A Monster with a Thousand Hands. Amy J. Rodgers
Gurr does not delve further into this question, making it seem as though “spectator” was simply another neologism generated during a particularly fecund epoch for the English language. However, spectator functions neither as a mere writerly synonym nor a term coined to designate a particular sort of playgoer. Unlike other neologisms of the period that spring fully formed into the English language, spectator is a translation and a very literal one at that. Before Sidney’s rendition, the Latin spectator was usually translated as “beholder” or “looker-on.”25 For example, in an account of the festivities orchestrated for the Duc d’Alencon’s visit to Antwerp in 1582, Arthur Golding translates those that stand and watch the extravagant spectacles as “beholders.”26 Sidney uses beholders seventeen times in the Arcadia, whereas spectator appears only twice. The question is, why did it appear at all? What representational lacuna does spectator fill for Sidney?
Similar to Golding’s usage, Sidney’s uses beholder to describe onlookers; for example, in Book I, beholders describes those who watch the portrait pageant held by Phalantus of Corinth to choose the most beautiful of eleven noble women. His first use of spectator, however, occurs during a narrative detour in which Sidney attempts to elucidate a complex dynamic of witnessing, one generated by a singular perspective and charged with psychic drama. Having lost his kingdom through his bastard son’s treachery, the usurped king of Paphlagonia (Leonatus) provides his betrayal’s backstory through narrative flashback. The “real-time” action begins when Leonatus’s recreant son Plexirtus discovers that his father and younger (and legitimate) brother are still alive and have reunited. In something of a panic, Plexirtus sets out to find and kill them: “But by and by the occasion was presented: for Plexirtus (so was the bastard called) came thether with fortie horse, onely of purpose to murder this brother; of whose comming he had soone advertisement, and thought no eyes of sufficient credite in such a matter, but his owne; and therefore came himself to be actor, and spectator.”27 In terms of signification, Sidney’s use of spectator appears to function in contradistinction to actor, an entity that represents the passive and impressionable side of this subjective equation. As both actor and spectator, Plexirtus should form a holistic spectatorial entity, an interpretive version of Aristophanes’s sexually unified originary beings.28 Instead, the two terms butt up uncomfortably against one another in the phrase, creating a sense of fragmentation rather than unity. In part, the narrative itself generates this dynamic. We already know that Plexirtus is a study in contradictions: he seems loyal, humble, and temperate but in reality is duplicitous, proud, and ambitious. But the interpretive yin and yang that Sidney seems to want to portray here feels odd, in large part because he tries on the new term spectator rather than using the tried-and-true beholder, a substitution that hints at a desire to represent something other than neatly opposing modes of interaction. What that is, exactly, is unclear; however, a kind of anschauung undergirds both actor and spectator here. Plexirtus does not merely set out to get rid of his annoying little brother but sets out to see what he needs to see: he “thought no eyes of sufficient credite in such a matter, but his owne.” Plexirtus is “actor” in that he seeks to confront the sight of his younger brother’s material reality; he is “spectator” in that his witnessing this physical entity is the sine qua non for Plexirtus’s subjective and psychic alteration from king into illegitimate usurper. The visual, then, becomes the epistemological channel that bridges the active and passive modes occupied by “actor” and “spectator” in this passage. Perhaps, as Gurr claims, the emergence of spectator as a term reflects a corresponding rise or reaffirmation of sight as the preeminent sense through which individuals came to know the world in the late sixteenth century. However, a question remains as to why Sidney did not rely on the more customary beholder, a term that would have evoked visual experience equally well.
One possibility is that Sidney attempts to express a relationship between acting and looking organized around a schema other than that offered by oppositional or complementary polarities. His statement that Plexirtus became “actor, and spectator” follows an equally enigmatic lead-in phrase: “and therefore came him selfe to be actor, and spectator” (my italics). On the one hand, Plexirtus’s “coming to be” is literal in that he comes in his own person to see for himself what he has heretofore only heard. On the other hand, the phrase “came him selfe to be” gives the figurative sense that a transformation has taken place in Plexirtus, not one that is physical or moral but experiential. Plexirtus’s actions here follow a specific, if empirically topsyturvy, trajectory in this passage: he does not see and then desire but desires and then sees. The reverse cause and effect described here seems to initiate a particularly powerful generative force, one that, to use Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase about subjectivity in the period, is “resolutely dialectical” in nature.29 When Plexirtus comes to be actor and spectator, he undergoes a transformation that is neither enacted upon him by outside forces (such as God or nature) nor completely generated by his imagination or psyche. Rather, the act of “coming of himself to be” necessitates being active and passive simultaneously. It is a chaos of agency, a collision of imaginative and experiential selves, a doing and a being done to. Rather than expressing polarities of experience (active/passive), Sidney struggles to express what happens when these seemingly divergent energies are yoked together, a struggle revealed in the very structure of the phrase. Sidney describes Plexirtus’s active transformation (the creation of himself as both actor and spectator) through the passive voice: he “comes to be.” When Sidney transports the term spectator, then, from one language to another virtually unchanged, it is not because he is running low on vocabulary but because he is trying to communicate something more turbulent and more subjective than beholding designates.
The disruptive rhythms generated by this primal chaos of dasein offer a kind of cultural seismograph, one that gauges moments during which the discursive spectator gains (or, more accurately, regains) traction in a given historical period. In 1584, when Sidney grasps for a signifier that encapsulates late sixteenth-century dynamics of reception, particularly those surrounding fictional representation, the sixteenth-century English incarnation of the spectator is still inchoate in form and concept but rapidly materializing in various discourses found in the period. Several other late Elizabethan writers echo Sidney’s use of the term in that they use it to describe an event that changes the viewing subject’s identity in some fashion. In his epic romance Vertue’s History, Francis Rous describes a scene of exquisite horror:
Of bloody gusts, and those vermilion swordes,
Which dide themselues in brothers broken hearts,
How swimming blood in streets made flowing fords,
And ruthfull turmoyles rose in diuers parts
I meane to sing.30
He then calls upon a nameless “spectator” to avenge these wrongs: “Which while these things were done spectator [sic] stoode: / Lift up blacke Nemesis thy glowing eyes.” Again, the observer described here is one who is called to occupy the positions of both actor and spectator, to witness and then avenge. Even closer to Sidney’s usage is the example found in Samuel Daniel’s Poetical Essays: “O faithlesse Cosen, here behold I stand / Spectator of that act my selfe haue plaid.”31 Daniel’s speaker addresses his cousin who has betrayed him (“thou dost me wrong / T’usurpe the government I held so long”), and, while the narrative situation is a reversal of Plexirtus’s, his spectatorial positioning is similar in that it is only in the seeing of his betrayer that the reality of his new identity (betrayed, powerless) becomes fully realized.32
There is another connection between these examples in that they all describe acts of violence. Sidney’s spectator sets out to see, then murder, his father and brother; Rous’s witnesses a bloodbath, and Daniel’s has been betrayed and overthrown by a family member. These scenarios do not simply describe instances of witnessing violence; rather, they suggest a process whereby this witnessing causes the subject to alter not only at the internal, psychic level (à la psychoanalysis) but at the manifest, social one. When Plexirtus sees his father and brother, he is forced to see himself as a traitor and parricide (a destiny he intends to fulfill) rather than as a legitimate ruler. Rous’s