Human sacrifice on the Restoration stage: the case of Venice Preserv'd. (2024)

I'm Sacrific'd! I am sold! (Venice Preserv'd, 3.2.1)

In 1641 Jean de Rotrou produced his tragedy Iphygenie en Aulide. This is a fairly close adaptation of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, albeit with an extra dash of decorum: who but a seventeenth-century Frenchman could have given Agamemnon a valet de chambre? Though not the first reworking of Euripides' play, it was the first to start a trend. Racines Iphigenie en Aulide appeared in 1674, being followed the same year by a version of the story by Michel Le Clerc and Jacques de Coras, Iphigenie (the authors having been under the impression that Racine was adapting Euripides' other Iphigenia play, Iphigenia in Taurica). The latter play was indeed being adapted (and being given a tragic turn) at this time in England, in Charles Davenant's Circe (1677), and by the turn of the eighteenth century two versions had finally appeared in France: La Grange-Chancel's tragedy Oreste et Pylade (1697) and the opera Iphigenie en Tauride (1704), with libretto by Joseph-Francois duch*e de Vancy and Antoine Danchet and music by Andre Campra and Henri Desmarets. Coincidentally, the last two tragedies to be premiered in London in the seventeenth century, both in December 1699, were two Iphigenia plays: Abel Boyer's Achilles; or, Iphigenia in Aulis (a translation of Racine) and John Dennis's Iphigenia, very loosely based on Euripides' Iphigenia in Taurica. In the same year, Hamburg witnessed the first performance of Reinhard Keiser's opera Die wunderbar errettete Iphigenia [The Miraculously Rescued Iphigenia], a somewhat elaborated version ofthe Aulis story. As for Italian settings, in 1678 Nicolo Minato provided Il Tempio di Diana in Taurica, a complete rethinking of Iphigenia in Taurica for setting by Antonio Draghi,(1) and in 1700 Carlo Maria Maggi produced an incomplete, but far more faithful, version of the Euripides play. (2)In the early eighteenth century, the Spanish dramatist Jose de Cafiizares produced a very free version of the Aulis story, El Sacrificio de Efigenia, the Taurica story being treated in El Sacrificio de Yfigenia. Segunda Parte, which is indebted to La Grange-Chancel's play (3)Iphigenia mania had swept Europe, and the stream of adaptations continued in theatres and opera houses throughout the eighteenth century. Mostly, these celebrated the capacity of civilization to advance beyond the practice of human sacrifice, and as the century progressed they were joined by other works on a comparable theme, such as Metastasio's libretto Dermfoonte (1733), which portrays the ending of an annual custom of virgin sacrifice. This was set to music over seventy times.

As the two Euripides plays exemplify, human sacrifice was a dominant theme in classical literature. The practice made renewed impact upon the Western imagination after contact with Aztec culture, but substantial literary interest in it was delayed, until the period I have described. For, initially, the primary archetype of savagery supplied by New World exploration was cannibalism. Consider, for example, the relative space and emphasis given to each in a work which does portray both human sacrifice and cannibalism, Titus Andronicus. Or, to explore less familiar paths, consider the development of the Renaissance epic, with its emphasis on religious and cultural expansionism. The production of such epics reached a peak, of quantity if not quality, in the 1650s, with the appearance of works such as Girolamo Graziani's II Conquisto di Granata (1650), Georges de Scudery's Alaric (1654), Pierre Le Moyne's Saint Louys; ou, la Sainte couronne reconquise (1658), and Pierre Mambrun's Constantinus; sive, Idololatria Debellata (1658). All these epics are set in the Mediterranean area, but all except the Scud[e']ry also look forward to the age of missionary exploration, whether to America (Graziani, Mambrun) or Japan (Le Moyne). All four emphasize the suppression of human sacrifice. (4) The prototype for such epics is, of course, Tasso's Gerusalernme Liberata (1581), which similarly looks beyond its primary theme of religious conflict in the Mediterranean to foresee and celebrate the discovery of America and its release from barbarous pagan violence. Here, however, the horrors that Christianity will suppress are not those of human sacrifice, but the "abominevoli vivande" (detestable food) of cannibalism. (5)

The turn from cannibalism to plots involving human sacrifice--the father-king's obligation to sacrifice his daughter for the sake of the nation, for example--brings sharpening focus on conflicts between systems of authority and their constituent members: conflicts which, in the 1640s, were fought out in earnest in England, France, and Spanish-ruled Naples. In the Spanish version of Iphigenia in Taurica, Toas--the king who presides over the barbaric sacrificial cult--states one of the fundamental conflicts with brutal simplicity:

 Toas. Un Soberano [a'] la Le no se sugeta. Idasp[es]. Mas non debe violentarla. Toas. Yo puedo hacer, quanto quiera. Toas. A king is not subject to the law. Idaspes. But he should not violate it. Toas. I can do whatever I would like.] (6)

In England, the conflict between the king and the law led to Charles I being, in Aphra Behffs words, "sacrific'd to the insatiate and cruel Villany of a seeming sanctifi'd Faction." The sacrifce of the king is also an important image in Abdelazer (1676) and The Widdow Ranter (1689), and likewise in the Dryden-Howard Indian Queen (1664), where two kings and a princess narrowly escape being sacrificial victims. (7)In England, however, quite other factors were also shaping the growing interest in sacrificial plots, in that dramatists started to explore a perceived hom*ology between sacrificial and monetary transactions: ways in which modern trades in human life and labor recreated the ancient transactions of human sacrifice. In the 1920s, Bernhard Laum was to suggest that money had actually developed from the dividing and distribution of sacrificial offerings, and the structural similarity of monetary and sacrificial exchange had been noticed centuries before. (8) Writers may, for example, imagine a cultural state that predates money, in which the fundamental currency consists of human lives, or body parts; their circulation, nevertheless, mimics and foreshadows that of coinage. Thus, in Titus Andronicus, the villainous Aaron incriminates Titus's sons by burying gold in the ground:

 Know that this gold must coin a stratagem Which, cunningly effected, will beget A very excellent piece of villainy. (9)

The gold duly reemerges from the ground and the sons are incriminated, but money is no longer needed, for culture has regressed to a level where it has no place, where the currency is of body parts, Titus attempting to buy his sons' lives by severing his hand, but being instead repaid with their severed heads. Rather similarly, in Drydeffs portrayal of the Conquest of Mexico, The Indian Emperour (1665), the sacrificial, non-monetary culture of the Mexicans repeatedly treats human life as the fundamental item of currency, both in noble and ignoble ways. "Fly Sir, while I give back that life you gave," exclaims Montezuma's virtuous son Guyomar, rescuing his father in battle (2.3.48, italics added). Later, forgetting his sons reciprocation of the gift of life, Montezuma attempts to kill him for disobedience: "That being which I gave, I thus destroy" (3.4.96; italics added). By contrast, towards the end of the play the avaricious Spaniards torture Montezuma and his chiefpriest--the latter fatally--in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of their hidden gold. By having the operation directed by a Catholic priest, Dryden clearly indicates a parallel with the sacrificial practices of the Mexicans; but this is sacrifice as an economic transaction. Lives are commutable not with other lives but with bullion. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental identity of process: the implication that the mind formed by a monetary culture creates new ways to reproduce the primal currencies of human life and the human body.

Human sacrifice also features in two later Dryden plays. At the end of Aureng-Zebe (1675), the virtuous but unloved Indian wife Melesinda departs to immolate herself on her husband's funeral pyre, and in King Arthur six victims are voluntarily sacrificed to Woden. It is, moreover, a sign of the deep trauma accompanying the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis that it should have generated three plays portraying cannibalism, the cannibalism being in each case associated with human sacrifice. These include Edward Ravenscroft's adaptation of Titus Andronicus (167%80?) and John Crowne's Thyestes (1680), in which Thyestes' son is sacrificed by a (Roman Catholic) priest before being served up to his father. Ravenscroft, however, rethinks the connection between monetary and bodily units. Instead of portraying a regression to a pre-monetary state, he shows Tamora's sons being led to their deaths by the promise of hidden gold: a ruse that repeats and avenges Aaron's incrimination of Titus's sons. (10)The point is nevertheless the same as Shakespeare's (and Bernhard Laum's): that monetary transactions mimic an older currency of flesh (a point obviously implicit in The Merchant of Venice).

Yet another Exclusion Crisis play of cannibalism and human sacrifice is Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), in which the Fecialian (i.e., Roman Catholic) priests sacrifice prisoners and drink their blood, literalizing a dynamic of destructive conflict that is equally central to both ofthe alternative political models offered in the play. The royalist counter-revolutionaries regard the common people as "Beasts for Sacrifice" and plot that the Senate will be "Sacrific'd;" Brutus, conversely, decrees the "Sacrifice" of his sons and "the Sacrifycing of my Bowels." (11) Lee's model of a fissured world, polarized between rival but equally sacrificial cultural models, also appears in Dryden (The Indian Emperour), Behn (Oroonoko), and Otway. (12) And it is the Popish Plot, of course, that generates Venice Preserv'd (1682). The typical eighteenth-century continental drama about human sacrifice shows humanity evolving beyond it. In these Exclusion Crisis plays, by contrast, there is a choice between two alternative forms of society, but each is equally supported and shaped by the model of human sacrifice.

By human sacrifice I mean one of two things. Most obviously, there is the literal ritual offering of a human life to the gods, as in plays about Iphigenia. Though mostly set in the ancient world, however, such plays are generally not about it: they are about the writer's own culture, as are Thyestes and Lucius Junius Brutus. A writer may, therefore, do things the other way round: write directly about contemporary civilization and see in it processes which seem fundamentally akin to rituals of human sacrifice--as Dryden does with the racking of Montezuma. This is what happens in Venice Preserv'd, which is the late seventeenth century's most elaborate and original exploration of the sacrificial impulse. In this play, we see a progressive literalization of the metaphors with which culture describes its own residually primitive strands, until they have returned in all their original nature and are no longer metaphoric. An example of this is the recurrent but gradually changing image of the dog. In its early uses, it is a simple metaphor, as when the protagonist laffeir describes himself as "A Dog, that comes to howl/At yonder Moon." (13) The boundary between the metaphoric and literal soon shifts, when the senator Antonio acts the part of a dog in his fetishistic sessions with the prostitute Aquilina. He is not a metaphoric dog, like Jaffeir, but an imaginary one, though his role is one from which he can exit at will. By the time of the heroine Belvidera's final madness, however, the boundary has disappeared altogether: for Belvidera goes beyond Antonio's condition, of fantasizing that he is a dog, into the downright delusion that she is one: "Oh I'll dig, dig the Den up" (5.503), she mumbles, evidently scrabbling at the earth in order to find and disinter her husband's ghost.

The same process occurs with the similarly pervasive image of human sacrifice. It first occurs, as a harmlessly comic metaphor, in the scene in which Antonio scampers under Aquilina's whip, pretending to be a dog and other animals: "Thus when Godlike Lover was displeas'd; / We Sacrifice our Fool and he's appeas'd" (3.1.144-45), quips Aquilina, whipping her unwelcome client out of the room. By the end of the play, however, the initially jocular metaphor is neither jocular or metaphoric. Stabbing himself to death on the scaffold where his friends have been executed, Jaffeir turns his suicide into a formal sacrificial ritual: a ritual to solemnize and effect the equally primitive ceremony of a curse:

 Thus of the blood y'have shed I make Libation, And sprinkl't mingling: May it rest upon you, And all your Race: Be henceforth Peace a stranger Within your Walls; let Plagues and Famine waste Your Generations. (5.470-74)

A ritual of human sacrifice materializes in the public spaces of one of the greatest Renaissance cities.

Perhaps it might be useful briefly to remind the reader of the plot. Before the start of the play, the hero, Jaffeir, has rescued Belvidera, the daughter of a powerful Venetian Senator, from drowning during the annual marriage of Venice with the sea. They marry, against her father's wishes, and fall upon hard times, whereupon Jaffeir is induced by his friend Pierre to participate in an attempted coup d'etat, in order to restore his fortunes. On joining the conspiracys he makes the extraordinary gesture of handing over his wife to his new friends, along with a dagger, as security for his good behavior; should he prove disloyal, they are to kill her with the dagger. He quickly, however, becomes disillusioned with the conspiracy when its leader attempts to rape Belvidera, and he is persuaded by her to betray it to the Senate. The captured conspirators repudiate the promise of clemency that Jaffeir has secured for them, and are executed. Jaffeir kills Pierre on the scaffold, to save him from the agony and disgrace of being broken on the wheel, and then performs his sacrificial suicide, whereupon Belvidera dies insane, her mind now that of a dog.

The tragic plot of Venice Preserv'd is interrupted by two darkly comic episodes involving Antonio's fetishistic rituals with the courtesan Aquilina, which have long been recognized as mirroring and illuminating the main plot in some detail. (14)The conspiracy and Antonio's sessions are both conducted in Aquilina's house of pleasure, and Antonio's language of sexual submission is repeatedly echoed by the conspirators, notwithstanding their claims to be restoring the primal liberty of the state of nature. "Such pleasure's in the pain" (4.94), murmurs Jaffeir as he is persuaded by his wife to betray the conspirators. "Here, take our Swords and crush 'em with your feet" (3.2.467), cries one of the conspirators to Pierre, persuaded to abandon his in fact all too just suspicion of Jaffeir, and doing so in an echo of the foot fetishism which is another feature of Antonio's sessions.

What is the point of such echoes? In two previous discussions of the play, I assumed that Antonio's masochism was the primary symbol: that it exposed in particularly pure form a universal human instinct for servitude which was the essential principle of society, and which persists even in the violent and anarchic would-be liberators of the conspiracy. (15)It certainly remains true that there is a general tendency towards acts of submission. For example, the extremely passive expression "lead me" occurs ten times. (16) The principle of unity, however, lies deeper than Antonio's masochism. That, and the conspirators' submissive outbursts, are parallel manifestations of something yet more deep-seated: the need of social groups to contain violence by constructing rituals to appease and disarm foes: "We Sacrifice ourFool and he's appeas'd," says Aquilina in the first of the play's sacrifice images (3.1.144). It is this need that links the two images that are common to both plots: that of the dog, a creature that both bites aggressively and fawns ingratiatingly, and that of sacrifice.

When Antonio howls like a dog during his first appointment with Aquilina, the recollection of Jaffeir's "A Dog, that comes to howl / At yonder Moon" is clear, but also unobtrusive: a lot has happened in the interval. If this cross-reference is evident only to the most attentive in the audience, however, it is followed by one that is so immediate as to be unmissable. No sooner has Aquilina "Sacrifice[d]" Antonio by whipping him out, in order to appease her jealous official lover, Pierre, than Belvidera enters, shocked by the attempted rape to which she has just been subjected: "I'm Sacrific'd! I am sold!" (3.2.1), she exclaims. The world "Sacrifice" (associated from the outset with money) is thus repeated in consecutive lines, and provides both a transition and a link between the two worlds portrayed in the play.

The idea continues to link the two juxtaposed spheres. When, in an especially clear echo of Antonio, Jaffeir finds pleasure "in the pain" of obeying Belvidera's injunction to betray the conspirators, he compares himself to "a tame Lamb" being led by a beautiful priestess "To Sacrifice" (4.87-88; italics added). The idea of sacrifice also occurs on three other occasions, prior to Jaffeir's final self-immolation:

 Peirre. [sic] If one the bravest and the best of men Had fallen a Sacrifice to rash suspicion. (3.2.480-81) Jaff. Forgot his Manhood, Vertue, truth and Honour, To sacrifice the Bosom that reliev'd him. (4.17-18) Belv. Fly to the Senate, save the promis'd lives Of his dear friends, e'r mine be made the sacrifice. (5.110-11)

When Belvidera first transfers the idea of sacrifice to the heroic plot, she announces not only that she has been sacrificed but that she has been sold. Well she might, since her husband has handed her as security to a bunch of cutthroats. The mercantile image provides another obvious link with the brothel scenes, which are paid for by Antonio's gold. More intriguingly, however, the pairing highlights the persistent imaginative association between sacrifice and monetary transaction. Indeed, despite its setting in an advanced, mercantile society the play does preserve a contrast between monetary and pre-monetary cultures, in that it portrays a conspiracy to overthrow the prevailing plutocracy and restore a primitive, pre-commercial state of nature. The conspirators want "to rouse up at the great Call of Nature" and overthrow a society "Where every slave that heaps up wealth enough / To do much Wrong, becomes a Lord of Right" (1.162, 182-83). One consequence of the emphasis on prostitution is that--like sacrifice--it focuses attention on the body as an object of exchange.

The characters in Venice Preserv'd are enmeshed in a monetary culture, while dreaming of alternative and more primitive systems of exchange. Their nostalgia for a world before money produces parallels with that more direct portrayal of such a culture, Dryden's The Indian Emperour. The parallels are doubtless spontaneous rather than deliberately allusive, springing automatically from shared assumptions about primitive forms of economic exchange, but they are not the less significant for that, and they highlight Otway's concern with the residual parallels between advanced and "primitive" cultures: a concern evident also in Dryden's play, as it was later to be in Behn's Oroonoko. The most remarkable parallel is a structural one: both open with accounts of an annual ceremony of national renewal. Both reach their climax with the destruction of an individual body: the racking of Montezuma and the breaking of the conspirators on the wheel.

The second scene of The Indian Emperour begins with a description of the annual sacrifice of 500 human victims on Montezuma's birthday, as a deadly and contrasting prelude to a fertility rite in which lovers choose their partners. Venice Preserv'd also opens with reference to the community's annual ceremony of renewal: in this case, it is the Ascension Day ceremony wherein the Doge casts a ring into the sea, confirming the marriage of Venice with the trade routes that bring it wealth. This ritual is one of economic circulation rather than sacrificial offering, but a more primitive exchange of bodies intrudes into the ceremony and takes it over: Belvidera had fallen from her gondola into the sea and, while others dithered, Jaffeir had leapt into the water and saved her, earning her love in recompense. "For her Life she paid me with her self" he reminisces (1.48) italics added). As in The Indian Emperour, the giving of life is rewarded in kind, though with a crucial difference of vocabulary: in the vocabulary of Montezuma and Guyomar, the verb is give; here, it is paY.17 Belvidera's sexual payment is quite unlike Aquilina's, but these manifestations of sexuality are described in the same terminology, and according to the same mental model. The prototype of monetary exchange is that of bodies: hence the imaginative association of prostitution and sacrificeJ8

But why do these seventeenth-century city-dwellers display such atavistic backsliding to practices more usually associated with the Aztecs? What creates the impulse to sacrifice?

As Hobbes argued, the primary social act is the surrender of power, in order to escape from the primal state of natural war. Hobbes, however, envisages a foundational contract agreed at the first formation of society. In Venice Preserv'd, by contrast, the surrender of power is not merely a primal prehistoric act; it has to be reenacted continually, day after day. How do you prevent someone from killing you? You appease him by giving him the power to do so, and thereby prove that you are not a threat. You give him, for example, a dagger: something that happens a lot, as is well known. The placatory ritual of submission is central to Venice Preserv'd, and its social archaeology is particularly well displayed at the end of the third act, when the conspirators rightly suspect Jaffeir, and want to kill him, until Pierre deludedly dissuades them. Like other incidents in the play, this one is a prolonged and agonizing study in meaningless choice, since Jaffeir has already left and is not available to be killed. Nevertheless, the working out of the choice is of the highest interest.

Pierre's first response is to try to placate his companions by offering himself to their violence and their weapons: "Here, here's my bosom, / Search it with all your Swords!" (3.2.410-11). But this is too early, for the conspirators are in the grip of a collective frenzy of slaughter: "each man kill his share of him" cries one conspirator, expressing the group's general surrender to de-individuated aggression (3.2.431). His attempt at submissive appeasem*nt failing, Pierre goes on the offensive, threatening to betray the conspirators (3.2.446-47). The tables thus turned, the conspirators promptly attempt to placate Pierre with their own ritual of submission. In an echo of the foot- fetishism of the masoch*stic scenes, one of them offers to hand over their weapons: "Here, take our Swords and crush 'em with your feet" (3.2.467). Not to be outdone, Pierre drops his threats and becomes placatory again: by all means kill my best friend after all, if you wish:

 Nay, now y' have found The way to melt and cast me as you will: I'll fetch this Friend and give him to your mercy: Nay he shall dye if you will take him from me. (3.2.468-71)

Whereupon the conspirator who had said "each man kill his share of him" now changes his tune completely: "may you both / For ever live" (3.2.47475). Thus reconciled with his associates, Pierre expresses relief that Jaffeir did not fall "a Sacrifice to rash suspicion" (3.2.481; italics added).

This scene is a particularly extended display of a social mechanism that governs many of the scenes in the play: forestalling the threat of violence by offering yourself to it. But what if the ploy fails or--still worse--if the offer is accepted? That is sacrifice. Sacrifice is what happens when the rituals of submission fail: when the proferred victim is claimed, or when, instead of offering your own life as a pledge in an exchange benefitting yourself, you find it offered by someone else on his own account. Otway's theory of sacrifice thus neatly reverses that which Ren6 Girard was to offer in our own time. (19) For Girard, sacrificial ritual supersedes collective outbursts of violence; it is a way of evolving beyond them, channeling the forces behind them, and preventing communities from being torn apart by them. For Otway, sacrifice is the primal outburst of violence. The secondary one, the pacificatory offering of your own life, is a means of keeping sacrifice at bay.

The polarity between contractual submission and sacrifice is displayed even in Antonio's masoch*stic sessions: contractual submission-rituals of a peculiarly well-defined kind. But Antonio is a fainthearted, fair-weather, Sunday-afternoon masoch*st. He has his limits, and Aquilina does not respect them. And it is by going beyond the limits of his tolerance, by becoming "too loving" (3.1.120), that Aquilina sacrifices him. Even in this comic world, the sacrifice occurs when the ritual of submission breaks down.

An oddly similar but far more serious example of sexually tinged sacrifice occurs when Jaffeir repents his betrayal of his friends, blames Belvidera for persuading him to it, and threatens to kill her with a dagger. She dissuades him by offering her life, as she does so representing death as an erotic pleasure:

 Now then kill me [Leaps upon his neck and kisses him. While thus I cling about thy cruel neck, Kiss thy revengeful] lips and die in joys Greater than any I can guess hereafter. (4.516-19)

This is seemingly eroticized suffering, after Antonio's fashion. But not really. Belvidera is not offering herself to Jaffeir's dagger in order to be killed but in order to avoid being killed. Depicting this episode in a later exchange with her father, she describes Jaffeir as threatening "sacrifice" (5.111). Sacrifice is, again, what is to be avoided: the violence that remains when all restraining mechanisms fail. Antonio's scenes belong in the play not because everyone in it is a masoch*st, but because rituals of submission are a fundamental organizing principle of life.

Antonio departs from the general trend by performing these rituals with a woman. The memory of maternal power is, however, also an element in Jaffeir's divided view of Belvidera: she joys more in him "Than did thy Mother when she hugg'd thee first" (1.333), he likens his feelings for her to those of an infant longing for his nurse, and she in return reproaches him as "a Disobedient Child" disdaining her "soft Authority" (3.2.17-26). Later, when he is about to betray the conspiracy, he sees himself as repeating a "Lesson" (4.74), again reentering the mentality of the child, and indeed Belvidera has just boosted his resolve by evoking the spectacle of "sad distracted Mothers" on the night of slaughter, their breasts dropping milk and blood (4.52-57). A man's first experiences of giving in are to the power of his mother or nurse, but (unless he is Antonio) he must in adulthood practice the craft in other spheres. The male bonding that dominates the play can only work if the competing power of the female is rejected (hence Jaffeir's surrender of Belvidera to the conspirators). For, in general, the threat of violence comes from men, and only strong men need to submit to prove they are no threat. It is significant that the antagonists in Otway's previous tragedy, The Orphan, are twin brothers: opponents of absolutely equal physical power. Indeed, even when adult men do submit to women, there remains a persistence of male power. Although Jaffeir likens himself to "a tame Lamb" (4.87) when Belvidera is leading him to betray the conspiracy, he is not betraying it because he covets the role of sacrificial victim. He is doing so because someone has infringed his rights of sexual property by attempting to rape his wife. Even Antonio baby-talks to Aquilina as she is dominating him.

Antonio's baby talk magnifies and caricatures a universal fact: that there is a significant difference between the terms in which men and women talk to each other. Men talk to each other in terms of shared codes--trust, honor, friendship--which clothe shifting and uneasy alliances with fictions of permanence and keep precariously at bay the ever-present threat that the alliances will dissolve into violence. Early in the play, Pierre describes honesty as "a Cheat invented first / To bind the Hands of bold deserving Rogues" (1.132-33). Trust, honor, and friendship have the same effect of restraining the violent hand: they are ritual restraints upon the power to kill. Friendship and honor are, of course, the primary and elevating values of early Restoration serious drama, such as the plays of the Earl of Orrery, where friendly rivals for a woman's affections are regularly so honourable in their conduct that each will urge her to marry the other. In Venice Preserv'd, however, friendship is less a consummation of the social instinct than a brake upon savage hostility. This is particularly evident among the conspirators, who are not fellow citizens but quarrelsome strangers of various nationalities--a miniature Hobbesian State of Nature. When they first appear in the play, they are quarrelling over national stereotypes, a French conspirator mocking an English one over the alleged English love of beef, coal fires, and whor*s. Bedamore, the Spanish leader of the group, contains the dangerous squabble by orchestrating a ritual of hand-clasping and embracing: traditional ways of demonstrating unarmed peacefulness of intent (but ways which create a puzzling symmetry between the body language of love and of violence). "'Tis thy Nations Glory" he says to the aggrieved Englishman, "To hugg the Foe that offers brave Alliance. / Once more embrace, my Friends--wee'l all embrace (2.235-37; italics added).

Embraces between males are thus gestures of bonding which neutralize threats of aggression: "Let us embrace. / Now would'st thou cut my Throat or I cut thine?" (3.2.292-93) says Jaffeir to Renault, ironically. Violence is, indeed, generally imagined as being physically intimate. In plotting the massacre that never happens, Renault refers briefly to cannon and petards (3.2.325-32), but otherwise killing is a matter of a blade in the heart, or the cutting of a throat (something mentioned eight times). The intimate gestures of male bonding exist in parallel with equally intimate forms of killing, and indeed the final display of male bonding fuses the two, in Jaffeir's stabbing of Pierre. One might expect male-female embraces to be contrasting expressions of simple sexual affection, but in fact they too border on hostility, being mentioned in the context of rejection or worse. Pierre rejects Aquilina for embracing Antonio (2.1-46). Jaffeir embraces Belvidera after deciding not to kill her (4.523), but when she recollects the incident Belvidera almost identifies the embrace with the hostility:

 oh 'twas thus We last embrac'd, when, trembling with revenge, He dragg'd me to the ground, and at my bosome Presented horrid death. (5.100-103)

The usual difference remains. Male hands clasp and embrace each other because they carry a threat. When a man embraces a woman, even this is tinged with rejection and male menace.

The conspirators' association again dissolves into prospective violence when Pierre resists their clamor to kill Jaffeir. Friendship is repeatedly invoked--seven times--during the elaborate ritual of submission which restores their amity, its uses charting the flow and ebb of hostility:

 Pierr. Away! w'are yet all friends. (3.2.427) Pierr. I am too hot: we yet may live Friends. Spino[sa]. 'Till we are safe, our Friendship cannot be so. (3.2.440-41) Pierr. Thou dy! thou kill my Friend! or thou, or thou. (3.2.458) Spino. Forgive us, gallant Friend. (3.2.468) Pierre. I'll fetch this Friend and give him to your mercy. (3.2.470) Peirre. [sic] I've preserv'd your Fame, and sav'd my Friend. (3.2.490)

The trust, honor, and friendship that are constantly in men's mouths are extensions of the ritual of submission. They contain the power to kill.

Other values that offer stability in the cutthroat world of male relationships are trust and honor. Trust is another distinctively male word, and is used of women only negatively, when Belvidera complains that Jaffeir does not trust her. But its most consistent use is to describe Jaffeir's entrusting of Belvidera to the conspirators. Similarly, honor is chiefly used of Belvidera when she is seen as an extension of Jaffeir's honor: especially, again, when he hands her over to the conspirators: "I've contriv'd thy honour," he says as he does so; "Trust to my Faith" (2.404-5; italics added). Similarly, the enormously common word friend is used of Belvidera only in circ*mstances which draw attention to the unusualness of its application. When she begs to be Jaffeir's friend, she has to ask "Look not upon me as I am, a Woman" (3.2.119). The point at which Jaffeir positively applies the male terms to Belvidera is the point of his maximum alienation from the male group, when he is momentarily submitting to her; that is, when he is on his way to betray his friends and is about to compare himself to a sacrificial lamb: "No, th'art my Soul it self; wealth, friendship, honour" he claims at this point (4.80). (20)

There is thus an elaborate vocabulary of male discourse, from which women are excluded, or in which they are included only in ways which highlight their general exclusion. The difference in vocabulary reflects the difference in the perception of male and female bodies. Men are antagonists to each other because they are each other's replicas. They are other because they are the same: each can, equally, kill the other. Women are simply other.

The bodies of men and women are therefore imagined quite differently: of the twenty-seven references to hands, for example, twenty-six are to the hands of men. For hands threaten, whereas women's bodies are soft and unthreatening, "Fram'd for the tender Offices of Love" (1.361). Moreover, it is men who predominantly wield those extensions of manual power, the dagger and the sword. Nor is that enough, for the blade-grasping enemy is at particularly intense moments visualized as a wild beast with paws, the artificial blade reimagined as animal claws, or teeth: human and animal physiques of aggression are fundamentally identical, and easily confused. Antonio (literally) bites Aquilina; Pierre threatens that the conspirators may (metaphorically) "bite" him (2.52). When Jaffeir is arrested by the guards of the Senate, he entirely forgets about their human form and artifacts and sees himself menaced by the paws of beasts: "Hold, Brutes, stand off, none of your paws upon me," he cries (4.104). Pleading to her father to protect her from Jaffeir's wrath by saving the conspirators, Belvidera turns him into a lion, raging in quadruped menace, his hands and feet now the natural weapons of a wild carnivore:

 Think you beheld him like a raging lion, Pacing the earth and tearing up his steps, Fate in his eyes, and roaring with the pain Of burning fury; think you saw his one hand Fix't on my throat, while the extended other Grasp'd a keen threatning dagger. (5.95-100)

Swords and daggers improve the efficiency of the hand, but in extreme moments the mind edits them out, and the characters revert to seeing themselves as creatures of the wild, red in tooth and claw.

It was with his hand that Jaffeir had rescued Belvidera from the sea ("Like a rich Conquest in one hand I bore her" [1.42]), with which he delivers her to the conspirators ("I in this hand, and in that a Dagger," she complains [3.2.101]), and with which he threatens to kill her when he repents his betrayal of his friends ("think you saw his one hand / Fix't on my throat," Belvidera says to her father [5.98-99]). When Pierre mocks honesty as a social fiction restraining the right of the fittest, he describes it as binding their "Hands" (1.133). But, as already noted, the hands are male. Women use hands, but these only enter verbal discourse once--and then in a moment of fiction--when Aquilina imagines hypocritically mourning for Antonio "With wringing hands" (2.40). Women do not have hands: they have arms. These they have aplenty, to embrace men in moments of sexual passivity ("By these armes that now cling round thy neck" [5.21]), but their hands are never considered. For, even when unassisted by the dagger, the gestures of the hand reveal a system of male power, male concession, and male signification from which women are excluded. Men too have arms, and use them to embrace women. But they also have arms in a sense that is denied to women: they are "Furnish'd with Arms and Instruments of mischief" (4.222). This is why women can never act as principals in the rites of appeasem*nt; they can only be offered as tokens, by men.

In its structure, this use of women as currency in the maintenance of male relationships resembles the hom*osocial bonding described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: "the routing of hom*osocial desire through women." (Indeed, Venice Preserv'd fits her case far better than the Restoration play she actually chose, The Country-Wife). The crucial difference from Sedgwick's model, however, is that the fundamental dynamic of male relationships is here not desire but hostility. (21) The rituals for displacing that hostility are often strikingly isomorphic to those of sex, but their basis is nevertheless enmity.

Otway's treatment of women has sometimes been seen as antifeminist. In her brilliant reading of the play, published in 1995, Jessica Munns wrote of "Belvidera's saving blindness to male codes of honor," but later critics have dealt more severely with Otway's view of women. Jean I. Marsden, for example, sees The Orphan as titillating the audience "with a vision of rape and incest visited on the body of an innocent woman" and Elizabeth Gruber has concluded that Otway treats Belvidera as a regrettable menace to the cohesion of the male group: "In Venice Preserved, it is Belvidera who functions as the evil that must be contained. She constitutes a disruption, with her very presence apparently threatening the creation and maintenance of overtly politicized bonds between men." (22) think Otway deserves better. Like Behn, he assumes that the starting point for social organization is that men are more violent than women, and he shows how this fundamental difference shapes everything, down to the vocabulary of social value. Unlike Behn, he is aware that the behavior he is describing is something that is logically prior to humanity. In the 1960s, Konrad Lorenz observed the role of "submissive or appeasing attitudes" in defusing quarrels between animals. The suppliant animal may offer his "weapon" to the aggressor, leaving himself dangerously defenseless; wolves and dogs offer their necks to the teeth of the victor. (23) Otway had observed the same thing. Here and elsewhere, he is fascinated by the links between human and canine behavior. There are nineteen dog or cur images in Venice Preserv'd, culminating in the mad Belvidera's imagined transformation into a dog. "You dog" is a common enough image in many Restoration plays, but Otway uses the dog as a symbol, not merely as a term of abuse, and he is particularly interested in the dog's combination of aggression and fawning obsequiousness. When, in The Orphan, Castalio has been excluded from the bridal chamber on his wedding night, he compares himself to that archetypal man's man Hercules, reduced to serving Omphale; and he in turn compares this submissive strong man to a dog: "How like a Dog / Lookt Hercules, thus to a Distaff chain'd?" (4.98-99). In The Souldiers Fortune--which contains thirty dog or cur images--one of the men is trained with a whip and bell by his mistress, like an aggressive dog learning obedience: "what tie me up like an ungovernable curr to the frame of a table, let, let thy poor dog loose that he may fawn and make much of thee," he says (5.21-23). A combination of aggression and fawning appears even in Antonio's animal play with Aquilina, for he alternates between the roles of aggressive and timid animals (a bull and a squirrel). If he is whipped like a dog, it is because he has tried to bite her, like a dog.

Behn sees two perpetual social manifestations of Hobbesian aggression: trading in women, the weaker sex, and sacrificing kings. Otway sees it in the perpetual containment of aggression by spontaneous contract; something which is not peculiar to human beings. Otway's special view of social prehistory gives him a special view of the pre-monetary state.

Exchanges of various kinds permeate Venice Preserv'd, involving three classes of object. There are documents, as when Jaffeir hands over the conspirators' names to the Senate. There are, also, coins: Antonio offers Aquilina gold, and Pierre seals Jaffeir's entry into the conspiracy by giving him "something to buy Pins" (2.98). Yet the conspiracy is an attempt to replace a plutocracy by something closer to the state of nature. It recalls Lucretius's claim that it was the invention of money that put an end to the primal rule of the stronger over the weaker:

 posterius res inventast aurumque repertum, quod facile et validis et pulchris dempsit honorem; divitioris enim sectam plerumque sequuntur quamlibet et fortes et pulchro corpore creti. (5.1113-16)

[Thereafter property was invented and gold found, which easily robbed the strong and beautiful of honour; for, for the most part, however strong men are born, however beautiful their body, they follow the lead of the richer man.] (24)

Accordingly, the body itself functions as a medium of exchange far more frequently than coin does. Women offer their bodies sexually, as when Belvidera pays Jaffeir with herself, or when she uses her body to defuse his murder threat. Men offer their bodies appeasingly, to prevent outbursts of hostility. The two processes follow absolutely parallel paths.

Yet the most common object of exchange is, as has often been noted, the dagger. To give someone a dagger is to give him the power to kill. It is a fundamental and explicit placatory transfer of power. The dagger first appears in the play, however, as an image of pure violence: a violence that is culturally prior to language. "Oh for a Curse / To kill with!" cries Jaffeir in his second meeting with Pierre. "Daggers, Daggers, are much better!" Pierre replies (2.122-23). "A thousand Daggers, all in honest hands," echoes Jaffeir, as the idea of the conspiracy sinks in (2.128). The dagger is thus at first an instrument of pure aggression, to be used on others. About to introduce Jaffeir to the conspiracy, however, Pierre introduces its other, more complex, function, as a guarantee in male bonding. If Jaffeir proves worthless, Pierre will "rip" his breast with his "Dagger" (2.314-15). Whereupon Jaffeir enters "with a Dagger" (2.316a), subsequently followed by Belvidera. He then hands over his wife to the conspirators as security for his own good behavior:

 To you, Sirs, and your Honours, I bequeath her, And with her this, when I prove unworthy[Gives a dagger. You know the rest:--Then strike it to her heart. (2.393-95)

If this is a reversion to using the body as currency, it is also a naked and indeed astonishing example of placating a potential foe by handing over the power to kill. But, of course, it is on this occasion the power to kill someone else. Men, who pose equality of threats to each other, may offer their own appeasing breasts to the dagger. Women, whose "Limbs, / [are] Fram'd for the tender Offices of Love" (1.360-61), pose no equivalent threat. They can offer themselves sexually, or be offered as a substitute for a man in the rituals of reciprocal reassurance that keep violence at bay. In offering a woman as substitute for himself, Jaffeir performs the most primitive monetary act. Belvidera speaks a profound truth when she says, as though the words were synonyms, "I'm Sacrific'd! I am sold!"

When Renault attempts to rape Belvidera, he menaces her with the dagger that Jaffeir had given. When Jaffeir is unfaithful, Pierre scornfully returns it. Jaffeir then threatens Belvidera with it, and finally restores its value by killing Pierre and himself on the scaffold, making a public "Libation" of blood. In its circulation, it cyclically runs through all the potentialities of man's capacity for violence: male sexual aggression, male competition, male bonding. A woman brandishes a dagger only once, when Aquilina threatens Antonio in their second scene. The threat is real, but is partly translated by Antonio into the fantasy they are acting out, and enjoyed accordingly.

When the dagger is handed over to the conspirators with Belvidera, it is given as a pledge (2.346, 3.2.190), a nicely ambiguous word which suggests both verbal commitment and economic substitution. It has long been recognized that the play is full of broken oaths, and that the dagger is their tangible correlative. (25) I here wish rather to stress the other, economic role of the dagger: not as an oath but as a quasi-financial pawn or security. To hand over the dagger is, concretely, to hand over the power to kill. This is the archetypal form of coinage, and the most effective. In the rebellion against the great trading city of Venice, the conspirators are not imaginatively or practically capable of regressing to a world without units of exchange; they can only retreat to a more primitive unit. The most primitive of all.

At the same time, the more advanced systems of control fail. One favorite way of distinguishing "primitive" and advanced cultures in early modern literature was to focus on their systems of measurement. The Caribs in Oroonoko record the passage of time by tying knots in a cord, whereas Oroonoko is fatally fascinated by the unfamiliar counting systems of European culture: the "Mathematical ... Instruments" which lure him onto the ship in which he is kidnapped (Behn, Works, 3:82, 103). As befits an advanced civilization, Otway's Venice is permeated by measurement, and the mechanical counting of time. The systems of counting and timing, however, rarely work. Dictating the master plan of the conspiracy, Renault enumerates the forces that are to take over the town: a thousand at St. Mark's, a hundred elsewhere, and so on. But the forces are never roused. Jaffeir delivers to the Senate a list of twenty-two conspirators to be saved; but they are not saved. And the play is full of clocks tolling, but tolling to no purpose: Pierre is late for the midnight appointment at which he lures Jaffeir into the conspiracy. The same midnight bell prompts Renault to complain that the conspirators are grossly late: "Clocks," Renault reflects, "will go as they are set: But Man, / Irregular Man's ne're constant, never certain" (2.206-7). The clocks give way to the passing bell, which tolls for Pierre's execution; but it is an execution which is not on time--"The day grows late, Sir" (5.452), the Officer complains--and which ultimately does not happen. Complaints that things are late run throughout the play. So far is the measurement of time from implying mastery that the only things that happen on time are acts of submission. Antonio turns up on time to be whipped by Aquilina; but it is only the client who does turn up on time. The dominatrix is late: it is "past eleven a Clock," Antonio complains (3.1.15). The other act of punctual submission occurs when Jaffeir is persuaded by Belvidera to betray the conspiracy "Anon at Twelve" (3.2.206), and describes his submission to her in terms of masoch*stically pleasurable sacrifice. Even keeping time is a ritual of submission, but its constant ineffectiveness shows how precarious the relationship is between savage impulse and the rituals that control it.

Otway, Dryden, and Behn shared much in common, and their shared interests distinguish them sharply from the dramatists who were producing sacrificial drama on the Continent. In particular, there is a striking--if doubtless coincidental--structural symmetry between The Indian Emperour and Venice Preserv'd, in that both begin with a communal ritual of renewal and culminate in a murderous assault on the integrity of the individual body. This pattern, which for Dryden characterizes an exotic and primitive world, serves Otway equally well for a portrayal of seventeenthcentury Venice. He displays a fascination with the way in which new intellectual and technical systems are inhabited by old demons. That fascination is still with us.

University of Aberdeen

NOTES

(1) Antonio Draghi and NicolO Minato, Il Tempio di Diana in Taurica (Vienna [1678]). Antonio Draghi (1634/35-1700), who was Kapellmeister to Leopold I in Vienna, is presumed to be the brother of Giovanni Battista Draghi (c. 1640-1708), who was active in England from the 1660s and composed the first setting of Dryden's St. Cecilia Ode for 1687.

(2) L'Ifigenia, Tragedia d'Euripide, in Rime varie di Carlo Maria Maggi, ed. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, 4 vols. (Milan, 1700), 2. The adaptation goes as far as line 1233 of Euripides' play.

(3) The Biblioteca Nacional de Espana has a manuscript of El Sacrificio de Efigenia, which it dates to 1701. The copies of the Segunda Parte that I have seen are undated, anonymous, and conjecturally assigned to dates subsequent to Canizares's death in 1750 (e.g., the British Library copy to 1765). The catalogues of the British and Cambridge University libraries assign the Segunda Parte to Canizares, but his authorship is denied in Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado, Catalogo bibliografico y biografico del teatro antiguo espanoL: desde sus origenes hasta mediados del SigIo XVIII (Madrid, 1860), 70.

(4) Girolamo Graziani, Il Conquisto di Granata, 2 vols. (Venice, 1789), 2:108,217-38; Georges de Scudery, Alaric, ou Rome vaincue (Paris, 1654), 61-67; Pierre Le Moyne, Saint Louys, ou la sainte couronne reconquise (Paris, 1658), 156, 251; and Petrus Mambrunus [Pierre Mambrun], Opera Poetica (La Fleche, France, 1661), 305-10. The first seven books of Saint Louys were first published as Saint Louys, ou le heros chrestien in 1653.

(5) Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, ed. Anna Maria Carini (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), canto 15, stanzas 28-32.

(6) Jose de Canizares, Tragedia. El Sacrificio de Efigenia. Segunda Parte (Barcelona, 1800), 17.

(7) Dedication of The Second Part of the Rover, Abdelazer 2.1.190; 3.1.156; 4.1.116, 357; 5.1.149, 353,610; The Widdow Ranter 4.1.9-12. The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992-96), 6: 228. All citations of Behn are to this edition. The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, et al., 20 vols. (U. of California Press, 1956-2002). Subsequent citation of this edition appears parenthetically.

(8) Bernhard Laum, Heiliges Geld: eine historische Untersuchung uber den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tubingen: Mohr, 1924). Laum's thesis is developed in Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge U. Press, 2004).

(9) Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995) 2.2.5-7 (italics added).

(10) Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus, or, The Rape of Lavinia (London: 1687), 48-50.

(11) Lucius Junius Brutus, 4.1.32, 62; 4.1.315; 5.2.38. The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke, 2 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1954-55).

(12) For fuller discussion of The Indian Emperour and Oroonoko, see Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), 81-93.

(13) Venice Preserv'd, 2.79-80, in The Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. C. Ghosh, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2. All citations of Otway are to this edition.

(14) R.E. Hughes, '"Comic Relief' in Otway's Venice Preserv'd," N&Q 5 (1958): 65-66; William H. McBurney, "Otway's Tragic Muse Debauched: Sensuality in Venice Preserv'd," JEGP 58 (1959): 380-99; Gordon Williams, "The Sex-Death Motive in Otway's Venice Preserv'd," Trivium 2 (1969): 59-70; Derek Hughes, "A New Look at VenicePreserv'd,"SEL 11 (1971): 437-57, and English Drama, 1660-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 300-6; Jessica Munns, Restoration Politics and Drama: The Plays of Thomas Otway, 1675-1683 (Newark: U. of Delaware Press, 1995), 167-203.

(15) Hughes, "A New Look at Venice Preserv'd,'" and English Drama, 1660-1700. The present article extensively elaborates and adds to arguments that I advanced in "Economics and Human Sacrifice: Otway's Venice Preserv'd," SEDERI: Journal of the Spanish Society for English Renaissance Studies 12 (2001): 269-79.

(16) Otway, Venice Preserv'd, 1.316, 348; 2.373; 4.1, 73, 87, 213,272; 5.416, 511.

(17) Dryden's Indian Emperour develops an elaborate distinction between giving and paying which it is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze.

(18) Munns, Restoration Politics, 179-80, discusses the circulation of women in Otway's play, observing that it sustains "the patriarchal model of society" and that "Belvidera is treated as an object of cost and exchange." She also observes that "Belvidera and Aquilina never meet, but many of their scenes are parallel; they are a twinned pair" (186).

(19) Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1977).

(20) He otherwise attributes honor to her only when he is finally rejecting her (5.295).

(21) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male hom*osocial Desire (Columbia U. Press, 1985), 49. Munns, Restoration Politics, 185, argues that the male bonding in Venice Preserv'd is "sexually charged." Sedgwick does observe that "the glue" between men can manifest itself as "hostility or hatred" (2). For Otway, however, it originates in hostility.

(22) Munns, Restoration Politics, 187; Jean I. Marsden, Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660-1720 (Cornell U. Press, 2006), 80; Elizabeth Gruber, '"Betray'd to Shame': Venice Preserved and the Paradox of She-Tragedy," Connotations 16 (2006/2007): 169.

(23) Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. Marjorie Latzke (London: Methuen, 1966), 112-13.

(24) Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. Cyril Bailey, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947).

(25) David R. Hauser, "Otway Preserved: Theme and Form in Venice Preserv'd," SP 55 (1958): 484; McBurney, "Otway's Tragic Muse," 388-89; Hughes, "New Look at Venice Preserv'd," 443.