"Look not big, nor stamp, nor stare": Acting Up in The Taming of the Shrew and the Coventry Herod Plays

Comparative Drama, Winter, 2000 by Jonathan Gil Harris

III

Shakespeare stands alone among the major playwrights of the early modern London stage in making repeated reference to Herod. The latter fails to be the subject of even a single allusion in any of Marlowe's and Jonson's plays; inasmuch as he does make an appearance in the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries, such as Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Maryam, the anonymous Second Maiden's Tragedy, and Herod and Antipater, it is as a historical character lifted from the pages of Thomas Lodge's 1602 translation of Josephus' Of the Antiquities of the Jews, and unrelated to the pageant Herod. (33) When Shakespeare alludes to Herod in his plays, by contrast, it is in almost every instance less the Herod of classical history or of scripture than his cycle-drama incarnation that informs the reference.

Mistress Page, speaking in The Merry Wives of Windsor of Falstaff's unwelcome love-letter to her, declaims:

   What a Herod of Jewry is this! 0 wicked, wicked world! One that is
   well-nigh worn to pieces with age, to show himself a young gallant!

   (2.1.18-20)

Mistress Page condemns Falstaff's wickedness, for which the Herod of scripture and classical history would have served as a sufficient exemplum. But her final exclamation, with its invocation of a raise "show" hints at a theatrical reference: Falstaff, like the cycle-drama Herod, is a vainglorious braggart. The memory of Herod as a loud, melodramatic, "strutting player" is even more apparent in Hamlet's legendary censure of noisy actors. Speaking of the player who "tear[s] a passion to tatters" and "split[s] the ears of the groundlings" Hamlet complains that "I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod" (3.2.10-11,13-15). Not only does Hamlet's allusion invoke the character in an explicitly theatrical context; the reference also has no corollary in the scriptural representation of Herod, whom the Geneva Bible proclaims to be "exceading wroth" (St. Matthew 2:16), but not loud.

One might counter that Shakespeare's allusions to the cycle-drama Herod in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Hamlet need not presume a first-hand acquaintance with the Coventry Herods. As Chaucer's description of Absolon's dramatic pastimes in The Miller's Tale shows, the character's bragging and ranting tendencies were legion; moreover, Hamlet criticizes what had become an obsolete style of acting, and it is precisely such obsolescence that means the allusion by itself can prove no more than Shakespeare's knowledge of the ear-splitting stereotype associated with Herod, and not any first-hand familiarity with the character in performance (let alone on the Coventry stage). Another of Shakespeare's explicit allusions to Herod, however, furnishes strong evidence that he was calling to mind a memory of a specific dramatic performance. In Henry V, Harry tells the inhabitants of Harfleur that they can expect to see

   Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, Whiles the mad mothers with their
   howls confused Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod's
   bloody-hunting slaughtermen. (3.3.115-19)