Paradoxical Time and Providential History in Shakespeare and Bacon

Few of Shakespeare's tragic characters have had so marty detractors as Richard II, who has been variously dismissed as a capricious tyrant, a self-absorbed poet, and a Protean dramatic forcé whose unpredíctable actions at times threaten the structural integrity of the play. This perception has in turn influenced the interpretation of Bolingbroke as a competent antagonist who brings much-needed order to the chaotic universe of the first two acts of Richard II. This essay sides with the minority of defenders of Richard-thecharacter as the central intelligence who exerts the greatest control over the dramatic events as they are represented upon the stage and on the page. In discussing Richards recovarse to constructions of human history imported from providentialist historiography I make ampie use of Francis Bacon's own self-representations as the abused Messiah of experimental philosophy. l.Richard's Plotting of HIStory. Taking a cue from E.M.W. Tillyard's 1946 essay on Richard II, later scholars have used a variety of rhetorical approaches to explore a central theme of the play. the interruption of a king's rule by the appearance of a usurper, and the ensuing promise that this rule will be restored at some time in the future. At stake in this argument is nothing short of the possibility that the early modern subject may be capable of planning (and perhaps even controlling) human affairs over long periods of time. Yet due to the scarcity of Renaissance nonliterary texts showing similar constructions of time and subjectivity, Shakespearean criticism has so far been somewhat reluctant to explore the implications of 150 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses these constructions for a more comprehensive Renaissance theory of human action. My contention is that one such set of texts is to be found in Bacon's posthumously published early treatises. For the early Bacon, experimental philosophy has had moments of incipient prosperity that were nevertheless thwarted by the sudden arrival of a usurper—Aristotle. Bacon repeatedly represents himself as being involved in a struggle against Aristotle and his seventeenth-century descendants. This self-representation leads me to the Identification of another similarity between the Shakespearean tragic hero and Bacon. Richard attempts to control rhetorically his own undoing by Bolingbroke while simultaneously accepting it and claiming that posterity will vindicate his ñame. For his part, Bacon acknowledges that his philosophy will be maliciously suppressed by rival epistemologies, for which reason he entrusts to posterity the strengthening and institutional implementation of Baconianism. Both Richard and Bacon articúlate their prophecies of rehabilitation and renewal around the time construct known to poststructuralists as the future perfect. In 2.1 of Richard II the Duke of York warns his sovereign and nephew, King Richard II, against unfairly dispossessing his other nephew, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, of his legitímate inheritance of lands and titles: "Take Hereford's rights away, and take from time/ His charters, and his customary rights;/ Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day:/ Be not thyself. For how art thou a king/ But by fair sequence and succession?" (195-99). Sameness or self-identity—being oneself—is here defined by means of a father-and-son relationship. For York, then, as for "a thousand well-disposed hearts" (2.1.206), a king is responsible for ensuring the uninterrupted linear unfolding of his own lineage at the same time as he protects and safeguards the "fair sequence and succession" of the peerage. But Richard, seeking to add new titles and lands to his personal patrimony, frustrates the expected succession of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, by his son Henry Bolingbroke. The effect of this violation of an ancestral code of loyalty is that Richard loses the support of that thousand well-disposed hearts. What is more, he manages to antagonize them in such a manner that he ironically becomes the one who is stripped of his succession privileges. He is deposed. This is, to put it briefly, how the dramatic conflict informing Richard II evolves through the reversal of positions experienced by the protagonist and his antagonists. In his cultural-materialist reading of the play, Richard Wilson has called attention to the irony that Ríchard's innovative economic practices, while meant to affirm and increase his absolutist pretensions, in fact questíon them. By appropriating the lands and titles of others, and selling them to untitled buyers, Richard turns inalienable ownership rights—including the right to the throne—into contingent, short-lived events. In other words, he moves from an economic practice based on the continuous possession of property by members of the same family to one in which property circulates in a random manner as dictated by the domineering and capricious will of the king (204-08). This change in ownership rights is seen by the aristocracy as a threat to their sense of communal identity, which depends heavily on the uninterrupted transmission of titles and properties from father to son. Indeed, linear time is represented in the play by means of three sets of images and situations: (1) images of progeny and of a father's succession by his son; (2) images of gardening and natural growth; and (3) images of earthly fame. Now Richard perceives the slow and orderly unfolding of linear time as a limitation to the absolutist Paradoxical Time and Providential History in ... 151 claims of his will. He in fact conceives the gratification of his desires as being necessarily simultaneous with the awakening of those desires, since he considers his royal prerogative to be God-given. The flrst three acts of the play challenge this fantasy of uncontested power. To give a couple of examples, in 3.2 Salisbury reports to him that his delay in returning from Ireland has caused his soldiers to disband: "One day too late, I fear me, noble lord,/ Hath clouded all thy happy days on earth./ O, cali back yesterday, bid time return,/ And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men!/ To-day, to-day, unhappy day too late..." (3.2.67-71). The second example features another character, the dying John of Gaunt, denying on his deafhbed Richard's power to manipúlate secular time to his advantage and extend his Ufe beyond its natural lirnits: Rich. Why, únele, thou hast many years to live. Gaunt. But not a minute, king, that thou canst give: Shorten my days thou canst with sullen sorrow, And pluck nights from me, but not lend a morrow; Thou canst help time to furrow me with age, But stop no wrinkle in his pilgrímage; Thy word is current with him for my death, But dead, thy kingdom cannot buy my breath. (1.3.225-32) Using this and other scenes in the play where time becomes a topic of conversation, Ricardo J. Quiñones has advanced an argument on temporality based on the traditional view of Richard as a victim of his own selfishness and blindness. For Quiñones, Richard's moral flaws would be most apparent in his condition of "fatherless tragic son." He is "neither father ñor son" in a dramatic universe where "family is a lifeline whose neglect means disaster" {Renaissance Discovery 314). Richard's main antagonist in the play, Bolingbroke, is also an inverted mirror image of the abusive king: Bolingbroke, through his words and acts, has become precisely the paragon of the dutiful and beloved son. In contrast with Richard, Bolingbroke would have made a "proper use of time" (324-25). For Quiñones, the fact that the "potentiality" of time is "neglected" by Richard but used by Bolingbroke to advance his personal interests and (supposedly) fhose of the realm reveáis a central theme of the play, namely, "that man can exercise a firm control over the events of his life, and that the father is the model for such possibilities" {Renaissance Discovery 320). In a later work on the Cain-and-Abel theme in Western literature, Quiñones has observed that this theme is reenacted in the conflict between Richard (a shepherd like Abel) and Bolingbroke (a farmer like Cain). The latter, in moving from a callous act of assassination to a sincere expression of remorse, gives closure to the otherwise endless repetition of an archetypal eyele of violence that may have had an immediate historical referent in the War of the Roses (Changes ofCain 81). However compelling it may sound, the popular interpretation of Bolingbroke as a self-redeeming regicide has been questioned in recent years by performance critics such as Harry Berger, Jr., Leonard Barkan, and Alexander Leggatt, among others, all of whom deny Bolingbroke both the capacity to 152 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses control the environment around him and the power to convince a seventeenth-century audience of the legitimacy of his rebellion. Bolingbroke's status as modern secular hero was first questioned by Tillyard in his influential study, Shakespeare's History Plays (1946). Like Quiñones, Tillyard argued that Richard is a medieval character whose political power stems from sacred ceremonies that only he can perform, whereas Bolingbroke is a man of the secular Renaissance who uses a mixture of courtly politics, common sense, and personal courage to challenge Richard (181). But in his essay Tillyard also made a series of fundamental points that some critics of a liberal-humanist persuasión have stubbornly overlooked: (1) Richard II is the most ceremonial and ritualistic of Shakespeare's plays to the point that the principal struggles and battles represented in it are linguistic rather than physical; (2) Shakespeare was surely aware that the main political event in the play is not Richard's tyranny but Bolingbroke's treason; and (3) Shakespeare's treatment of Bolingbroke is perplexing in that his political stature diminishes as the dramatic action progresses: "[Bolingbroke] has no steady policy and having once set events in motion is the servant of fortune. As such, he is not in control of events, though by his adroitness he may deal with the unpredictable as it occurs" (184). Tillyard disagrees with Quiñones on the fundamental issue of the degree of control that Bolingbroke keeps over his surroundings. However, Tillyard ñnds a way out of this interpretive predicament by reducing Richard II to a prototype of the great Lancastrian plays—1 & 2 Henry IV and Henry V—just as Quiñones does: Richard II does its work in proclaiming the great theme of the whole cycle of Shakespeare's History Plays: the beginning in prosperity, the distortion of prosperity by a crime, civil war, and ultímate renewal of prosperity. The last stage falls outside the play'sscope... (185) The linking of these two moments of prosperity separated by a lapse of chaos and disgrace is of course what interests me in this essay. As Quiñones and Tillyard would have it, Shakespeare explored consecutively—in 1, 2 & 3 Henry VI, Richard II, 1 & 2 Henry IV, and Henry V—the implications of disrupting the linear sequentiality of England's prosperity and the necessity of restoring and preserving this prosperity. What is left out of these accounts is the positive valuation that the collapse of an uninterruptedly prosperous history—what in my title I cali paradoxical time—acquires in Richard II. In his monograph-length reading of the play, Harry Berger has argued (I think convincingly) that Richard's attitude toward the oíd order of the ceremonial monarchy is one of overall contempt: contempt for the ideology of kingship; contempt for his performance as king—a performance that slandered the ideology and revealed its powerlessness to restrain his abuses; contempt for himself, perhaps in part for having idealistically belíeved in divinely sanctioned kingship; contempt for those around him who, if they don't actually believe in that idea, continué to invoke it, especially when they want to excuse or justify the inaction that lets him go on slandering it. (52) Paradoxical Time and Providential History in ... 153 Berger demonstrates that, within the scope of the play's action, it is Richard who has the idea that he should be deposed, not Henry. Thus, Richard maneuvers others into punishing him for having represented a false image of sacred power. At the same time, Berger goes on (and this is where the originality of his argument resides), Richard craftily turns Bolingbroke into a usurper and a traitor—the originator of a cursed, ¡Ilegitímate lineage. Berger is almost alone among contemporary critics in refusing to grant that Richard ends up "retir[ing] into a world of prívate f antasy" which is incompatible with the demands of the public world (James Winny, qtd. disapprovingly in Berger 50). Berger further explains how Richard transforms Bolingbroke's plans for a peaceful abdication into a four-stage magnicidal plot. The four goals sought by Richard are "to get himself deposed, [to] pick out a likely 'heir' to perform that service, [to] reward him with the title of usurper, and [to] leave him with a discredited crown" (49). If Richard is going to be deposed and murdered, then it is he who wants to appear as the engineer of his own undoing. This authorial position is all-important in that it connects present and future in such a way as to transform the nature of the future as "discovery" into a "'homecoming'" (Schmidt 72). How does Richard benefit from this movement from unquestioned sovereignty to deposition and on to retroactive rehabilitation? To begin with, Richard steps out of the magical universe of medieval ceremonial power to face a world of relations where he continúes to make strategic use of state rituals and formulae pertaining to that medieval world view without necessarily believing in them. In so doing, he secularizes his position as an agent of historical change. It could be said, therefore, that Richard emancipates himself from the theocentric order of the medieval monarchy. Despite Richard's occasional invocations of divine providence, it is quite clear that the human universe depicted in the play is thoroughly secularized (Champion 109; Sinfield 246-47). Providential history appears in the play by analogy with the structure of Richard's will to elicit in his audience, through ritual repetition, the recognition that what is past can be recreated in the future. Richard's imaginative enactment of how his story will be received by posterity is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that, on a purely psychological level, permits him to evade momentarily the constraints of historical time—to pretend that the disruptive changes which have brought him pain and unhappiness are not definitive. From the moment Richard realizes the imminence of these changes in the form of his deposition, he willingly cooperates in the plotting of his own violent death. Richard knows that in helping Bolingbroke assassinate him, "the crown can be purified, preserved, sent safely beyond Bolingbroke's hands" (Berger 111). To help this design, he cóncentrates his energies on two tasks: the rehearsal of an ars moriendi routine containing the images of himself by which he would like to be remembered, and the subversive transformation of Bolingbroke's initial plans for an abdication into a sanguinary deposition. 2. Bacon, Shakespeare, and the Anti-Christ. In his earlier writings, Francis Bacon presented the history of philosophy as a series of violent encounters between rival philosophers who were more interested in dominating their predecessors and contemporaries than in discovering the truth. As a result, Bacon 154 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses believed that philosophy developed a chronic state of trauma whose very physicality he described with such words as "abortion," "killing," and "parricide." For example, in the treatise Thoughts and Conclusions (Cogitata et visa [1607; publ. 1653]) Aristotle appears as "the dictatorof philosophy" [Lat./ere Dictaturam inphilosophiaadeptum] (Farrington 83; Works 7.116), and as the ethnic other of the ideal Baconian scientist: "Aristotle, itmust be confessed, busied himself, like an Ottoman Turk, in the slaughter of his brethren [Lat. atque illum scüicet Ottomanorum more infratribus trucidandis occupatum fuisse], and with success, Yet he cannot escape the judgment that must be passed on the Greeks as a whole" (Farrington 84; Works 7.117). In The Refutation of Philosophies (Redargulio philosophiarum [1608; publ. 1734]) Bacon once again calis Aristotle a parricidal author, this time adding that he was al so an unlawful ruler who usurped the throne of philosophy: "Aristotle, like the Ottoman Turk, did not think he could reign secure tul he had slain his brothers" (Farrington 110). Because of this infamy, Aristotle proved himself to be deserving of the same degree of violence which he had inflicted on others. Thus Bacon asks his audience to murder Aristotle: "Are you too timid to apply to him the rale he applied to his predecessors?" (114), The analogy with Richard II is obvious enough. Boiingbroke deconsecrates the medieval monarchy when he violates the divine right of kings. He thus clears the way for future rebellions against his own authority. This is so because Bolingbroke's authority is that of the usurper. Bacon calis Aristotle the Anti-Christ of philosophy. Aristotle is "no greater than... the Prince of Imposture, the Anti-Christ" [Lat. atque Princeps Imposturae Antichristus] (Farrington 113; Works 7.69). It is typical of the Anti-Christ figures that they manage to gather support for their iflicit plans while the trae Son of God, Christ, is betrayed by his neighbors: Christ says that he who comes in the ñame of the Father, which in a trae and pious, if not a literal, sense is the ñame of antiquity [Lat. in nomine paternitatis aut antiquitatis], will not be received, but he who, levelling and destroying all that went before, usurps authority to himself and comes in his own ñame [Lat. authoritatem sibi usurpaverit et in nomine proprio venerit], men wíll follow. Now if any man in philosophy ever carne in his own ñame, Aristotle is that man. (Farrington 113; Works 7.69) Like Aristotle and the Anti-Christ, Boiingbroke ñmctions in Richard's speeches as "he who, levelling and destroying all that went before, usurps authority to himself and comes in his own ñame." This illegitimacy is exposed in 4.1, where Boiingbroke imagines a peaceful and dignified transfer of power from Richard to himself in the form of a public abdication: "Fetch hither Richard, that in common view/ He may surrender; so we shall proceed/Without suspicion" (155-57). Richard subverts Bolingbroke's plan when he forces him to grasp the crown with his own hands, to touch the one sacred object he should always reveré at a distance: "Here, cousin, seize the crown" (4.1.181). This invitation to desecrate the foundations of a theocratic order is instrumental in triggering off the process of Richard's own victimization. What Richard does is to overlook the presence of Boiingbroke on the stage—he refuses to grant the usurper the treatment bestowed on legitímate monarchs—concentrating instead on the many violations of the crown that nave Paradoxical Time and Providential History in ... 155 been imposed upon him by his enemies. He thus constructs himself as a martyr and a scapegoat: Now, mark me how I will undo myself. I give this heavy weight from off my head, And this unwieldly sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath reléase all duteous oaths ... (4.1.203-10) What is extraordinarily subversive about this scene is that Richard consciously and repeatedly violates the sanctity of his own anointment: he enumerates one by one the offenses that Bolingbroke and he are committing in carrying out the decoronation act. In a stroke of political genius he shrewdly reverses the initial distribution of roles in the play by rendering Bolingbroke as the abusive usurper and himself as the defenseless martyr: "God pardon all oaths that are broke to me,/ God keep all vows unbroke ate made to thee!" (4.1.214-15). The rhyme "me/thee" immediately draws attention to the interchangeability of the positions of deposing and deposed ruler. Not only does Richard ask pardon f or what is unpardonable—that he be deposed—but he also announces the vulnerability of Bolingbroke's newly-acquired power. Bergerhas aptly summarized the complex dynamics atplay in4.1: On the one hand Richard formally reenacts the self-deposition he has helped bring about, thereby publicly demonstrating his active relinquishment of the crown. On the other hand he forces Bolingbroke to reenact his usurpation, thereby publicly dramatizing the illegal seizure. The transfer of power is framed as a transfer of guilt. (73) Act 4, then, effects a series of political and psychological reversáis aimed at questioning the legitimacy of Bolingbroke's claim to the throne. It is in the context of these state rituals for the transfer of power that Richard's patterning of his personal career after a providential design takes on a new purpose. The appearance of this new historical dimensión is first hinted at in the play through Richard's interest in having others spread stories of a past Golden Age. He knows there is a genre of literature that focuses on the fall of princes, and accordingly takes delight in his violent fall: For God's sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings: How some have been depos'd, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill'd, All murdered—for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court... (3.2.155-62) 156 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses Richard goes so far as to declare himself the victim of the crown, a scapegoat who must undergo a disciplinary process so that the crown may be saved. Moreover, he even compares the "deposing of a rightful king" to the crucifixión of Christ: "Though some of you, with Pílate, wash your hands,/ Showing an outward pity—yet you Pilates/ Have here deliver'd me to my sour cross,/ And water cannot wash away your sin" (4.1.239-42). Other references in the play to Judas betraying Christ or to the redeeming valué of martyrdom contribute as well to the overall effect of rhetorically transforming Richard's personal plight into a manifestation of providential history. It is important to note that Richard's self-identification with Christ combines a cyclical view of history (he claims to be typologically reenacting the plight of Christ) with a linear one (this enactment has a very specific goal, the dislodging of Bolingbroke). In this connection, Phyllis Rackin has called attention to the ways in which Shakespeare's play echoes the crucifixión scenes in medieval drama, in which Christ often speaks to the audience from the cross. For Rackin, Richard's deposition is presented "not simply as a re-enactment of a past event but as immediate present action that engages its audience as participants" (270-71). It is then characteristic of the Christ plot that it tells an exemplary story whose ending is known beforehand. The telos or end-goal of providential history consists of the Second Corning of the Messiah and the damning or redemption of all creatures depending on whether they deserve one fate or the other. Yet the arrival of the Messiah is also—to use a once-fashionable deconstructionist phrase—"always already deferred." The ñame by which this paradoxical time construct is known in psychoanalytically inflected theories of human time is the "future perfect" or "future anterior" [Fr. futur antérieur]. This is the perfect tense by which the completion of an action is projected and anticipated at the moment of the enunciation: e.g., "By midnight I will have graded at least two-thirds of the exams." The future perfect is also the time of desire, since it enables the speaker to envision imaginatively as complete a reality which has not yet come into being, a process which has not even been launched. In a maneuver reminiscent of Richard's speeches, Bacon manipulares his reader into accepting that the history of philosophy has evolved around the same pattern as providential history. In both plottings, an idyllic state of prosperity (prelapsarian Edén/ Presocratic philosophy) became corrupted by an illicit act (Adam's temptation and Fall/ Aristotle's "slaying" of Democritus). This fallen state can and will be redeemed by a prophet with messianic powers (Christ/ Bacon). This Messiah knows that his own contemporaries will betray and kill him, and so his mission of redemption is postponed until he makes his Second Corning. 3. Conclusión: Discovering the Pathos of the Future. To what extent do the character of Richard and the philosophical persona of Bacon's shorter treatises respond to the same anxiety about the future? How can their respective constructions of time and subjectivity illuminate each other? First, there is the obvious similarity that both subjects stage a rhetorical reaction to forms of authority that allot them a subordínate position. Second, by analogy with providential history, they interpret any Paradoxical Time and Providential History in ... 157 threats to their project of domination as positive índices of the legitimacy of that project. Bolingbroke's challenge to Richard's absolutist pretensions only reinforces the deposed monarch's conviction that an abused king is, like Jesús Christ, a God-appointed king. In like manner, Bacon identifies the main speakers in his writings with Moses, Daniel, Solomon, and Christ, all of whom are said to be as interested in material progress as in spiritual salvation. Finally, Richard and Bacon conceive of their words as guides which should move posterity to action. For example, in 5.1 of Shakespeare's play Richard entrusts his Queen to turn the event of his deposition into a textual performance, an oral narrative whose audience exists in a sterile future figured as "winter's tedious nights": In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire With good oíd folks, and let them tell thee tales Of woeful ages long ago betid; And ere thou bid good night, to quite their griefs Tell thou the lamentable tale of me, And send the hearers weeping to their beds; For why, the senseless brands will sympathize The heavy accent of thy moving tongue, And in compassion weep the fire out, And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-black, For the deposing of a rightful king. (5.1.40-50) Richard imagines that his story will move posterity first to pity, and later to action. Since he is bound to die childless, what he hopes to restore in the future is his fame, which (as Quiñones reminds us) was one of the Renaissance manifestations of the linear unfolding of time. Richard's lifestory, as told by the Queen, functions then as an announcement of—and a preface to—the rehabilitation of his ñame. Bacon also uses a textual image, that precisely of the preface, to argüe for the continuation of his project after an unwanted period of interruption: For himself Bacon was minded not to yield to his own or to anyone's impatience, but to keep his eyes fixed on the ultímate success of the project... Looking ahead he could see that the stronger and loftier minds, advised by what he now had to offer and without waiting for greater aids, would not only aspire but succeed in achieying the rest for themselves... But he did not intend to slacken his own efforts ... They needed a preface, and this he hopes the present writing might supply, for that was the intention of every word in it. (Thoughts and Conclusions [Farrington 101]) Both Richard and Bacon explore the possibility that words uttered in the present may provoke a perlocutionary effect in future audiences. The pathos that Richard and Bacon strive for may be an emotional flaw in a king and in an analytical philosopher, but in the leading character of a tragic drama and in a rhetorician it is most certainly an asset. Even if Shakespeare did not mean for Richard to function in this manner, as an onstage character the deposed king does not hide his altérnate commitments to a providential and a secular view of history and action, and to forms of self-aggression and self-aggrandizement. That 158 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses is to say, Richard occupies a variety of subject-positions, some of which might have been realized by a receptive audience (be it an audience represented within the play or a group of seventeenth-century English playgoers) in such a way as to construct him as an agent of the historical process which in the text of the play he undoubtedly wishes to influence. In this connection, it must be borne in mind that in the year 1601 the rebellious Lord Essex subsidized a special performance of Richard II at the Globe on the eve of his failed uprising against Elizabeth Tudor. The immediate intention of this production was to impel a select audience composed largely of his fellow conspirators to carry his plans for a deposition into action. The performance was done by the book—using an authorized text—and by a licensed company. As explained by Louis Monteóse, the fact that some contemporaneous authorities and writers ascribed such political transcendence to a seemingly innocuous performance has at least three teachings for the student of dramatic literature: (1) that the same text may be seen alternately as politically seditious (the author's intention was to support Bolingbroke/Essex) and politically conservaüve (his intention was rather to support Richard/Elizabeth); (2) that dramatic characters can be identified by different playgoers with different historical persons (Elizabeth may be alternately identified with Richard and with Bolingbroke); and (3) that any public representation of the defhronement of a king immediately called to mind a series of political events, since the Elizabethan educated classes were used to conceptualizing their historical present in terms of familiar plots (52-56). Indeed, a long-standing concern of New-Historicist critics such as Louis Montrose and Stephen Greenblatt has been the study of how the actions represented in such characteristically early modern genres as historical drama and utopian fiction may influence human actions in a real-world context. The historical Richard II may have failed as a king in his own time, but his eponymous tragic hero (or the actor playing him) may in turn succeed as the leading character in a poignant drama of deposition and posthumous rehabilitation of which he is also the aufhor and stage manager. Similarly, Bacon fails to implement his philosophy in his own time, but promises his readers that it will bear fruit in the future, when it is adopted by a loyal progeny of Baconian scientists. By way of conclusión, I want to relate this effect of pathos to poststructuralist theories of paradoxical time. Writing on some of Rousseau's and Kant's self-representations, Geoffrey Bennington has shown how a pioneering philosopher's disinterested pursuit of truth is often undermined by anequally intense concern for reputation (22-25). Both truth and reputation can be momentarily preserved by deferring the moment in which each undergoes the test of experience. The preservation of a certain truth is "made in principie the more secure by [its] temporary renunciation" and by invoking in its place such inducements of "pathos" as the philosopher's self-sacrifice, vulnerability, and even "shameful weakness" (23). In Richard's speeches and in Bacon's early works the audience is invited to experience the speaker's project of self-rehabilitation not as objective truth, but as pathos. What allows this pathos to sustain a self-vindicating argument is the contention that the future realization of the project mirrors an earlier moment of plenitude (Bennington 20-21). In Richard's case, this earlier moment of objectified meaning is Christ's passion, his martyr-like suffering at the hands of his betrayers (Grene 47, 49). Bacon also uses the Christ analogy: Aristotle was an Anti-Christ who killed Democritus, Paradoxical Time and Providential History in ... 159 whereas Bacon himself is the new Messiah who unmasks and plots the destruction of the Anti-Christ. In Richard's and Bacon's reasonings, if an audience believes in the Second Corning of Christ, why should it not believe in the posthumous triumph of a deposed king or a neglected philosopher? The use of the future perfect—a future contained in the past, but whose realization is always a deferred event—allows the speaker to claim that he will be posthumously vindicated and reinstated by posterity. As novelist Javier Marías has interpreted it, the Shakespearean future perfect (which he locates in the misquoted verse, "the dark back and abyss of time") is meant to sublimate an experience of loss into one of gain, or at the very least to alleviate that loss: Lo no venido, esto es, lo no llegado, lo no sucedido, lo no existido, no debemos seguirlo esperando, sino darlo ya por pasado. No [es] que debamos darlo por imposible, ni tampoco descartarlo u olvidarlo sino [darlo] por incorporado a nuestra vida y a nuestro saber ... Y se me ocurre que quizá sea eso, lo que no viene y sin embargo es pasado, lo que discurra por aquella negra espalda y abismo del tiempo ... (35) That which is still to come ("lo que no viene") yet is perceived as an integral part of the past ("y sin embargo es pasado") describes a well-known strategy of psychoanalysis by which a patient is encouraged to seek by himself the origin of his trauma. While the truth of this trauma manifests itself in the symptoms of the patient's present disorder--its cause lies buried somewhere in his past—the elucidation of its meaning is posited as taking place in an unspecified future—it is a deferred event. As a result of this double bind, "[t]he duration of [the analysis] can only be anticipated for the subject as indefinite" (Lacan 95-96). To be sure, Richard and Bacon foreshadow each in his own way the strategy of connecting the moment before the trauma/ fall (when neither Aristotle ñor Bolingbroke had yet made his appearance) with the moment when the trauma is overeóme by means of the assurance that Aristotle and Bolingbroke will be dislodged. For both Richard and Bacon, the most immediate motivation behind this unusual way of conceptualizing time and history may be to seek consolation for the traumatic realization of their subordinate positions in relation to their antagonists. At the same time, however, their paradoxical account of time seeks to créate (in the eyes of others) the representation of a historical process as both inevitable and hard-won. Such is the import of Richard's "I will be acknowledged as a lawful king whereas Bolingbroke's lineage will be damned," and of Bacon's "My philosophy will in time dislodge that of Aristotle." By deferring the realization of their respective prophecies, both speakers protect themselves from the objection that the forcé of their arguments lies not in the empirical valué of the truth they advócate, but simply in the seductiveness of their rhetoric. In other words, they protect themselves from the charges frequently leveled against the character of Richard to the effect that he is not an onstage king with a clearly defined political project, but simply a self-pitying and sentimental poet. 160 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses