which can
also be said of Shylock, though in the case of Shakespeare’s notorious
usurer it is a matter of wealth being seized, not offered.
Nor is Shylock an eager convert. The proceeding he instigates and
to which he falls prey re-establishes the fallen state that makes of sheer
subjugation a necessity. The “mercy” he is finally shown is but an-
other face of authority and can easily revert to its opposite. Shylock’s
conversion, in being compelled, is a sign of the condition that true
mercy would transform. The alchemical aim of converting base metals
into gold was part of a more comprehensive dream that included the
chiliastic vision of a paradise on earth. The Enlightenment adopted this
vision and with it the brand of hermeticism common to the puzzle of
the caskets and the parable of the rings. Lessing’s play is a rich example
of the German engagement with Shakespeare, and not only because
of the dissimilarities that reveal Nathan as Shylock’s specific nega-
tion. The parallel between the three caskets and Lear’s three daughters
further points to King Lear as a covert force behind Nathan’s parable,
which like Shakespeare’s tragedy contends with the consequences
 Introduction 7

of abdication. The demise of sovereign rule looms over a setting that

places the wise Jew before a dangerous oligarch. That Nathan’s subject-
hood is of the modern variety is clarified over the course of his hearing,
which suspends the hierarchy that the trial in The Merchant of Venice
forcefully reinstates. That “secret power,” of which he is the mouth-
piece is ultimately the power of ethical self-transformation. Couching
his message in the elusive form of a parable, Nathan demonstrates the
mystifying practices used by the ascendant merchant class in order to
shield itself from the Absolutist state.
The Enlightenment’s contradictory employment of the occultism it
would seem to oppose is related to the paradox on which this study
turns – namely, that the German literary world had begun to embrace
Shakespeare just as it was firming up the broad but pronounced anti-
Baroque sensibility found, pivotally, in Lessing’s critical and dramatic
works. It is Lessing’s considerable authority that Walter Benjamin cred-
its with the cloud that has long hung over the Baroque Trauerspiel.4 Ben-
jamin cites the first two instalments of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie,
in which Lessing reviews a “martyr drama” recently adapted from
Tasso for the German stage. Lessing faults the unfledged attempt for,
among other things, the heroine’s improbable conversion to Christi-
anity, asserting that the “effects of grace” (“Wirkungen der Gnade”)
were incompatible with the requirement that decisions and reversals
proceed naturally from an internally coherent character.5 An Aristo-
telian standard is enlisted against the Lutheran conception of divine
grace as, in practice, deus ex machina. Hamlet, late of Wittenberg, his
taedium vitae aligning him with the Northern Baroque, would be judged
un-tragic because of the “drastic externality” (“vehemente Äusserlich-
keit”) of his death: stung by Laertes’ poisoned rapier, he falls victim
not to destiny but to an “accident” that he himself orchestrates.6 The
deviser of the “mousetrap” is also the impresario of his own death. In
the end, his body is placed upon a “stage” as testimony to “deaths put
on by . . . forced cause” (Hamlet 5.2.366). Benjamin remarks on Gryphius’
translation of ex machina as “aus dem gerüste” (Gerüst meaning “scaf-
fold”).7 The tradesman-like vernacular accentuates the materiality of
the wooden platform that, in Hamlet, serves both as stage and as gibbet,
the displayed corpse an omen of the consequences of shaky craft (“lest
more mischance / On plots and errors happen” [377–8]).
This crowning exhibit of unredeemed carnage inverts the penul-
timate scene of 1 Henry IV when Falstaff is resurrected from a death
he is merely playing at. Having feigned death in order to avoid it, he
8 Affecting Grace

“riseth up” after Hal, who believes him dead, invokes the eviscera-
tion that precedes embalming (“Emboweled will I see thee by and
by” [5.4.108]). The prince’s words resound in solemn contrast to the
many colourful barbs with which, in lighter moments, he empha-
sizes Falstaff’s “stuffing” (“that roasted . . . ox with the pudding in
his belly” [2.4.437–8]).8 Falstaff’s aborted “mimesis unto death” – to
adopt a phrase from the Frankfurt School – is more in keeping with the
newfound asceticism of the heir apparent. That Falstaff is repeatedly
portrayed as a skin packed with “guts” marks him as a deindividu-
ated, comic persona who encompasses humanity at large, much as his
self-equation with “all the world” (2.4.464) casts him as the stage per
se.9 Standing for Adam, he likewise embodies guilt and is as such the
potential object of judicial or ritual disembowelment. When pressed to
explain himself after a bungled robbery, Falstaff protests that he would
not yield up his “reasons” even “on compulsion” – not if stretched on
“all the racks of the world” (2.4.227–31). Confessions, like conversions,
may be the products of “forced cause.” The defiant Falstaff anticipates
Shylock, whose near butchery of Antonio effectively rejoins the ques-
tion he addresses to Portia upon her insistence that he be merciful: “On
what compulsion must I?” (The Merchant of Venice 4.1.181). Shylock
risks the fate that Antonio has narrowly avoided. His forced conver-
sion to Christianity makes a mockery of Portia’s signature declaration:
“The quality of mercy is not strained” (182).
With a focus on German literature and thought during the eigh-
teenth century and beyond, Affecting Grace examines the afterlife of the
argument that Portia uses to stall the baroque momentum of the trial
scene in The Merchant of Venice. Lessing’s claim that the effects of divine
love could not be credibly translated into dramatic action attests to the
persistent entanglement in the sacred of an aesthetics that eschewed
anything mechanical, calculated, strained. The antonym of compulsion,
grace recovers its secular flavour through recourse to an updated an-
tiquity. Portia’s formula prepares the way for the reinscription of mercy
as grace, which, no longer bestowed from above, re-emerges (in its neo-
classical guise) as an attribute of a subject whose autonomy is marked
by the absence of apparent effort. A semblance of unconscious ease is
the negation of theatre and of an exposure that is both theatrical and
financial. The explicit mercantilism of Shakespeare’s comedy reveals
the material cognate of the moral debt that grace absolves. The mercy
that Portia likens to “gentle rain” (4.1.183) has its conceptual echo in
Kantian “disinterest,” of which Shylock, as a collector of interest, is the
 Introduction 9

literal counter-embodiment. Beauty, the object of disinterested contem-

plation, is possessed of the fulness in which the beholder may glimpse
the possibility of unfragmented selfhood. Invulnerable in the presence
of the beautiful object, the subject is returned to a gentle state. Devoid
of lack or greed, of guilt or constraint, that world is a paradise where,
in the words of Jean Starobinski, “everything is given over to a freedom
that is only free to do good.”10
The unusual terms of Shylock’s contract with Antonio pose the pri-
meval synonymy of payment and pain in which Nietzsche locates the
genesis of modern morality. Shylock consents to convert, in fact, on
pain of death. Conversion entails assimilation – an acquiescence to the
pressures of one’s milieu not dissimilar from an organism’s imitation of
its immediate surroundings. Such natural mimicry constitutes a dimin-
ished vitality akin to the asceticism that, in the Shakespearean context,
is the fruit of Falstaff’s sacrifice. Falstaff’s physicality, along with the
humble settings in which his creatural immanence is shown, is part of
what Erich Auerbach calls the “polyphonic cosmic coherence” (“viel-
stimmiger Weltzusammenhang”) of Renaissance drama, which, instead
of “isolated blows of fate,” presents “this-worldly entanglements” (“in-
nerweltliche Verstrickungen”) through which, as in Dante, even the
spirits of the dead are enveloped by given historical circumstances.11
This is part of the realistic impulse that culminates in the nineteenth-
century French novel and particularly in Flaubert, whose characters are
not types or personae but individuals as specific as the milieux that pro-
duce them. An “objective seriousness,” having displaced any vestige
of “choral” mediation, quietly informs the sombre destinies of these
individuals “but without itself becoming moved [ohne doch selbst in Er-
regung zu geraten], or at least without betraying that it is moved.”12 Nar-
rative consciousness now resembles the clinical attitude characterized
by Foucault as “mute and without gesture” (“muet et sans geste”).13
The physical stillness implied in these formulations points to the
link between the “feigned death” of natural mimicry and the tableau
vivant, to which dramatic practices in the age of Diderot and Lessing
were themselves beginning to assimilate. Nathan the Wise concludes
with a scene that is explicitly mute (stumm). The silence that finally
befalls Lessing’s “Play in Five Acts” is prototypical of a new drama
characterized by the same effacement of theatrical self-awareness sug-
gested by Auerbach’s phrasing (“without betraying that it is moved”).
And while Lessing’s plays help inaugurate the diminished co-presence
of performer and spectator that defines modern stage practices, they
10 Affecting Grace

also express an overt and thoroughgoing concern with dissemblance

(Verstellung), which is typically associated with the studied duplicity of
the courtier. Auerbach notably equates Goethe’s pervasively influential
aristocratism with a lack of attunement to vital historical currents, and
it is worth adding that what Auerbach refers to as Goethe’s abhorrence
of “formless ferment” is amplified by Nietzsche, who indicts the popu-
list rancour of the French Revolution – and of the Reformation before
it – for causing the collapse of “the last political nobleness [Vornehm-
heit] Europe had known, that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
France.”14
Nietzsche and Auerbach’s respective genealogies hinge on tensions
between the Biblical and classical legacies – between Israel and Rome,
to cite the provocative schema by which Nietzsche implicates the Ref-
ormation as the source of the revitalized popular instincts that, during
the Revolution, defeated the values of antiquity once and for all. Auer-
bach emphasizes the vital materialism that pervades Shakespeare and
praises in him the very qualities that offended the precepts of French
Classicism (and its German adherents): a mixture of high and low
styles, a co-mingling of the classes, the use of common diction, an inat-
tention to the “unities,” and an engagement, even in the most serious
plays, with “the everyday processes of life.”15 In his status as pariah,
Shylock uniquely personifies this general disregard for boundaries,
and Auerbach notes in him a combination of grotesqueness and tragic
complication. He insists, however, that tragic interpretations of Shy-
lock are “at odds with the economy of the play as a whole,” in which
“fairy-tale sport and amorous dalliance” (“Märchen- und Liebesspiel”)
resume in the wake of the villain’s defeat.16
This inkling of the Rococo helps isolate what is historically prophetic
about Shylock’s revolt against the extravagance of Portia’s Belmont.
Yet the comic resolution of Shakespeare’s play comes not despite the
genuinely tragic potential of Shylock’s suit before the court of Venice.
Benjamin devotes an important passage to the way in which ancient
tragedy is absorbed by the image of the trial and inherits a conciliatory
aspect from it. He follows Jacob Burckhardt’s claim that the purpose of
the trial in Athenian society was not to punish the guilty “but to prevail
upon the injured party to renounce vengeance” – something altogether
commensurate with the pressure placed upon Shylock from the start
(“We all expect a gentle answer, Jew” [4.1.34]). Benjamin points out that
the trial in antiquity had a “chorus,” composed partly of “the array of
comrades of the accused begging the court for mercy.” This too has its
 Introduction 11

application for The Merchant of Venice, as does Benjamin’s assertion that

the “characteristic feature of Athenian law” was to oppose “the persua-
sive power of living speech” to the agon of “factions [Sippen] battling
each other with weapons or prescribed verbal forms.”17 The law, such
as it is, prevails over the knife brandished by Shylock at a proceed-
ing that brings Antonio to the brink of martyrdom. Shylock’s heroic
defiance has its counterpart in Antonio’s saintly resignation. The bond
between them is the mark of an affinity by which Shakespeare’s play, in
the space of the trial scene, deduces modern tragedy from its classical
forebear. Benjamin, invoking the Trauerspiel as the synonym of modern
tragedy, cites Franz Rosenzweig on this count: “Die Heiligentragödie
ist die geheime Sehnsucht des Tragikers” (“The tragedy of the saint is
the secret longing of the tragedian”).18
Key to Benjamin’s analysis is the manner in which the trial-as-drama
is cleansed of the violence of the ordeal. Antonio, whose sainthood is
no more in keeping with the comic outcome than is Shylock’s righteous
severity, is spared the test of pain that is the mainstay of the Trauerspiel.
Such ordeals are touched on in Henry V, which begins with a nod to the
parallel between theatre and courtroom: the Chorus – a stage-manager
of sorts – appears before the assembled spectators and beseeches them
to render an equivalent of the “gentle answer” required of Shylock. His
purpose is to prepare the audience for the “imperfections” both of the
stage, deemed an “unworthy scaffold,” and of the “flat, unraisèd spir-
its” who dare impersonate kings and princes (Henry V Pro. 9–10, 23).
The “all the world” that is tantamount to a stage is a fallen one. Theatre
is the explicit consequence of the expulsion from Eden, the performer’s
exposure being like that of Adam before God. Attempts during and
after the Enlightenment to “de-theatricalize” performance represent
an adaptation to this given-to-be-seen. The direct audience-address of
the Prologue to Henry V is but one obvious example of the theatrical
self-consciousness that modern dramaturgy works to dismantle. The
theatre after Diderot and Lessing is one in which the performer seeks
to disarm or neutralize the gaze by pretending innocence of it – by af-
fecting grace. Like natural mimicry, in which the organism is absorbed
by (and disappears into) all that surrounds it, performance on stage
becomes, to use Lacan’s formulation, a means of defending against the
light.19
My interest in Lacan is not narrowly psychoanalytic but is informed
by a general sense of the theatrical, indeed, Shakespearean echo in his
analysis of a subject who – as the subject of guilt – imagines himself the
12 Affecting Grace

object of the all-seeing aspect of the world. Kleist’s story of a beautiful

youth in a bath derives the birth of theatre from the loss of innocence:
the boy’s attempts to affect grace before a mirror – to emulate a famous
Greco-Roman figure in bronze – quickly devolve into a corporeal inco-
herence described as mechanical and comic. The anecdote reveals at a
glance what the classical object is meant to uphold; its contrary is the
kind of gestural deliberation that Brecht was later to advocate in terms
of limbs that signify. Baroque painting, in which an outstretched hand
or averted countenance is brightly illuminated, gives formal expres-
sion to the idea that gestures, which are defensive almost by definition,
expose the subject to the light they aim to deflect. The better strategy is
the pretence of not being seen, which is the conceit of serious theatre
as it developed during and after the eighteenth century. The statuette
in Kleist’s tale – a boy ensconced in the act of removing a thorn from
his foot – negates theatricality, just as the classical ideal it represents
stands opposite the somatic exuberance embodied by Falstaff.
German literature’s most Falstaffian character, an endearingly corrupt
village judge named Adam, takes the stage in Kleist’s peerless comedy
of 1806, The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochne Krug). A ceramic vessel adorned
with a festive scene of feudal patrilineage, the titular “crock” is heir to
the venerated artefacts of antiquity. Its description before the court is
ekphrastic both aesthetically and forensically, its now shattered beauty
a clue to the scuffle that has resulted in its destruction. The broken rem-
nants retain vestigial images of human figures, whose arms and legs
may, in their truncation, be described as “limbs that signify.” The peasant
woman who has brought the jug to court exhibits a peculiar visual liter-
acy when she points out attitudes and gestures of lamentation that seem
to respond to the object’s breakage. Little does she suspect the judge
himself of being the culprit, yet his guilt is gradually disclosed over the
course of the hearing he reluctantly conducts. The jug’s catastrophic
plunge from a windowsill is thus implicated in the Fall from Grace, by
means of which the judge is linked to his Biblical namesake as well as to
Falstaff, who alerts Hal to the vulnerability that is Adam’s legacy: “Thou
knowest in the state of innocency Adam fell, and what should poor Jack
Falstaff do in the days of villainy? Thou seest I have more flesh than
another man, and therefore more frailty” (1 Henry IV 3.3.164–8). Via the
plaintiff in Kleist’s comedy, Shylock is reborn as Falstaff’s accuser. Frau
Marthe resembles Shylock in both her literalness and her ferocity, and
while she describes the broken jug as if it were Achilles’ own shield,20
she angrily wields its shards rather like clay tablets. Shylock’s craving
for the law is no less her craving. The jug’s irreparability stands opposite
 Introduction 13

the reparation to which neither petitioner is amenable, much as the jus-

tice they demand excludes the sort of symbolic substitution that Portia
names in comparing herself to the tribute that Troy offered to the sea
monster: “I stand for sacrifice” (The Merchant of Venice 3.2.57).
Kleist’s play, while richly supplied with sacrificial motifs, resolves
into a plot of probation more consistent with the utopian vision of the
age. In a recent book on the Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo, Ro-
berto Calasso observes that the eighteenth century, though un-tragic to
its core, “surrounded itself – in music, in the theater, in painting – with
portrayals of that which lies at the roots of tragedy: sacrifice.”21 The
abiding interest in this Classical as well as Biblical theme may represent
a latent force waiting to resurface, but the stock treatment of Iphige-
nia, for example, reflects what sacrifice had become: “a chance for an
aria,” an operatic spectacle instead of “the source of all actions.”22 Ca-
lasso’s claim that Tiepolo, estranged from high dramatic suffering, felt
a devotion “only to. . . . all those intermediate and mediating creatures
entrusted with the psychic circulation between heaven and earth,”23
aligns the great painter with Mozart, whose Papageno (of The Magic
Flute) is of a piece with Tiepolo’s beloved satyrs. These figures embody
the prelapsarian unity characteristic of Mozart’s personae generally,
their inner lives fully exteriorized through song. Ivan Nagel has argued
that mercy (Gnade) was Mozart’s “guiding obsession,” thus the opera
buffa became the framework in which grace, dislodged from Baroque
hierarchies, was recast as the harmony of inside and out: “At the same
instant that he rejected gods and princes, he dared to preserve mercy
as the earliest promise of opera, to rescue its rescuing power.”24 This
promise echoes from within comedic characters whose undivided self-
hood points to the better world rehearsed in Eden. A stranger among
these figures is the Guest of Stone in Don Giovanni, the agent of cos-
mic vengeance in whom “the old genre with lofty terror irrupts into
the world of the new.”25 This helps explain Shylock, who is himself
described as a “stony adversary” (4.1.4) and whose essentially tragic
role stems from his exclusion from an economy of just deserts – from
a nexus of transparent social relations in which the merchant, citing
Nagel, “strives to protect his earnings from the depredations of nature
and the ruling class.”26 He is as alien to bourgeois society as Mozart’s
uom di sasso is to the world of comedy. The act of clemency, which Portia
urges on the court, consigns Shylock to the order of Absolutism by fix-
ing his identity as that of conspirator.
The trial scene of The Merchant of Venice consolidates a social bound-
ary even as the play as a whole participates in its dissolution. The very
14 Affecting Grace

law that Shylock invokes binds him to the rigid hierarchies of yore.
His conviction is ostensibly tempered by his conversion to Christian-
ity, though this conversion, in being compelled, bears the seal of the
machination that, already in Aristotle, is executed by a man of stone
(the statue of Mitys at Argos).27 Shylock’s pardon by the Duke is it-
self emulative of archaic tyranny. Playing Abraham to Antonio’s Isaac,
Shylock is both instrument and object of justice. He is thus framed
within a Biblical scene – prelude to a deferred sacrifice – which Auer-
bach reproduces with all the lighting and gestural drama of a Baroque
painting:

. . . denkt man sich Abraham im Vordergrunde, wo etwa seine nieder-

geworfene oder knieende oder mit ausgebreiteten Armen sich neigende
oder nach oben aufschauende Gestalt vorstellbar wäre, so ist doch Gott
nicht dort: Abrahams Worte und Gesten richten sich nach dem Innern des
Bildes oder in die Höhe, nach einem unbestimmten, dunklen, auf jeden
Fall nicht vordergründigen Ort, von dem die Stimme zu ihm dringt.

. . . if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be pos-

sible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread
arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham’s words and ges-
tures are directed towards the depths of the picture or upward, but in any
case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is
not in the foreground.28

Auerbach situates this humbling encounter and the tradition it repre-

sents at the beginning of a long literary history defined by the serious
treatment of everyday life. Its culmination in nineteenth-century Re-
alism accorded with the austerity of a modern, bourgeois order that
condemned wholesale the frivolity of the regime it had displaced. The
paintings of Giambattista and his contemporaries (including brother-
in-law Francesco Guardi) register the evanescence and twilight of that
declining world. The theatre of their works is one uncoupled from drama
and consists in the generation of stock figures and personae that are used
and reused to accessorize heaven and earth. Their paintings reflect the
fading glory of the same world against which Shylock rebels. His hos-
tility towards Belmont is likewise a hatred of the culture of carnival and
masque, and it is to this theatricalized milieu that he loses his daughter.
(She absconds, disguised as a boy, with the aid of confederates decked
out for Carnevale.)
 Introduction 15

Rigorous and frugal, Shylock is ancestor to the ethos that would dis-
place the ostentation and wild expenditure that reigned during the de-
cades preceding the French Revolution. The Rococo, which had left the
severity of the Baroque behind, was to be confronted with an ascendant
class severe in its own right. An aristocratic spirit survived in certain
of the categories with which post-revolutionary aesthetics resisted the
new economic moralism. Schiller’s characterization of Anmut, while
adapted from antiquity, suggests something of the noble carriage pre-
scribed during the Renaissance. The property that Calasso finds per-
sonified in Tiepolo’s painting is sprezzatura, the practised nonchalance
upheld by Castiglione as an antidote to “the bane of affectation.”29 The
Book of the Courtier defines this trait in opposition to labour, the con-
spicuousness of which “shows an extreme want of grace.”30 Calasso’s
claim that Tiepolo “never had symbols or meanings assume a pose”31 in-
tones an anti-theatricalism seemingly at odds with a mode of painting
so preoccupied with the staging of grand scenes. His ceiling frescoes
are singular heirs to the Baroque method of feigning infinity, the effect
of which was to subjugate through wonder. Castiglione’s sprezzatura
is anchored firmly within the stratified order of the Renaissance court.
Inherently theatrical, it requires an audience – of princes or peers – in
whose regard the subject’s gracefulness is affirmed. Yet the absence of
apparent effort, whose bodily expression is an ease or fluidity of mo-
tion, reappears in the weightless mass of the painted firmament, borne
effortlessly by the trompe l’oeil columns that extend functional or deco-
rative supports (pilasters) into the airy, voluminous realm of fulfilled
wishes.32 The Rococo interior was Heaven’s antechamber, offering a
“foretaste” of a better life.33 A world free of all burden, it constituted
a liminal sphere in which gravity had begun to relinquish its hold on
the human form. In the case of Tiepolo, the suppleness of the painter’s
hand passes over into his figures, whose “ability to avoid encounter-
ing obstacles,” as Calasso puts it, marks them in precise opposition to
Kleist’s Adam, who is his own stumbling block.34
Tiepolo’s magnificent ceiling fresco in the residence at Würzburg is
a monument to the innumerable “effects of Venice” felt throughout the
German-speaking regions. The same can be said of the three Mozart
operas whose libretti were penned by Lorenzo da Ponte, a converted
Jew born in the ghetto of Ceneda (in the Venetian Republic).35 Bernardo
Bellotto, Canaletto’s nephew, became the painter of Dresden – the city
where Casanova’s mother, a professional actress, spent much of her
career performing commedia dell’arte.36 It was in and around Dresden
16 Affecting Grace

that Chinese porcelain, of which Marco Polo had returned to Venice

with news centuries earlier, was reinvented. The “white gold” of Meis-
sen became the ceramic medium through which the popular figures
of the Venetian commedia proliferated as miniaturized harbingers of
delight. Porcelain lends an air of grace even to denizens of the scullery
and the street (cooks, vendors, musicians, and beggars), who are typi-
cally posed in attitudes familiar from the ballet. The Meissen figurines
are products of the mannered perfection prized at court, released from
their everyday circumstances into a realm of pure theatre. In their
customary levity, as well as their inherent isolation, these portrait fig-
ures contradict in advance the seriousness of nineteenth-century fic-
tion, in which individuals, following Auerbach, are “impregnated”
(“durchtränkt”) with their “physical atmosphere.”37 Even in its strictly
material impregnability (to stains, for example), porcelain upholds the
prophylaxis of the classical object, of which Kleist’s jug is an indirect
citation. The treasured vessel, whose beauty and wholeness Frau Mar-
the restores verbally before the bench, eclipses what she mistakenly
believes to be the violation of her daughter’s chastity.
The contingency against which the beautiful object guards is none
other than history itself. The jug’s fracture occasions a narrative both
of the solemn event depicted on it (the transfer in 1555 of the Dutch
provinces to the Spanish crown) and of its own comically adventurous
biography – a tale of war and conflagration, mischief and wild luck. As
in those tavern scenes in Henry IV, or even in Dante’s Commedia, his-
tory, which for Auerbach is the condition of mimesis, takes the form of
subterranean comic energy. Grace, of which the immaculate aspect of
porcelain is one expression, is history’s antidote. The mercy that Por-
tia invokes is likewise superordinate to the “sceptered sway” of kings
(4.1.188). The world her efforts aim to uphold seems timeless, its de-
mise the very definition of history. Shylock threatens the city of Ven-
ice with ruin; Frau Marthe, who embodies a similar threat, holds the
evidence of calamity in her hands. Her allegiance to the order the jug
symbolizes is that of the feudal subject. Her almost personal familiar-
ity with the high personages depicted suggests a submergence in the
“narrowly local,” which, according to Auerbach, continued to plague
German literature of the nineteenth century and to deprive it of genu-
ine social-historical depth. Auerbach locates Kleist at the periphery of a
constellation of German writers who, unable to shake the “atmosphere
of pure convention” fostered at court, remained wedded to “the genres
of semi-fantasy and idyl.”
 Introduction 17

Auerbach’s analysis has the unmistakable timbre of partisanship. He

is heir both to Shylock’s expropriation and, more closely, to positions
staked out by German critics during the second half of the eighteenth
century. The historical differentiation of styles that is the crux of Mimesis
has its foundation in Herder, whose seminal Shakespear (1773) empha-
sizes the historicity from which Auerbach extracts the distinctly mod-
ern quality of Elizabethan tragedy: the character’s entanglement in the
mesh of historical circumstances that, taken together, compose his or
her “fate.” Not insignificantly, Auerbach pairs Lear and Shylock as two
particular examples of a “tragic” personality that is not simply natural
but is instead “prepared by birth, situation, and prehistory.” What Au-
erbach says of these characters he has already said of Abraham, David,
and Jacob, who (as compared to Achilles or Odysseus) are “so much
more fraught with their own biographies, so much more distinct as in-
dividuals.”38 Unlike the Homeric heroes, the figures of the Old Testa-
ment develop, and it is typically the experience of degradation or exile
that lends their existence its individual stamp. By arguing that Lear and
Shylock suffer fates specific to their characters, Auerbach aligns Shake-
speare with the Biblical custom that makes misery the sign of divine
favour. Lear’s greatness is all the more poignant for being glimpsed
through his “brittle creaturality” (“brüchige Kreatürlichkeit”).39 Her-
der’s summary of Lear’s end is effusive but generally consistent with
Auerbach’s account of the “stylistic rupture” that lies within Lear’s
being: His head bared to thunder and lightning, the raving and out-
cast king is “plunged down to the lowest class of humankind” (“zur
untersten Klasse von Menschen herabgestürzt”).40 Auerbach empha-
sizes Lear’s “grotesque histrionics” and herein differs from Herder,
for whom the vast multiplicity of material in Shakespeare, including
the intermezzi and divertissements, is suffused with a unifying spirit that
makes one oblivious to theatre’s “plank scaffolds” (Bretterngerüste).41
This divergence, which the aforesaid “stylistic rupture” accommodates,
is proper to the paradox at the crux of the present study – that German
critics after Diderot should have turned to plays of such overt theatrical
self-awareness as Shakespeare’s.
Auerbach distances himself from Herder, asserting that the latter’s
“particularism” blinded him (and historicists generally) to the gather-
ing forces that would join European societies in a common modernity.
A kindred imperviousness to the “concrete future” may be discerned
in Frau Marthe’s dogged, personal investment in an earthenware
memento of the Holy Roman Empire. Given its visual reference to an
18 Affecting Grace

imperial history whose individual figures she can name, it is instruc-

tive to regard the jug in light of Lessing’s analysis of Homer and Vir-
gil, specifically his comparison of the respective shields forged for
Achilles and Aeneas: Whereas Homer integrated the incidental em-
bellishments of Achilles’ armour into the more immanent complex of
Greek life, the shield fashioned by Virgil’s Vulcan exists for the sake
of its decorations. These represent, in the form of prophecy, the eso-
teric particulars of an empire yet to be established, leaving the hero to
delight in imagery whose meaning escapes him. There is a premoni-
tion of Kant when Lessing criticizes Virgil – “the clever courtier” (“der
witzige Hofmann”) – for using “external means” (“äussere Mittel”)
to make his object “interesting” (“interessant”). Lessing dubs Aeneas’
shield an “insert” (“Einschiebsel”) meant to “flatter the national pride
of the Romans” (“dem Nationalstolze der Römer zu schmeicheln”).42
Auerbach, who argues that the stories from Genesis do not “court our
favor,” echoes Lessing’s ubiquitous disdain for flattery – that “glib and
oily art” in which Shakespeare’s Cordelia declines to participate (King
Lear 1.1.223).
Aeneas’ shield may serve to offset Auerbach’s conception of the
essential, mimetic art that culminated in Flaubert’s distinctively re-
strained ability to “bestow the power of mature expression” upon
objects and material circumstances. Emma Bovary’s dreary domestic
situation contains a “concealed threat,” though Emma herself can no
more read the portents than Aeneas can decipher his armour. In a richly
suggestive passage on the “phenomenology of Eros,” Emmanuel Levi-
nas intones an opposition between feminine beauty, which he calls a
“primordial event,” and the “weightless grace” with which the artist
endows “the cold matter of color and stone,” thereby transforming
beauty into “calm presence, sovereignty in flight.” “The beautiful of
art,” he continues, “substitutes an image for the troubling depth of the
future.”43 Such beauty, “immobilized in the instant” by the painter or
sculptor, neutralizes the “irresponsible animality” of Eros, whose ex-
pression is “incessantly upsurging outside of its plastic image.” Levi-
nas’s account isolates the function of beauty, classically configured, as
that of stemming an eruptive, animal vitality and associates the latter
with a future whose “troubling depth” corresponds to the background
that, in Auerbach, harbours a “concealed threat.” The “calm presence”
of plastic beauty is of a genre with the temporal arrest that Lessing at-
tributes to the marble Laocoön, which, though pregnant with its own
future, withholds even the very next moment from view.
 Introduction 19

The restraint that Lessing discerns in the Laocoön figure has its
moral–theological counterpart in the mercy that Portia characterizes
for Shylock as “not strained.” Much as the visual arts favour the ex-
tended present over consecutive moments, so mercy, in keeping con-
sequences at bay, is superior to “the force of temporal power . . . /
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings” (The Merchant of Venice
4.1.188–90). The distinction that Portia draws between these two di-
mensions parallels Auerbach’s famous comparison of the Odyssey with
an episode from Genesis, and it may be ventured that Auerbach, in em-
phasizing the historical dynamism of the latter, carries Shylock’s plea
forward in the form of a critical language that privileges the exposure
of hidden dangers. Auerbach goes so far as to make Shylock the victim
of a Classical ideal reminiscent of the Homeric style. He states that
Shakespeare summons Shylock’s provocative passion only to drop
it again with “heedless Olympian serenity” (“achtloser, olympischer
Heiterkeit”). In the end, Shylock’s tragic potential serves merely as “an
added spice in the triumph of a higher, nobler, freer, and also more
aristocratic humanity.”44
Starobinski has discussed the refinement of courtly manners in terms
of an aestheticized renunciation of the amorous instinct. An ever more
forcefully repressed Eros resurfaces in the broad attempt to make all
forms of social commerce – including dress, conversation, and the ex-
change of letters – free of discord, even pleasurable.45 It is hardly sur-
prising that Lessing, whose diffidence towards the conventions of court
Auerbach shares, should have shown interest in the works of Shake-
speare, persistent in their scrutiny of empty words and “hollow bo-
soms” (Henry V 2.Cho.21). Flattery, the height of courtly dissimulation,
is also germane to the “theatre” of the public world, in which citizens
were increasingly wary of threats concealed by nuances of physical
and verbal gesture. The bloody price that Antonio nearly pays for his
default is a mark of the violence that flares when conventions break
down. The contracted pound of flesh is the “bait” with which Shylock
whets his own tyrannical appetite. Shylock’s constitutional suspicion
of flattery is mirrored by Bassanio’s indictment of the beautiful surface,
which in turn reinforces Antonio’s characterization of “falsehood” as
“a villain with a smiling cheek, / A goodly apple rotten at the heart”
(1.3.97–8).
Antonio’s allusion to the fruit of Eden also recalls for us the poisoned
apple of “Snow White,” which is itself proffered by a kindly villain and
is, moreover, furnished with “cheeks” (Backen) of its own, one red, one
20 Affecting Grace

white.46 The storied apple, which reproduces the colours of the child’s
complexion, imports the legacy of Adam into a scenario that situates
the child within the speculum mundi. Her “resurrection” coincides with
the fall of a tyrant, whose excruciating death answers the ordeal to
which the young princess – banished and marked for slaughter – is
subjected. An allegory of flattery, the popular tale, with its magic mir-
ror, reveals the bestial aggression that flattery would keep at bay. Its
generic artifice is endemic to the Rococo, as are those Meissen figurines,
the vague presence of which in “Snow White” is implied through the
heroine’s plastic appearance and her temporary fate of being displayed
under glass. Her suspended animation is another “feigned death” – a
defence against temporality, which the aging queen represents, but also
against the light. Falstaff, who maintains that “to counterfeit dying” is
“the true and perfect image of life indeed” (1 Henry IV 5.4.116–18), em-
bodies a vulnerability to the gaze, and thus to judgment, which is the
condition common to Adam and the theatrical subject.47 The subject,
who as the subject of guilt is inherently theatrical – that is, inexorably
aware of himself as one who is seen – seeks refuge in the redoubled
pretence of invisibility. In his pretended indifference to “all the racks
of the world,” Falstaff dismantles the mechanisms of conscience and
links these to the externalizing techniques of a theatrical tradition to
which he – a shell filled with stuffing – is supremely suited. Citing the
radical disintegration of the moral and corporeal in the Baroque Trau-
erspiel, Benjamin affirms that the former is “of no consequence for the
inner constitution [das Innere] of the dramatis personae,” whose mystical
fulfilment is possible only by means of physical agony.48 The sequence
of dramatic events is likewise not graceful, because the medium of their
unfolding is corrupt. The “light of grace [Gnadensonne]” still shines but
is “mirrored in the swamp [Pfuhl] of Adam’s guilt.”49
Kleist’s Adam inherits from his biblical forebear the same “brittle
creaturality” that Auerbach ascribes to Lear. His congenital club foot
is the literal antipode of grace (Anmut), which in the immediate wake
of Kant’s Critique of Judgment represented a healing of the fracture be-
tween the moral and the physical. The loss of his judicial wig exposes
a head sorely wounded by the misadventure that brought the jug to
ruin. The contiguity of head and vessel reveals the former as some-
thing decidedly un-Classical and thus devoid of the “plastic curative
power” that, for Nietzsche, makes noble temperaments immune to in-
jury.50 This capacity for oblivion is shared by the Classical object and
marks it as a fetish, its purpose being that of erasing memory and with
 Introduction 21

it the very debt around which the subject is constructed. The Classical
object and theatrical subject are the conceptual parameters in this study,
which examines the afterlife of Portia’s famous appeal in a period of
German literature and thought that mounts a rearguard action against
the history unleashed by the jug’s destruction.
The significance of The Merchant of Venice for the tradition of Ger-
man thought is covert and thus far supersedes anything that could be
brought under the headings of “influence” or “reception.” It may in
fact be Nietzsche, more than Lessing, for whose work Shakespeare’s
play has the sharper conceptual resonance. The particular treatment of
guilt-as-debt is part of this, as is the manner in which The Merchant of
Venice relates “risk” to the kind of exposure that is also the condition of
the subject on stage. Portia’s statement on the “quality of mercy” fore-
casts the secular, aesthetic argument for projecting grace as the zero-
degree of theatre. In making the trial the very image of theatre, both
The Merchant of Venice and The Broken Jug restore guilt as the crux of a
subjectivity that is synonymous with the awareness of being seen. The
Broken Jug is of particular importance in that it points to a configuration
within which objects as well as subjects are called upon to “stand trial.”
Even the Meissen figurine, which must literally withstand a trial by
fire, is the product of a command performance: the artisan-alchemist
who eventually created German porcelain was called before an impa-
tient sovereign and directed, on pain of death, to make gold. Shylock’s
conversion (also on pain of death) suggests a kindred alchemy, espe-
cially in light of the parallel action concerning the three caskets. An
heir to Shylock, Lessing’s Nathan is himself summoned before a throne
and made to choose among the three Mosaic religions. He is hereby
“converted,” in effect, to the role of Bassanio, whose success in divining
the precious contents of the lead box sets him apart from Shylock and
aligns him instead with the figural mode of exegesis on which Auer-
bach’s literary history turns.
While Auerbach devotes relatively little attention to German litera-
ture, the arc of his Mimesis traces a critical carapace that, for the purposes
of the present study, places a persistent German Classicism opposite
the likes of Dante and the Medieval poet’s emphasis on forms of ret-
ribution that seem the absolute contrary of grace. Auerbach’s censure
of the residual courtliness in the Age of Goethe effectively aligns the
literature of that period with Homer’s Odyssey, which with its surfeit
of foreground (and concomitant lack of historical depth) does not com-
pel belief but instead “flatters” the reader. Goethe’s own Von Deutscher
22 Affecting Grace

Baukunst (On German Architecture), in which the young poet describes

an encounter with the great cathedral at Strasbourg, is part and parcel
of the historicist project of which Herder’s Shakespear is a defining mo-
ment. Yet even as the massive Gothic “fragment” would appear to pres-
ent anything but a pleasing surface, it nonetheless serves as a mirror in
which Goethe glimpses – and from which he draws – a certain phan-
tasmic wholeness. The meeting translates the experience of flattery, in
which the words of others provide one with an enhanced image of self,
into an internal process. This process is emphatically untheatrical. Its
effect is that of dislodging the subject from a vantage point at which
he is otherwise asked to stand and “behold” – where he is fixed to a
spot before a spectacle that sees just as it is seen. Goethe, who recounts
viewing the mighty structure repeatedly and from different angles of
approach, exhibits a new-found mobility that verges on flight. For all
its pierced ornament and foreboding mass, the cathedral becomes the
negation of Baroque excess, for which Goethe expresses outright dis-
dain. In its self-containment it is a sightless façade, its blindness the
guarantor of the autonomy the young traveller experiences. However
un-Classical the object, the church offers an aesthetic remedy to that
“brittle creaturality” (to use Auerbach’s expression once more), which
the young poet, recovering from a long illness, perceives in himself.
A comparable, “sovereign” mobility is tracked in Schiller’s decidedly
Classical “Der Spaziergang” (“The Walk”), a two-hundred-line elegy
that turns on a visionary encounter with the cenotaph inscribed with
Simonides’ famous distich honouring the Spartans who fell at Ther-
mopylae. The leisurely walk, with its lack of direction and purpose,
is another example of Kantian disinterest, but as an element of lyri-
cal structure it facilitates as well the sequential unfolding identified by
Lessing as poetry’s defining virtue. The essential disembodiment of the
strolling subject is likewise consistent with a basic tenet of Laocoön, in
which Lessing diminishes forms of expression that install the beholder
as an embodied presence before the object. The speaker of Schiller’s
poem meanders self-forgetfully past vistas that double as cultural-
historical tableaux until, much like Dante, he loses his way and finds
himself caught between towering rocks and plunging gorges. His re-
flections soon restore him to a beneficent nature warmed by an explic-
itly Homeric sun, and just as this recovered nature is prelapsarian, so
too does the preceding rupture leave the subject an outcast in a barren
landscape. “Der Spaziergang” is not a work for the theatre, of course,
but it constructs its aesthetic integrity in opposition to a “theatrical”
 Introduction 23

crisis, in which the subject is exposed, rather like Abraham before God.
As noted earlier, Auerbach describes that biblical “scene” as if it were a
painting by Caravaggio.51 Antonio, called to answer for his debts before
the court of Venice, is a similar counter-example to the Classical ideal,
and it is precisely this ideal – a subject invulnerable to the depths –
that the principle invoked in his defence anticipates. It is an ideal com-
mon to the writings by Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller named here, and
Kleist’s Broken Jug is a particular reminder of human frailty, which that
same ideal (along with its corresponding object) is meant to counteract.
Following chapters on the texts by Goethe and Schiller just men-
tioned, Affecting Grace concludes with an extensive treatment of The
Broken Jug, though Kleist’s comedy is present throughout much of this
study, just as various works by Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice,
Henry IV, Henry V, King Lear, Hamlet, and the sonnets) are woven into
the fabric of a broad epochal suggestion. While The Merchant of Venice
and The Broken Jug serve as bookends of the overall discussion, Lessing
is the crucial intermediary through whom Shakespeare is revived as a
(somewhat unlikely) standard of modern dramatic verisimilitude, his
work divested of the same stylistic rupture that the jug’s breakage may
be said to restore. Equivalent of the Biblical fall, that rupture enables
a surge in social energy and implicates Lessing’s “law of beauty” (Ge-
setz der Schönheit), to which Frau Marthe in a sense appeals, as an aes-
thetic bulwark against the force of history. The shield of Aeneas, with
its disconnected historical references, is structurally analogous to the
“crudely illuminated separate scenes” that, following Benjamin, char-
acterize Baroque drama, which lacks the consistency of motivation and
action that Lessing finds in Shakespeare.52 Lessing’s disparagement of
Virgil as a “clever courtier” aligns the Roman poet with the habits of the
ancien régime, whose theatre Lessing discredits by means of a persistent
indictment of flattery. Shakespeare’s importance in this regard is due in
part to an intricate semantics that associates dissemblance with corrup-
tion and that projects the latter as venom. Hamlet, in which theatre as
such is distilled as the re-enactment of a royal poisoning, is a prominent
example and one that, because that poisoning is set in a garden, iso-
lates the Fall from Grace as the theatrical moment par excellence. “Snow
White,” which has already been introduced as a simple configuration
in which flattery and poison are linked, is embedded in Lessing’s Miss
Sara Sampson. This “bourgeois tragedy” of 1755, though it bears little
outward resemblance to any play of Shakespeare’s, displays an inces-
sant concern with the dissimulation that, in the folk narrative, takes the
24 Affecting Grace

form of cosmetic disguise. The tale looks forward to the Nietzschean

theme of individuals who grow sick (and ugly) from nursing a noxious
rancour and holding it in reserve. The precursor of this state is courtly
intrigue, and even Hamlet displays, or rather doesn’t display – indeed,
makes a point of not displaying – his innermost thoughts and designs
(“I have that within which passes show” [1.2.85]). The latter half of the
eighteenth century, with its emphasis on a “language of the heart,”
positions itself less against overt theatrics than the practice of hiding
what lies within. Lessing’s generation established norms of representa-
tion that were not conducive to existing forms of socially sanctioned
deception, in particular flattery, which is itself a theatre of calculated
self-deprecation. Preoccupied throughout with deceit and its dramatic
synonyms, Miss Sara Sampson culminates in a fatal poisoning, which
follows a confrontation that had reduced the young, modern heroine to
a supplicant trembling at the feet of a tyrant. This “regression” amounts
to a sudden return of the Baroque and marks the high degree to which
the style of Absolutism became the foil against which modern person-
hood was conceived. A state of political subjugation stands in basic re-
lation to the aesthetic experience in which the artwork, monument, or
façade calls the viewing subject into its presence.
Starting thus with examples from Shakespeare, Affecting Grace builds
on scenes in which individuals are called to appear before a king or
judge, or a monument that instantiates sovereign authority. Judge and
potentate coincide in the Duke of Venice, who in sending for Shylock
names an exposure akin to that of Abraham called to sacrifice his son:
“let him stand before our face” (4.1.16). Lessing’s Nathan is similarly
summoned, though his “Parable of the Ring” effectively displaces a
despot with a judge, who in turn releases each man to his own judg-
ment and to a destiny of his own fashioning. Nathan’s impromptu
tale is a gift meant to appease a tyrant. Bach composed his Musical
Offering, its title rich in sacrificial overtones, after being called upon
to improvise a fugue before Frederick the Great. Comparable circum-
stances surrounded the creation of Meissen porcelain, which came at
the behest of an impatient monarch. To this list of “tributes” we may
add the “tun of treasure” – the convoy of tennis balls with which the
French Dauphin presents Shakespeare’s King Harry (Henry V 1.2.256).
A deliberate insult, this gift is flattery’s antithesis. The bloody siege
that follows represents the extreme of what is at stake where conven-
tions of praise are concerned. The consequences of Cordelia’s refusal
 Introduction 25

to exalt Lear are nearly as dire. The various offerings just identified –
narrative, musical, and ceramic – are like the gilded words of the flat-
terer, who uses the magic mirror of language to provide the sovereign
with a reflection devoid of lack. (Kleist’s comedy begins with the op-
posite gesture: the court clerk presents Adam with a mirror in which to
examine his wounded face, from which a “piece” is missing.) Pounds
of flesh in their own right, the flatterer’s words, like those “sacrificial”
gifts, furnish the elevated person with an embellished self-image while
enabling the giver to withdraw from view, as if feigning death.53 Such
is the modern theatrical subject.
 Chapter One

Mercy and the Spirit of Commerce:

Shylock’s Shadow in the Age of Disinterest

“the necessary never comes from the hand of divinity without grace”
Lessing, Laocoön

In 1782 Francesco Guardi carried out a series of paintings documenting

the ceremonies surrounding the visit to Venice of two members of the
Russian high nobility. His Gala Concert (Figure 1) is the most accom-
plished of these and is thought by many to be the crown jewel of Guar-
di’s ample oeuvre. With characteristically loose brushwork the painter
maintains the many celebrants in their formal separation while envel-
oping the whole in a dense, almost turgid atmosphere. Three elevated
rows of musicians (students from the women’s conservatory) seem be-
yond the reach of the long shadows, which suffuse the scene with a
sense of fading daylight, if not dying glory. At centre foreground, as if to
leave one visible trace of the music, a black-liveried servant with a large
silver tray appears to be executing a dance step. Not that “execute” re-
motely captures the spontaneous whimsy of the gesture, which stands
out against the orchestrated formality of the reception. There is some-
thing of the evasive nonchalance of a bullfighter in the way the young
man, his back arched and head bowed, pivots and rolls to his left. The
theatrical grandeur of the occasion provides a contrastive backdrop for
the unselfconscious absorption – the unaffected grace – of the suddenly
agile servant. Yet the young man’s attempt at “cutting loose” befits the
overall program of the Rococo and shares in the levity and lustre of the
aristocratic fête. A more decisive break with the evanescent pleasures of
the ancien régime is foretold in Mozart and da Ponte’s pre-revolutionary
Don Giovanni (1787), which begins with Leporello declaring that he
 Mercy and the Spirit of Commerce 27

1 Francesco Guardi (1712–1793), Gala Concert in Honor of Princess Maria

Fedorowna in Venice (1782). Oil on canvas, 67.7 × 90.5 cm. Alte Pinakothek,
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing /
Art Resource, New York.

would like to “play the gentleman” (“far il gentiluomo”) and be a ser-

vant no more (“non voglio più servir”).1
A seeming velleity, the servant’s nimble turn inclines more in the di-
rection of the post-revolutionary aesthetics that anchored the unity of
body and soul in a minimum of deliberation. This ideal is nowhere more
strikingly exposed than in Kleist’s “On the Theatre of the Marionettes”
(“Über das Marionettentheater” [1811]), specifically in the anecdote of a
scene the narrator reports having witnessed in a public bath: Towelling
off before a mirror, a budding Adonis glimpses, in the inadvertent dis-
position of his limbs, a resemblance to the famous Greco-Roman statue
of a boy gingerly teasing a thorn from his foot.2 In an effort to convince
28 Affecting Grace

his sceptical companion of the similarity, the youth tries but fails to du-
plicate the unpremeditated “pose.” His increasingly frantic attempts at
affecting grace degenerate into expressions of adolescent ungainliness.
The narrator ascribes a “comical element” to these efforts, confirming
in essence that comedy as such – with its inherent theatricalism – is co-
eval with the loss of the same prelapsarian innocence embodied by the
ancient bronze ephebe absorbed in the act of nursing his foot.3
A consonance of body and spirit is thus undone by the Biblical
fall, which here corresponds to the sudden dissolution of the “grace”
(Anmut) that, prior to this experience, had begun to inform the move-
ments of the comely, only faintly self-aware sixteen-year-old. The youth
falls prey to the paradox that favours the sheer involuntarism to which
the marionette – a lifeless aggregate of individual wooden parts – owes
its unique ability to move gracefully, even dance. With no thought to
the individual responses of its separate limbs, the puppeteer provokes
a sympathetic movement of the whole by means of a single tug at the
figure’s mechanical centre. This severance of aesthetic effect from fore-
sight has often been construed as a demonstration of Kantian “disinter-
est.” Yet the jolt whereby the puppeteer stimulates the marionette into
action erupts into the more urgent realm of the Sublime, where a dis-
position of the inner self (Gemütsstimmung) subjugates the same natural
contingency that arouses it.4
Kleist’s piece presses this disarticulation of inner and outer selves,
asserting the efficacious nullity of the former. The discovery of effort-
less perfection in a soulless puppet constitutes a radical statement of
the tension that the previous generation would have resolved in terms
of a naturalized (instinctive) adherence to moral imperatives. Schiller
begins a treatise from 1793 by seeking to make sense of the allegory
the Greeks used to explain grace: Myth had provided Venus with a
belt (Gürtel) that had the power to confer grace on whomever wore
it and garner him love. Schiller interprets the belt, in its portability,
to indicate that grace for the Greeks is “a mobile beauty” (“eine be-
wegliche Schönheit”), one that is not intrinsic to the subject but that
arises in him momentarily and by chance (“zufällig”).5 And because
grace is an objective property whose addition or removal leaves the
subject unchanged, this “mobile beauty” is also a beauty of movement,
or more accurately “a beauty of chance movements” (“eine Schönheit
der zufälligen Bewegungen”).6 This formula well describes the boy in
the bath, who is faced with the twofold vanity of repeating consciously
an arrangement whose occurrence was unintended – of staging an
 Mercy and the Spirit of Commerce 29

innocence he forfeited in the mere act of noticing it. Yet Schiller seeks to
claim grace for the realm of virtue, attributing the apparent naturalness
of such movements to the degree to which morality – for this is what
they convey to the eye – has become second nature. Much as there are
no virtues, only virtue, so too is grace not an affair of discrete gestures
but a harmony of movement issuing from a core. There is an echo here
of the Lutheran tenet that truly good deeds are not performed with
the intention of being good but instead emanate from a soul touched
by (divine) grace. This idea is found also in Lessing, for whom history
points forward to a time when doing good would cease to be tethered
to the prospect of external sanctions or rewards.7 We are quick to notice
a parallel between the allegory of Venus’ belt and the “Parable of the
Ring” in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779). Like the belt, which has the
power to bestow grace upon its bearer, the ring that Nathan describes
has the power to make whomever wears it “pleasing before God / And
man” (“vor Gott / Und Menschen angenehm” [3.7.399–400]).8
Symbol of divine selection, the ring enters the scene “aus lieber Hand”
(397), the bequest of a “dear” or “loving” hand whose Kleistian coun-
terpart is the hand of the puppeteer, which we may imagine extend-
ing briefly into view from above, manipulating a “centre of gravity”
(Schwerpunkt) within these wooden figures so as to lend them the qual-
ity of being “weightless” (antigrav). The heaviness their graceful move-
ments counteract is the same corporeal burden so aptly signified by the
weight of flesh that Shakespeare’s Shylock is determined to cut from
Antonio’s bosom. Antonio, who is prepared to face Shylock’s “tyranny
and rage” with a “quietness of spirit” (Merchant of Venice 4.1.11–13),9
personifies the equanimity that, in the later aesthetic framework, places
the subject above those “effects of nature” (“Wirkungen der Natur”) in
which the “superstitious” individual is prone to perceive “eruptions
of anger” (“Ausbrüche des Zorns”) – expressions of a divine power
whose will is “at once irresistible and just” (“unwiderstehlich und zu-
gleich gerecht”).10 Shylock stands for such immutable justice, much as
he literalizes – as usurer – the “interest” named by Kant as the impedi-
ment to aesthetic experience. Antonio indeed likens Shylock’s righteous
severity to “effects of nature” that are arguably sublime: “You may as
well forbid the mountain pines / To wag their high tops and to make
no noise / When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven” (4.1.75–7).
Compared to Antonio, who explicitly dissociates his sadness from his
imperilled “merchandise” (1.1.45), Shylock embodies the “spirit of
commerce” (Handelsgeist) that Kant, in opposing it to the “sublimity”
30 Affecting Grace

of war, equates with “self-interest, cowardice and weakness” (“Eigen-

nutz, Feigheit und Weichlichkeit”).11
A comparable Handelsgeist is implied as the opposite of the future
that Lessing projects – one in which ethical action would no longer pre-
suppose “physical penalties and rewards” (“sinnliche Strafen und Be-
lohnungen”).12 In casting the capacity for aesthetic experience in terms
of “religion” versus “superstition,” Kant echoes Lessing’s delineation
of the New Testament from the Old, the latter being the expression of a
faith grounded in an excess of submission. What Lessing identifies as
“heroic obedience”13 on the part of the Israelites has its counterpart in
Kant, who associates “superstition” with “subjugation” (Unterwerfung)
and thus with a “fear and trembling before the super-powerful being”
(“Furcht und Angst vor dem übermächtigen Wesen”). Such affects are not
favourable to the Sublime, the apprehension of which causes one “to
submit voluntarily to the pain of self-reproach in order to purge oneself
gradually of its cause” (“sich willkürlich dem Schmerze der Selbstver-
weise zu unterwerfen, um die Ursache dazu nach und nach zu vertil-
gen”).14 Kant thus introduces a kind of self-mortification – purification
through (sublime) pain of the “original thing” (Ursache), which as the
“cause” of self-reproach is synonymous with “original sin” (Ursünde).
Sublimation in the Kantian as well as the Freudian sense entails su-
preme fungibility, just as the demise of “superstition,” in both senses,
connotes the attenuation of the hold that the “original thing” has over
the subject. The ring of Nathan’s parable is one such Ur-Sache, its magic
mitigated through reproduction: the man who finds himself in its pos-
session has two perfect copies made so that he may bequeath a ring
to each of his three sons. Still in thrall to the One, the sons, rather like
Shylock, seek out a judge, whom they would have decide which of the
rings is the original.
Shylock is the villainous heir to Biblical forebears whose minimal
capacity for abstraction, as Lessing sees it, is consistent with the lit-
eral economy of “an eye for an eye.”15 An “ancient grudge” (1.3.42)
binds him to Antonio with a sacrificial zeal grounded in what Hork-
heimer and Adorno term “the uniqueness of the chosen one” (“die
Einmaligkeit des Erwählten”).16 Shylock will accept no substitute for
the quantity of flesh owed him. As if to confirm Freud’s assertion that
no amount of money can compensate for the unfulfilled longings of
childhood,17 he rehearses the manifold increase in the delinquent sum
only to dismiss it: “If every ducat in six thousand ducats / Were in
six parts, and every part a ducat, / I would not draw them. I would
 Mercy and the Spirit of Commerce 31

have my bond!” (4.1.85–7).18 The exchange that Shylock resists is in

principle no different from his judicially mandated conversion to
Christianity: one thing – one religion – is more or less the same as
another. This is the lesson of Nathan’s parable. For Shylock there is
no “more or less,” which can also be said of Lear’s Cordelia, who
invokes an exacting legality as a counterweight to the inflated praise
demanded of her: “I love your majesty /According to my bond, no
more, no less” (King Lear 1.1.92–3).
Cordelia’s steadfast refusal to flatter Lear subjects her to the mo-
narchical rage eventually to be visited upon her two sisters, the con-
sequences of their father’s curse resembling those of the Biblical fall
(e.g., “Into her womb convey sterility” [1.4.260]). The barren wilderness
in which the king himself is left alone and howling conjoins the post-
Edenic world with the state of emergency into which his kingdom has
been plunged. Flattery is a small price to pay for peace and stability.
Courtly society understood this, understanding as it did the violence
that could result from injuries dealt the psyche. Nietzsche cited, as a
mark of genuine nobility, Mirabeau’s supposed obliviousness to in-
sults: he could not remember what did not hurt him. Memory is rather
the attribute of the low-born and low-minded, who are inclined to bear
grudges, to lie quietly in wait, and to exact compensation for injury in
the form of physical pain. Nietzsche could well have had Shylock in
mind when he recalled the age-old custom whereby a creditor could
“cut from the debtor’s body an amount commensurate with the size of
the debt” (“dem Leibe des Schuldners [so viel] herunterschneiden als
der Grösse der Schuld angemessen schien”).19
Ever wary of the flatterer, who builds up his object and in the pro-
cess “stages” his own inferiority, Shylock partakes of what Nietzsche
describes as the creditor’s delight in the idea of a being more hum-
ble than himself. The creditor, Nietzsche contends, takes pleasure in
debasing and abusing his debtor. This enjoyment (Genuss), which
increases in proportion is to the creditor’s own lowliness, is a “sa-
vory morsel” (“köstlicher Bissen”) and a “foretaste of a higher rank”
(“Vorgeschmack eines höheren Ranges”).20 The creditor’s procedure
of doling out pain is not the extravagant violence of ancient festivi-
ties, at which executions and demonstrations of torture were de ri-
gueur.21 It has become instead a matter of equivalence – of measure
for measure. At the heart of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is the
proto-Freudian association of sadism with frugality. Starobinski, who
comments on Guardi and on a waning aristocracy once accustomed
32 Affecting Grace

to dazzling through sublime expenditure, isolates the newly emer-

gent, post-revolutionary habit of seeking pleasure in the deferral of
pleasure: “After the decorative climax of rococo, it was frugality,
hard-won, that produced a thrill.”22
Whatever their differences, Shylock and Cordelia are both obstacles
to the generosity embodied by Antonio, who pronounces himself ready
to pay the debt “instantly with all my heart” (4.1.278). Implied is the
understandable wish that his death be quick, though the temporal di-
lation of torture is itself akin to the speculative parsimony that is Shy-
lock’s stock in trade. Its contrary is forgiveness – the same divine mercy
invoked by Shakespeare’s King Harry in sentencing his three would-
be assassins to a painful and protracted end: “Get you . . . / . . . to
your death; / The taste whereof God of his mercy give / You patience
to endure and true repentance / Of all your dear offenses” (Henry V
2.2.177–81). While the bodies of the condemned become sites of the
desolation to which they were prepared to consign all of England, their
sovereign defers to the divine suspension of quid pro quo: “God quit
you in his mercy!” (166). The effect of the process he here prescribes
is that of transforming the physical agony of torture into the pain of
self-reproach. Conscience, following Nietzsche, is the ultimate devel-
opment of the memory with which the creditor, using the promise of
pain, endows the borrower. The near victim of a Judas who “[might]
have coined me into gold” (2.2.98), Harry (like Antonio) is implicated
in a history defined by the progressive entanglement of the material
and moral connotations of Schuld – of “debt” and “guilt” respectively.
In characterizing the exposed treachery as “[a]nother fall of man” (142),
the king corroborates Nietzsche’s account of the curse that lights upon
man’s causa prima. This is the Ursache – the original sin (Erbsünde) re-
deemable only through a self-sacrificing deity, that is, a creditor who
takes the debt upon himself.23
Explicitly disavowing vengeance as a motivation, King Harry draws
no pleasure from the pain his verdict is bound to inflict. There is a sense
in which he has heeded the words of Portia from the closely contem-
poraneous Merchant of Venice. Disguised as the learned jurist Baltha-
zar, she upholds the validity of Shylock’s suit but implores him to be
merciful. “On what compulsion must I?” (4.1.181), he asks, eliciting
from her an eloquent disquisition that, over its course, defines “mercy”
as a quality that makes kings god-like in its exercise. Her statement
that “it becomes / The thronèd monarch better than his crown” (186–7)
may evoke for us the portability that Schiller ascribes to grace (Anmut),
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
craft of war; and hath not the Prophet himself said, What is war but a
game of deception?’[497] ‘That is true,’ responded Aly, ‘but I will have
none of the aid that cometh from Muâvia.’ ‘Then,’ said Ibn Abbâs,
‘thou hadst better depart to thy property at Yenbó, and close the
gates of thy stronghold behind thee; for everywhere the Bedouins
are hounding along; and if thou makest the rest of the people thine
enemies, these will find thee alone, and will surely lay the blood of
Othmân at thy door.’ ‘Come,’ said Aly, trying another line, ‘thou shalt
go forth thyself to Syria. See, now, I have appointed thee.’ ‘That,’
replied Ibn Abbâs, ‘can never be. Muâvia would surely behead me or
cast me into prison because of Othmân’s death, and my being akin
to thee. Hearken to me, and make terms with him ere it be too late.’
But Aly turned a deaf ear to his appeal.[498] .
Acting on these wayward impulses, Aly
sent men of his own to replace the existing Aly appoints new governors
governors in the chief commands throughout the empire.
Moharram, a.h. XXXVI. July,
throughout the empire. In most places they a.d. 656.
met with but a sorry reception. At
Bussorah, Ibn Aámir, unwilling to provoke hostilities, retired, and his
successor, Othmân ibn Honeif, entered unopposed; but the faction
which clung to the memory of the late Caliph was as strong at
Bussorah as that which favoured Aly, while a third party waited to
see how the tide of public opinion might run at Medîna. In Egypt it
was much the same. Cays, appointed to the command, was a
singularly wise and able ruler; but he only succeeded in passing the
frontier garrison by feigning attachment to the cause of Othmân;
while a strong and aggressive faction occupied the district of
Kharanba, swearing that they would not submit until the regicides
were brought to justice. In Yemen, the new governor obtained
possession, but only after Yála, his predecessor, had carried off to
Mecca all the treasure. The governors-elect of Aly who attempted to
enter Kûfa and the province of Syria, met with a rough reception on
the border, and were fortunate in escaping with their lives back again
to Medîna.
Dispirited by these reports, Aly again took counsel with Talha and
Zobeir. The sedition, he said, which he had apprehended, was
already kindled, and would spread like
wildfire, catching whatever came in its way. Aly sends letters to Muâvia
‘Then,’ replied they, ‘let us depart, that we and Abu Mûsa.
may do thee service in the field.’ ‘Wait,’ answered Aly; ‘the cautery
must be the last resort.’ So he resolved, in the first instance, to
address letters to Muâvia, and also to Abu Mûsa at Kûfa, demanding
their allegiance. Abu Mûsa replied in loyal terms, but at the same
time bade the Caliph beware of the spirit of disaffection which in
Kûfa was rife around him. With Syria, all communication was cut off;
weeks elapsed, and there was no reply. In truth, a strange scene
was being enacted there.
Muâvia had no sooner received the
emblems of his Master’s murder—the gory Emblems of vengeance
shirt and Nâila’s mangled fingers—than he suspended
Damascus.
on the pulpit at

hung them up on the pulpit of the Great

Mosque at Damascus. There suspended, they remained a spectacle
maddening the Syrians to a bloody revenge.[499] Still they took no
immediate action. Biding their time, they waited to see what the new
Caliph might do. Aly, had he been wise, would have used such allies
to take vengeance at once on the conspirators, and at the same time
crush the rising democracy and disaffection of the Arab tribes. In this
work Syria would have been his strongest stand-by; for it never
suffered from the Bedouin turbulence which kept Irâc and Egypt in
continual turmoil. In the early campaigns, Syria was the favourite
field of the Coreish, who, settling there in larger proportion than
elsewhere, found their influence, in consequence, better recognised.
Moreover, the conquering race inhabited the ancient Syrian cities in
common with the Christian population, which had surrendered, for
the most part, on favourable terms. Society was thus throughout all
classes of the community orderly and loyal, whereas on the banks of
the Euphrates the settlements of Bussorah and Kûfa were filled with
wild and headstrong Arab tribes who regarded the vanquished lands
as their patrimony. Law prevailed in Syria; in Irâc and Egypt, the
pride and petulance of arms. Syria was, moreover, attached to its
Coreishite governors of the Omeyyad stock, and remained thus
faithful to the end.
 The Syrians had not long to wait for the outcome of Aly’s plans.
The abortive attempt to supersede Muâvia, and the refusal to arraign
the regicides, gave colour to the charge of collusion; and, with the
bloody shirt before their eyes, the Syrians soon raised that cry
against the Caliph. The majesty of
outraged law must be vindicated; and if the Muâvia sends defiant answer
assassins were not pursued to justice, then to Aly’s letter, Safar, a.h.
XXXVI. August, a.d. 656.
who but Aly was responsible for the
failure? Damascus was in this excited temper when Aly’s letter was
handed to Muâvia. At the first no answer was vouchsafed. The
envoy was kept in waiting from day to day to witness the gathering
storm. At last Muâvia sent a despatch; and a stranger document,
perhaps, was never seen. It bore, as was usual, the seal of state
outside upon the cover, which was superscribed with this address—
From Muâvia to Aly. It contained no other word, but was all blank
within. The despatch was carried by Cabîsa, a chief of the Beni Abs,
and with him the envoy was given permission to depart. Arriving at
Medîna just three months after Othmân’s death, Cabîsa presented
the letter to Aly, who read the address, and, breaking open the seal,
found the despatch all blank within. ‘What meaneth this?’ cried Aly,
starting at the unwonted sight;—‘let the enigma be explained.’
Cabîsa, instructed by his Master, inquired whether his life was safe.
‘It is safe,’ answered Aly; ‘the person of an ambassador is sacred.
Speak on.’ ‘Know then,’ proceeded the envoy, ‘that but now I left
behind me, weeping under the blood-stained shirt of Othmân, by the
pulpit of the Great Mosque at Damascus, sixty thousand warriors, all
bent on revenging the Caliph’s death—and revenging it on thee!’
‘What!’ exclaimed Aly, aghast, ‘on me! Seest thou not that I am
powerless to pursue the murderers? Oh, Lord! I take Thee to witness
that I am guiltless of Othmân’s blood. Begone! See, thy life is safe.’
As the Absite chief withdrew, the petulant slaves and rabble shouted
after him, ‘Slay the dog; slay the envoy of dogs!’ He turned, and,
apostrophising the Coreish, cried at the pitch of his voice, ‘Children
of Modhar! Children of Cays! The horse and the bow! Four thousand
picked warriors are close at hand. See to your camels and your
horses!’
 Medîna was startled by the envoy’s cry,
only as Mecca had been startled by the Aly resolves to attack Muâvia
voice of Dham-dham at the battle of Bedr, and invade Syria.
four-and-thirty years before. The time was come when Aly could no
longer put his decision off. Hasan, ever poor in spirit, counselled his
father to wait; but Aly saw too plainly that the hour for action was
now or never. He gave vent to his troubled soul in martial lines which
were soon in everyone’s mouth, and from which the people first
learned his resolve to make the sword the arbiter betwixt Muâvia and
himself. An expedition against Syria was proclaimed. Captains were
appointed to command the various companies of the expected
levies, and banners were presented to them by Aly; but he was
careful to name no one who had taken any part in the attack on
Othmân.[500] Orders were also sent to Kûfa, Bussorah, and Egypt, to
raise troops for the war. Having made these preparations, Aly
mounted the pulpit and harangued the citizens of Medîna. If they
failed to fight now, he told them, the power would pass away from
them, never more to be regained. ‘Fight, then, against the cursed
schismatics, who would destroy the unity of Islam and rend in twain
the body of the Faithful. Haply the Lord will set that right which the
nations of the earth are setting wrong.’ But the people did not
respond to the appeal, and the ranks were slow of filling.
Talha and Zobeir, when they saw how
affairs were drifting, again asked that they Talha and Zobeir depart to
might be allowed to quit Medîna. With Aly’s Mecca.
leave, they now set out for Mecca, on pretext of performing the
Lesser Pilgrimage.
 CHAPTER XXXVI.
REBELLION AT BUSSORAH.

A.H. XXXVI. A.D. 656.

But, before crossing arms with Muâvia,

heavy work was still in store for Aly. Work nearer home.

On her way back from the pilgrimage at

Mecca, Ayesha was met by the tidings of Ayesha retires to Mecca.
Othmân’s murder and of Aly’s accession to
the Caliphate. ‘Carry me back,’ forthwith cried the incensed and
impetuous lady; ‘carry me back to Mecca. They have murdered the
Caliph. I will avenge his blood.’
In the early period of Othmân’s
troubles, Ayesha, like the rest of the world, And propagates sedition
there.
is said to have contributed her share
towards fomenting public discontent. We are told that she even
abetted the conspirators, among whom (as we have seen) her
brother Mohammed son of Abu Bekr was a chief leader. But however
this may have been, she certainly was no party to the factious
proceedings so soon as they began to be pressed to cruel
extremities; and she had, in fact, sought to detach her brother from
them by carrying him off with her to Mecca. Vain and factious, she
had never forgiven the cold and unhandsome conduct towards her of
Aly when, on the occasion of the misadventure with Safwân, her
virtue had been doubted by the Prophet;[501] and now she would
gladly have seen Zobeir Caliph in the place of Aly. Instead, therefore,
of proceeding onwards to her home at Medîna, she returned
straightway to Mecca. There the disaffected (who ever gravitated for
safety to the Sanctuary) gathered around her, while from her veiled
retreat she plotted the revenge of Othmân, and with shrill voice
loudly harangued her audience on the enormous crime that had
desecrated the Prophet’s home and resting-place.[502]
 Thus when Zobeir and Talha reached
Mecca, they found sedition well in the Zobeir and Talha, with
ascendant. The numerous members of the Ayesha, march on Bussorah,
Rabi II. a.h. XXXVI. a.d. 656.
Omeyyad family, who had fled on the
Caliph’s death from Medîna, and the adherents of that powerful
House still residing at Mecca, as well as the factious and
discontented population at large, listened eagerly to the tale of their
distinguished visitors. ‘They had left the men of Medîna,’ they said,
‘plunged in perplexity. Right and wrong had been so confounded that
the people knew not which way to go. It was therefore for the citizens
of Mecca now to lead, and to punish the traitors who had slain their
Caliph.’ The standard of rebellion was raised, and many flocked to
join it. Bussorah was chosen as the first object of attack. It was a city
which had always favoured the claims of Talha; and Ibn Aámir, the
late governor, had an influential following there. The treasure which
he had brought away with him, as well as that carried off by Alâ from
Yemen, was now expended in equipping the force, and providing
carriage for the more needy followers. Ayesha, spurning the
restraints of her sex, prepared to join the campaign and to stir up the
people of Bussorah, as she had stirred up those of Mecca. Haphsa,
daughter of Omar, another of ‘the Mothers of the Faithful,’ was with
difficulty restrained by her brother (who had just fled from Medîna,
and held aloof from either side) from accompanying her sister-widow.
At length, some four months after Othmân’s death, the rebel army
set out 3,000 strong, of whom a thousand were men of Mecca and
Medîna. Ayesha travelled in her litter on a camel, which was
destined to give its name to the first engagement in the civil war.[503]
The other widows of Mahomet residing at Mecca accompanied her a
little way, and then returned. As they parted, the whole company,
men and women, gave vent to their feelings, and wept bitterly at the
louring fortunes of Islam; ‘there was no such weeping, before or
after, as then; so that it was called The Day of Tears.’[504]
Questions even now began to arise as
to which of the two, Talha or Zobeir, would Ambition mingled with cry for
revenge.
in event of victory be the Caliph; but
Ayesha, staying the strife, as premature, desired that Abdallah son
of Zobeir should lead the prayers; and it was given out that, if
success should crown their efforts, the choice of the future Caliph
would be left, as heretofore, in the hands of the men of Medîna.[505]
Saîd, with a body of the rebel troops, distrusting the motives of the
leaders, turned aside at the last moment, and went back to Mecca.
As the cavalcade swept by him, shouting that they were on their way
to destroy the murderers of Othmân root and branch, Saîd cried out
to Merwân: ‘Whither away? the proper objects of your vengeance
are on the humps of their camels before your eyes.[506] Slay these,
and return to your homes!’ It is not improbable that with many of the
party, and notably with Talha and Zobeir, ambition, the ruling motive,
was mistaken for the desire of a just revenge. In the whirl of passion
and intrigue, party-cry too often takes the place of reason; and we
need not doubt that both leaders and followers had wrought
themselves up into the belief that punishment of the high treason
enacted at Medîna was their real object.
Yet, notwithstanding all this parade of
justice, the conscience of Ayesha was ill at Ayesha’s qualms of
ease. As they journeyed through the conscience.
desert, her camel-driver beguiled the tedium of the long autumn
nights by calling out the names of the hills and vales along which
they passed. Approaching a Bedouin settlement the dogs as usual
began to howl;—‘The Valley of Hawâb!’ cried the guide. Ayesha
started and screamed. Something dreadful which Mahomet had
spoken, about those at whom the dogs of Hawâb should bark,
flashed across her memory or imagination. ‘Carry me back,’ she
cried; and, making her camel kneel, she hastily alighted from her
litter. ‘Alas and alas!’ she continued, ‘for I heard the Prophet say,
reproaching us, as he sat surrounded by his wives one day: “O that I
knew which amongst you it is at whom the dogs of Hawâb will bark!”
It is me! I am the wretched Woman of Hawâb. I declare that I will not
take another step on this ill-omened expedition.’ They sought to
persuade her that the guide had mistaken the name; but she refused
to stir, and the army halted for her a whole day. In despair, they
bethought them of a stratagem. The following night, they raised the
cry that Aly was upon them. The greater terror prevailing, Ayesha
hastened to her camel, and the march was resumed.
The alarm, feigned for the purpose,
was not, however, altogether groundless. Aly fails to intercept the
rebels.
When rumours of the defection first
reached Medîna, Aly declared that he would not move against
malcontents at Mecca, so long as no overt act of rebellion
threatened the unity of Islam. But shortly after, a message arrived
from the widow of Abbâs[507] at Mecca, with news of the design
against Bussorah. At the first, Aly was disposed to congratulate
himself that the conspirators had not made Kûfa, with its greater
Bedouin population, their object. The son of Abbâs, however, pointed
out that Bussorah was really the more dangerous of the two,
because fewer of the leading chiefs were there, able as at Kûfa, if
they chose, to curb the people and repress rebellion. Aly admitted
the truth of this; and, now thoroughly alarmed, gave orders that the
Syrian column should march instead to Nejd, hoping thereby to
intercept the rebels on their way to Bussorah. But the people still
hung back. Finding that Abdallah son of Omar had disappeared, Aly,
in alarm lest he too should have gone to join the rebels, sent scouts
in all directions after him. Meanwhile his own daughter, Omm
Kolthûm, widow of Omar, sent to assure her father that Abdallah had
really gone on pilgrimage to Mecca, and was altogether neutral;
whereupon Aly, ashamed of his apprehensions, recalled the scouts.
[508] At last a column of 900 men was got together, at the head of

which Aly himself marched to Nejd.[509] But, although they used all
expedition on the road, they found on reaching Rabadza that the
insurgents had already passed. Not being equipped for further
advance, Aly halted at Dzu Câr. Messengers were sent to Kûfa,
Egypt, and elsewhere, demanding reinforcements; and for these the
Caliph waited, in his camp, before he ventured forwards.
To return to Ayesha. The insurgent
army, having resumed its march, reached The rebels attack Bussorah.
Bussorah, and encamped close by.
Messages were exchanged, and immediately on Ibn Honeif, the
governor, becoming aware that the cry of vengeance on the
regicides covered designs against his Master, he called together an
assembly to try the temper of the people. Finding from the uproar
that the strangers had a strong party in the city, he put on his armour,
and, followed by the larger portion of the citizens, went forth to meet
Ayesha, who, on her side, was joined from the town by the insurgent
faction. A parley ensued. Talha, the favourite at Bussorah, Zobeir,
and even Ayesha, with her shrill and powerful voice, declaimed
against the murderers of Othmân, and demanded justice. The other
side were equally loud in their protestations against the expedition. It
was a shame, they said, and a slight on the memory of the Prophet,
for Ayesha to forego the sanctity of the Veil, and the proprieties of
‘the Motherhood of the Faithful.’ Aly had been duly elected, and
saluted Caliph; and now Talha and Zobeir were treacherously
violating the allegiance which they had been the first to swear. These
both protested that the oath had been forced upon them. On this
point the controversy turned; and from words they fell to blows. Night
interposed; but fighting was resumed the following day, and with so
serious a loss to the loyalists that a truce was called, and an
agreement come to, on the understanding that the facts should be
ascertained from Medîna. If it were shown
that force had been put upon the two Reference to Medîna on
leaders to take the oath, then Ibn Honeif question of compulsion.
would retire leave the city in their hands. An envoy accredited by
either side was accordingly deputed to Medîna. He arrived while Aly
was absent in his camp, and forthwith proclaimed the commission he
was charged with, before the assembled city. The people at first
were silent. At last Osâma ibn Zeid, a Companion of the highest
rank,[510] declared that both Talha and Zobeir had done homage
under compulsion, whereupon a great tumult arose; and the envoy,
having seen and heard enough to prove diversity of opinion on the
subject, took his leave.
When tidings of these things reached
Aly, who was with his army in Nejd, he Fighting at Bussorah. City
addressed a letter to Ibn Honeif: ‘There occupied
Talha.
by Zobeir and

was no compulsion,’ he wrote; ‘neither of

these my adversaries was constrained otherwise than by the will of
the majority. By the Lord! if their object be to make me abdicate, hey
are without excuse; if it be any other thing, I am ready to consider it.’
So when the envoy returned, and upon his report the insurgents
called on Ibn Honeif to evacuate the city according to agreement, he
produced the Caliph’s letter, and refused. But the rebels had already
obtained the footing they desired within the city. Arming themselves,
they repaired to the Mosque for evening service, and, the night being
dark and stormy, were not perceived until they had overpowered the
body-guard, entered the adjoining palace, and made Ibn Honeif a
prisoner. On the following day, a severe conflict raged throughout the
city, which ended in the complete discomfiture with heavy loss of
Aly’s party, and so the government passed into the hands of Talha
and Zobeir. True to their ostensible object, these now made
proclamation that every citizen who had engaged in the attack on
Othmân should be brought forth and executed. The order was
carried rigorously out, and great numbers were put to death.[511] The
life of Ibn Honeif was, after some hesitation, spared. He was set at
liberty, his head and beard shaven, and his eyelashes and
moustaches clipped; and in this sorry plight the ousted governor
made the best of his way to Aly.
The insurgents communicated tidings
of their success to Syria. And Ayesha Ayesha’s messages to Kûfa,
wrote letters to Kûfa, Medîna, and Yemen, &c.
seeking to detach the people from their allegiance to Aly, and stir
them up to avenge the death of Othmân.
Meanwhile the citizens of Bussorah
swore allegiance to Talha and Zobeir Apathy of Bussorah towards
conjointly. To avoid all appearance of Talha and Zobeir.
rivalry, the public prayers were conducted alternately by a son of
each. Little active sympathy was evoked by the usurpers. Talha
proclaimed an expedition to proceed against Aly. But no one
responded to the call, and his spirit fell. Thus some weeks passed
uneasily, till the city was aroused by the announcement that Aly with
a great army was in full march upon it.
 CHAPTER XXXVII.
BATTLE OF THE CAMEL.

Jumad II., A.H. XXXVI. December, A.D. 656.

Finding that the insurgent troops, with

Ayesha, Zobeir, and Talha, had already Aly, strengthened by
passed, Aly, as we have seen, halted for a contingent from Kûfa,
advances on Bussorah,
while at Dzu Câr in Nejd, with the view of Jumâd II. a.h. XXXVI. Nov.
strengthening his army; for, although joined a.d. 656.
on his march by the Beni Tay and some
other loyal tribes, he still felt too weak for an offensive step. To Kûfa
he addressed a special summons, inhabited as it was by many
veteran Companions on whose loyalty to the Caliphate he might
reasonably depend; and he added force to the call by holding out the
prospect that their city should be the seat of his government. ‘See,’
he wrote to them, ‘have I not chosen Kûfa before all the cities for
mine own? Unto you do I look, in these hard times, for succour, if
haply peace and unity again prevail as it behoveth among brethren
in the Faith.’ But the summons was at the first unheeded. The
overgrown city was made up of many factions; and from some of
these the message of Ayesha, demanding revenge for Othmân’s
blood, had already found response. Abu Mûsa was altogether
unequal to the emergency. Loyal to the memory of the murdered
Caliph, he yet sought to allay the ferment by a neutral course, and
urged the citizens to join neither party, but remain at home. A second
deputation meeting with no better success, the Caliph bethought him
of sending his eldest son, in company with Ammâr, the former
Governor of Kûfa, to urge his cause. The personal appeal of Hasan,
the grandson of the Prophet (albeit a spiritless creature devoted only
to his harem), had the desired effect.[512] The chord of loyalty in the
fickle city’s heart was touched; a tumult arose, and Abu Mûsa,
unable to maintain his weak neutrality, was deposed. The Arab tribes
rallied, and for the moment heartily, around such noted leaders as
Cacâa, and Adî the son of Hâtim. And soon ten thousand men, partly
by land, partly embarking on the river, set out to join the Caliph, who,
advancing slowly from Dzu Câr, awaited their arrival. Thus
reinforced, Aly was able to take the field effectively, and to march on
the rebellious city with an imposing force.
Bussorah itself was not wholly hostile.
A considerable portion of the Beni Bekr Aly opens negotiations with
and Abd al Cays went forth and joined the Talha and Zobeir.
camp of Aly. The Beni Temîm, another tribe inhabiting the city,
perplexed by conflicting obligations, stood aloof, and encamped,
under their leader Ahnaf, within a few miles of the city, watched what
the result might be. Still the numbers bound to the insurgent cause
nearly equalled the Caliph’s army; and on its approach they marched
forth with Talha and Zobeir at their head, and Ayesha in a well-
fenced litter on her camel. But Aly’s thoughts were for peace, if it
were possible. He was a man of compromise; and here he was
ready, in the interests of Islam, magnanimously to forget the insult
offered to his throne. Apart, indeed, from personal jealousies, there
was no disagreement sufficient to bar the hope of reconciliation. The
cry of Talha and Zobeir was for vengeance against the murderers of
Othmân. As yet, Aly did not deny that justice should be dealt out
against them. But he was obliged to temporise. He had in his army
great numbers of these very men, and he felt that to inflict
punishment on them, as his adversaries required, would be, for the
present at least, impossible. Holding these views, he halted while still
some little way from Bussorah, and sent forward Cacâa to
expostulate with Talha and Zobeir. ‘Ye have slain six hundred men of
Bussorah,’ said Cacâa to them, ‘for the blood of Othmân; and lo! to
avenge their blood, six thousand more have started up. Where in this
internecine work are ye to stop? It is peace and repose that Islam
needeth. Give that, and again the majesty of law shall be set up, and
the guilty brought to justice.’ As he spoke, the truth flashed on the
minds of Zobeir and Talha, and even of Ayesha; and they returned
word that if these really were the sentiments of Aly, they were ready
to submit. After several days were spent in such negotiations, Aly,
rejoicing at the prospect of a bloodless compromise, advanced.
 But as we have seen, Aly’s army,
recruited at random from the Bedouin Tactics of the regicide.
settlements, comprised a great number of
notorious regicides. Afraid of bringing these into contact with the
heated army of his opponents, which was still breathing out fire and
slaughter against them, Aly gave command that none who had
shared in the attack on Othmân should for the present accompany
him in his advance.[513] These in their turn, with Ashtar and Ibn
Sawda at their head, became alarmed. Talha’s adherents, sworn to
their destruction, were double their number. If peace, then, were
patched up, as was now proposed, what were they all but doomed
men? Reasoning thus, they held a secret conclave, and came to the
conclusion that their only safety lay in precipitating hostilities, and
thus forcing Aly’s hand to crush their enemies. Accordingly, when the
Caliph marched, they remained behind, but with the resolve that,
when the right moment came, they would advance and throw
themselves upon the enemy.
The army of Bussorah, numbering from
twenty to thirty thousand men, remained Continued peaceful
encamped on the outskirts of the city. Aly’s negotiations.
force, advancing unopposed, halted within sight of them. The
citizens, as well as Talha and Zobeir, sent deputations to the Caliph;
and negotiations for peace went on, evidently of a sincere and
substantial character. Aly himself approached on horseback, and
Talha with Zobeir rode forth to confer with him. ‘Wherefore came ye
out?’ asked Aly; ‘did ye not swear homage to me?’ ‘Yea,’ replied
Talha, ‘but with the sword over our necks; and now our demand is
that justice be executed against the regicides.’ Thereupon Aly said
that he too held them guilty; and in no measured terms exclaimed,
‘The Lord blast the murderers of Othmân!’ But they must bide their
time. Zobeir on his side was softened by a passage from some
conversation of the Prophet recalled by Aly to his mind; and he
bound himself by an oath that he would not fight.[514] Then they all
retired. And both armies, understanding that pacific negotiations
were in progress between their leaders, went to rest that night in
such security as they had not felt for many weeks.
 But the spell was rudely broken.
Towards morning, a sudden shock Armies both surprised by
changed the scene. The regicides, finding regicides.
that the time for action was fully come, had, during the night, carried
their design into execution. Squadron upon squadron of Bedouin
lances bore down, while it was yet dark, upon the Bussorah tents,
and in a moment all was confusion. Each camp believed that it was
being treacherously attacked by the other; and the dawn found both
armies drawn up, just as the conspirators desired, in mortal combat
one against the other. In vain Aly, perceiving the cause, endeavoured
to hold back his men. The sense of treachery embittered the conflict.
It was a strange engagement, and the first occasion on which
Moslems crossed swords with Moslems. It resembled one of the
deadly battles of old Arab times, only that for tribal rivalry were now
substituted other passions. The clans were broken up, and it became
rather a contest between the two rival settlements: ‘The Beni Rabia
of Kûfa fought against the Beni Rabia of Bussorah, the Beni Modhar
of the one against the Beni Modhar of the other;’ and so on, we are
told, with the various tribes of the Peninsula, and even with families,
one part arrayed against the other. The Kûfa ranks were urged on by
the regicides, who felt that, unless Aly conquered, they were
altogether lost. The field was contested with an obstinacy and
sanguinary issue which can be only thus accounted for. An eye-
witness tells us that ‘when the opposing sides came breast to breast,
it was with a furious shock, the noise whereof was like that of
washermen at the ghaut.’[515] The attitude of the leaders was in
marked contrast with the bitter struggle of the ranks. Zobeir, half-
hearted since his interview with Aly, had left the battle-field according
to his promise, and was killed in an adjoining valley by a soldier of
Ahnaf’s neutral company. Talha, disabled
by an arrow in the leg, was carried into Zobeir and Talha killed.
Bussorah, where he died. Bereft of their
leaders, the insurgent troops gave way. They were falling back upon
the city, when they passed by the camel of Ayesha, stationed in the
rear. Attacked fiercely all round, she was screaming unceasingly,
with fruitless energy, from within her litter, the old cry, ‘Slay the
murderers of Othmân.’ The word ran through the retiring ranks, that
‘the Mother of the Faithful was in peril,’ and they gallantly stayed
their flight to rescue her. Long and cruelly the renewed conflict raged
around the fated camel. One after another, brave warriors rushed to
seize the standard by its side, and one after another they were cut
down. Of the Coreish, seventy perished by the bridle. At last, Aly,
perceiving that the camel was the rallying point of his enemy, sent
one of his captains to hamstring and disable it. With a loud scream,
the animal fell to the ground.[516] The
struggle ceased and the insurgents retired The insurgents defeated.
Ayesha escapes unhurt.
into the city. The litter, bristling all round
with arrows like a hedgehog, was taken down, and, by desire of Aly,
placed in a retired spot, where Ayesha’s brother, Mohammed,
pitched a tent for her. As he drew aside the curtain of the litter, she
screamed at the unknown intrusion;—‘Are thine own people, then,’
he said, ‘become strange unto thee?’ ‘It is my brother!’ she
exclaimed, and suffered herself to be led into the tent. The brave but
wayward lady had escaped without a wound.
The carnage in this ill-starred battle
was very great. The field was covered with Losses in the battle.
ten thousand bodies in equal proportion
from either side;[517] and this, notwithstanding that there was no
pursuit. For Aly had given stringent orders that no fugitive should be
followed, nor any wounded soldier slain, nor plunder seized, nor the
privacy of any house invaded. A great trench was dug, and in it the
dead were buried, friends and foes together. Aly, who encamped for
three days without the city, himself performed the funeral service. It
was a new experience to bury the dead slain in battle not against the
infidel, but believer fighting against believer. Instead of cursing the
memory of his enemies (as became too soon the fashion in these
civil wars), Aly on this occasion spoke hopefully of the future state of
those who had entered the field, on whichever side, with an honest
heart. When they brought him the sword of Zobeir, he cursed the
man who had taken his life; and, calling to mind the feats of the
deceased warrior in the early battles of Islam, he exclaimed: ‘Many a
time hath this sword driven away care and sorrow from the Prophet’s
brow.’ The Moslems might well mourn over the memory both of Talha
and Zobeir, when they remembered how on the field of Ohod the
former had saved the life of Mahomet at the peril of his own; and
how often the latter, conspicuous from afar in his saffron turban,
carried confusion into the ranks of the idolaters while they yet held
possession of Mecca. Their fall, and that of many amongst the
Companions, was a loss to the empire itself, because seriously
weakening the Coreish in the struggle that yet remained to be fought
out betwixt them and the Arab tribes. In fact, this victory of Aly was
virtually the victory of these latter—that is to say, of the regicides,
and of the factious citizens of Kûfa. Thenceforward Aly himself was
almost wholly dependent on them. If, instead, he had succeeded in
effecting a strong and lasting compromise with Talha and Zobeir, his
position would have been incomparably strengthened.
The bearing of Aly after the victory was
generous towards the fallen foe. Having Aly’s magnanimity towards
entered the city, he divided the contents of the enemy.
the treasury amongst the troops which had fought on his side,
promising them a still larger reward when the Lord should have
delivered Syria into his hands. But otherwise he treated friends and
foes alike, and buried in oblivion the animosities of the past. Merwân
and the immediate adherents of the house of Omeyya fled back into
the Hejâz, or found refuge in Syria. All that remained in the city
swore fealty to Aly. The only class dissatisfied was that of the slaves
and rabble, who murmured at having no share in the treasure, nor
any chance of plunder. These, gathering into marauding bands,
occasioned much disquietude to the Caliph, and indeed hastened his
departure with the view of checking the mischief they were bent on.
[518]

Ayesha was treated by Aly with the

honour and reverence due to ‘the Spouse Ayesha retires to Medîna.
of the Prophet both in this life and in the
life to come.’ She was now five-and-forty years of age, but had lost
little of the fire and vivacity of her early days. After the battle, the
Caliph visited her tent, and expressed his satisfaction at finding her
unhurt; adding mildly, but half reproachfully: ‘The Lord pardon thee
for what hath passed, and have mercy upon thee.’ ‘And upon thee!’
was her ready answer. The best house in Bussorah was given up to
her; and there she was waited on by her own adherents. Not many
days after, she was dismissed, with a retinue of forty handmaids, and
attended by her brother. Aly himself accompanied her for a mile or
two on foot; and a large party went as far as the first stage, to bid her
farewell. At Mecca she performed the Lesser Pilgrimage; and then
retiring to Medîna, no more attempted to interfere with the affairs of
State. Her nephew Abdallah son of Zobeir (and of her sister
Asma[519]) retired with her. He is famous as the nearly successful
usurper of the Caliphate; but that was not till Ayesha had passed
away. She spent the remainder of her days at Medîna. There crowds
of pilgrims visiting the Prophet’s tomb (her own apartment) gazed
wonderingly at her as the once beautiful and favourite wife of
Mahomet; while she, becoming the garrulous and fertile source of
tradition, entertained them with stories of the Prophet, ascending as
far back as the earliest memories of her childhood. She died in the
fifty-eighth year of the Hegira, aged about sixty-six, having passed
forty-seven years in widowhood.[520]
Aly did not stay long in Bussorah.
Having appointed his cousin, Abdallah son Ibn Abbâs governor of
of Abbâs, as governor of the city, with Ziâd, Bussorah.
the able administrator, to aid him, as in charge of the treasury, he set
out for Kûfa.